1889

__________ 

“No one, up to that time, had ever thought of outfitting windows with fly-screens.” 

H. L. Mencken

__________

April 23: A land rush is unleashed in Oklahoma, as lands taken from the various tribes’ reservations are sold. Claims went to the first person who could reach a spot and mark it.

 

“A dispatch from Oklahoma City to-night says that at 12 o’clock men seemed to rise from the ground there, and in an incredibly short time a town was staked off and lots placed on the market.” (The New York Times.)

The term “Boomer Sooners,” popular with University of Oklahoma sports fans, relates to the land rush of 1889.

 

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The Boston Beaneaters pitcher Vic Willis is the highest paid player in the league, earning a salary of $1,800. (Sports Illustrated; 12-14-15)

 

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June 24: Butch Cassidy begins his criminal career, taking part in the robbery of a bank in Telluride, Colorado. In following years he and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh) perfect the “pony express” method of escaping the scene of the crime – a crime that they have just committed. They have relays of horses and supplies ready, at twenty-mile intervals. Using this system, they could rob a bank in Rawlins, Wyoming on a Monday, and be 120 miles away in Browns Park, Utah, the following day. (“Riding the Outlaw Trail” by Robert Redford, National Geographic, November 1976).

 

Their famous “Hole-in-the-Wall gang” got its name from a gap barely wide enough for a horse, in a fifty-mile-long sandstone ridge “rearing out of the Wyoming grassland.” (625) Two men with Winchesters, Redford says, could hold off an army at that narrow opening.

 

In 1900, and by that time famous, Butch had an idea for a “good joke,” when he and the rest of the gang posed for a picture in Fort Worth, Texas. They were wearing clothes they had just purchased with money they “withdrew” from a bank in Winnemucca, Nevada. (628)

Left to right: Longabaugh, Bill Carver, Ben Kilpatrick (alias: Tall Texan), Harvey Logan (Kid Curry), and Robert Leroy Parker (Butch Cassidy).

 

 

Logan is “credited” with eight killings, including his first, in 1894, during a Christmas party in Landusky, Montana, named after Powell Landusky, his victim. Logan eventually fled to Argentina, where he was murdered in turn by another outlaw. As for the town, by 2017, the population had fallen to only 40.

 

The Sundance Kid soon acquired a girlfriend named Etta Place. According to the Pinkerton detective agency, which had been tasked with tracking down the gang, Etta “appears to be refined;” but she could also ride and shoot. She, Butch and Sundance traveled to New York City in 1901, where they spent a great deal of money. (632) In his earlier career, Butch liked to pass himself off as a horse trader; but it was soon noted that he was always selling and rarely buying. As for his nickname, he got it after working at a butcher shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming. (637) The gang also hung out at South Pass City. A gold rush in the area caused population to boom, reaching 2,000. Today, South Pass City is a ghost town.

The Sundance Kid with Etta Price.

The movie version of the gang's story, starring Katherine Ross (as Etta),
Robert Redford (as the Sundance Kid) and Paul Newman (as Butch).

Abandoned mine near South Pass City.

The lure of gold.

Old placer mining site near South Pass City.

South Pass City in boom times.

Lynchings were common during this era.
(George Witherell, accused of murder in Colorado).

 

One tough character who lived there was Jesse Ewing. He had been clawed badly by a grizzly, winning the nickname, the “Ugliest Man in South Pass.” He once shared a jail cell with Isom Dart, an African American criminal – which did not please Ewing. He made Dart kneel one day, and used his back for a table. Dart’s friend later killed Ewing, and then Dart was killed by Tom Horn, the bounty hunter. Horn, in turn, was hanged in 1903, after he allegedly shot and killed a 14-year-old boy.

 

The gang liked to hold up Union Pacific trains, and near Wilcox, Wyoming, used dynamite to blast open a safe on a mail car. The explosives were too powerful. The car and the safe were obliterated, and $30,000 in cash was scattered in all directions.

Redford notes that there is no record that Butch ever killed anyone, calling him “the most amiable of all western outlaws.” (655)

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September 12: Henry Mencken turns nine. Around this time he discovers Huckleberry Finn, an event he will later describe as “the most stupendous of my whole life.” With that, his desire to write is born. H. L. Mencken, as he will become known, described growing up in Baltimore in the 80s. (49/5-18) 

Mencken remembers: “There was a great epidemic of typhoid fever every Summer, and a wave of malaria every Autumn, and more than a scattering of smallpox, especially among the colored folk in the alleys, every Winter.” 

