1891

 

____________________

 

“Follow it up buy one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

 

L. Frank Baum

____________________

 

 

January 3: L. Frank Baum – later the author of The Wizard of Oz – writes in the Aberdeen Pioneer, 

 

The Pioneer has before declared that our safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we can better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up buy one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. (See: Year 1890.)

Sioux boots for fancy occasions.

 

The Sioux or Lakota people had a proud history.


*

“What must the Indian do? Die, fight, or starve?”

 

Robert M. Utley wrote about one particular incident from this period, in an American Heritage story called, “The Ordeal of Plenty Horses.”

 

On January 8, 1891, newspapers throughout the United States headlined a tragic event in the Indian troubles rocking the Sioux reservations of South Dakota. A talented and popular army officer attempting to enter a hostile encampment to talk peace had been treacherously slain by a young Sioux warrior. The death of Lieutenant Edward W. Casey shocked and saddened his legions of friends and admirers. For Plenty Horses, his killer, it was part of an ordeal that personalizes in one tragic figure the cultural disaster that befell the American Indians after dwindling land and game forced them to submit to the grim life of the reservation.

 

The killing of Lieutenant Casey took place as the last important Indian conflict in American history drew to an unhappy close. The Sioux had suffered a decade of cultural disintegration under the impact of reservation programs aimed at civilizing them. Old customs and institutions had been perverted or destroyed and no satisfactory new ones substituted. A massive land grab, a succession of broken promises, and hunger and sickness completed the plunge into despair. In desperation many of the people turned to the ghost dance religion, which held forth the bright promise of a return to the old way of life – the white people would be swept away, the buffalo would once again blacken the plains, and generations of ancestors would come back to life to dwell with the faithful in paradise.

 

Among other tribes that danced the Ghost Dance in quest of the millennium, the new religion retained the pacifist teachings of its founder, a Nevada Paiute named Wovoka. But among the Sioux, oppressed by special misfortunes, it took a violent turn. The apostles Short Bull and Kicking Bear urged their followers to hasten the day of deliverance by force, and they invented “ghost shirts” to stop the bullets of any white people disposed to resist. The excitement reached a peak in November, in 1890. The agent at Pine Ridge appealed for military support, and in the next few weeks the army flooded the five Sioux reservations with the largest concentration of troops the nation had seen since the last days of the Civil War. (15)

 

In the wake of the slaughter at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), the chiefs of the Sioux heatedly discussed their next moves. One encampment of rebels (I might call them) grew to 4,000, including 800 to 1,000 men of fighting age. Senika-Wakan-Ota, Plenty Horses, was 22, which would make him five years old in 1873, when buffalo darkened the Great Plains and his people were still free.

 

He must have talked to warriors who fought off the U.S. Army in 1868, the year of his birth, in Red Cloud’s War.

 

Yet, from 1883 to 1888, Plenty Horses had attended the Indian boarding school at Carlisle Barracks, in Pennsylvania. When he returned to the reservation, Utley writes, “he was no longer an Indian. But as anyone could plainly see, he was not a white person either.” His hair was cut short, he spoke English, and dressed in white man’s clothes. Plenty Horses had difficulty fitting in, as he later explained,

 

I found that the education I had received was of no benefit to me. There was no chance to get employment, nothing for me to do whereby could earn my board and clothes, no opportunity to learn more and remain with the whites. It disheartened me and I went back to live as I had before going to school. To forget my school habits and English speech was an easy matter. (16)

 

Utley also writes about Lt. Casey, a graduate of West Point, and a superb soldier. “The sun will never shine upon a better,” in the words of Frederic Remington. He had fought the Sioux before, at the Battle of Muddy Creek, in 1877, and then returned to West Point for four years as a tactics instructor. In 1889 he organized a scout troop made up of Cheyenne Indians. Utley says he had no trouble  attracting recruits. “He gave them firm, conscientious, and sympathetic leadership sharpened by uncommon insight into Indian character. They repaid his solicitude with veneration and affectionately named him big nose. Quickly he molded them into an elite unit.” (17)

 

Casey’s warriors kept eyes on the big camp of Sioux, and Sioux warriors rode out almost daily to exchange news. On Jan. 6, Lt. Casey and several of the Sioux spoke. “Their report of sentiment in the camp convinced him that he might further the cause of peace by personally talking with some of the Brulé and Ogalala chiefs.” The following morning, Lt. Casey headed up White Clay Creek for the Sioux camp.

 

Meanwhile, Plenty Horses has fled from the reservation with another band of Sioux, but returned in time to hear distant gunfire on December 29. Hastening to Wounded Knee, he later said, he came upon “an awful sight.”

 

“The survivors,” he added, “told such a pitiful tale.”

