1869

Blogger's collection.

__________ 

“A few thousand square miles of uninhabited territory.” 

Hendrik Van Loon, historian.

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TEACHERS NOTE: You can make a good argument that reservations for Native Americans were the same as big prisons. Let students figure it out. 

Luther Standing Bear would later describe the Rosebud Agency, where he and other Lakota live as a “government prison.”

* 

HARVARD selects Charles W. Eliot, 35, to be president of the college, the youngest man ever chosen to head the oldest college in the nation. Interested in education reform, having studied schools in Europe for two years, he overhauls the curriculum in dramatic fashion, greatly reducing the emphasis on classical learning, Greek and Latin, and introduces a system of electives. 

    As David McCullough writes, regarding Teddy Roosevelt’s later experiences at the school, 

    Eliot wished the Harvard student to be treated like an adult, to flourish in an atmosphere of academic freedom. He got rid of petty discipline rules, so that by Theodore’s time the old rule book of nearly forty pages had been reduced to one of five. In back of his elective system was an unshakable faith in the instinctive capacity of free human beings to follow the path that was best for them. No one could master anything worthwhile “without a deal of drudgery,” but then with so much that was so urgent and difficult in school life – in any life – it seemed “superfluous to invent other disagreeableness, whether for children or for men.” 

 

    The new president of Harvard believed in public service and in duty. On a gate to Harvard Yard, he had these words inscribed: 

Enter to grow in wisdom

Depart better to serve thy country and thy kind. 

 

    His personal motto was a saying of one of his overseers, Edward Everett Hale: “Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.” 112/196

*

May 10: The first transcontinental railroad is completed, but not before the two competing companies first drive right past each other, in an effort to get more free federal land. As Alistair Cooke once wrote, the rail crews opened fire on each other at one point, before cooler business heads prevailed. 

    “A century ago,” Cooke also wrote, “the railroad engine was as magical as a space ship.” (America, 228-229) 

The coming of the railroads means growing trouble for Native Americans on the Great Plains. Gilbert King, writing in Smithsonian magazine, explains: 

Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake. Unlike the Native Americans or Buffalo Bill, who killed for food, clothing and shelter, the hunters from the East killed mostly for sport. Native Americans looked on with horror as landscapes and prairies were littered with rotting buffalo carcasses. The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks. Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows, leaving countless 1,500-pound animals where they died.

 

Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions: 

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

 

Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands in the winter months. One hunter, Orlando Brown brought down nearly 6,000 buffalo by himself and lost hearing in one ear from the constant firing of his .50 caliber rifle. The Texas legislature, sensing the buffalo were in danger of being wiped out, proposed a bill to protect the species. General Sheridan opposed it, stating, “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.” 

 

The historian, Hendrik Van Loon, also has a say: 

Thus far the railroad contractor had followed the pioneer. Now the railroad contractor himself turned pioneer. He no longer waited until there were enough settlers in any given part of the Union to make it worth his while to build an iron road and go after their business. He first of all provided a few thousand square miles of uninhabited territory with decent means of communication and then invited farmers from the East and immigrants from Europe to settle within reasonable distance of his depots and use his road for the transportation of their cattle and their farm products. (124/410)

 

Van Loon seems blind when he speaks of “uninhabited territory,” but redeems himself a few pages later, writing, 

In this mad rush for new grazing fields and fresh wheat fields, the last remnants of the Indians (who had been given this territory as a sort of conscience money when the United States occupied their ancestral possessions in the East), those poor savages were ruthlessly pushed out of the way or were cooped up in vast concentration camps where they were allowed to vegetate and to generate as mildly interesting specimens of the original local fauna.

 

But such cruel incidents seem to be an unavoidable part of the White Man’s progress across the face of the globe. Theoretically the European and the American recognize the fact that black and yellow and copper-colored creatures also have the right to exist. In practice, however, they prefer such creatures when they “know their place” and shine their boots for them or do their masters’ laundering. When one of the races which seem to stand between the pale-face and his immediate profits declares itself too proud to become a bootblack or a dishwasher, the Caucasian does not quite know what to do with him. In such a dilemma he gets nervous and begins to play with his revolver and nine times out of ten something happens and the gun goes off. …

 

This chapter in our history is not very flattering to our pride. On every page we read the records of greed and cruelty and of broken treaties and the entire episode is steeped in the contraband room of the prairie saloon. (124/412-413)

 

Later, he writes that when the white men came, “They slew and hacked and burned and shot and hanged and generally destroyed everything the natives had built as rapidly as they could.” (124/415)

 

* 

THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER once described Collis P. Huntington, one of the Big Four investors behind the Central Pacific Railroad, as a man “with no more soul than a shark.”

