1885

__________ 

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

Ernest Hemingway

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Image from blogger's collection.
(Feel free to use.)

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

January 15: 

A Dastardly Outrage 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

        … 

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

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

  

* 

February 6-7: Anti-Chinese riots in Humboldt County, California, erupt after “Eureka City Councilman David Kendall is caught in the crossfire of two rival Chinese gangs and killed.” A local newspaper insists the time has come to “Wipe Out the Plague Spots.” A total of 480 Chinese were then driven out of the city and county and sent to San Francisco, and probably home to China. 

    As a book review in The New York Times explains, afterwards, business leaders proudly claimed that Humboldt was “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.” “But it wasn’t true: Some Chinese people remained with the support of white residents; a jack-of-all-trades named Charley Moon, who survived the pogrom, was still living in Humboldt upon his death in 1943.”

 

* 

TEDDY ROOSEVELT has spent the winter of 1884-1885 in the Dakota Territory, and the hard life appeals to him. According to biographer David McCullough, at this point, “Theodore was looking different, even sounding different from what he had. The change is cited in numerous surviving accounts and appears to have become obvious by the time the roundup ended. He himself was to describe the experience as ‘superbly health-giving.’” 

Before, he had been described as “a light little fellow,” and Teddy had suffered from asthma and perhaps even imaginary ailments. 

After this Bad Lands spring of 1885 – the point, by all signs, that marks the final turn in his lifelong battle for health – no such references are to be found again. An old New York friend remembered that when he returned from the West, he had become “physically a very powerful man. … With broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bread, slight young friend I had known earlier.” 

A reporter believed that Teddy had put on thirty pounds and said that his voice, once reedy and weak, was now “strong enough to drive oxen.” (112/340-341)

 

* 

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

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

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

    On this fateful evening, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 

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

 

*

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

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

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

 

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

    Another 300 white miners were also employed. 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

* 

September 3: In the Dakota Territory, the ill-feeling between the Marquis de Mores, and prominent rancher, and Theodore Roosevelt nearly leads to a duel. De Mores had been indicted for the murder of a cowboy – which he claimed was self-defense. He sent the following letter to Teddy, now back home: 

MY DEAR ROOSEVELT,

 

My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris [Theodore’s old hunting guide now a storekeeper in Medora[ is very active against me and has been instrumental in getting me indicted by furnishing money to witnesses and hunting them up. The papers also published very stupid accounts of our quarreling – I I sent you the paper to N.Y. Is this done by your orders? I thought you my friend. If you are my enemy I want to know it. I am always on hand as you know, and between gentlemen it is easy to settle matters of that sort directly.

 

Yours very truly,

MORES

 

    Roosevelt expected a duel, and even favored Winchester rifles at twelve paces, but Mores kept his cool. 

    No duel was fought. 

 

*

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

    All his life he spoke German primarily.

 

*

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

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

(Image from blogger's collection.)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

* 

SCULPTURE by Charles Ray: “Sarah Williams.” 

Huck dressed as a girl.
(Image from internet.)

 

    As explained by a New York Times art critic: 

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

 

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

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

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

 

*

(Image from blogger's collection.)

 

* 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

    The n-word appears 200 times. 

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

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

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

 

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

Finn never did like school much.
(Image from blogger's collection.)

 

*      

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

    How much? 

    The clerk said $2.48. 

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

    Estimated value at auction: $250,000. 

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

 

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

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

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

    Only 24 were known to exist. 

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

(Sold at auction: $2.42 million.) 

1886

 

(All images in this post from blogger's collection: feel free to use.)

January: The American Bell Telephone Company dominates the business and has 330,000 telephones in use. 

As he historian Benjamin Andrews wrote in 1925, “One of the most interesting and valuable inventions of this or any century was that of the telephone,” (4/354)

* 

March 5: William Least Heat-Moon culled this tale from an old Kansas newspaper, in an attempt to bring the story of the past back to life (from the Chase County Leader): 

 

A Pleasant Affair. 

    In response to invitations to a rainbow party, about 30 friends gathered at the home of Mr. And missus. H. Colette, at elk, on Friday evening, February 28. After the friends had assembled they were led to the dining room where an elegant supper was spread, the table being beautifully decorated with hyacinths and evergreens. When their daughter, miss Lizzie, presented each with a cord representing some color of the rainbow and, pointing to the table, intimated that the price for partaking of the supper would be defined who was at the other end of the cord. They all most eagerly fell to work, thinking how small the price set upon such a repast. After following the cords a short time they found they led to the parlor where their eyes fell on a lovely rainbow tastefully arranged in one corner by the skillful hands of grace and Lizzie. After much admiration and favorable comments someone remarked that when the rainbow appears the rain is over and it would be well to go on with their work.

