__________
“In many places they covered the soil
with a moving mass, and filled the air like snowflakes on a snowy day.”
Grasshopper
plagues ruin western farms.
__________
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Most cowboys in this era were young men. Would their lives be glamorous or not? |
February 9: Elliott Roosevelt describes his father’s last, agonizing hours, as he dies from appendicitis.
At 10 a.m., his sister asks him to come upstairs and help move his father.
As I came in he beckoned to me. I ran to him and my arms about
him, he got up and with my help tottered to the mantel. Here suddenly his face
became distorted with pain and he called out loud for ether. I left him, got
the bottle and taking him in my arms put him on the sofa and drenching the
handkerchief I held it on his face. Mother, Bamie, and Mary Ann came up and we
sent for the doctor. This was 10:15. From then until 11:30 all the strength I
had could barely keep him on the sofa. He never said anything but “Oh! My!” but
the agony in his face was awful. Ether and sedatives were of no avail. … Pretty
soon father began to vomit after which he would be quiet a minute, then with
face fearful with pain would clasp me tight in his arms. … The power with which
he would hug me was terrific and then in a second he would be lying, white,
panting, and weak as a baby in my arms with sweat and huge drops rolling down
his face and neck. At 11:30, thank God, the doctor came.
A second doctor was summoned; and chloroform was applied, and “father became quiet instantly but the two doctors despaired of his life.” Mrs. Roosevelt sat by her husband’s head, the son by his side, ready “with the chloroform and handkerchief.” All that afternoon they “put him from one chlo[roform] sleep into another.”
Elliott was sick, himself, but at 6:30, he wrote, “Mother and I went down and tried to eat dinner. I felt so sick I stayed to smoke a cigar and after felt well and more myself.”
Going upstairs at 7:30 I found the servants in the hall waiting
with scared faces in Corrine’s room… Father seemed the same but his pulse much
feebler. … Oh my God, my father, what agonies you suffered. … So it went on. At
eleven fifteen he opened his eyes. I motioned to the Dr. to apply the tube and brandy
to his mouth. He did not make an effort to suck even. He put the glass up and
dropped it [the brandy] down. He turned sharp to the left and throwing up his
arms around, he gave one mighty clasp and then with a groan of pain turned over
and with his right hand under his head and left out over the side of the sofa
began the gurgling breathing of death. “Call the doctor.” “Bamie - Corrine.” “Mother,
come here for God’s sake quick.” And then Dr. Polk sitting by his side. Mother
kneeling by him. Bamie by her. The little Baby [Corrine] trembling and crying,
kneeling by me on his left side and all the rest standing near. His eyelids
fluttered, he gave three long breaths. It is finished. No, my God, it cannot
be. “Darling, darling, darling, I am here,” cried my little widowed mother. I
knelt down and prayed, “Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy
will be done, Thy will be done.” As the last breath left his body the little
clock on the table struck one – one half past eleven. Thirteen and a quarter hours
of agony it took to kill a man broken down by three month’s sickness.
By that time the extended family had gathered. “We got the girls and Mother to bed,” Elliott added. “The uncles watched the dead. I laid down on the sofa in father’s dressing room but not to sleep…”
To Teddy, it was all a “hideous dream.”
*
April 17: A long legal fight finally comes to an end when Henrietta Wood wins her lawsuit, seeking compensation from Zebulon Ward, for selling her back into slavery, a quarter century earlier.
Her story is well-told in Smithsonian magazine; but here are a few of the details. She was freed by a previous owner in 1848, while living in Cincinnati. Five years later she was kidnapped by Ward and later sold off to a slave owner in Texas. The jury found for Wood, in their verdict, awarding her $2,500 (equal to about $81,500 when recalculated in December 2024.)
Wood had finally made it back home in 1869, but had not forgotten her tormentor, and sued Ward for $20,000.
That would have been equal to $652,000 in December 2024.
As W. Caleb McDaniel writes,
“I can’t quite tell my age,” Wood recalled in a newspaper
interview in 1876, but she knew she was born enslaved to the Tousey family
between 1818 and 1820. In 1834, the teenager was bought by a merchant in
Louisville and taken from her family. She was soon sold again, to a French
immigrant, William Cirode, who took her to New Orleans.