What would the natives think?

 

* 

July: Teddy Roosevelt, 11, and his family travel to Europe, where they will spend ten months. 

He keeps a diary, writing in it every day without fail. In one entry, from France, he expresses his hurt, like any boy might today. 

At supper Mamma laughed at me a great deal and made fun of me because I always say “Pretty Papa, Pretty Mama” and made me feel (and I feel now) very cut and ashamed of myself and I don't feel natural, though Mama and Papa both tried to make it up when they saw what she had done. (112/87) 

 

* 

JILL LEPORE, a bicycle enthusiast, writes: 

No one’s quite sure who came up with this idea – most historians place their bets on a French carriage-maker, in 1855 – but putting a crank on the axle of the front wheel, with pedals on either side of the hub, changed everything about bicycles, including their name: most people called the ones with pedals “velocipedes,” which is, roughly, Latin for “fast feet.” People expected velocipedes to replace horses. “We think the bicycle an animal, which will, in a great measure, supersede the horse,” one American wrote in 1869. “It does not cost as much; it will not eat, kick, bite, get sick, or die.” 

 

*

 

CONSTRUCTION begins on Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, named after Gen. Joshua W. Sill, killed in the Battle of Stones River. 

The Native American artist, T.C. Cannon, painted the following picture, “Beef Issue at Fort Sill,” and wrote the accompanying poem in the mid-1970s.

With the buffalo fast disappearing, Native Americans stuck on reservations
are forced to rely on government beef.
Painting from the internet.

Beef Issue 

Everything must be used
then else returned to the earth
for even now
the grass is black with blood 

the rainsmell fills the breeze
and the children are hungry
i can see that the sky
is yellowing again 

the fuzzy face soldiers are laughing
they are never hungry
the dogs are eager for the bones
the sky is burning down overhead 

everything must be used
the grass is black with blood. 

 

*

 

Mid-August: James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok is elected sheriff of Ellis County, in Kansas. (He will not be reelected in November.) Hays is the biggest town, filled with cowboys, and frequented by soldiers of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. One biographer says of Hickok, that he was “the handsomest man west of the Mississippi. His eyes were blue – but could freeze to a cool steel-gray at threat of evil or danger.”

 

By 1866, he could tell a reporter he had already killed about a hundred men, not counting Native Americans. He told another reporter, “As to killing men, I never think much of it…. The killing of a bad man shouldn’t trouble one any more than killing a rat or an ugly cat or a vicious dog.”

 

During his time in Hays,

 

he may have killed a man named Jack (or Sam) Strawhorn (or Strawhan) who tried to get the drop on him; he may have killed two soldiers who talked tough at him; he may have thrashed Tom Custer, a brother of General George Custer; he may have killed three soldiers whom Custer had vengefully sicced on him – all the evidence bearing on these matters is likewise fuzzy. What is certain is that Hickok left Hays in a hurry one winter night, lest he be further beset by the Seventh Cavalry. 

 

Source: an old American Heritage article, “The Wild, Wild West” by Peter Lyon (formatted on brown pages, without numbers).

 

*

“Is it possible to get further down in National degeneracy and disgrace?”

  

When a white member of Congress from South Carolina is forced to resign, having sold an appointment to Annapolis, the Republican Party sends Joseph Hayne Rainey, an African American, to fill his place. Rainey is later elected to serve a full term. (See also: 1871, 1872, 1873.)

 

The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer responds: “Is it possible to get further down in National degeneracy and disgrace?”

 

Congressman Rainey.
Photo from the internet.

 

*

 

September 24: Benjamin Andrews describes the attempt to corner the gold market and the crash known as “Black Friday.”

 

In 1869 a clique of speculators in New York thought to realize an immense fortune by cornering gold, a large proportion of the stock east of the Rocky Mountains being known to be in New York City.

