1857

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“Everybody in 1857 is wearing the hoop.”

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Most Americans in 1857 lived on farms.
Picture not in blogger's possession.

 

ACCORDING to Smithsonian magazine, an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad – heading north. Less well known: about one tenth as many headed south, reaching Florida when it was owned by Spain, or escaping across the border with Mexico.

 

    Most of the runaways, headed south were men, and usually in their 20s. Women, who had children to raise, couldn’t leave them behind. Some had forged passes. Other stole horses and weapons. One escapee stole 12 gold watches and a diamond breast pin.

 

    After crossing the Nueces River, the runaways faced their biggest challenge. The area was sparsely populated, rattlesnake-infested, broiling hot during summer months, and home to Apaches and Comanches, usually unsympathetic to the plight of escaping slaves. Some made it all the way – only to drown crossing the Rio Grande.

 

    By this time, Mexico’s congress had decreed that slaves from U.S. territory would become free “by the act of stepping on the national territory.” A slave who made it – who was willing to join the Mexican military – would be granted land and citizenship.

 

    As Smithsonian magazine explains,

 

    This soon became common knowledge among enslaved people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and what would later become Oklahoma. They envisioned… what historian Mekala Audain calls a “Mexican Canaan” across the Rio Grande – a promised land where they could be free. They made the…arduous journey through Texas. They stowed away on boats leaving from Galveston and New Orleans for Tampico and Veracruz. In the 1850s a dozen slaves were reaching Matamoros, Mexico, every month. Two-hundred-seventy arrived in Laredo, in Tamaulipas (now called Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas) in a single year. American diplomats kept pressuring their Mexican counterparts to sign extradition treaties, which would return runaway slaves to their owners, but Mexico flatly refused – in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1857.

 

    Like slaves heading north, escapees headed for Mexico found a variety of allies to help them. One was a white man from Alabama, Nathaniel Jackson. A descendent explains:

 

    “He married a slave that he freed, Matilda Hicks, and they came out [to Texas] in covered wagons in 1857. She already had three children by another man, and she had seven more with Nathaniel.”

 

    Nathaniel bought 5,535 acres of land right here by the river and established the Jackson Ranch…There were Black, white and mixed-race people all living together, raising cattle in a place that was very remote, where they could be left alone. The runaways knew they could get help here – food, clothing and work if they wanted it. Nathaniel was a nice, generous, courageous man, a humanitarian. He would cross them into Mexico in boats.”

 

    John Webber was another white man willing to aid runaways. 

    “He came to Mexican Texas as a single man and settled near Austin in Webber’s Prairie, which later became Webberville,” says [one historian]. “He fell in love with his neighbor’s slave, Silvia Hector, and had children with her. He emancipated her in 1834, married her, and purchased the freedom of their children.”

 

    After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passed, Webber moved his family to the lower Rio Grande Valley, and bought 8,856 acres of land in 1853. “Like the Jackson Ranch, it became a stopping place for runaway slaves going to Mexico,” says Sofia Bravo, a direct descendant of Webber and Hector’s.

 

    The couple received a license to build a ferry across the Rio Grande, which helped John in his business as a trader – and also came in handy for ferrying runaways across to freedom. 

    By 1857, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, an entire colony of black Seminoles, descended from free black and slave runaways who had allied with the Seminole people in Florida, had been established. Their journey began fifteen years earlier, after the U.S. Army broke Seminole resistance and forced almost that entire people to move west to the Creek reservation in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

 

    The Creeks denied the newcomers land and started capturing Black Seminoles and selling them into slavery in Arkansas and Louisiana. By 1849, says [one historian], “the Seminoles and their Black allies had had enough.”

 

    The Seminole leader Wild Cat, with the assistance of John Horse, leader of the Black Seminoles, led more than 300 men, women and children, including 84 Black Seminoles, from Indian Territory south to Mexico. In northern Coahuila, the Mexican government granted them a 70,000-acre military colony with work animals, agricultural equipment and financial subsidies. Within months of arriving, Wild Cat went back to Indian Territory and returned with about 40 more Seminole families and most of the remaining Black Seminoles.

 

    Runaway slaves started arriving before the colonists had finished clearing fields and building their wood-frame houses. One man named David Thomas had escaped with his daughter and three grandchildren. In 1850, a group of 17 arrived, asking to join the Black Seminoles. By 1851, there were 356 Black people living at the colony, and three-quarters of them were runaway slaves. At a moment’s notice, all the adult males had to be ready to fight against the Comanches or Apaches, arguably the most formidable Native American warriors on the continent.

 

    The Black Seminoles, known as Mascogos in Mexico, had a well-earned reputation as superb trackers and fighters. On foot or on horseback, according to the historian Kenneth Porter, who gathered their oral histories in the 1940s, the stronger men would use muskets as clubs. “They beat down buffalo-hide shields, splintered lance shafts, and rammed the iron-shod stocks into their enemies’ astonished faces.” Others used machetes to hack off spear and lance points, and then decapitate their foes. In a battle known in the oral history as “the big fight,” 30 or 40 Black Seminoles defeated a much larger force of Comanches and Apaches, and much of the fighting was hand-to-hand combat.

