1898

  

“The old order — the rule of the white people.” 

Race riots in Wilmington, N.C., end with the black community in ruins. Josephus Daniels, editor of The News and Record, the state’s most influential newspaper, fueled outrage in stories about sex and race and power. As a book review in The New York Times points out, when trouble exploded,

 

Successful black men were targeted for banishment from the city, while black workers left all their possessions behind as they rushed to the swamps for safety. Over 60 people died. No one seemed to care. The governor of North Carolina cowered in the face of the violent rebellion, worried about his own life. President William McKinley turned a blind eye to the bloodshed. 

 

An avowed white supremacist took over as mayor. In the wake of the violence, leading newspapers explained, “We must hope that by far the greater part of Negroes in this city are anxious for the restoration of order and quiet and ‘the old order’ — the rule of the white people.”  

The men who led the overthrow of city government went on to successful political careers. Daniels was a cabinet member under President Woodrow Wilson. Furnifold Simmons served 30 years as a United States senator.  The grandson of Alex Manly, who wrote about the riots, says simply “If there’s a hell, I hope they’re burning in it, all of them.” 

 

* 

“The great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.” 

Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders attracted all kinds of recruits, the mayor of Prescott, Arizona, the grandson of Grant’s secretary of state, the two top-ranked tennis players in the country. Five percent of the men in the regiment, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, were from Harvard.

 

Roughly 16,000 Americans fought in Cuba, but Roosevelt’s unit gained widespread fame. The “Rough Rider” hat sold well; Stephen Crane chronicled the regiment’s exploits, as did a dozen other writers. The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded them: “Whether Fifth Avenue millionaires or Western cowboys, they fought together and died together in Cuba for the great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.”

 

The Rough Riders landed in Cuba on June 22; by August, Spain was suing for peace.

 

Roosevelt credits African American soldiers who helped take San Juan Hill in his book on the war; the newspapers of the nation said little about them at the time.

The attack on San Juan Hill.

 

*

 

“The tyranny of the most cruel of modern nations.”

 

McLaughlin, in A History of the American Nation; pp. 529-530; (1911), describes the motivation for American intervention in Cuba, after the Spanish crush a rebellion:

 

Moreover, the people of the United States were shocked by the methods used in suppression of the rebellion, which were cruel in the extreme, entailing untold misery not so much upon the soldiers in arms as on the women, children, and other non-combatants. A large portion of the whole island was laid waste, its commerce destroyed, while tens of thousands of its citizens died of want and starvation.

 

This is ironic given the fight at Wounded Knee earlier in the decade and our fighting against the Filipinos to follow.

 

Charles Morris in The Great Republic also lays out the motivation for war against Spain, involving: “the wresting of the Philippines, Porto Rico, and the Ladrones from the tyranny of the most cruel of modern nations, and the addition of Hawaii to our domain.” “The Greater United States, at one bound, assumes its place in the van of nations, and becomes the foremost agent in civilizing and Christianizing the world.”

 

The Publishers Introduction has this to say:

 

With a fervent trust in a guiding Providence, and an abiding confidence in our ability, we enter upon the new and grander career, as in obedience to the divine behest that the Latin race must decrease and the Anglo-Saxon increase, and that the latter, in a human sense, must be the regenerator of all who are groping in the night of ignorance and barbarism.

 

Morris adds in his Author’s Introduction:

 

It may be fairly said, then, that the founders of our nation came from the cream of the populations of Europe, born of sturdy Teutonic stock, and comprising thrift, energy, endurance, love of liberty, and freedom of thought to a degree never equaled in the makers of any other nation upon the earth. They were of solid oak in mind and frame, and the edifice they built had for its foundations the natural rights of man, and for its superstructure that spirit of liberty which has ever since throbbed warmly in the American heart.

 

He admits that the Native Americans had been driven back, step by step, but claimed: “Yet the Indians are probably as numerous to-day as they were originally, and are certainly better off in their present peaceful and partly civilized condition than they were in their former savage and warlike state.”

 

Oddly enough, elsewhere he condemns the Spanish for their behavior in settling America: “Spain sent her armed expeditions thither, and in time they overran the sections [of land] named, their footprints marked everywhere by fire and blood.” 

A way of life was destroyed.

* 

James Whitcomb Riley, “The Hoosier Poet,” is busy writing all kinds of sentimental poems. 

Not sure when he published “The Boy Patriot,” but it’s clear Riley never thought much about the high costs of war. The fact that it appeared in the anthology, The Book of Joyous Children (1902) may tell us something: 

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand
Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,
Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band;

I want to hear, high overhead, The Old Flag flap her wings

While all the Army, following, in chorus cheers and sings;

I want to hear the tramp and jar

Of patriots a million,
As gayly dancing off to war

As dancing a cotillion.

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand

Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,
Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band.

I want to see the battle! –

The battle! –

The battle! –

I want to see the battle, and be in it to the end; –    
I want to hear the cannon clear their throats and catch the prattle
Of all the pretty compliments the enemy can send! –
And then I know my wits will go, – and where I should’nt be –

Well, there’s the spot, in any fight, that you may search for me.

So, when our foes have had their fill,
Though I’m among the dying,
To see The Old Flag flying still,
I’ll laugh to leave her flying!