 

The next day Plenty Horses joined with other young men in attacking and routing the 7th Cavalry at Drexel Mission, then rode down White Clay Valley to the big camp at No Water. It rocked with intense excitement. Inflamed by Wounded Knee, the Indians danced the Ghost Dance and worked to erect defenses against the attack they feared would come. On the morning of January 7, Plenty Horses later stated, “I was out from the camp watching that no troops came to harm my father and relatives. Of course I was in a bad frame of mind. Our home was destroyed, our family separated, and all hope of good times was gone. There was nothing to live for.” (18)

 

Meanwhile, Lt. Casey and two Cheyenne scouts ran into a party of about forty Sioux, including Plenty Horses. A message was sent to Red Cloud, with the main village, with an offer to discuss peace. Red Cloud sent Pete Richard, a “half-breed,” part Sioux, part French, to speak with Casey. Richard, who spoke Sioux better than English, met the Army officer about a mile-and-a-half from camp, and they shook hands. “I told him that he had better go home at once for the young fellows were just the same as if they were drunk or crazy.” The chiefs, Richard added, would talk peace with General Nelson Miles, the next day. So, Casey should go.

 

Utley explains what happened next:

 

During this conversation Plenty Horses had slowly backed his horse out of the circle [of riders] and posted himself by three or four feet behind Casey. As Richard and the officer wheeled their horses to depart Plenty Horses took his Winchester from under his blanket, calmly raised it to his shoulder, and fired one shot. The bullet tore into the back of Casey’s head and came out just under the right eye. The horse reared and pitched its rider from the saddle. Casey crashed to the ground on his face, dead.

 

One warrior took Casey’s horse, another dismounted, turned the body over, opened Casey’s overcoat, and removed his two pistols. (18)

 

On January 15, the Sioux surrendered. A week later, General Miles paraded the regiments and began to send them to their hoe stations. “The last Indian ‘war’ had ended,” wrote Utley.

 

The Sioux considered what Plenty Horses had done to be just one act of war among many. Red Cloud told a reporter, in Utley’s words, “but he and all the other suit Chiefs deplored the death of Casey, a true friend of the Indians, but regarded it as a misfortune of war for which no one could be blamed or punished.” The Army had a different view and Plenty Horses was arrested on February 19, and locked up in the guard house at Fort Meade, near Sturgis, S.D. In the civilian courts, Plenty Horses was soon indicted for murder. But U.S. Army officers were having second thoughts. If what he had done was murder, might not some soldiers also face charges for their actions at Wounded Knee?

 

Certainly, there where whites who deserved to be charged. Utley writes:

 

On January 11, before the surrender and while residents of settlements outside the reservations still feared a general Indian war, two Ogalala families broke camp on the Bell Fourche River and resumed their journey by wagon toward Pine Ridge. Bearing an official pass from their agent, they had been hunting near Bear Butte. When scarcely three hundred yards from the night’s campsite the travelers were met by a fusillade of rifle bullets fired from ambush. The two horses pulling the lead wagon dropped in their traces. Few Tails, the driver, slumped dead in his seat, a bullet through his face and one in his chest. Clown, his wife, jumped from the wagon and was knocked down by bullets. In the second wagon One Feather lashed the horses into a run as a shot struck his wife, Red Owl, and as his thirteen-year-old daughter and infant child cowered amid the meat in the wagon bed. Pausing later to abandon the wagon and place his family on horseback, On Feather fought a courageous rearguard action against his assailants, who finally gave up the pursuit rather than get too close to his Winchester. Two weeks later One Feather’s family reached Rosebud Agency exhausted and hungry, Red Owl weak from loss of blood, the infant dead of starvation. Clown survived, too. In an extraordinary five-day feat of determination and endurance, with a bullet in her breast and another in her leg, she made her painful way across a hundred miles of frozen prairie to Pine Ridge Agency, where she arrived on January 18 almost dead from her wounds and exposure.

 

Military investigations established beyond question that the perpetrators of this cold-blooded act were three Culbertson brothers who owned a ranch near the scene of the killing. The Culbertsons contended that the Indians had stolen horses from them and had fired first, but this hollow explanation collapsed under the weight of accumulating evidence. Pete Culbertson revealed their truer motives when he boasted: “I’ve shot one of those damned Government pets, and if any more of them want to be fixed, let them come this way.” (82)

 

At least one Army officer drew a direct line between the killing by Plenty Horses and the killings by the Culbertson brothers. If one had to be tried for murder, then the others should be.

 

Young Man Afraid of His Horses, a powerful Oglala chief, had a simple solution, albeit lacking in Fifth or Eighth Amendment protections. When asked to surrender Plenty Horses and a second warrior, he responded:

 

No, I will not surrender them; but if you will bring the white men who killed Few Tales, I will bring the Indians who killed the white soldier and the herder; and right out here in front of your tepee I will have my young men shoot the Indians, and you have your soldiers shoot the white men, then we will be done with the whole business; they were all bad men. (82-83)

 

It was finally agreed that the Culbertson brothers would stand trial for murder, as would Plenty Horses. Two young Sioux Falls lawyers, George P. Nook and D. E. Powers agreed to defend Plenty Horses. Utley sets the scene, the defendant sitting in court every day “without a trace of emotion.” Plenty Horses was covered in a faded blue blanket, wore a cheap red shirt and well-worn trousers, and plain moccasins on his feet. His hair was long and braided, tied up with strips of flannel, and fell to his chest.