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February 25: Horace Tabor was a Maine stone cutter, who met Augusta Pierce, his future wife, when he went to work for her father in 1853. He asked her to marry him in 1855, they married in 1857 and then headed for Kansas, to start a new life. (From: William M. Thayer’s Marvels of the New West, p. 246-248.)

 

    His wife later described their first taste of frontier life:

 

    On the 25th of February we left my home in Augusta, Me., for our new one in Kansas. … At Kansas City we purchased a yoke of oxen, a wagon, a few farming tools, some seed, took my trunks and started westward. My trip was not very pleasant, for the wind blew disagreeably, as it always does in Kansas.

 

    We arrived at our destination on the 19th of April at 11 a.m. I shall never forget that morning. To add to the desolation of the place, the wind took a new start. The cabin stood solitary and alone upon an open prairie. It was built of black walnut logs 12 x 16 feet; not a building, a stone, or stick in sight. We had brought two men with us, and how we could all live in that little place was a question I asked myself many times. The only furniture was a No. 7 cookstove, a dilapidated trunk, and a rough bedstead made of poles, on which was an old tick filled with prairie grass. I sat down upon this trunk and cried; I had not been deceived in coming to this place. I knew perfectly well that the country was new, that there were no saw-mills near, and no money in the territory, but I was homesick and could not conceal it from those about me.

 

    Mr. Tabor and the two men unloaded the wagon while I tried to clean up the cabin. I found a number of old New York Tribunes in the room, smoothed them out, made a paste of flour, and soon had the black, ugly logs covered, putting the newspapers right side up, that I might read them at my leisure, for I could see that reading matter was likely to be very scarce. Having covered the walls, I unpacked the boxes and made up a decent bed. I took out my table linen and silver, for I had not left home without the usual outfit, and then began to prepare my first meal. I cannot say that it was very inviting, but I did the best I could and we were all blessed with good appetites. The two men took rooms nearby and boarded with us, thus helping us to money to support the table. Mr. Tabor broke the land, put in the seed, and began farming in good earnest, exchanging day’s labor with the neighbors to save hiring help. In this way our pioneer farm was started.

 

    No rain fell that summer, so that when harvest came we had nothing to gather. Mr. Tabor went to Fort Riley and worked at his trade, while I remained at home with my babe, and made a little money by raising chickens.

 

    Indians and snakes were then numerous in Kansas, and I lived in constant dread of both. I cannot tell which I feared the most. The rattlesnakes crawled into my cabin to get into the shade, and when I sat down it would be upon a three-legged stool with my feet under me.

 

    “The winter was warm and pleasant. When spring came we tried farming once more. An abundant crop resulted, but there was no market for it; eggs were three cents per dozen, and shelled corn twenty cents per bushel. I kept boarders and made some butter to sell

(See also, 1859, for the Tabor’s next move, to Colorado.)

 

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JACKSON HOLMES writes to his brother, urging him to come to Kansas. His spelling and sentence structure are fairly typical of an era, when most Americans had very little formal education:

when you come to the perraryes that you had beter take a little wood along in your fead troft or else you mite miss your coffee some night because that when I came out I had to burn cobs or get no coffee also when you get to Kansas City if your woman neads anything Hannah says that is the time to get it whatever it may be you can get things closer but not so cheap before you get through the state of Mosoury get some fead for your horses if you have any and if you have cattle you won’t nead any grane for you will finde plenty of grass of the best kinds bring ropes and drive little stakes and tie some of your horses and let the Rest go and they won’t nead much hay Hannah wants you to bring roses sprouts lalock sprouts curns sprouts tansy and roots and a little whiskey to keep the roots alive for Jackson peach seeds aple seed and all kinds of garden seeds that you suppos to be neadful because they are scarce out here they are nothing like sweet potatoes here If you can bring a few Irish potatoes or good ones some [of] a good kind we have had toler colde winter but it has not been long about two months and then the winter was over. … Now I will clos these few lines so no more at present but remains effectionet friends until Deth   100/61 

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Hand washing! Who knew? 

May 12: Doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell open the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. According to a review of a book about their lives, the two sisters were in advance of other medical professionals in several way – and bogged in the limits of medicine so prevalent at that time. 

    As Casey Cep explains: 

    Neither sister was satisfied with the way medicine was being practiced or taught. “Medicine is always an evil,” Elizabeth once wrote, “though sometimes a necessary evil.”

 

On the positive side: 

[The sisters] promoted practices borrowed from hydrotherapy and hygienic cures – basic routines of bathing and sanitation that were so contrary to mainstream methods that they attracted protests for “killing women in childbirth with cold water.” In fact, they were saving women; one of the greatest innovations in health care at the time was hand washing, which doctors had previously failed to do even when moving between morgues and maternity wards. Despite the opposition, the Blackwells and their staff treated nearly a thousand patients in their first year, and performed three dozen surgeries. Both sisters also began giving lectures and teaching classes on public health.