 

By Wednesday, September 22d, they had pushed up the price of gold in greenbacks from 131 to 141, causing a disastrous tumble in stocks and almost a panic. The money market grew tight, and interest enormous. Loans were to be had only on the very best securities. On Thursday gold still advanced, showing that the corner remained solid. At the last call it stood at 144; at the first on Friday, September 24th, 105 [error?] was the figure. The ring was believed at this time to hold in gold and in contracts to deliver the same, over $100,000,000, while all the gold in New York outside the United States Sub-Treasury was hardly over $10,000,000. Only the Government could break the corner. At 11:00 o’clock gold was at 155, whence in half an hour it rose to 160, then to 162, then to 164. In the midst of an excitement never paralleled in the Gold Room before our since, it was announced on authority that the Government would sell. The price at once went down to 135, and the power of the clique was instantly broken. This day passed into history under the name of “Black Friday.” (356-359)

 

 

* 

November 6: The College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and Rutgers play the first ever college football game, with Rutgers prevailing 6-4 (goals are worth one point and scored by kicking the ball across an opponent’s goal line.) Passing and carrying the ball are illegal and teams are comprised of 25 players, including 11 “fielders” to play defense and 12 “bulldogs” whose job is to score. The remaining pair position themselves near the opponent’s goal, hoping to pick up an easy point. 

A “game” ends when a goal is scored, and ten games are played. Rutgers uses the “flying wedge” for the first time to break through the New Jersey defenses. But J.E. Michael, known as “Big Mike,” for New Jersey, soon counters, breaking through the wedge. Madison M. Bell, a wounded Civil War veteran, also impresses spectators (there are about 100), using a heel kick to stop New Jersey scoring rushes and even set up a score for his own team.

1871

 

All illustration in this post from blogger's collection.
(Feel free to use.)

____________________ 

“When thieves could be kept in power by such means

plunder was easy and brazen.”

Benjamin Andrews

____________________

 

 

PEOPLE DON’T CHANGE. Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, uncle of Theodore, the future president, fathers the first of three children with his Irish immigrant mistress, Marion Theresa “Minnie” O’Shea. (He will marry her sixteen years later, after his wife dies, but will always refer to his children by her as his “stepchildren.” His double life led to a second child with O’Shea in 1875, and a third in 1880. 

This fiction was revealed only years later by some of his descendants, who were doing genealogical research.

*

March: The historian, Benjamin Andrews, notes the need for civil service reform in this era, citing a custom-house appraiser in Evansville, Indiana who informed his senator and the Secretary of the Treasury that his job entailed no actual duties. 

He could not be charged with neglect of duty, “for no officer was ever more faithful and diligent in drawing his salary than I was during those two years, and absolutely there was nothing else to do.” (11/60-61)

* 

April 20: The Ku Klux Klan Act is passed, designed to protect newly freed African Americans in the South from violence. Congressman Joseph Hayne Rainey, from South Carolina, and other lawmakers who supported the act receive a letter written in red ink. It reads, “Here, the climate is too hot for you….We warn you to flee. Each and every one of you are watched each hour.” (See also 1873 and 1874.) 

    Andrews calls the law the “Force Act,” and outlines its provisions and purpose: 

    The Force Act of 1871 was a much harsher measure. It empowered the President to employ the army, navy, and militia to suppress combinations which deprived the negro of the rights guaranteed him by the Fourteenth Amendment. For such combinations to appear in arms was made rebellion against the United States, and the President might suspend habeas corpus in the rebellious district. By President Grant, in the fall of 1871, this was actually done in parts of the Carolinas. (4-203)

 

*  

AN OLD American Heritage article, “The Wild, Wild West” by Peter Lyon (formatted on brown pages, without numbers) includes this nugget: 

A treaty of 1867 guaranteed that no white man would hunt buffalo south of the Arkansas River; by 1870, when the army officer commanding at Fort Dodge was asked what he would do if this promise were broken, he laughed and said, “Boys, if I were hunting buffalo I would go where buffalo are;” in 1871 the massacre began in earnest. One hunter bagged 5,855 in two months. It has been estimated that 4,373,730 were killed in the three years 1872-74.

