1885

__________ 

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” 

Ernest Hemingway

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WILLIAM LEAST HEAT MOON culled old newspapers from Chase County, Kansas, for stories to bring back life, good and bad, to the past. For example: 

January 15: 

A Dastardly Outrage 

    This community was shocked last Monday morning by the report that C.C. Watson had attempted to commit a rape on a little girl, about 13 years old, the afternoon before. The scene of the outrage was the kitchen of Bauerle’s restaurant, where the girl works, and during the absence of Bauerle and wife.

 

    Watson’s reputation is unsavory, but no one believed him so depraved as his fiendish attempt last Sunday afternoon stamps him.

 

    The details of the outrage are simply horrible and unfit for publication, and, but for the timely arrival of a boy, about 15 years old, who was attracted to the room by the noise made by the girl in her efforts to protect herself, the lecherous brute would have accomplished his purpose.

 

    Watson has a wife and three children, is about 30 years of age, and his beastly habits have placed him prominently before the public on more than one occasion. A couple of years ago he was convicted in the district court of an attempt to commit an abortion upon a young woman who lived in his family and with whom he had maintained a criminal intimacy. 

        … 

    Expressions of indignation are loud and deep on every hand and it would require but a slight effort to induce Judge Lynch to administer summary justice, a mode of procedure it is hope will not be resorted to, as Watson has been arrested on complaint of his intended victim, and the law, even if inadequate to deal with such characters, should be allowed to take its course. 

Story in the Chase County newspaper, the Leader. 100/514-515

*

 

“We are all going hunting and shooting all the Chinamen we see.” 

September 1: Notices have been posted in mining towns throughout southern Wyoming, calling for Chinese workers to be expelled. 

    One white labor leader has warned that “a storm is brewing.” White miners, many digging coal for the Union Pacific Railroad, are earning a dollar a day more than Chinese miners, but complain, if there are mine shutdowns, that Chinese laborers are rehired faster than whites. 

    On this fateful evening, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 

Andrew Bugas, a nineteen-year-old white miner, was at home with his cousin. A fellow-miner named Sandy Cooper showed up unannounced and asked Bugas’s cousin if he had a rifle or a shotgun. “I will furnish you with one which you must use tomorrow, for we are all going hunting and shooting all the Chinamen we see,” Cooper said. Bugas and his cousin thought Cooper was joking, but the man returned half an hour later with a heavy rifle and two boxes of cartridges. Cooper then urged Bugas’s cousin not to go to work in the morning, because it was important for white miners to be “present.” It would become clear the following day what he meant.

 

*

September 2: By the time the first workers are scheduled to report to the mines, a mob of white miners, mostly foreign-born themselves, has formed in Rock Springs. A fight between white and Chinese workers ignites a spark of hate, and the mob eventually attacks the area known as “Chinatown.” Before the fury burns itself out, at least 28 Chinese are dead, and Chinese homes and businesses are burned to the ground. 

    In the summer of 2024, George Matthes, a student working as part of an archaeological dig, uncovers, 

A coin, a piece of glazed stoneware, a fragment of bone. Close to a metre down, Matthes began digging through charcoal, as if he were crouched in the middle of a fireplace. He uncovered a melted glass jar, then an intact pig’s jaw. He’d found it: the burn layer. “I realized, I’m standing on top of one of the most horrible events in Wyoming’s history.”

 

    The town of Rock Springs itself had mushroomed suddenly, after a rich bituminous coal deposit was found in 1868, two miles south of a stream known as Bitter Creek. The railroads were just beginning to cut iron paths across the West, and fuel was critical, and coal made Rock Springs. By 1885, the town was home to roughly 3,000 people, with about 550 Chinese miners working in tunnels below. 

    Another 300 white miners were also employed. 

    Leo Qarqwang was already working the early shift in No. 6 mine, when a gang of about a dozen white miners attacked him and another Chinese, battering them with spades, picks, and shovels. Qarqwang was hit in the head with a shovel, leaving him with a gash a quarter inch deep. Fighting spread, as other Chinese rushed to defend their comrades, and when the first battle ended, four Chinese were badly wounded, one of whom would later die. Several of the white miners were also injured. 