 

    Cep continues:

    Although their degrees and their methods made them pioneers, that word implies a radicalism they rejected. Elizabeth, in particular, disdained the poverty and the alleged promiscuity of some of her patients. Even as germ theory was taking hold, she came to regard disease as a moral failing. She espoused phrenology, opposed contraception, and campaigned against vaccinations. Neither sister was especially supportive of other women seeking medical degrees, even going so far as to refuse them the honorific of “Doctor.” Only begrudgingly and for financial reasons did they finally add a female medical college to their infirmary, after long dismissing women’s schools as inferior.

 

    Cep adds other details about the sister’s lives: Elizabeth looked down on nursing, and refereed to Dorothea Dix as the “meddler general,” during the Civil War. She gave up the practice of medicine in 1869, returned to England where she was born, and devoted her energies to crusading against “social evil.” Emily practiced until she was 73. Both sisters adopted little girls. Emily lived for much of her life with Elizabeth Cushier, an obstetrician who had graduated from the sister’s college. Elizabeth’s “daughter” was an Irish orphan, who worked as a domestic servant, and was forced to address Elizabeth as “Dr. Elizabeth.” The girl was also forbidden to marry.

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August 24: The failure of the New York branch of an Ohio banking firm leads to a panic. As Northrop writes, “Men went to bed thinking they were rich, and waked up to find they were poor. Colossal fortunes were swept away.” (36/45)

 

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NOTE TO TEACHERS: If you are not familiar with the story of the S.S. Central America, my students were always intrigued. The book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea chronicles the story in great and often exciting detail.

September 9-12: Loaded with gold minted in San Francisco, the vessel was sailing for New York in 1857 when caught in a violent Atlantic storm. For three days, the vessel struggled to survive, finally going down, and taking three tons (or perhaps fifteen, sources differ) of gold and 425 passengers and crew with her. 

    For the next 125 years no one gave much thought to finding the wreck. A man named Tommy G. Thompson, who had studied engineering and robotics at Ohio State University, began studying old records. Eventually, he and a company he founded (with support from 160 investors) discovered the wreck in 7,000 feet of water (some sources say 8,000). 

    A great deal of detective work and searching of possible wreck sites had already been involved; one summer was spent on a site of another vessel, sunk around the same time, which seemed to fit the profile of the Central America.  

    Eventually robot cameras located the proper wreck. Thompson and others first looked at a series of pictures snapped by the robot. Thompson described what they saw now: 

 

    “It was just…it was just…covered with gold! I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it! That was the most thrilling….We had hit right on a pile, nice low pictures, nice and clear. I mean everything was perfect, man. It was incredible! But I looked at it, and I looked up, and, Naaaah, this can’t be. I thought, That’s gotta be a bunch of brass laying there. So I looked again! Holy! And I just started looking at the other shots, and I…mean…it…was…PILES! I’m not kidding you, it is awesome! It is absolutely awesome! Stacks of coins and bars of gold of every size and shape just sitting there!” (Ship of Gold, p. 450)

 

Some of the coins were still in neat sacks, the bags in which they had been contained having long since rotted away.

 

    In another scene from the book a robot camera is filming the ocean bottom. The submersible approached a beam sticking up. Nearby, a hundred gold coins, washed by some current glinted in the searchlight. Other hints of bars and coins showed under a layer of sediment. An operator above pointed the forward thruster downward and shot out a gentle wash of water to blow away the covering.

 

    The sediment was thin, but when the wake of the thruster hit, it exploded upward, swirling into clouds, blotting out the rotted timbers, turning the monitors white. For several minutes the techs could see nothing but the roiling sediment. Then the clouds began to drift with the light current; the picture on the monitors began to clear and slowly revealed a scene few people could imagine.

 

    “The bottom was carpeted with gold,” Tommy said. “Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing, clear back in the far distance bars stacked on the bottom like brownies, bars stacked like loaves of bread, bars that appear to have slid into the corner of the room. Some of the bars formed a bridge, all gold bars spanning one area of treasure over here and another over here, water underneath, and the decks collapsed through on both sides. Then there was a beam with coins stacked on it, just covered, couldn’t see the top of the beam it had so many coins on it.” (452)

 

    Author Gary Kinder describes what the recovery team saw that day:

 

    So many bricks lay tumbled upon one another at myriad angles that the thirty-foot pile appeared to be the remnants of an old building just demolished. Except these were bricks of gold: bricks flat, bricks stacked, bricks upright, bricks cocked on top of other bricks. And coins single, coins stacked, coins once in stacks now collapsed into spreading piles, some coins mottled in the ferrous oxide orange and brown from the rusting engines, others with their original mint luster. Besides a tiny squat lobster carefully picking its way across piles of coins, the scene lay perfectly still.

 

    One team member laughed, “Look at those damn fire bricks.” A pink-orange anemone drifted softly through the scene. “Sticking up out of another area was a coin tower,” Kinder writes, “eight stacks of gold coins, twenty-five coins to a stack, all of the stacks abutting one another like poker chips still in the rack, the whole thing frozen together and angled upward at sixty degrees.” The camera on the underwater vehicle could swivel; and now they saw “a mound of gold dust frozen ten inches high, dotted with nuggets, and capped by two small gold bars.” (453)

 

    The camera swung again, briefly passing a coin standing straight up. Tommy had caught the date. The camera was swung back.