It was, he says, the “Aframerican way,” to burn buckets of rosin and tar to prevent disease. “The whole neighborhood choked on the black, greasy, pungent smoke for hours afterward,” he recalled many years later. “It was thought to be an effective preventative of cholera, smallpox and tuberculosis.” 

Another problem was that raw sewage, from both private and public buildings, emptied into the Back Basin, and the water flowed slowly down to Chesapeake Bay. “As a result it began to acquire a powerful aroma every Spring, and by August smelled like a billion polecats. This stench radiated all over downtown Baltimore, though in Hollins street we hardly ever detected it.” 

On a happier note, Mencken had a kind of fun that seems almost impossible today. “In every way,” he wrote, “city life was much nosier than it is now.” 

Children at play were not incarcerated in playgrounds and policed by hired ma’ms, but roved the open streets, and most of the games involved singing or yelling. At Christmas-time they began to blow horns at least a week before the great day, and kept it up until all the horns were disabled, and in Summer they began celebrating the Fourth far back in June and were still exploding fire-crackers at the end of July. Nearly every house had a dog in it, and nearly all the dogs barked more or less continuously from 4 a.m. until after midnight. It was still lawful to keep chickens in backyards, and many householders did so. All within ear range of Hollins street appeared to divide them as to sex in the proportion of a hundred crowing roosters to one clucking hen.

 

He and his brother were regularly ordered to bathe – no easy task, in an era before showers, and bathtubs with running water. 

Whenever it was decided that we had reached an intolerable degree of grime, and measures were taken to hound us to the bathroom, we went into the vast old zinc-lined tub together, and beguiled the pains of getting clean by taking toy boats along. Once we also took a couple of goldfish, but the soap killed them almost instantly.

 

Mencken also reports: 

Nothing, in those days, seemed to work. All the house machinery was constantly out of order. The roof sprang a leak at least three times a year, and I recall the day when the cellar was flooded by a broken water main in Hollins street,  and my brother and I had a grand time navigating it in wooden wash-tubs. No one, up to that time, had ever thought of outfitting windows with fly-screens. Flies overran and devoured us in the Summer, immense swarms of mosquito were often blown in from the swamps to the southwest, and a miscellany of fantastic moths, gnats, June-bugs, beetles, and other insects. Some of them of formidable size and pugnacious, buzzed around the gas-lights at night.

 

On a happier note,  

Baltimore lay very near the immense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay, and out of the bay it ate divinely. I well recall the time when prime hard crabs of the channel species, blue in color, at least eight inches in length along the shell, and with snow-white meat almost as firm as soap, were hawked in Hollins street of Summer mornings at ten cents a dozen. The supply seemed to be almost unlimited, even in the polluted waters of the Patapsco river…

 

Mencken says of his father, “In the evening he seldom had much appetite, and would usually complain that cooking was fast going downhill in Baltimore, in accord with the general decay of human society.” He also recalled that his dad paid $1.20 for a case of 24 bottles of beer. 

The people of Baltimore believed that all vegetation was healthful, and kept down chills and fever. So, even dandelions grew in the streets.     

I myself once had proof that the excess of litter in the streets was not without its value to mankind. I was riding the pony Frank when a wild thought suddenly seized him, and he bucked me out of the saddle in the best manner of a Buffalo Bill bronco. Unfortunately, my left foot was stuck in the stirrup, and so I was dragged behind him as he galloped off. He had gone at least a block before a couple of colored boys stopped him. If the cobblestones of Stricker street had been bare I’d not be with you today. As it was, I got no worse damage than a series of harsh scouring running from my neck to my heels. The colored boys took me to Reveille’s livery-stable, and stopped the bloodshed with large gobs of spider web. It was the hemostatic of choice in Baltimore when I was young. If, per chance, it spread a little tetanus, then the Baltimoreans blamed the mercies of God. 

 

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The Merck Manual of Medical Information recommends one hundred different treatments for bronchitis. (The modern editor of the manual admits that “none of them worked.”)