 

    Turning again to their tasks they were confronted by a mass of cords in the form of a spider web reaching from ceiling to floor, upstairs and down, no one knew where.

 

    It was most amusing to see Bert Campbell tangled in the web and the girl's tightening upon him as a spider with a fly, while Bob Reed was crawling around on the floor, looking like he had been badly knocked out in last week's pillow fight. But all found their coveted prize and a jollier crowd never sat down to a feast, and when leaving the table each carried away a Japanese napkin with the signatures of all present as a souvenir of the occasion. 110/516

 

* 

March 18 (also from the Chase County Leader): Isaac Jones reports that his father had hanged himself. 

    The deceased has undoubtedly been insane, or partly so, for a long time. He has at times labored under the hallucination that his life was in jeopardy from one and another and when thus affected would arm himself, and it is only a few weeks since he made an onslaught on two of his sons, C. W. And Scott, with murderous intent, first with a shotgun, which the boys took away from him, and immediately after with a revolver, firing twice at his son Charlie, who, to prevent the old gentleman from overtaking and shooting him, was compelled to shoot the horse which he (his father) was riding. (100/517-518)

 

* 

April 11: Forty miles east of Medora, in what is now Dickinson, N.D., Victor Hugo Stickney, a physician from Vermont, steps out of his office around noon. As David McCullough explains, Dr. Stickney spied “the most bedraggled figure I'd ever seen come limping down the street.” It was Teddy Roosevelt, clothes torn, covered with mud, “the queerest specimen of strangeness that had ever descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there.” 

    Stickney continued: 

He was all eyes and teeth. … He was scratched, bruised and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bulldog. He was actually a slender young fellow, but I remember that he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him that I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson but in the whole surrounding country.

 

    “By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see. … My feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”

 

    I took him into my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story …

 

    Roosevelt had just returned from New York to his ranch near Medora in the last days of March. He was informed by his men that a boat the ranch often used had been stolen. They suspected a man named Finnegan, and two accomplices, and after putting together a makeshift boat, Teddy and two hands, Bill Sewall and Wilmot Dow, set off down river to catch the thieves. 

    McCullough writes: 

    It was a matter of principle, Theodore later said. “To submit tamely and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense…”

 

    They were three days on the river before catching up with the thieves, their boat charging along between snow-covered buttes and weird Bad Lands configurations that looked to Theodore like “the crouching figures of great goblin beasts.” He had brought along some books to read and his camera, expecting there might be a magazine article in the adventure. Each man had his rifle. The second night the temperature dropped below zero.

 

    The next day at a point about a hundred miles downstream from where they had started, they spotted the missing boat and going ashore found Finnegan and his partners, who surrendered without a fight. (“We simply crept noiselessly up and rising when only a few yards distant covered them with the cocked rifles.”) From there they spent another six days moving on down the river, making little headway now because of ice jams, and taking turns at night guarding the prisoners, who because of the extreme cold could not be bound hand and foot. Food ran low and the cold and biting winds continued. But not the least extraordinary part of the story is that during these same six days after catching the thieves, Theodore, in odd moments, read the whole of Anna Karenina, and “with very great interest.”

 

    Teddy had his prisoners. Now the question was how to get them to Dickinson, where they could be turned over to the sheriff. Roosevelt sent his men down the river with the boats, hired a wagon and driver from a nearby ranch, then walked behind the wagon for 45 miles, keeping his Winchester rifle ready, in case the prisoners tried to escape. By the time Dr. Stickney met him, McCullough notes, the young rancher had gone two days without sleep or rest. 

    When Stickney and others at Dickinson asked why he had not simply shot or hanged the thieves when he first found them and saved himself all that trouble, Theodore answered that the thought had never occurred to him.

 

    “He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier.”

 

    Sewall had known Roosevelt since he was a young boy and could not fail to see the improvement in his health. “When he got back into the world again, he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for a livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.” (112/346-350)

* 

June 17 (the Leader, again): 

A Mad (?) Dog Killed 

    A commotion inside a clothing store, owned by a Mr. Holmes draws the attention of J.M. Engles and Harry Clifford, just passing by. Inside is a mad dog, under a bed, or so it is believed, with Holmes and a clerk named Charlie having taken safety on higher ground. Clifford entered, and whistled to the dog. 