 

    Everyone laughed as Moore tapped the camera back again. There stood a coin upright, face front, just as pure and lustrous as the day it left the San Francisco Mint. It was emblazoned with the bust of Lady Liberty, lovely in profile, her hair crossed with a tiara and cascading in ringlets down her neck, thirteen stars surrounding her, and her ringlets stopping just short of the date “1857.” In a pocket thirty feet across, the ocean floor lay covered with these coins.

 

    Doering [another member of the recovery team] figured he had now seen more gold coins in one place at one time than any other treasure hunter in history, and that included Cortes and Pizarro. He was ready to pluck some of that gold from the ocean floor, drop it into the artifact drawer, and bring it to the surface, so he could feel it right there in the palm of his hand. (455)

 

    New technologies had to be developed to bring the coins up, unmarred, making them many times more valuable. (It was soon decided to lower a long, wide hose down to the site, coat the coins in silicon, pick them up and drop them in a drawer on the robot vehicle, then pull them out at the surface, unharmed.)

 

    There were gold bars fifteen times larger than anything then known to exist. The estimated value of the haul was $400 million; but there were multiple court challenges ahead – including one from an insurance company that had paid off the losses back in 1857.

 

    In the end, Thompson prevailed. The treasure belonged to his company. But he later ran off and left investors with the same amount of gold they started with, which would be none.

 

    Thompson sold his share of the gold, including 532 gold bars and a trove of coins, for $50 million. A lengthy manhunt ended with his arrest in 2015; but when last I checked he was still in jail and still refused to reveal what had become of all the treasure.

 

    At least some of it had probably gone into a trust fund for his children.

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IN 1857, the Shasta Republican, a California newspaper, admitted, “hundreds of Chinamen have been slaughtered in cold blood during the last five years by desperados that infest our state. [Yet] we have heard of but two or three instances where the guilty parties have been brought to justice.” It didn’t help that by law the Chinese could not testify against whites. 500/28 

Even the term, “a Chinaman’s chance,” related to the fact that if they turned up gold while digging, they could be sure that Americans would seize their claim. 

 

*

 

AN ARTICLE in American Heritage titled “1857” by Oliver Jensen, notes that if you were to go back in time you would notice “the tremendous quiet,” no radios blaring, no power mowers, no loud vacuum cleaners, or airplanes overhead. “Everybody in 1857 is wearing the hoop.”

 

    One issue for women: “When a breeze springs up, as it never does in Currier & Ives prints, the hoops are a little frisky.”

 

    The economic possibilities seem endless. One financier tells a British traveler that if only he had taken up a certain speculation he would not have doubled or tripled his money, he would have “fourbled or fivebled” it. Harriet Martineau, an English woman visiting Washington, notices a problem with servants. None in America will wear livery.

 

    James Mursell Phillippe predicts that by the end of the century the U.S. will have 100 million people. In another fifty years, “she will be almost indubitably the most powerful government on earth.”

 

    It is a different world from what we will ever know. The U.S. government does not issue paper money; but 1,400 state banks do. The Sovereign of the Seas has just crossed from N.Y.C. to Liverpool in 13 days, 22 hours. The heyday of whalers operating out of New Bedford and Nantucket, bringing sperm oil to light the lamps of the young nation, is about to end with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. Half the workers in the Boston area are Irishmen and Irish women. Fifteen out of every hundred Americans live in cities (vs. 5 out of 100 in 1790). Thomas Howe manages to make pins of one piece of metal and sell them in papers. Previously, they had been expensive, and heads often fell off. Medicine is still backward. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarks, “if the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”

 

    Lincoln tells a gathering in June, in Springfield, that the slave’s condition is worsening:

 

    All the powers of the earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house…One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key—the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places, and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of the mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more difficult than it is.

 

    In New York City, Fifth Avenue is cut through north of Twenty-Third Street, “but it still resembles a country road.”

 

    There are plans afoot to create a great central park, two and one-half miles long and a half-mile wide. Many other areas of the city are overrun with crime. Policemen walk in pairs for protection in many areas, on streets with names like Cow Bay and Murderer’s Alley. Prostitutes as young as 12 roam the streets. Gangs like the Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, and Bowery Boys dominate entire neighborhoods. Police estimate there are 621 houses of prostitution, 99 houses of assignation and 75 “concert halls of ill repute.”

 

    There are only 8,500 miles or railroads in 1850; that number triples to nearly 24,000 by 1857; this year the Baltimore & Ohio reaches St. Louis, Missouri. The trip takes four days.

 

    Steam power has been spreading. One orator cries that “the march of civilization” is driven “by the power of steam!” Another: “The world has not seen a greater achievement!”

 

    No one yet has dreamed of time zones or synchronized times; and fundamentalist preachers are warning that God knows but one time for Heaven and for earth.