    The troubles now spread. Around 10:00 a.m., Burgas would later testify, he saw a group of white men and boys 

hurling stones at Chinese dinner carriers – men who carried meals on poles slung over their shoulders, to deliver to miners – causing them to scatter. Soon afterward, he watched as a brigade of sixty or seventy white men assembled nearby, most with rifles or revolvers. They headed to the Knights of Labor hall, chanting, “White men, fall in.” When they spilled out, later that afternoon, a cry went up: “Vengeance on the Chinese!” The mob took a vote and decided that the Chinese residents should be expelled. A group of seventy-five men began making their way toward Chinatown. When they encountered a group of Chinese workers along the railroad tracks, they fired wildly at them. The mob halted just outside the Chinese quarter, and a committee of three men delivered a message: residents had an hour to pack up their belongings and go. But barely half an hour later the rioters invaded Chinatown.

 

    They came from two different directions, Chinese witnesses later said. One group crossed a plank bridge over Bitter Creek, and another advanced from the railroad tracks. A man named Lor Sun Kit was the first resident shot. A bullet pierced his back; he crumpled to the ground, wounded but still alive. The rioters shot a fifty-six-year-old miner named Leo Dye Bah in the chest, killing him. A thirty-eight-year-old man named Yip Ah Marn was also shot dead.

 

    At this point, the Chinese began scattering to the surrounding hills. Soon, one witness recalled, the hills were “literally blue with the hunted Chinamen.” 

    Qarqwang was still being treated for his wounds when he saw armed members of the mob approaching. He, too, fled to the hills, and spent the next several days wandering in the sagebrush, with nothing to eat. 

    Other Chinese fled down the Union Pacific railroad tracks that crossed through town, hoping to catch a ride to safety. Some tumbled down the steep banks of Bitter Creek, in a desperate attempt to escape. At least one was shot and killed as he tried to climb the far bank. A second Chinaman, Leo Mauwik, was shot in the arm, but despite the loss of blood, didn’t stop running until he reached the town of Green Springs, fifteen miles away. A white woman (some say a “Mrs. Osborn,” who owned a local laundry) fired as Chinese ran past, felling two. Rioters set fire to Chinese homes and business, and clouds of smoke billowed over the town. The worst members of the mob picked up bodies and tossed them into the burning buildings. Ah Lee barricaded himself inside his own business; but whites broke through the roof and shot him in the head. 

    Ah Kuhn, a Chinese interpreter was one of the lucky ones. He managed to flee. But he dropped about sixteen hundred dollars in gold he was carrying – equal to more than $50,000 today. East of town, he found a white resident who gave him bread and water and let him rest. Another lucky miner, known as China Joe, found safety inside a large oven, where he remained for three days. 

    Rioters also approached the home of the white foreman in charge of the No. 6 mine and made it clear he must leave town. 

Next, the group visited the home of Soo Qui, one of the Chinese head men, but he was in Evanston. His terrified wife met them instead. “Soo, he go,” she said. “I go to him.” Two days later, she arrived in Evanston by train, disembarking in a colorful gown. A newspaper reporter characterized her as the “last of her race” to abandon Rock Springs and “probably the last to set foot in the place for many a long year.”

 

    Around 7 p.m., members of the mob spotted a badly wounded Chinese man lying in the street. They debated whether to shoot him or not but decided to let him die in due time. Gunfire crackled throughout the night, and fires lit “the town in a red glow.” 

    With the dawn of September 3, the full extent of disaster was revealed: 

Bodies were found in the burned-out cellars, often clustered together. Some people had draped wet cloths over their heads and burrowed into the earthen walls, trying to escape the smoke and flames. Hogs feasted on a corpse that they had dragged from the ruins. “Today for the first time in a good many years, there is not a Chinaman in Rock Springs,” the town’s newspaper proclaimed. “Nothing but heaps of smoking ruins mark the spot where Chinatown stood.”

 

    The Union Pacific, for whom the Chinese had worked, sent a trainload of food and water down the tracks, hoping to save as many of the workers and their family members as it could. And again, there were heroes who stood up for humanity, and did not bow to blind fury. 

A man who managed to reach Green River was chased by a band of forty men until the white manager of a local hotel ushered him inside. “She cowed the mob as effectually as could a whole battery of artillery have done,” a newspaper account later said. Several hundred people eventually took refuge in Evanston. Some went to a gun store in town and bought all the revolvers in stock, in preparation for another attack.

 

    Francis E. Warren, the governor of Wyoming, sent an urgent request for U.S. soldiers to be sent to Rock Springs, but the President of the United States was off hunting in the Adirondack Mountains, and could not be reached.  