    Clifford didn’t want to see the dog half as bad as he thought he did, for when the dog came out from under the bed Clifford struck out for the front door with all the speed possible, the dog following close behind, and did not stop until he gained the top of a pile of lumber across the street, where he and the dog went “into committee of the whole” to discuss the difference between them. Engles, who was looking in at the door when the dog came from under the bed, climbed up Hotchkiss’ sign post so as to give Clifford and the dog plenty of room. While Clifford and the dog were watching each other, Charlie procured a loaded gun and gained the lumber pile by a circuitous route and gave the weapon to Clifford, who shot the dog, and the meeting adjourned. The dog belonged to Holmes, who is now, selling clothing at cheaper prices than ever, in fact, “dog gone” cheap. 100/518-519

 

*

 

June 2: Chapter XXII of The Youth’s History of the United States by Edward Ellis, includes this lengthy passage:

 

[The marriage of President Cleveland] …took place on Wednesday, June 2, 1886, in the Blue Room of the White House, and was one of the most brilliant ceremonies of the kind that has ever occurred in that historic building.

 

    Daylight was carefully excluded from the room and the whole interior was radiant with the flood of light from the massive crystal chandelier. The air was fragrant with the perfume of flowers, and the great banks of scarlet begonias and magnificent roses threw a rich glow over all. The delicate ivory shades of the bride’s wedding gown were strikingly set off by the masses of crimson roses just beyond.

 

    The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Dr. Sunderland, and the Rev. Mr. Cleveland, brother of the president, pronounced the benediction.

 

    The bride, in whom the whole nation felt a tender and admiring interest, was Francis Folsom, who was born in Buffalo, July 21, 1864. She possessed fine ability, was amiable and popular, and during her occupancy of the White House, none presided with more grace and becoming dignity. It cannot be denied that much of the popularity of President Cleveland’s administration was due to his accomplished wife. Since his retirement from office a daughter has been born to the husband and wife.

 

    The marriage of President Cleveland, while in office, renders appropriate an account of the domestic life at the White House.

 

    Abigail Adams was the first to establish domestic life there at the beginning of the present century. The structure was much inferior to the one of the present day, and the festivities were few, the only important ones being those which occurred at the New Year’s receptions.

 

….Jefferson was simple in his tastes, and while he was president no entertainments were given except the public receptions. When, however, the genial “Dolly” Madison became mistress, she made the White House a social center.

 

    The first marriage in the White House was in 1811, while Mrs. Madison was hostess. The bride was her niece, Miss Todd, a Quaker girl, of Philadelphia, and the groom Congressman John J. Jackson, of Virginia. It may be stated that he was the great-uncle of the famous Confederate leader, Stonewall Jackson. Out of respect for the religious principles of the demure Quaker girl, the wedding was a quiet one. The reception was attended by all the congressmen and the Washington officials.

 

    The second marriage in the White House was that of Marie Monroe, youngest daughter of President Monroe, to her cousin, Samuel L. Gouverneur, of New York. This took place in March, 1820. The wedding was private, only the bridesmaids, the family relations, and the old friends of the bride and groom being present. The bridesmaids and their attendants assisted at a public reception given in their honor, the following week, by the president. He and Mrs. Monroe mingled with the company, leaving to the bridal pair the duties of host and hostess. A grand ball was afterward given to them by Commodore Decatur.

 

…Only one president previous to Mr. Cleveland was married during his term of office. The wife of John Tyler died in 1842, when he had been president a year and a half. Within the succeeding two years, he was married to Julia Gardner in New York. He returned at once to the White House, where a grand reception was held in her honor. [Tyler’s third daughter was also married at the White House, “the wedding was a brilliant one,” and guests included Mrs. Madison.]

 

    One of the most famous weddings in the White House was that of Nellie Grant, only daughter of General Grant. It was performed in the East Room, May 21, 1874, the groom being Algernon Sartoris, of Hampshire, England. The wedding was the most brilliant ever known in Washington. The two hundred guests present represented the officials of the government and their families, the army and marine corps and their families, the diplomatic corps and personal friends. The couple sailed for Europe, where they have spent most of their time since.

 

[President Arthur was a widower; Buchanan was a bachelor, and Harriet Lane, his beautiful niece, presided.]