 

    Buchanan is in the White House; on slavery he says, I “hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end.”

 

    U.S. troops are preparing to march against the Mormons in Utah. Brigham Young describes federal power as “a stench in our nostrils.”

 

    Robert Gould Shaw – who will die in 1864, at the head of the 54^th Massachusetts, and all-Negro regiment, save for its officers, is a student at Harvard.

 

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JANE GRAY SWISSHELM divorces – partly because her husband kept a mountain lion in the woodshed. She was forced to fight a legal battle to keep her personal property, which under the laws of that time became the property of her husband once they married.

 

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November: When Robert E. Lee returns home, after two years of hard duty in Texas, he finds his wife, only 49, an invalid, crippled by arthritis. His father-in-law has died; and in his will has called for all of his slaves to be emancipated within five years after his death. (22/95)     

1859

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“Nor may it be easily decided whether an adventurer – supposing himself under the direction of the Higher Law – may in such a manner attack the abuses of a State and whether, if he do, he strikes the blow in the character of a fool and madman or as the hero and protagonist of a new era.” 

John Clark Ridpath on John Brown.

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John Brown.
Blogger's photo.

March 2-3: For the enslaved people of Georgia, this event is called “the Weeping Time,” the day on which 

436 people were brought to the hammer to pay off the bad investments and gambling debts of Pierce M. Butler, the absentee owner of the Butler Island plantation. The auction was held at a playground of the local elite: the Ten Broeck Race Course, then on the outskirts of Savannah, Ga. It netted Butler the phenomenal sum of $303,850.

 

 A photograph of the site today 

cannot show you enslaved families herded into sheds that normally held horses. It cannot show you a man named Jeffrey, recorded in one contemporary writer’s account begging in vain for his purchaser to also buy his love, Dorcas, Chattel No. 278: “Please buy Dorcas, Mas’r. We’re be good sarvants to you long as we live. We’re be married right soon, young Mas’r, and de chillun will be healthy and strong, Mas’r, and dey’ll be good sarvants too.”

 

A photo can’t capture the contribution those 436 enslaved men, women and children made to the economy of their country, 

or the gifts and talents they lent it. (As part of the Gullah Geechee community, they were among those who gave the world a song of peace, “Kumbaya.”) What you do see are two tracks, intersecting but going in different directions, toward different outcomes – a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for black and white life in America. In 2008, the Georgia Historical Society and the City of Savannah erected a commemorative marker near this land, but no marker can capture the scars carried by those separated on the auction block. Today the site is home to a large regional plywood and lumber distributor. It also contains the Otis J. Brock III Elementary School, whose students are almost all black. This March, the school was the site of a moving commemoration of the 160th anniversary of the Weeping Time. 

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April 5: In February, Horace Tabor, living in Kansas with his wife Augusta (see: 1857 for the story of how the couple settled there and took to farming) hears of the discovery of gold in the Pike’s Peak region. As Augusta later wrote, her husband

 

at once decided to try his luck in the new El Dorado. I had my choice to return to my parents in Maine or remain with my husband and cast in my lot with him. After canvassing the subject with much reflection, it was settled that I should remain, as the more practicable course to be pursued. The two men decided to go along with us. Mr. Tabor worked at the Fort through March and April.

 

    The fifth day of April we gathered together our scanty means, bought supplies for a few months, yoked our oxen and cows, mounted our seats in the wagon, and left the town of Zeandale with the determination of returning in the fall, or as soon as we had made money enough to pay for the one hundred and sixty acres of government land, and buy a little stock.

 

    What I endured on this journey only the women who crossed the plains in 1859 can realize. There was no station until we arrived within eighty miles of Denver, via the Republican [River] route; no road and a good part of the way no fuel.

 

    We were obliged to gather buffalo chips [dried buffalo dung], sometimes traveling miles to find enough to cook a meal with. This weary work fell to the women, for the men had enough do in taking care of the teams, and in “making” and “breaking” the camp. The Indians followed us all the time, and were continually begging and stealing.

 

    Every Sunday we rested, if rest it could be called. The men went hunting, while I stayed to guard the camp, wash the soiled linen, and cook for the following week. Quite frequently the Indians gathered around my camp, so that I could I do nothing all day. They wallowed in the water-sources from which our supplies were obtained, and were generally very filthy. My babe was teething and suffering from fever and ague [fever and shivering, often caused by malaria, then common in America], so that he required constant attention day and night. I was weak and feeble having suffered all the time that I lived in Kansas with ague. My weight was only ninety pounds.