I want to be a Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

A Soldier! –

I want to be a Soldier, with a sabre in my hand

Or a little carbine rifle, or a musket on my shoulder,

Or just a snare-drum, snarling in the middle of the band.

*

 

In a humorous piece by Riley, “Hik-Tee-Dik,” the reader meets two “loud and hilarious” boys. At school, Billy and Buddy are always causing a commotion. When they enter class, shouting their war cry, “Hik-tee-dik,” they’d “ bang the school-door till the plastering fell.” 

Three days in a row, they pretend to “clinch,” and in wrestling with each other, knock over the teacher’s desk. 

Finally, they get beat: 

For the teacher, she righted her desk – raised the lid

And folded and packed away each little kid –

Closed the incident so – yes, and locked it, she did –

Hik-tee-dik! Billy and Buddy!

The teacher has her way.

*

 

July: Belinda Mulrooney, 26, one of the first “stampeders,” as the Klondike gold-rushers were known, opens the glamorous Fair View Hotel in Dawson City, Alaska.

 

    How had an Irish immigrant, and a woman on her own, ended up so far north? Despite her youth, Mulrooney had repeatedly shown a nose for a good investment. She bought a lot near the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and built on it, then sold it at a profit, and bought a nearby restaurant, serving hungry fairgoers. She sold out and headed for San Francisco in 1895, investing wisely once more. A fire at an uninsured property left her without funds. So, when gold was discovered in Alaska, she started fresh. 

    This time she found success in merchant ventures, bootlegging whiskey and other coveted supplies aboard the steamship City of Topeka between Seattle and southern Alaska – then reselling goods at frontier prices. She opened a store in Juneau and was scanning the landscape for opportunity when a prospector strolled into town, showing off some of the gold nuggets he’d found in what seemed like a promising strike in the Klondike. Instantly, Mulrooney began outfitting for an expedition that would change her life, and the frozen frontier, forever. 

    Getting to the Klondike gold fields in 1897 required astonishing mettle. The majority of stampeders … came via a brutal overland trek, each explorer hauling gear by sled over the icy, 3,550-foot Chilkoot Pass. Mulrooney’s supplies required 30 such trips. Then came the two-week journey down the turbulent Yukon River to Dawson, for which travelers had to build their own boats. 

 

    Mulrooney made it to Dawson, but by that time, she was down to her last coin. As she often told the story later, she decided to toss it in a river, announcing to nearby miners, “I’ll start clean.”

 

    With a sharp eye for a sale, Mulrooney sold hot water bottles to miners who spent nights in frigid tents. She understood that the men (there were few women in Dawson City) were desperate for a good meal – opened a restaurant – and did a booming trade, serving home-style fare. She made a 600% profit on her first shipment of goods and kept going.

 

    Mulrooney’s eye for creative re-use proved key in an undeveloped environment where materials were scarce. “I started buying up all the boats and rafts that were arriving, hired a crew of young fellows who had nothing to do, and had them build cabins,” she said of her first Yukon real estate venture, which she embarked on shortly after arriving. Those cabins were soon selling for as much as $4,000 apiece, or more than $150,000 today.  

    Mulrooney also had a canny instinct for location. During that first Yukon spring, she scouted ground on which to open her first hotel and chose the junction of the two busiest gold-mining creeks, 16 miles outside of Dawson. The Grand Forks quickly became the miners’ primary gathering place and soon doubled as an official collection office for royalties demanded by the Canadian government. At night Mulrooney put the floor sweepings through a sluice, gleaning an extra $100 or so in gold dust daily. Perfectly positioned for intelligence-gathering, she invested accordingly and by the end of 1897 owned five gold claims—plus almost 20 percent of one of the region’s wealthiest mining companies.  

    Ever the expansionist, Mulrooney set out to build the finest hotel in Dawson City, one modeled on the elegant hotels she’d seen in Chicago and San Francisco. Calling it the Fair View, Mulrooney was meticulous in choosing the lace curtains, plush carpets, brass bedsteads and other finery that would make her new hotel the envy of the region’s other hoteliers, who housed most guests in rough dormitories. When explorer Mary E. Hitchcock arrived in Dawson in June 1898, she was deeply impressed and detailed her reaction in her 1899 memoir, Two Women in the Klondike: “The menu, beginning with ‘oyster cocktails,’ caused us to open our eyes wide with astonishment, after all that the papers have told us of the starvation about Dawson.” 

    The Fair View was the first property in town to have electricity. When miners bet Mulrooney $5,000 that she couldn’t keep the three-story building warm, she bought an old steamboat boiler, attaching a sawmill to provide the fuel. Mulrooney modernized the town in other ways, too, helping bring Dawson its first telephone and telegraph, housing the switchboard in the Fair View, and forming the Hygeia Water Supply Company to provide safe drinking water. It was less than two years since she arrived in Dawson, and already she was one of its foremost citizens.

 

    She even started a bank and can be seen in one photo from this era, examining an 88-ounce gold nugget.

 

    Unfortunately, she was less fortunate in love, falling for a sham European nobleman, Count Charles Eugene Charbonneau, who had been a barber from Montreal. They married in Dawson City, on October 1, 1900, and the “Count” soon wrecked his wife’s finances. She ditched the fake, and later divorced him, profited again from her businesses, and finally moved south to Yakima, Washington, where she built an impressive stone castle.