 

*

 

ELLIS, THE AUTHOR, gives brief capsules of all the first ladies. Mrs. Washington was 17 when]

 

…she married John Parke Custis, a wealthy gentleman, who died ten years later. The handsome and wealthy widow afterward married George Washington.

 

[Abigail Adams came to D.C.]: That beautiful city was then a straggling town built in a swamp. Mrs. Adams was the first lady of the White House, but when she took up her abode in it the building was only half finished….Mrs. Adams was a lady of unusual mental power and proved an invaluable helpmate to her husband.

 

[Jefferson’s daughters, Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Eppes] visited the mansion only twice, and now and then Mrs. Madison officiated. The first child born in the White House was the son of Mrs. Eppes, who was a lady of remarkable beauty. Mrs. Randolph was brilliant and accomplished, but the demands of her family prevented her from acting as the hostess of the White House.

 

    Mrs. Madison was a genial, kind-hearted, laughing lady, who was the widow of a staid Friend, when she was married at the age of twenty-three to James Madison. She may have lacked the elegance of some of the other ladies of the White House, but her tact and wit, her astonishing memory of faces and her geniality made her popular with all. She delighted in having young people around her, and paid little attention to the ceremonious customs of her predecessors. She was fond of dress, though not extravagant.

 

    Mrs. Monroe, her successor, was the opposite in every respect. She was tall, graceful and elegant of manner, well-informed, and her life abroad had made her familiar with the usages proper in such an exalted position. The East Room, which had long been the play room of children, was furnished, and her receptions were of a stately and ceremonious character. She required full dress and returned no calls. She died suddenly one year before the death of her husband, and five years after he had withdrawn to private life.

 

    Mrs. John Quincy Adams was a worthy successor…Although of American lineage, she was born and educated in London and married there at the age of twenty-two. She was highly accomplished, with exquisite taste and considerable beauty…Her health was failing when she came to the White House and her life there was quiet.

 

[Jackson’s wife was dead when he came to Washington. Her nieces, Mrs. Donelson and Mrs. Jackson, Jr. acted as hostesses.] The four children of Mrs. Donelson were all born in the White House, and the christening of each was made a memorable occasion by the president.

 

[Van Buren was also a widower of twenty years.] During his term the wife of his eldest son presided in the White House with grace and taste. She was a beautiful lady of fine education and of an aristocratic family.

 

    You remember that President Harrison died shortly after his inauguration—so soon, indeed, that his wife’s preparations for going to the capital were not completed and she never occupied the White House.

 

[After Tyler’s wife died…] Miss Julia Gardner and her sister, daughters of a wealthy gentleman of New York, often accompanied their father in his travels for pleasure, and they spent several winters in Washington. About a year after the death of Mrs. Tyler, Miss Gardner attracted the attention of the president at a White House reception held on Washington’s Birthday, 1844, and later the president went to New York and married her. The bride was twenty-six years of age and the groom was a little more than double her age. She was the lady of the White House for eight months only, but her reign was brilliant.

 

    Mrs. Sarah Childress Polk was a strict member of the Presbyterian Church, and a thoroughly graceful and accomplished lady. She banished dancing from the White House during her stay, and allowed no refreshments at the presidential receptions.

 

    The wife of President Taylor entered the White House with a reluctance amounting to aversion. Her husband had led a stormy life, having taken part in a great many battles for his country. The two were strongly attached to each other, but General Taylor’s duties had kept him from home so long that the wife’s fondest hope was that they might spend their declining years together. All that was destroyed by his elevation to the presidency, and she gave over to her daughter, Mrs. Major Bliss, the direction of ceremonies, dinners and receptions at the White House.

 

…Mrs. Abigail Powers Fillmore succeeded as the hostess of the executive manor. She had been a teacher for several years before and after her marriage, which took place when she was twenty-seven years old. She was of a social disposition, but suffered so much from a bad lameness that she gave her place so far as possible to her young daughter.

 

    When Mrs. Pierce entered the White House, she was bowed with grief over the death of her last child. Indeed, she never fully recovered from her affliction. She was the daughter of President Appleton, of Bowdoin College, and her mind was highly cultivated. She was of dreamy and poetic tendencies and took but slight interest in political affairs.