 

Benjamin Andrews also describes the decimation: 

A still worse grievance [in the eyes of the Plains tribes] was the destruction of buffaloes by hunters and excursionists. Thousands of the animals were slaughtered for their hides, which fell in price from three dollars each to a dollar. In one locality were to be counted six or seven thousand putrefying carcasses. Hunters boasted of having killed two thousand head apiece in one season. Railroads ran excursion trains of amateur hunters, who shot their victims from the car windows. The creatures were at last well-nigh exterminated, so that in 1894 buffalo robes cost in New York from $75 to $175 each. (11/175)

 

* 

IN 1871, THE TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURE of Arizona begged Congress for protection from the Apache and other tribes. Affidavits were submitted, Andrews writes, “declaring that within two years 166 persons had been killed, 801 horse and mules and 2,437 cattle killed or stolen.” (11/171)

    In November governor A. P. K. Safford gave out an impassioned letter, of which we reproduce the substance. He said that with natural resources unsurpassed, with gold and silver mines that ought to be yielding annually $20,000,00, the people of his Territory were in poverty, and had undergone for years scenes of death and torture unparalleled in the settlement of our new countries. Instead of receiving sympathy and encouragement from their countrymen they were denounced as border ruffians, though nowhere were the laws more faithfully obeyed or executed than in Arizona. In but one instance had the people taken the law into their own hands. That, as the facts showed, was done under the most aggravating circumstances. In the possession of the Indians killed was found property belonging to men and women who had been murdered while the Indians were fed at Camp Grant. For this attack on the red men the whites were indicted by a grand jury…The Territory was out of debt, and was soon to have a free school in every district, indicating the law-abiding character of the population; yet men who were making money at the cost of the lives and property of the Arizona people denounce them as everything bad, and represented the Apache Indians, who had for four hundred years lived by murder and robbery, as paragons of moral excellence. The people of Arizona wanted peace and cared not how it was obtained; but they knew by years of experience that to feed Indians and let them roam over large tracts of lands simply placed them in a secure position to raid the settlers and return to their reservations for safety and rest. Though possessing one of the richest territories, all the Arizonians felt discouraged. At least five hundred had been killed, a large number of these horribly tortured. Those left, after fighting for years to hold the country, found themselves in poverty and looked upon as barbarians. (11/172) 

 

* 

July 18: William Marcy Tweed was born at 24 Cherry Street, New York City, in 1823. 

A youth devoted to business made him a fair penman and an adept reckoner, but not a businessman. He, indeed, once attempted business, but, as he gave his chief attention to speculation, gambling and ward politics, completely failed, so that he seems forever to have renounced legitimate money-making.

 

   He became a volunteer fireman and was known as “Big Six,” gaining leadership of a band nicknamed the “Roughs.” 

    When he became the head of Tammany Hall, “Tweed’s lambs” made sure voting went the way he wanted at party caucus and convention. 

    Two days before election these venal cohorts would assemble in the 340 election districts, each man of them being listed and registered under several assumed names and addresses. From Tweed’s house in 1868 six registered, from Justice Shandley’s nine, from the Coroner’s thirteen. A State Senator’s house was put down as the home of thirty voters. One Alderman’s residence nominally housed twenty, another twenty-five, an Assemblyman’s fifteen. And so it went. Bales of fictitious naturalization papers were secured. One year 105,000 blank applications and 69,000 certificates were ordered printed. In one case thirteen men, in another fifteen, were naturalized in five minutes. The new citizens “put in” election day following their leaders from polling place to polling place as needed.

 

    When thieves could be kept in power by such means plunder was easy and brazen. Contractors on public works were systematically forced to pay handsome bonuses to the [Tweed] Ring. One of them testified: “When I commenced building I asked Tweed how to make out the bills, and he said: ‘Have fifteen per cent. over.’ I asked what that was for, and he said, ‘Give that to me and I will take care of your bills.’ I handed him the percentage after that.” Innumerable methods of fraud were successfully tried. During the year 1863 the expenditures of the Street Department were $650,000. Within four years Tweed quadrupled them. A species of asphalt paving, dubbed “Fisk’s poultice,” so bad that a grand jury actually declared it a public nuisance, was laid in great quantities at vast cost to the city. Official advertising was doled to twenty-six daily and fifty-four weekly sheets, of which twenty-seven vanished on its withdrawal. But all the other robber enterprises paled before the city Court House job. This structure, commenced in 1868 under stipulation that it should not cost more than $250,000, was in 1871 still unfinished after an outlay of $8,000,000, four times as much as was spent on Parliament House in London. Its ostensible cost, at last, was not less than $12,000,000 as by witchcraft the city’s debt was in two years more than doubled. The Ring’s operations cheated the city’s taxpayers, first and last, out of no less than $160,000,000, “or four times the fine levied on Paris by the German army.” Though wallowing in lucre, and prodigal withal, Tweed was yet insatiably greedy. “His hands were every where, and every where they were they were feeling for money.” In 1871 he boasted of being worth $20,000,000, and vowed soon to be as rich as Vanderbilt.