 

    We arrived in Denver about the middle of June…[and later went on to Golden, where they heard of the rich “Gregory diggings”]. On the morning of the Fourth of July, the men took a supply of provisions on their backs, with a few blankets, and, leaving one of the party to keep me company, pushed forward into the mountains, hopeful of success. They were absent three weeks, and to me they were three very lonely, wearisome weeks, although wagons were camped around and Golden City was a half-mile away. A vast wilderness, whose silence was broken only by the lowing of cattle, stretched out on every side. Even to a pioneer woman, on whom the necessity of such experience was laid, the situation was one of indescribable isolation. On the 26th of July we again loaded the wagon and started into the mountains. The road was a mere trail; every few rods we were obliged to stop and widen it. Many times we unloaded the wagon, and, by pushing it, helped the cattle up the hills. Going downhill was so much easier than it was often necessary to fasten a full-grown pine tree to the back of the wagon for a hold-back or break. Often night overtook us where it was impossible to find a level place to spread a blanket. Under such circumstances we drove stakes in the ground, rolled a log against them, and lay with our feet against the log. Sometimes the hill was so steep that we slept almost upright. We were nearly three weeks cutting our way through Russell’s Gulch into Paine’s Bar, now called Idaho Springs.

 

    Ours was the first wagon through, and I was the first white woman there, if white I could be called, after camping out three months. The men cut logs and laid them up four feet high, then put the 7 x 9 tent on for a roof. Mr. Tabor went prospecting. I opened a “bakery,” made bread and pies to sell, gave meals, and sold milk from our cow. Here one of our party, Mr. Maxey, had an attack of mountain fever, and for four weeks he lay very ill at the door of our tent, in a wagon bed, I acting as physician and nurse. A miner with a gunshot wound through his hand was also brought to my door for attention.

 

    With the first snow-storm came an old miner to our camp, who told us dreadful stories of snow-slides, and advised Mr. Tabor to take me out of the mountains immediately. Those who know anything of the surroundings of Idaho [error, by the woman who transcribed Mrs. Tabor’s story?] will smile at the idea of a snow-slide there. But we, in our ignorance of mountains, believed all the old miner said, and left for Denver.

 

    I had been very successful with my bakery in that camp, making enough to pay for the farm in Kansas and to keep us through the winter.

 

    Arriving in Denver, we rented a room over a store. It was the first roof I had slept under for six months. I took a few borders, and Mr. Tabor returned to his prospect, which he found had been jumped by the miner who had advised us to leave. “Might was right” in those days, so he lost all his summer’s work, and had to sell the cow to buy the supply for the new camp, which was up the head-waters of the Arkansas.

 

    The 19th of February, 1860, I was lifted from a bed of sickness to a wagon, and we started for the new mining excitement. No woman had yet been there.

 

    We were seven days going to where Manitou [Manitou Springs, Colorado] now stands. I made biscuit with water of the soda springs; they were yellow, and tasted so strongly of soda that even we, with our out-door appetites, could not relish them.

 

    We lingered there one week, the men doing a little prospecting, and working on a new road over the Ute Pass.

 

    We made such slow progress over this road that every evening we could look back and see the smoke from the camp-fire of the previous evening. After two weeks of such wearying travel, we reached South Park. I shall never forget my first vision of the park. The sun was just setting. I can only describe it by saying it was one of Colorado’s sunsets. Those who have seen them know how glorious they are. Those who have not cannot imagine anything so gorgeously beautiful. The park looked like a cultivated field, with rivulets coursing through, and herds of antelope in the distance. We camped on the bank of a clear stream, and the men went fishing. We had broiled trout that night for supper, and passed the evening over a game of whist by the light of our campfire.

 

    The fourth day in the park we came at night to Salt Creek. Tried the water and found that we could not let the cattle drink it; neither could we drink it. We tide the oxen to the wagon and went supper-less to bed. The night was very cold, and a jack [male mule; in this case, probably young] came to our tent and stood in the hot embers until he burned [the hair on] his fetlocks off. He stayed with us to the end of our trip, and carried me many miles upon his back.

 

    We moved on the next day to freshwater, and camped on trout Creek. Knowing that a party of men had left Denver a few days before we did, and feeling anxious to come up with them, the men shouldered their rifles and started out in search of footprints, each going in a different direction. The one who came upon a trail was to fire off his gun as a signal to the others. All day long I listened for the report of a gun. The men had not arrived when night’s shadows gathered around, and I felt desolate indeed. The little jack came into the tent, and I bowed my head upon him and wept in loneliness of soul.

 

    The men had gone farther than they expected, and were somewhat bewildered, and only for the camp-fire that I kept blazing, they could not have found their way back.

 

    As they did not find a trail, we concluded to follow the way a stick might fall. It fell pointing southwest, and we went in that direction.

 

    Finding what we thought a good fording place in the Arkansas River, we decided to cross as the road seemed better on the other side.

 

    The river was very rapid and full of bowlders, around which clung cakes of ice. Our cattle, thin, weak, and tired, were numb with cold, and halted in the middle of the river. The men plunged into the cold stream, which was waist deep, tied ropes to their horns, went up on the opposite shore, and endeavored to drag them over, but with no success. They then unloaded the wagon, putting the goods upon the ice, which was liable to break off and float away, unyoked the oxen, dragged the wagon over, and carried the goods on their shoulders. The faithful little jack swam the river with me on its back. Upon consulting our watch we found that we had been six hours crossing the Arkansas.

    

    We made a fire, dried our clothes on us, and nursed the cattle all night, feeling that we must save them, for our provision was getting low, and unless game came in from the valley, we should be obliged to eat them.