 

    Harriet Lane, the niece of President Buchanan, was the lady of the White House during his presidency. She had a tall, commanding figure, fine features, luxuriant brown hair, a strikingly beautiful complexion, and was one of the most admired of women…

 

    Miss Mary Todd, when twenty-one years old, married Abraham Lincoln…Within a few days of his inauguration as president she held her first reception at the White House. She was a cheerful, kind-hearted lady, whose later years were darkened by the awful tragedy that robbed our country of one of the greatest and best presidents since Washington.

 

    Miss Eliza McCardle was married in her eighteenth year to Andrew Johnson, who at twenty-one was still an apprentice. You know with what labor he had learned to read, while he was toiling in a tailor’s workshop, and he now became the pupil of his wife, who taught him to write. He pursued his studies evening after evening until his learning at last outstripped that of his teacher. After Mrs. Johnson entered the White House, her health became so broken that she was unable to perform the duties of hostess. [Mrs. Martha Patterson, a daughter, helped take charge.]

 

    When Mrs. Julia Dent Grant moved into the White House it was beautifully furnished and equipped. She liked splendor and pleasure, and from the time she took charge it was the scene of magnificent entertainment. Mrs. Grant was well educated, and presided with grace and dignity.

 

    Mrs. Lucy Webb Hayes was married to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1852, and was the happy mother of four boys and one girl. She was noted for her devotion to the wounded soldiers of the war. Her husband’s three terms as governor of Ohio gave her all the tuition she could need for the more exalted position of lady of the White House. Her refinement and Christian character rendered her one of the most illustrious of all who have presided in the executive mansion.

 

    Miss Lucretia Rudolph married James A. Garfield when he became president of Hiram College, in which both had been students. She was a lady of many accomplishments and was a devoted wife and mother, but hardly had she become used to the duties of the White House when her life was darkened by the dreadful death of her husband.

 

[President Arthur’s sister presided.]

 

    During the first part of Mr. Cleveland’s administration, his sister, Miss Rose Elizabeth, was the lady of the White House. She is a woman of high mental gifts, and her brief reign as the first lady of the land was worthy in every respect of her illustrious predecessors.

 

    Miss Lavinia Scott married President Harrison when he was a young man just beginning the battle of life, and had the happiness, therefore, of being his companion and helper in adversity as well as prosperity. She was a lady of excellent education and many accomplishments, long identified with active charitable and church work at her home in Indianapolis. As mistress of the White House, she commanded the respect of all by her amiable disposition, grace and true womanliness. She died after a lingering illness, November 1, 1892.

 

* 

Fall: Writing in Century magazine, Theodore Roosevelt warns of problems ahead in the Dakota Territory: 

    Overstocking may cause little or no harm for two or three years, But sooner or later there comes a winner which means ruin to the ranches that have too many cattle on them; And in our country, which is even now getting crowded, it is merely a question of time as to when a winter will come that will understock the ranges by the summary process of killing off about half of all the cattle throughout the northwest.

 

    The summer had been dry and there was little grass, as the cold months approached.

 

* 

Winter months: Starting in the last days of 1886, bad weather drives the cattle business on the Northern Plains into ruin. As Helena Huntington Smith writes (see: “The Johnson County War,” in American Heritage): 

Snow fell and drifted and thawed and froze and fell again, clothing the ground with an iron sheath of white on which a stagecoach could travel and through which no bovine hoof could paw for grass; and since the plains were heavily overstocked and the previous summer had been hot and dry, there was no grass anyway. Moaning cattle wandered into the outskirts of towns, trying to eat frozen garbage and the tar paper off the eaves of the shacks; and when the hot sun of early summer uncovered the fetid carcasses piled in the creek bottoms, the bark of trees and brush was gnawed as high as a cow could reach. Herd losses averaged fifty percent, with ninety percent for unacclimated southern herds…

 

In the heyday of the beef bonanza, herds had been bought and sold by “book count,” based on a back-of-an-envelope calculation of “natural increase,” with no pother about a tally on the range. As the day of reckoning dawned, it turned out that many big companies had fewer than half the number of cattle claimed on their books. Now the terrible winter cut this half down to small fractions…

 

    McCullough tells a similar tale: 

    Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Bad Lands, children were lost and froze to death within a hundred yards of their own doors. Cattle, desperate for shelter, smashed their heads through ranch-house windows. The snow drifted so deep in many places the cattle were buried alive and temperatures hovered at about 40 below. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who could not wait blew their brains out. (112/344-345)

 

Some of the biggest cattle barons, blaming smaller ranchers for the loss of so many cattle, and fighting often erupted. (See: Year 1892.)