 

    With his coarse nature the Boss reveled in jibes made at the expense of his honor. He used gleefully to show his friends the safe where he kept money for bribing legislators, finding those of the “Tammany Republican” stripe easiest game. Of the contractor who was decorating his country place at Greenwich he inquired, pointing to a statue, “Who the hell is that?” “That is Mercury, the God of merchants and thieves,” was the reply. “That’s bully!” said Tweed. “Put him over the front door.” His donation of $100 for an altar cloth in the Greenwich Methodist Church the trustees sent back, declaring that they wanted none of his stolen money.

 

   Andrews noted that the city papers, those not corrupted, were at first muted in protest. Prominent citizens, in on the graft, whitewashed Tweed’s reputation. Attempts were made to buy up the stock of the Times – and boycotts were organized against Thomas Nast’s  cartoons. The New York Bar Association was formed to keep watch over the judges who were in on the fix. 

    On July 18, 1871, a disgruntled member of the Ring walked into the office of the New York Times, and handed over a bundle of documents, saying, “There are all the figures: you can do with them what you will.” Two days later, the story was printed in both English and German, showing the extent of the corruption. Samuel Tilden was one of the leaders of the fight to bring Tweed down, which led to his being elected governor, and then put forward as candidate for president in 1876. 

   Tweed himself jumped bail, made it as far as Cuba, but was recaptured and turned in to authorities and sent back to the United States. (11/11-14)

 

* 

“One of the most stupendous frauds ever conceived and carried out.” 

    This description of the Tweed Ring comes from Library of American History, by Edward S. Ellis, published by the Charles P. Barrett Co. in 1895. 

    One of the most stupendous frauds ever conceived and carried out was that of the “Tweed Ring” in the city of New York. A short time before the Chicago fire, proofs were published that the metropolis had been swindled to the extent of millions of dollars by a gang of city officials, the leader of whom was “Boss” William M. Tweed, Superintendent of the Street Department. They had become supreme in the local organization known as Tammany Hall, and in 1868 managed the elections so as to carry the State for their party. They had a law enacted at Albany, which gave them control of the government in New York, and they began enriching themselves. 

 

    A contract was made for building a new courthouse, at an estimated cost of $250,000. Its erection was begun in 1869. All persons having contracts for furnishing supplies and labor were made to double and treble the amounts of their bills. Tweed was a member of the board of supervisors, which promptly passed the bills. Auditor Watson, one of the criminals, immediately audited the bills. The contractors having received what honestly belonged to them, the “ring” divided the enormous surplus among themselves.

 

    Tweed was a state senator, and by corruption secured a new charter for the government of New York City. The power of auditing or passing bills was given to a board of audit, composed of A. Oakey Hall, mayor; Richard B. Connelly, comptroller; William M. Tweed, commissioner of public works, and Peter B. Sweeney , commissioner of parks. This board audited bills for the new court-house in one evening to the extent of $6,000,000, of which the “ring” received two-thirds, Tweed’s share amounting to a million. Before the end of the year $2,000,000 more were charged against the account of the court-house. To check criticism, hundreds of people were placed on the pay-rolls of the city and paid large salaries for doing nothing. Others were hushed by means of “fat” contracts. Police justices were bribed and paid salaries double that of the governor of the State. The expenses of the city ran up to the astounding total of $24,000,000 a year. The debt sprang from $50,000,000 to $113,000,000, with a vast number of bills still to be heard from. The taxpayers were defrauded in the end out of fully $160,000,000, “or four times the fine levied on Paris by the German army,” and when Tweed was confronted with the amazing facts he coolly asked, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

 

    By and by discord came into the “ring.” Ex-Sheriff James O’Brien and State Senator Harry Genet revolted. O’Brien told the whole story to the New York Times, which, in July, 1871, published it. It shook the city like the rocking of an earthquake. It seemed too incredible for belief, but at a mass-meeting held at Cooper Institute, September 4, a committee of seventy was appointed to investigate and bring the criminals to justice. Tweed was arrested the following month, and gave a million dollars bail . A month later he was elected State senator, but did not take his seat.