    When Warren finally reached Rock Springs himself, he found it hard to believe what the mob had done. As he would later recall, “The smell of burning human flesh was sickening and almost unendurable, and was plainly discernible for more than a mile along the railroad both east and west.” 

    A report written up later by the Chinese counsel in New York, added additional detail. The body of Leo Know Boot, age 24, was found, with a bullet having passed through his neck, “cutting the windpipe in two.” Yii See Yen, had been shot in the left temple, the “skull broken.” He was 36, and “had a mother living at home” in China. Leo Dye Bah had been shot in the chest and killed. “I also ascertained that the deceased was 56 years old, and had a wife, son and daughter at home.” 

    “Every one of the surviving Chinese has been rendered penniless by the cruel attack,” the counsel added. 

(We should point out that a grand jury was impaneled to bring charges, but two dozen white witnesses refused to implicate any rioters. Backed by federal troops, the Union Pacific managed to restart mining operations – and even brought back 250 Chinese to do the digging. When most white miners refused to return if the Chinese had jobs, “a contingent of Mormons,” members of another group that had face mob violence and blind hate, helped get the mines running again.)

 

*

October 7-19: Friedrich Trump, grandfather of President Donald J. Trump, leaves Bavaria, in part to avoid mandatory military service, and travels to America. According to his grandson, on arrival he knew almost no English. 

    All his life he spoke German primarily.

 

*

MARK TWAIN'S Huckleberry Finn, on which he first began work in 1876, is published in the United States. 

    As Ernest Hemingway later explains, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

 

    For the next hundred years, it seems the first half of Twain’s handwritten manuscript is lost irrevocably. Finally, in 1990, it turns up in an attic trunk. The second half had been sent to the Buffalo and Erie County Library in the 1880s. Fraser Gluck, a library benefactor, had  asked Twain for the manuscript from Life on the Mississippi. That was unavailable. So Twain offered Huck. 

    Twain came to believe that the first half had been destroyed at the printer’s office; but he located it in 1887 and sent it to Gluck. His granddaughter found it in the fall of 1990 in an old trunk. 

    At the time, it was estimated the find might be worth $1.5 million; the library claimed ownership; a court battle followed, and Barbara Testa, who found the manuscript, and her sister eventually reached an undisclosed settlement. The two halves were “reunited” in 1995. 

    Scholars were most excited to examine any differences in the original handwritten and published versions of the novel, not least because printers had been known to “correct” passages Twain had written in dialect. 

    As the Associated Press explained, “Twain was infuriated by changes that were commonly made by printers in his time. On one occasion he said his publisher had written “that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.” 

    In 2001, a new library edition of Huck was issued, complete with three new scenes and notes on the original pen drawings by E. W. Kemble that illustrated the first printing of the classic. Two, related to the slave Jim, indicated once again, how sympathetic the author was to the slave’s plight. Kemble’s drawing of Huck and Jim’s first encounter shows Jim on his one knee, hat in hand. The sketch is almost identical to a widely known graphic symbol of the campaign to end slavery. 

    Another sketch in the book of Jim’s “coat of arms” - a slave figure toting a knapsack over one shoulder and running - is virtually the same as the image commonly used in newspaper notices about runaway slaves.

 

* 

SCULPTURE by Charles Ray: “Sarah Williams.” 

Huck dressed as a girl.

 

    As explained by a New York Times art critic: 

    “Sarah Williams,” a stainless steel sculpture also from 2021, is the show’s final work. It returns to Huck and Jim’s antebellum tale, to depict a scene of Jim helping Huck disguise himself as a woman so he can suss out who, at their latest stopover, might threaten their liberty. This time Huck seems incredibly tall, wearing a long gown whose folds fall like the flutes on a column; Jim, kneeling behind him, has been working on the hem. They are both playing roles: a white adolescent in drag and a Black man doing women’s work. And they both seem palpably sad. Huck’s head is bowed; Jim’s face is raised, subtly anguished. 

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Anyone who doubt’s where Twain’s heart lay should read Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1893, or Twain’s defense of “Chinamen,” who were victims of every kind of abuse out West, found in Roughing It, published in 1872. 

Halleck, writing in 1911 also points to Twain’s concern for the downtrodden, explaining how his actions show his true feelings. “For the same reason he paid all the expenses of a negro through an eastern college.”  