Cirode returned to France in 1844, abandoning his wife, Jane,
who eventually took Wood with her to Ohio, a free state. Then, in 1848, Jane
Cirode went to a county courthouse and registered Wood as free. “My mistress
gave me my freedom,” Wood later said, “and my papers were recorded.” Wood spent
the next several years performing domestic work around Cincinnati. She would
one day recall that period of her life as a “sweet taste of liberty.”
Unfortunately, Cirode’s daughter and son-in-law, Josephine and Robert White, still lived in Covington, Kentucky, right across the river from Cincinnati, and they viewed Wood as a valuable “inheritance.” It was then agreed by Mr. and Mrs. White that in return for $300, they would grant Ward the right to sell Henrietta Wood, if he could catch her and keep her. Ward and his gang of “slave catchers” located Wood’s employer, a boardinghouse keeper named Rebecca Boyd and paid her to join their scheme. “One Sunday afternoon in April 1853, Boyd tricked Wood into taking a carriage ride across the river.”
Henrietta was first sold to a man named Gerard Brandon, who lived near Natchez, Mississippi, and owned 700 to 800 slaves, and “he put me to work at once in the cotton field,” she remembered. “I sowed the cotton, hoed the cotton, and picked the cotton. I worked under the meanest overseers, and got flogged and flogged, until I thought I should die.”
Brandon held her in bondage easily, until July 1, 1863, when Union troops arrived in Natchez, and so, marched 300 of his slaves into Texas, and managed to hold her until well after the war ended, even after “Juneteenth.” In 1866, when she returned to Mississippi with Brandon, she was finally freed – agreeing to work for Brandon for $10 a month, which she said he never paid. It was four more years before she could return to Cincinnati, where she looked for long-lost members of her family. McDaniel was unable to learn whether she succeeded.
By this time, Ward was a wealthy
man, living in Lexington. Wood hired a lawyer named Harvey Myers and sued.
Myers was later murdered by a client’s husband in an unrelated divorce case;
but records indicate that in the wake of the jury verdict, Ward did pay damages
in 1879.
As for the conscienceless
slave catcher, Mr.
Ward, when he died in 1894, he left an estate worth at least $600,000, equal to
perhaps as much as $18-20 million in 2024. (I multiplied the known equivalent
of $20,000, $652,000, by thirty, getting a figure of $19,560,000; but the
difference between the value of the award in 1879, and the value of his estate
in 1894, makes an exact calculation problematic.)
*
“Could anyone expect less?”
IN THE the Annual Report of the
General of the U.S. Army Gen. Phil Sheridan admits, in reference to the Native American tribes of the Great Plains:
“We took away their country and their means of support, broke up
their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among
them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could anyone expect
less? Then, why wonder at Indian difficulties?”
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Blogger's collection. (The white spots are light reflected off the glass over the painting.) |
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Listening to the hum of a telegraph wire. Progress for one race meant disaster for another. Painting from the internet. |
*
PLAGUED BY VIOLENCE, Dodge City, Kansas has on its books laws
requiring all cowboys and others to turn in and place their weapons on racks
provided for the purpose, while visiting town. Only peace officers are allowed
to carry guns. (article by Peter Lyon, previously referenced).
*
AN OUTBREAK of yellow fever kills 4,000 in Memphis, Tennessee. (113/129)
*
A TRAVELER named Samuel Manning, describes the plague of locusts or grasshoppers he had seen in Kansas:
In many places they
covered the soil with a moving mass, and filled the air like snowflakes on a
snowy day. At a roadside station, the train was not able to start till they had
been swept from the track. The growing crops were cut off, the trees stripped
of their leaves, and the cattle were starving for want of food. The alarming
extension of this insect pest, which has ravaged Kansas, Nebraska, and the
neighboring states for the last two or three years, is plausibly explained by
the destruction of winged game on the prairies. 100/357
*
G. STANLEY HALL graduates from Harvard with the first degree in psychology ever awarded in the United States. He later becomes famous for his work in the field of “adolescence,” at this time still unknown.
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