 

    Comptroller Connelly, being arrested, gave half a million dollars bail and fled the country. In 1872 several suits were brought against Tweed. A juror died during the trial of A. Oakey Hall, and the next jury disagreed. A similar result was reached in the trial of Tweed, who had not lost his power of corrupting men. However, in November, 1873, he was found guilty on each of the fifty-one indictments. He was ordered to pay a fine of $12,550 and was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island; but the Court of Appeals decided he must be set free, because he had been confined on a cumulative sentence. He was released June 22. Meanwhile other suits were brought against him, one of which was to recover $6,000,000. He was held to bail for $3,000,000, failing to find which he was sent to Ludlow Street Jail. On account of his health, he was allowed occasionally to ride in the park and to visit his residence. On December 4, while at his home, he escaped (or was allowed to escape) his keepers, and after remaining in hiding for several months, sailed in a yacht to Cuba, whence he made his way to Spain. We had no extradition treaty at the time with that country, and Tweed felt that at last he was safe; but Spain was inclined to help us, because of some courtesy received from Secretary Seward. Accordingly the fugitive was arrested at Vigo, sent back to this country, and lodged again in jail on Blackwell’s Island.

 

    In the suit against the prisoner, the city received a verdict for $6,537,117.38, but only a small amount was ever recovered . Tweed promised, if released, to turn State’s evidence, but the offer was not accepted and he died in jail in April, 1878.

 

    Ellis adds a footnote: 

    The Tweed ring offered Thomas Nast, the artist, one hundred thousand dollars to cease drawing his cartoons of the ring and to leave the country. “I don’t care what is written about me,” said Tweed, “for mighty few of my constituents ever read a newspaper, but none of them can mistake those pictures: they hurt.” (pp. 1179-1182)

Caricature of Boss Tweed.

Stuffing ballot boxes, buying votes, were common practices.
Both drawings from blogger's collection.

 *

EDWARD EGGLESTON’S NOVEL, The Hoosier Schoolmaster is published. The historian John Bach McMaster, in his A Brief history of the United States, written in 1907 for elementary students, recommends it. 

    At the very opening, a young schoolmaster, brand new to the task of teaching, visits the backwoods home of one of the school trustees:

 

   “Want to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would you do in Flat Crick deestrick, I’d like to know? Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes. You might teach a summer school, when nothin’ but children come. But I ’low it takes a right smart man to be school-master in Flat Crick in the winter. They’d pitch you out of doors, sonny, neck and heels, afore Christmas.”

 

    The young man, who had walked ten miles to get the school in this district, and who had been mentally reviewing his learning at every step he took, trembling lest the committee should find that he did not know enough, was not a little taken aback at this greeting from “old Jack Means,” who was the first trustee that he lighted on. The impression made by these ominous remarks was emphasized by the glances which he received from Jack Means’s two sons. The older one eyed him from the top of his brawny shoulders with that amiable look which a big dog turns on a little one before shaking him. Ralph Hartsook had never thought of being measured by the standard of muscle. This notion of beating education into young savages in spite of themselves dashed his ardor.

 

* 

October 8: The deadliest fire in U.S. history sweeps through the logging town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Eight hundred people in the town are killed – and possibly 2,400 across the region.

 

* 

October 8-10: Benjamin Andrews describes the terrible fire that swept much of the city of Chicago. I’m not sure who he was quoting here: 

    "Niagara sank into insignificance compared with that towering wall of whirling, seething, roaring flame. It swept on and on, devouring the massive stone blocks as though they had been the cardboard playthings of a child. Looking under the flame one could see, in the very centre of the furnace, stately buildings on either side of Randolph Street whose beauty and magnificence and whose wealth of contents were admired by thousands the day before. A moment and the flickering flame crept out of a window; another and another hissing tongue followed; a sheet of fire joined the whirling mass above, and the giant structure was gone. One pile after another thus dissolved like snow on the mountain. Loud detonations to the right and left, where buildings were being blown up, the falling of walls and the roaring of flames, the moaning of the wind and of the crowd, and the shrill whistling of tugs endeavoring to remove the shipping out of the reach of danger, made up a frightful discord of sound that will live in every hearer’s memory while life shall last.” (11/6-7)

 

    Andrews himself writes, “the glare could be seen for hundreds of miles over the prairie and the lake. The river seemed to boil and mingle its steam with the smoke.” 

    Early Monday morning, the Tribune building remains intact, “the only structure left in the business quarter.”  Two patrols are alert, sweeping up live coals, another watching the roofs. 

    “Till four o’clock the reporters passed in regular reports of the fire. At five the forms were sent down….At that moment the front basement is discovered on fire. The water-plug at the corner is opened, but the water-works have been destroyed. The pressmen have to fly for their lives. By ten o’clock the block is in ashes.