 

    After camping in this place a week, we moved further up the river, where we went to work in earnest. Mr. Tabor and Mr. Maxey whip-sawed some lumber and made sluice-boxes, sawed riffles from a log, put in a ditch from the creek, and commenced washing the bank away. Cleaning the boxes up at night, we found fine gold in an abundance of black sand. I worked hard every day, trying to separate the gold from the iron sand, and at night would have only a few pennyweights of the precious metal. For four weeks we worked there; our supplies were about gone, and we felt discouraged. It had been one long year since we heard from the loved ones at home.

 

    One morning a man came to the camp, and said he was one of the party that left Denver a few days in advance of us, and they had found gold in paying quantities. He gave us explicit directions how to reach the rich diggings. We followed his directions, and undertook to cross the river where it looked shallow. When near the opposite bank we came to a deep channel. Our wagon bed, with myself and child in it, raised above the wheels and floated down the stream. It was rapidly filling with water, when it occurred to me to cling to the willows on the bank. I did so, and held with unnatural strength until the men came to my rescue. We reached California Gulch three months after we left Denver. The first thing after camping was to have the faithful old oxen butchered that had brought us all the way from Kansas, – yes, from the Missouri River, three years before. We divided the beef with the miners, for they were without provisions or ammunition.

 

    Before night they built me a cabin of green pine logs, without floor, door, or window. The roof was covered with poles, bark, and dirt, and the wagon was converted into table, side-board, and three legged stools. I entered this place happy that I once move had a roof to cover my head, and at once commenced taking boarders, with nothing to feed them except poor beef and dried apples.

 

    It was soon noised about that gold was struck in California Gulch, and before many weeks that were ten thousand people there. A mail and express was immediately decided upon, and I was appointed postmistress.

 

    With my many duties the day passed quickly. I was called upon to weigh all the gold taken from the upper part of the gulch, as we were the only owners in that section of a pair of gold-scales. The miners would clean up their boxes, get their gold weighed, and go to town (where Leadville now stands), spree all night, and return “dead broke” in the morning to commence again.

 

    Mr. Tabor was then working our mine, which was No. 12 above discovery. We took that because it had a fall; but it was a mistake, for the gold was nearly all washed over the fall into the claim below, from which eighty thousand dollars was taken out during the summer of 1860.

 

    I was very happy that summer, and joyfully anticipated a visit to my mother and father in the fall.

 

    On the 20th of September Mr. Tabor gave me one thousand dollars in dust. I put my wardrobe – what there was of it – in a carpet-bag, and took passage with a mule train that was going to the Missouri River. I was five weeks crossing, and cooked for my board.

 

    With that thousand dollars I purchased one hundred and sixty acres of land in Kansas, adjoining the tract we already owned. My folks dressed me up, and in the spring I bought a pair of mules and a wagon in St. Joe to return with, which took about all my money.

 

    Mr. Tabor gave me one-fifth of what was made that summer, when I left; the other four thousand he sent to Iowa and bought flour, and in the spring we opened a store in my cabin. He worked in the mine during the day, while I attended to the store. Those were days and years of self-sacrifice, hard labor, and rigid economy, when the foundation of Mr. Tabor’s immense wealth was laid. A little less courage, fortitude, and perseverance would have turned us back, and the golden opportunity to amass a fortune had been lost forever. (See: Year 1879, and the story of how the Tabor’s became fabulously rich.)

 

* 

May 25: Thomas Wiggins, born to a slave mother in Georgia turns 10. Soon after he was born it became clear baby Tom was blind. Charity Wiggins, his mother, and her four children, were sold soon after to another owner, Gen. James Neil Bethune – and Thomas would help him make a fortune. 

    The New York Times tells the story:

 

…For within a decade, Charity’s son had become a touring musical phenomenon, reportedly earning up to $100,000 a year, well over $1 million today and enough to make him among the best compensated performing artists of his time. Under the stage name “Blind Tom” Wiggins, he played his own compositions and improvised on the piano, demonstrating uncanny skills at replicating, note for note, pieces he heard — both classical works and popular songs.

 

    One of his tricks involved playing “Fisher’s Hornpipe” with one hand and “Yankee Doodle” with the other, while singing “Dixie.” He could repeat political speeches he had heard months before, mimicking the vocal cadences of the speaker, even in foreign languages unknown to him.

 

    Wiggins’s life is shrouded in misinformation and exploitative mythologizing. From what is known, as a young boy Tom could barely walk or express his needs. But he had an obsession with sounds: rain, wind, clanking tools, kitchen pans, roosters crowing, rattling chains and, especially, clapping, shouting, songs and music. He soon became a kind of mascot at the main house when the young Bethune daughters sang and played the piano and he listened, seemingly in ecstasy.

 

    Tom was allowed to plunk out notes and pound the keys on the piano. One day, without warning, he started playing a piece he had heard one of the daughters practicing. The nearly 50-year career of “Blind Tom” Wiggins had begun.