 

His father, Living Bear, proved more animated as he gave way to touching shows of affection for his son and sorrow over his plight; each morning he followed as two deputies escorted Plenty Horses to the courtroom and each evening enacted the same ritual as Plenty Horses was returned to his cell.

 

At one point during the trial, several Native American visitors to town were excited to find seventeen buffalo in a corral. Meanwhile, Nock and Powers based their defense on the idea that both Lt. Casey and Plenty Horses viewed themselves as participants in a war, insisting, in Utley’s words, that “the killing of a belligerent during a state of war could not be regarded as a criminal offense within the competence of a civilian court.” Plenty Horses was called to the stand at one point, but when the court refused to allow him to answer questions through an interpreter, and answer instead in English, his lawyers refused to let him testify and rested their case.

 

“I wanted to tell them that I am not guilty of murder,” the defendant said on his way out of court. The jury deadlocked, with six voting for a conviction on the charge of murder, but six voting for conviction for manslaughter.

 

A second trial began on May 23. Plenty Horses looked pale and wasted, after weeks in jail. “A bright red shirt and yellow neckerchief, the gift of an admirer added color to his appearance.” This time, General Miles even sent a member of his staff, Captain Frank D. Baldwin to testify for the defense – and make it clear, yes, a state of war had existed. With that, the judge declared the trial over. “There is no need of going further with this case,” he said. Indeed, the U.S. Army understood, “If Wounded Knee was not a battle in a war, the soldiers were guilty of murder.” (84)

 

Utley explains:

 

Had Casey shot and killed Plenty Horses while reconnoitering the No Water camp, he surely would not have been charged with murder in the civil courts. The slaying of Casey, therefore, could only be called an act of war, and Judge Shiras could not accept any verdict other than acquittal. After a brief discussion without even leaving the room, the jurors obediently complied with their instructions, although a poll later taken by a newspaperman disclosed that left to their own deliberations, they would have convicted Plenty Horses of manslaughter.

 

Before the judge could dismiss the defendant and gavel the trial to a close, the courtroom exploded with cheers, for public sympathy had swung to the sad, lonely figure in the prisoner’s dock. As Powers grasped the hand of his client in congratulation a watching reporter could find no hint of joy in Plenty Horses’ demeanor. “On his face there was no sign of delight, as before there had been none of anxiety or fear.” Another observer, however, saw tears on the Indian’s cheeks and heard him murmur, “I am free! Good, good, good!” For an hour after the formal adjournment of the court well-wishers crowded around Plenty Horses, shaking his hand. Later, in the street outside, the Indians who had gathered for the trial enacted a similar ceremony. “I am glad you are free,” said the stately [chief] American Horse. “You killed Casey; that was bad. He was a brave man and a good one. He did much for the Indian, but the whites cruelly starved us into such a condition that the young men were crazy and you did not know what you did.”

 

Before boarding a train back to the reservation, American Horse spoke to a gathered crowd. “What must the Indian do?” he asked. “Die, fight, or starve? We ask not much. Give us a chance to learn your ways and do not charge us three prices for what white man gets for one. The spot of snow is melting. Soon the Indian will be no more. Give us a chance, keep your treaty.”

 

In July, a jury in Sturgis found the Culbertson brothers not guilty in the murder of Few Tales, and the story was ended.

 

As for Plenty Horses, he had already explained his actions to a grand jury, before his trial. “I am an Indian. Five years I attended Carlisle and was educated in the ways of the white man. … I was lonely. I shot the lieutenant so I might make a place for myself among my people,” he said. “Now I am one of them. I shall be hung and the Indians will bury me as a warrior. They will be proud of me. I am satisfied.”

 

Rather than be hanged by the neck until dead, he went on to marry, and he and his wife, Josephine, had a son, named Charles. They lived in a one-room log cabin on the reservation. Records indicate that Plenty Horses died on July 15, 1933, a year after the untimely death of his wife and his son. (86)

 

Utley went on to write sixteen books, focusing primarily on the U.S. Army and its confrontations with Native American peoples. The dilemma the military faced, he described in 1988:

…the frontier army was a conventional military force trying to control, by conventional military methods, a people that did not behave like conventional enemies and, indeed, quite often were not enemies at all. This is the most difficult of all military assignments, whether in Africa, Asia, or the American West.

(U.S. troops in Afghanistan, to this day, might agree.)

Burial of Native American dead after Wounded Knee.

 

*

 

March 14: Thousands of Italian immigrants have settled in New Orleans in recent years, including some whom are members of the Mafia. After Captain David C. Hennessey, chief of police, is “assassinated by some secret murderer,” suspicion falls on members of the crime syndicate.

 

Ridpath explains what happened:

 

A trial followed, and the circumstances tended to establish – but did not establish – the guilt of the prisoners. The proof was not positive – did not preclude a reasonable doubt of the guilt of those on trial, and the first three of the Italian prisoners were acquitted. The sequel was unfortunate in the last degree. A great excitement followed the decision of the Court and jury, and charges were made and published that the jury had been bribed or terrorized with threats into making a false verdict. These charges were never substantiated but on the day following the acquittal of the Italians a public meeting, having its origin in mobocracy, was called, and a great crowd, irresponsible and angry, gathered around the statue of Henry Clay, in one of the public squares of New Orleans.