 

    “Streets, bridges, parks are gorged with panic-stricken throngs. Not a few are crazed by terror. One old woman stumbles along under a great bundle, crooning Mother Goose melodies. Anarchy reigns. The horrors of the night are multiplied by drunkenness, arson, burglary, murder, rape. Vigilance committees are formed. It was estimated that fifty ruffians first and last were shot in their tracks, among them five notorious criminals. Convicts locked in the court-house basement would have been burnt alive but for the Mayor’s timely order, which his son, with the utmost difficulty and danger, delivered after the building had began to burn.

 

    “The morning after the fire the indomitable Chicago pluck began to show itself. William D. Kerfoot knocked together a shanty, facetiously called “Kerfoot’s block,” and unrivaled structure, for it was the only one in the neighborhood. To it he nailed his sign which well typified the spirit of the city. ‘W.. D. Kerfoot, all gone but wife, children, and ENERGY.’ Next Sunday the Rev. Dr. Collyer preached where his church had formerly stood, in the midst of the city, yet in the heart of a wilderness, more than a mile from human habitation.

 

    “Not till Tuesday morning was the headway of the fire checked, and parts of the charred debris smoldered on for months. nearly three and a third square miles were burned over; 17,450 buildings were destroyed, 98,5000 persons rendered homeless; and over 250 killed.” (11/7-9)

 

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October 27: Teddy Roosevelt turns thirteen. His description of his father is of interest here.

    My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older, he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man. With great love and patience, and the most generous sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid. I do not mean that it was a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him. .. 

    David McCullough describes a man who was unfulfilled in his work, a man at a desk “going through the motions, performing dutifully as the proper Victorian breadwinner, a prudent, attractive figure, quite in the Roosevelt mold, but uninspired, unaggressive, and, probably, not very good at what he did.” 

    As time went on, his crusades among the needy, his hospital and museum projects, became his true vocation. It was thus that he became one of the prominent men of the city, as truly good a good citizen as New York had ever known. “Whatever he had to do, he did it all out,” remembered Charles Loring Brace, the pioneer social worker. To some, he seemed strangely driven. John Hay, another friend, spoke of his “maniacal benevolence,” and in letters to his wife Theodore himself infers occasionally that with so much to do he has no choice. “I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.”

 

    Together with Brace and a friend named Howard Potter, he had helped establish the Children’s Aid Society, to do something for the city’s homeless children – “street rats” as the police chose to call them…

 

    Eventually, 100,000 orphans and homeless children would be sent West to start new lives away from the city. (112/28, 31) 

    Theodore’s father one explained, “I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language.”

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might be interesting to ask students how they think young Theodore’s life would have been shaped by his father’s example. But you never know. I remember once, in discussion on some topic, that a young man in my first bell announced to the whole class, “My father’s a useless meth head.”  

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    John Humphrey Noyes warns the doubting world that the Day of Judgment is upon the world. 

    I think there is abundant evidence, especially in the last year, that the judgment has begun. He that searcheth the hearts and trieth the reins has been among us cutting between the righteous and the wicked and between good and evil in our own characters. So of the resurrection. We have seen that there is a power among us that can conquer death. Some of us have lived for a long time in the jaws of death, and also in the jaws of the resurrection; dying daily and rising daily.

 

    With a mighty hand and marvelous wisdom God has gathered us together here. We’ve been able to cut our way through the isolation and selfishness in which the mass of men exist, and have attained a position in which before heaven and earth we trample under foot the domestic and pecuniary fashions of the world. Separate households, property exclusiveness have come to an end with us. Our association is established on principles opposed at every point to the institutions of the world.

 

    If our spiritual attainments are inferior to those of the primitive church before 70 A. D., on the other hand our political and corporate position is in advance of theirs. The fact that communism has developed with us at an earlier period of experience than with them corresponds with the advancing purpose of God.

 

… Therefore it was unanimously adopted as the declaration of the believers assembled, that the Kingdom of God has come. 

 

    Noyes later claimed, that God announced his approbation in His own unique fashion. “A singular incident occurred at the close of the meeting. At the exact moment when the vote was taken a sublime clap of thunder like a cannon salvo startled us. It was the only clap that evening, and was so entirely unexpected that it seemed like Heaven’s response to our act.” (Veysey, pp. 134/27-28)