The small “n” was then typically used. In fact, Halleck sums up Twain, calling him, “Mark Twain, philosopher, reformer of the type of Cervantes, and romantic historian… (30/363-364)

 

*

 

* 

“Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen.” 

TWAIN would later say that Huck was modeled on his friend from childhood, Tom Blankenship. “In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was,” Twain  wrote in Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition. “He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.”

    Twain first set to work on the story in 1876, and quickly finished 400 pages, but told a friend he liked his story, “only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn.” 

    He took a steamboat ride down the Mississippi in 1882 and may have been prompted to return to his work. 

    “I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn’t name the number of days,” Twain wrote to a friend in August 1883. “I shouldn’t believe it myself, and of course couldn’t expect you to.” The book was published in 1884, in England. 

    Twain grew up in a slave state. An uncle owned twenty slaves. “I vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained to one another, once,” he said, “and lying in a group on the pavement, awaiting shipment to the Southern slave market. Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen.” If Twain ever accepted slavery as normal, his attitudes must have changed. He married into an abolitionist family. His father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad and helped Frederick Douglass escape from slavery. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Nuts, I may be quoting part of this, as in the above paragraph, without attribution. Heck with it. I’m too busy to go back and check all the websites I consulted right now. Besides, I’m only putting this out for teachers’ use.

    I’m all but certain the next paragraphs are direct quotes: 

    The moral climax of the novel is when Huck debates whether to send Jim’s owner a letter detailing Jim’s whereabouts. Finally, Huck says, “All right, then, I'll go to hell,” and tears the letter up.

 

    Huckleberry Finn was first banned in Concord, Massachusetts in 1885 (“trash and suitable only for the slums”) and continues to be one of the most-challenged books. 

 

    The n-word appears 200 times. 

    Definitely quoting: “In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library removed Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer from the shelves because, as a librarian wrote to Twain, Huck is “a deceitful boy who said ‘sweat’ when he should have said ‘perspiration.’” 

    It turns out disaster was narrowly averted with the first printing. Quoting again: 

    Twain, who ran his own printing press, hired 23-year-old E. W. Kemble to illustrate the first edition of Huckleberry Finn. Right as the book went to press, someone – it was never discovered who – added a penis to the illustration of Uncle Silas. The engraving shows Uncle Silas talking to Huck and Aunt Sally while a crude penis bulges from his pants.

 

    According to Twain’s business manager Charles Webster, 250 books were sent out before the mistake was caught. They were recalled and publication was postponed for a reprint. If the full run had been sent out, Webster said, Twain’s “credit for decency and morality would have been destroyed.”

Finn never did like school much.

 

*      

IT’S ALWAYS interesting when people find historical treasures, be it the wreck of the Atocha, the Spanish treasure ship, or the lucky find made by Michael Sparks, in a Nashville, Tennessee thrift shop. In 2007, he unrolled an old document, and took a liking to a copy of the Declaration of Independence. 

    How much? 

    The clerk said $2.48. 

    Sparks made the buy, took his copy home, did a little online sleuthing, and found he had one of 200 “original” copies of the Declaration of Independence, commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1820. 

    Estimated value at auction: $250,000. 

(It sold soon after for $477,650.)

 

    In 1989, an even better discovery was made. At a flea market in Pennsylvania, a shopper saw an ornate old picture frame he liked and paid $4. When he took it home and removed  the picture, he found an old copy of the Declaration of Independence, folded into the size of an envelope. The frame proved unsalvageable and he had to throw it away, meaning he was out $4. He kept the document, however, as something of “a curiosity.” It was fortunate that he did, for his copy turned out to be one from the original “Dunlap” run, 200 copies printed hastily on the evening of July 4, 1776, and sent to all parts of the Thirteen Colonies for public reading. 

    One, for example, is said to have been sent to George Washington, to be read to the troops during the winter at Valley Forge. Another, now in the possession of the National Park Service and housed in Philadelphia is believed to have been read to the people of that city by Colonel John Nixon, sheriff, on July 8, 1776. 

    Having been covered up by a picture for decades (perhaps), meant the flea market Declaration was an “unspeakably fresh copy,” according to experts at Sotheby’s. It was instantly one of only three known copies in private hands. 

    Only 24 were known to exist. 

    Estimated value in 1991: between $800,000 and $1,000,000. 

(Sold at auction: $2.42 million.)