 

Speeches were made. The authorities of the city, instead of attempting to check the movement, stood off and let it take its own course. A mob was at once organized and directed against the jail, where the Italian prisoners were confined. The jail was entered by force. The prisoners were driven from their cells and nine of them were shot to death in the jail yard. Two others were dragged forth and hanged. Nor can it be doubted that the innocent as well as the guilty (if indeed any were guilty – as certainly none were guilty according to law) suffered in the slaughter. (1219-514)

 

Many of the immigrants were from Sicily, and in a Jim Crow era, they were not always welcome.

 

“Sicilians were viewed by many Americans as culturally backward and racially suspect,” writes historian Manfred Berg. Because of their dark skin, they were often treated with the same contempt as black people. They were also suspected of Mafia connections, and their family networks were closely watched by the New Orleans police.

 

In the wake of the murder, there were trials, but those trials did not go as many believed they should.

 

When news spread that the trial had resulted in six not-guilty convictions and three mistrials, the city went wild. They assumed that the Mafia had somehow influenced jurors or fixed the trial and that justice had not been served. “Rise, people of New Orleans!” wrote the Daily States newspaper. “Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr’s blood upon your vaunted civilization.” The message was clear: If the New Orleans justice system couldn’t punish Italians, the people of New Orleans would have to do so instead.

 

In response, thousands of angry residents gathered near the jail. Impassioned speakers whipped the mob into a frenzy, painting Italian immigrants as criminals who needed to be driven out of the city. Finally, the mob broke into the city’s arsenal, grabbing guns and ammunition. As they ran toward the prison, they shouted, “We want the Dagoes!”

 

A smaller group of armed men stormed the prison, grabbing not just the men who had been acquitted or given a mistrial, but several who had not been tried or accused in the crimes. Shots rang out – hundreds of them. Eleven men’s bodies were riddled with bullets and torn apart by the crowd.

 

Outside the jail, the larger mob cheered as the mutilated bodies were displayed. Some corpses were hung; what remained of others were torn apart and plundered for souvenirs.

 

The Italian government complained and there was talk of war between the two countries. 

But many Americans, swept up on a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, applauded the killings. An editorial in The New York Times called the victims “desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins…are to us a pest without mitigations.”

 

The difficulty between Italy and the United States would subside over the coming months; but the anti-immigrant feeling in this country would boil up repeatedly in this country, in years ahead.

 *

 

“A man like me is helpless, just like a fly in a pan of molasses.”

 

Hamlin Garland publishes Main-Traveled Roads, what we would now call an historic novel, highlighting the difficult conditions faced by western farmers:

 

The main-traveled road in the West is hot and dusty in summer, and empty and dreary with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the wind sweeps the snow across it…it is a long and wearyful road and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-traveled road of life, it is traversed by many classes of people – but the poor and weary predominate.

 

He dedicated the work “…to mother and father – whose half-century pilgrimage on the main-traveled road of life has brought them only toil and poverty.”

 

In another passage (I don’t have the page to hand), a farmer explains his plight. With the banks likely to foreclose on his mortgage, with the railroads charging exorbitant rates, with the Robber Barons creating monopolies and raising prices on machinery he needs on the farm, he’s stuck. “A man like me is helpless, just like a fly in a pan of molasses,” he explains. “There ain’t no escape for him. The more he tears around, the more liable he is to rip his legs off.”

 

*

 

We have placed some of the stories from Main-Traveled Roads in the years where they are set. In the second story, “Up the Coulee,” Mr. Howard McErlane is taking the train home to the small town in the La Cross Valley, where he grew up.

 

It was about six o’clock as he caught sight of the splendid broken line of hills on which his baby eyes had looked thirty-five years ago. A few minutes later, and the train drew up at the grimy little station set into the hillside, and, giving him just time to leap off, plunged on again toward the West. Howard felt a ridiculous weakness in his legs as he stepped out upon the broiling-hot, splintery planks of the station and faced the few idlers lounging about. He simply stood and gazed with the same intensity and absorption one of the idlers might show standing before the Brooklyn Bridge.

The town caught and held his eyes first. How poor and dull and sleepy and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left, and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, with walled, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements; the same—only worse and more squalid—was the town.

 

He was a goodly figure of a man as he stood there beside his valise. Portly, erect, handsomely dressed, and with something unusually winning in his brown mustache and blue eyes, something scholarly suggested by the pinch-nose glasses, something strong in the repose of the head. He smiled as he saw how unchanged was the grouping of the old loafers on the salt-barrels and nail-kegs. He recognized most of them—a little dirtier, a little more bent, and a little grayer.

 

They sat in the same attitudes, spat tobacco with the same calm delight, and joked each other, breaking into short and sudden fits of laughter, and pounded each other on the back, just as when he was a student at the La Crosse Seminary and going to and fro daily on the train.

They ruminated on him as he passed, speculating in a perfectly audible way upon his business.

 

“Looks like a drummer.”

 

“No, he ain’t no drummer. See them Boston glasses?”

 

“That’s so. Guess he’s a teacher.”

 

“Looks like a moneyed cuss.”

 

“Bos’n, I guess.”

 

He knew the one who spoke last – Freemen Cole, a man who was the fighting wonder of Howard’s boyhood, now degenerated into a stoop-shouldered, faded, garrulous, and quarrelsome old man.

 

We learn the town is squalid; but the surrounding hills are beautiful. Howard is an actor and has had good luck in his career and the good sense to use it. He’s against alcohol and tobacco, too, but a good companion, nonetheless.

 

In the farmhouse ahead of him a light was shining as he peered ahead, and his heart gave another painful movement. His brother was awaiting him there, and his mother, whom he had not seen for ten years and who had lost the power to write. And when Grant wrote, which had been more and more seldom of late, his letters had been cold and curt.

 

He began to feel that in the pleasure and excitement of his life he had grown away from his mother and brother. Each summer he had said, “Well, now, I’ll go home this year, sure.” But a new play to be produced, or a new yachting trip, or a tour of Europe, had put the home-coming off; and now it was with a distinct consciousness of neglect of duty that he walked up to the fence and looked into the yard, where… his brother lived.

 

As he waited, he could hear a woman’s fretful voice and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill-temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm-scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by the pump.

 

“Good-evening,” said Howard, out of the dusk.

 

Grant stared a moment. “Good-evening.”

 

Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more sullen. “Don’t you know me, Grant? I am Howard.”

 

The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. “You are?” after a pause. “Well, I’m glad to see you, but I can’t shake hands. That damned cow had laid down in the mud.”

 

They stood and looked at each other. Howard’s cuffs, collar, and shirt, alien in their elegance, showed through the dusk, and a glint of light shot out from the jewel of his necktie, as the light from the house caught it at the right angle. As they gazed in silence at each other, Howard divined something of the hard, bitter feeling that came into Grant’s heart, as he stood there, ragged, ankle-deep in muck, his sleeves rolled up, a shapeless old straw hat on his head.

 

The gleam of Howard’s white hands angered him. When he spoke, it was in a hard, gruff tone, full of rebellion.

 

“Well, go in the house and set down. I’ll be in soon’s I strain the milk and wash the dirt off my hands.”

 

“But mother—”

 

“She’s ’round somewhere. Just knock on the door under the porch round there.”

 

Howard went slowly around the corner of the house, past a vilely smelling rain-barrel, toward the west. A gray-haired woman was sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the faintly yellow sky, against which the hills stood, dim purple silhouettes, and on which the locust trees were etched as fine as lace. There was sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair in her attitude.

 

Howard stood, his throat swelling till it seemed as if he would suffocate. This was his mother—the woman who bore him, the being who had taken her life in her hand for him; and he, in his excited and pleasurable life, had neglected her!

 

He stepped into the faint light before her. She turned and looked at him without fear. “Mother!” he said. She uttered one little, breathing, gasping cry, called his name, rose, and stood still. He bounded up the steps, and took her in his arms.

 

“Mother! Dear old mother!”

 

In the silence, almost painful, which followed, an angry woman’s voice could be heard inside: “I don’t care! I ain’t goin’ to wear myself out fer him. He c’n eat out here with us, or else—”

 

Mrs. McLane began speaking. “Oh, I’ve longed to see yeh, Howard. I was afraid you wouldn’t come till—too late.”

 

“What do you mean, mother? Ain’t you well?”

 

“I don’t seem to be able to do much now ’cept sit around and knit a little. I tried to pick some berries the other day, and I got so dizzy I had to give it up.”

 

“You mustn’t work. You needn’t work. Why didn’t you write to me how you were?” Howard asked, in an agony of remorse.

 

“Well, we felt as if you probably had all you could do to take care of yourself. Are you married, Howard?” she broke off to ask.

 

“No, mother; and there ain’t any excuse for me—not a bit,” he said, dropping back into her colloquialisms. “I’m ashamed when I think of how long it’s been since I saw you. I could have come.”

 

“It don’t matter now,” she interrupted gently. “It’s the way things go. Our boys grow up and leave us.”

 

“Well, come in to supper,” said Grant’s ungracious voice from the doorway. “Come, mother.”

 

Mrs. McLane moved with difficulty. Howard sprang to her aid, and, leaning on his arm, she went through the little sitting room, which was unlighted, out into the kitchen, where the supper table stood near the cook-stove.

 

“How.—this is my wife,” said Grant, in a cold, peculiar tone.

 

Howard bowed toward a remarkably handsome young woman, on whose forehead was a scowl, which did not change as she looked at him and the old lady.

 

“Set down anywhere,” was the young woman’s cordial invitation.

 

Howard studies everyone at dinner, including the wife, the baby, and a fourteen-year-old boy. He realizes that his brother is a man of great character. He could see that now. His deep-set, gray eyes and rugged face showed at thirty a man of great natural ability.

 

“Well, that’s another way of makin’ a livin’, sure,” said Grant. The baby had cleared the atmosphere a little. “I s’pose you fellers make a pile of money.”

 

“Sometimes we make a thousand a week; oftener we don’t.”

 

“A thousand dollars!” They all stared.

 

“A thousand dollars sometimes, and then lose it all the next week in another town. The dramatic business is a good deal like gambling—you take your chances.”

 

“I wish you weren’t in it, Howard. I don’t like to have my son—”

 

“I wish I was in somethin’ that paid better than farmin’. Anything under God’s heavens is better ’n farmin’,” said Grant.

 

“No, I ain’t laid up much,” Howard went on, as if explaining why he hadn’t helped them. “Costs me a good deal to live, and I need about ten thousand dollars leeway to work on. I’ve made a good living, but I—I ain’t made any money.”

 

Grant looked at him, darkly meditative.

 

Howard went on: “How’d ye come to sell the old farm? I was in hopes—”

 

“How’d we come to sell it?” said Grant with terrible bitterness. “We had something on it that didn’t leave anything to sell. You probably don’t remember anything about it, but there was a mortgage on it that eat us up in just four years by the almanac. ’Most killed mother to leave it. We wrote to you for money, but I don’t suppose you remember that.”

 

“No, you didn’t.”

 

“Yes, I did.”

 

“When was it? I don’t—why, it’s—I never received it. It must have been that summer I went with Bob Manning to Europe.” Howard put the baby down and faced his brother. “Why, Grant, you didn’t think I refused to help?”

 

“Well, it looked that way. We never heard a word from yeh, all summer, and when y’ did write, it was all about yerself ’n plays ’n things we didn’t know anything about. I swore to God I’d never write to you again, and I won’t.”

 

“But, good heavens! I never got it.”

 

“Suppose you didn’t. You might have known we were poor as Job’s off-ox. Everybody is that earns a living. We fellers on the farm have to earn a livin’ for ourselves and you fellers that don’t work. I don’t blame you. I’d do it if I could.”

 

“Grant, don’t talk so! Howard didn’t realize—”

 

“I tell yeh I don’t blame him! Only I don’t want him to come the brotherly business over me, after livin’ as he has—that’s all.” There was a bitter accusation in the man’s voice.

 

Howard leaped to his feet, his face twitching.

 

“By God, I’ll go back to-morrow morning!” he threatened.

 

“Go, an’ be damned! I don’t care what yeh do,” Grant growled, rising and going out.

 

“Boys,” called the mother, piteously, “it’s terrible to see you quarrel.”

 

“But I’m not to blame, mother,” cried Howard, in a sickness that made him white as chalk. “The man is a savage. I came home to help you all, not to quarrel.”

 

“Grant’s got one o’ his fits on,” said the young wife, speaking for the first time. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’ll be all right in the morning.”

 

“If it wasn’t for you, mother, I’d leave now, and never see that savage again.”

 

He lashed himself up and down in the room, in horrible disgust and hate of his brother and of this home in his heart. He remembered his tender anticipations of the home-coming with a kind of self-pity and disgust. This was his greeting!

 

And he had presents for everyone but the baby, too.

 

In his room that night, Howard writes a letter to his “Dear Margaret,” but goes to bed angry, pitying himself. “If it were not for you (just to let you know the mood I’m in)—if it were not for you, and I had the world in my hands, I’d crush it like a puff-ball; evil so predominates, suffering is so universal and persistent, happiness so fleeting and so infrequent.” A night’s rest revives him, but when he rises again, having overslept, rain is pouring outside. “The barnyard showed a horrible mixture of mud and mire, through which Howard caught glimpses of the men, slumping to and fro without more additional protection than a ragged coat and a shapeless felt hat.”

 

Howard joins his mother in the sitting room. The wallpaper is old and faded.

 

…There were no books, no music, and only a few newspapers in sight—a bare, blank, cold, drab-colored shelter from the rain, not a home. Nothing cozy, nothing heart-warming; a grim and horrible shed.

 

“What are they doing? It can’t be they’re at work such a day as this,” Howard said, standing at the window.

 

“They find plenty to do, even on rainy days,” answered his mother. “Grant always has some job to set the men at. It’s the only way to live.”

 

Howard offers to take his mother back to the city with him, where she can live a life of ease. She makes clear she would never feel comfortable in such a busy world. Howard has a second plan.

 

“Well, then, how would you like to go back into the old house?”

 

The patient hands fell to the lap, the dim eyes fixed in searching glance on his face. There was a wistful cry in the voice.

 

“Oh, Howard! Do you mean—”

 

He came and sat down by her, and put his arm about her and hugged her hard. “I mean, you dear, good, patient, work-weary old mother, I’m going to buy back the old farm and put you in it.”

 

____________________

 

“I hate farm life, it’s nothing but fret, fret and work the whole time, never going any place…I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I’m sick of it all.”

____________________

 

 

At one point, Grant’s wife explains her existence to Howard: “I hate farm life, it’s nothing but fret, fret and work the whole time, never going any place…I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I’m sick of it all.”

 

When Howard tries to talk to Grant about his plan, however, Grant becomes angry again. Howard knows he should have come home before, but tries to explain.

 

All I can say in excuse is that since I got to managing plays I’ve kept looking ahead to making a big hit and getting a barrel of money—just as the old miners used to hope and watch. Besides, you don’t understand how much pressure there is on me. A hundred different people pulling and hauling to have me go here or go there, or do this or do that. When it isn’t yachting, it’s canoeing, or—”

 

He stopped. His heart gave a painful throb, and a shiver ran through him. Again he saw his life, so rich, so bright, so free, set over against the routine life in the little low kitchen, the barren sitting room, and this still more horrible barn. Why should his brother sit there in wet and grimy clothing, mending a broken trace, while he enjoyed all the light and civilization of the age?

 

He looked at Grant’s fine figure, his great, strong face; recalled his deep, stern, masterful voice. “Am I so much superior to him? Have not circumstances made me and destroyed him?”

 

“Grant, for God’s sake, don’t sit there like that! I’ll admit I’ve been negligent and careless. I can’t understand it all myself. But let me do something for you now. I’ve sent to New York for five thousand dollars. I’ve got terms on the old farm. Let me see you all back there once more before I return.”

 

“I don’t want any of your charity.”

 

“It ain’t charity. It’s only justice to you.” He rose. “Come now, let’s get at an understanding, Grant. I can’t go on this way. I can’t go back to New York and leave you here like this.”

____________________

 

“I mean life ain’t worth very much to me. I’m too old to take a new start. I’m a dead failure. I’ve come to the conclusion that life’s a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us.”

____________________

 

 

Grant rose, too. “I tell you, I don’t ask your help. You can’t fix this thing up with money. If you’ve got more brains’n I have, why, it’s all right. I ain’t got any right to take anything that I don’t earn.”

 

“But you don’t get what you do earn. It ain’t your fault. I begin to see it now. Being the oldest, I had the best chance. I was going to town to school while you were ploughing and husking corn. Of course I thought you’d be going soon yourself. I had three years the start of you. If you’d been in my place, you might have met a man like Cook, you might have gone to New York and have been where I am.”

 

“Well, it can’t be helped now. So drop it.”

 

“But it must be helped!” Howard said, pacing about, his hands in his coat-pockets. Grant had stopped work, and was gloomily looking out of the door at a pig nosing in the mud for stray grains of wheat at the granary door. The old man and the boy quietly withdrew.

 

“Good God! I see it all now,” Howard burst out in an impassioned tone. “I went ahead with my education, got my start in life, then father died, and you took up his burdens. Circumstances made me and crushed you. That’s all there is about that. Luck made me and cheated you. It ain’t right.”

 

Grant softens a little, calls his brother “How,” as he used to when they were young and growing up together on the farm. Howard explains his unexpected success in drama.

 

“I went to New York. People liked my work. I was very successful, Grant; more successful than you realize. I could have helped you at any time. There’s no use lying about it. And I ought to have done it; but some way—it’s no excuse, I don’t mean it for an excuse, only an explanation—some way I got in with the boys. I don’t mean I was a drinker and all that. But I bought pictures and kept a horse and a yacht, and of course I had to pay my share of all expeditions, and—oh, what’s the use!”

 

He broke off, turned, and threw his open palms out toward his brother, as if throwing aside the last attempt at an excuse.

 

“I did neglect you, and it’s a damned shame! and I ask your forgiveness. Come, old man!”

 

He held out his hand, and Grant slowly approached and took it. 

 

Grant now agrees to take his older brother’s help.

 

“I don’t mean that, How.” Grant’s voice was very grave. “Money can’t give me a chance now.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I mean life ain’t worth very much to me. I’m too old to take a new start. I’m a dead failure. I’ve come to the conclusion that life’s a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us. You can’t help me now. It’s too late.”

 

The two men stood there, face to face, hands clasped, the one fair-skinned, full-lipped, handsome in his neat suit; the other tragic, somber in his softened mood, his large, long, rugged Scotch face bronzed with sun and scarred with wrinkles that had histories, like saber-cuts on a veteran, the record of his battles.

 

And there, on that somber note, ends the story, Grant beaten down by the hard life of working a farm.

 

Grant, I think, in another passage grumbles that good land is so expensive, “you couldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole from a balloon.” (I’ve lost the page number for that quote, and may be attributing it to the wrong man.)

 

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I never used this story with my classes; but I might ask students to

 

1.      Give their impressions of Howard? Is he a likeable man? The same question, regarding Grant.

2.      Have students highlight as many details as possible that bring out the hard life of working a farm.

 

Students should also know that the average worker in American in those days made about $500 per year. Howard says at one point in the story that he has saved up $10,000, a nearly unimaginable sum to his brother.

 

*

 

The Populist Party is founded and develops a program calling for the following changes in law and government.

 

With students, I used the classic definition of politics: “Who gets what, when, and how?” Politics is also about gaining control of government.

 

____________________

 

“It’s time we farmers raise less corn and more hell.”

 

Mary Elizabeth Lease

____________________

 

 

Populist Party demands (some included to bring more factory workers into the fold):

 

·       An income tax on wealthy individuals (graduated scale).

·       An inheritance tax (graduated scale).

·       Congress to lower tariff rates.

·       Direct election of U.S. senators (state legislatures were able to select senators until 1912).

·       Eight-hour workday by law.

·       Government ownership of railroads and Telegraph lines.

·       U.S. to buy silver and issue more money – silver coinage.

·       Government loans to farmers.

·       Initiative power in making state laws.

·       Referendum power in state laws.

·       Laws against child labor.

·       Limits on immigration.

·       No court injunctions to stop strikes and no use of troops during strikes.

 

Reasons:

 

The income and inheritance taxes, it was hoped, would break up the fortunes of Robber Barons, who used money to influence and even bribe lawmakers. One simple trick was for railroads to give lawmakers and friendly newspaper reporters railroad passes – like free airline tickets today. Stock in railroads was sometimes handed over to willing politicians who would work to pass laws beneficial to the companies and block laws the companies opposed.

 

Monopolies were the bane of the farmer’s existence, and most railroads had a monopoly in the area where they operated. The same was true with grain elevator companies. Four Chicago grain elevator operators had interlocking business shares. It was policy to buy up all the grain, at low prices, then mix good with bad or good with spoiled, but sell it all as top quality grain. The elevators often cheated farmers on weight, or sold the wheat but paid the farmers later, and made interest on the money.

 

The governor of Minnesota stormed:

 

“It is time to take the robber corporations by the scruff of the neck

and shake them over hell.”

 

Suppose in 1890, that a tariff were imposed on English-made china, which could be shipped to the U.S. for $20 a set, otherwise. China made in the U.S. might sell for $25. So an $8 tariff protected American business. Tariff rates in 1890 hit all-time highs as Congress raised levels on cotton cloth and textiles, tin plate, steel, iron, many raw materials, tea, coffee, hides for leather and many more.

 

Farmers rarely benefited and complained about “special interests.”

 

In 1890, a ten and even fourteen-hour workday was not unusual. Most workers did six days a week.

 

From 1870 to 1900, the U.S. population nearly doubled. The amount of money in circulation increased almost none. Farmers found themselves squeezed in a vice. More land opened up in Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere and farmers overproduced. They also met competition from farmers worldwide.

 

Today, the federal government pays farmers not to plant all their fields. There are also “price supports,” minimum prices at which, say, milk can be sold. When milk falls below that level, the government buys it at the minimum price.

 

Silver coinage was desired because the U.S. had gone into a sustained period of deflation after the Civil War. Prices on almost everything went down; but farmers who had taken out 30-year mortgages on their farms now found it harder and harder to pay back those loans. Populists also favored the printing of “greenbacks,” or paper money. More money in circulation would cause inflation and make it easier to pay off the mortgages on their land. The government does, of course, control the “money supply,” a concept likely foreign to most students.

 

Fall behind…and goodbye farm.

 

The initiative allowed citizens to propose their own laws, get enough signatures in support, and put their proposals on the ballot.

 

The referendum allowed voters to gather signatures on petitions, and call for repeal of unpopular laws.

 

It was believed that an end to child labor, a limit on immigration (which brought in people willing to take jobs at low pay) and protecting workers’ ability to go on strike would help them bargain for higher wages.

 

In those days, a worker could be legally fired for joining a union and “blacklisted,” as well. A worker injured on the job would be fired. Since taxes were low (my notes say three percent in 1901), there were few programs of any kind to help individuals in need.

 

“Sockless” Jerry Simpson described the unequal situation that existed in that era this way:

 

“It is a struggle between the robbers and the robbed.”

 

*

 

Good questions for students might include:

 

Which of the above do we have now?

 

How would these changes put more power into the hands of the ordinary farmer and worker?

 

A teacher should also make it clear that Americans now, and in 1892, and even 1792, tended to vote for candidates and political parties that promised new laws and programs that voters believed would benefit them in some way. It might be a good exercise to ask students to list some changes they’d like to see in the law, and then try to match their interests up to today’s political parties.

 

The Populist Party was considered radical for its time; but many of its precepts were adopted by the Democrats.

 

I wanted students to know the difference between reactionaries, conservatives, liberals and radicals.

 

*

 

December: Dr. James Naismith, divinity-school graduate, and “drum major for clean living,” sets down the 13 rules of a new game he has invented. The list goes up on the wall of the gym at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts before the first basketball game ever played.

 

(In 1968, a collector offers $1 million for the original list, then in possession of a grandson of Dr. Naismith; and that grandson inadvertently leaves them one day, in a briefcase he forgets after eating at a Hooters.)

 

The first game was played with a soccer ball, with rules designed to eliminate “ruffianism,” an issue in college football during that era. Rule 5: “No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping or striking, an any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed.” The dribble was invented later, but players quickly realized, under the rule, that they could roll a ball, or drop it, and pick it back up. When the dribble was invented, Dr. Naismith described it as “one of the sweetest, prettiest plays in the whole bunch.” It was written into the game in 1898.

 

Not until 1906, will the rules committee call for elimination of the bottom of the baskets, so the ball can be quickly put back in play.

 

James Naismith and his wife have five children in years to come; but he never really profits from his game.