 

    

    One of his most famous pieces is, “The Battle of Manassas,” a nearly eight-minute work written around 1863, when he was 14, that evokes the first major victory of the Confederate army, an event that had been recounted to Wiggins in detail.

 

    Even after slavery ended, Gen. Bethune, and later his son, remained in control of Tom’s career, having been declared his guardians.

*

The Norris case. 

June: An incident involving three runaway slaves, not two, brings into question the picture often presented of Robert E. Lee. Again, Freeman, Lee’s biographer, can write cluelessly in the 1930s:  

    [Lee] was compelled to send some of the Arlington Negroes to work in eastern Virginia. This may have caused something of a rebellion among them, for two of them, a man and a young woman, ran away in the hope of reaching Pennsylvania. They were captured and returned to Arlington. Thereupon Lee sent them to labor in lower Virginia, where there would be less danger of their absconding. That probably was the extent of the punishment imposed on them. (22/98) 

    The “extent” being to have been sold away from family? 

    Wikipedia offers a more detailed picture: 

   In this telling, three of Lee’s slaves, Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin, flee, heading North, but are captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania border and forced to return to the Arlington plantation. 

On June 24, the anti-slavery newspaper New York Daily Tribune published two anonymous letters (dated June 19 and June 21), each claiming to have heard that Lee had the Norrises whipped, and that the overseer refused to whip the woman but that Lee took the whip and flogged her personally. Lee privately wrote to his son Custis that “The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.”

    Wesley Norris himself spoke out about the incident after the war. After the three runaways were returned to Arlington, he said Lee told them that “he would teach us a lesson we would not soon forget.” 

Lee then ordered the overseer to tie the three of them firmly to posts, and ordered them whipped: 50 lashes for the men and 20 for Mary Norris. Norris claimed that Lee encouraged the whipping, and that when the overseer refused to do it, called in the county constable to do it instead. Unlike the anonymous letter writers, he does not state that Lee himself whipped any of the enslaved people. According to Norris, Lee “frequently enjoined [Constable] Williams to ‘lay it on well,’ an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

 

    The two men were sent by Lee’s agent to work on the railroads in Virginia and Alabama. Wesley was then sent to Richmond in January 1863 “from which place,” he later said, “I finally made my escape through the rebel lines to freedom.” 

    Federal authorities reported that Norris came within their lines on September 5, 1863, and that he “left Richmond … with a pass from General Custis Lee.” In fact, it would seem, that in accordance with provisions of a will, filed by Lee’s wife’s father, he had freed Norris, and all other slaves owned by the Custis family, on December 29, 1862.

 

    Biographers have differed in their descriptions of these events. Freeman shrugged it off, saying that the incident was “Lee’s first experience with the extravagance of irresponsible antislavery agitators,” adding, “There is no evidence, direct or indirect, that Lee ever had them or any other Negroes flogged. The usage at Arlington and elsewhere in Virginia among people of Lee’s station forbade such a thing.” 

    In 2000, Michael Fellman, in The Making of Robert E. Lee, found the claims that Lee had personally whipped Mary Norris “extremely unlikely,” but found it not at all unlikely that Lee had ordered the runaways whipped: “corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism “firmness”) was [believed to be] an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage.”

 

    Elizabeth Brown Pryor concluded in 2008 that “the facts are verifiable,” based on “the consistency of the five extant descriptions of the episode (the only element that is not repeatedly corroborated is the allegation that Lee gave the beatings himself), as well as the existence of an account book that indicates the constable received compensation from Lee on the date that this event occurred.” 

    In 2014, Michael Korda wrote that “Although these letters are dismissed by most of Lee's biographers as exaggerated, or simply as unfounded abolitionist propaganda, it is hard to ignore them [...] It seems incongruously out of character for Lee to have whipped a slave woman himself, particularly one stripped to the waist, and that charge may have been a flourish added by the two correspondents; it was not repeated by Wesley Norris when his account of the incident was published in 1866 [...] [A]lthough it seems unlikely that he would have done any of the whipping himself, he may not have flinched from observing it to make sure his orders were carried out exactly.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It might be interesting to have students write a description of these events from whatever perspective they choose. The blogger will note that he is not sure which would be worse: That Lee would choose to watch the beating, or that he would choose not to. Lee is consistently described as a good Christian gentleman in the history books.  

I wonder how many of your students will know anything about what the Bible says, regarding slavery. Also see: George Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery, in Cannibals All ( Year 1854.)

*

 

June: A rider crosses over the Sierra Nevada, from Washoe County in what is then Utah Territory. He has in his saddle bags some gold-bearing quartz. Melville Atwood, in Grass Valley, Ca. assays the rocks – gold content $1,000 per ton – silver content $3,000! The news spreads, all over Grass Valley, to Nevada City. Judge James Walsh bangs on the door of a friend and they pile supplies on a mule and head for the new diggings. One of the first to follow is George Hearst – with Atwood beside him, having spread the news. (See: American Heritage, “Go it, Washoe!” by Remi Nadeau.)

 

    Peter O’Reilly and Pat McLaughlin had made the first strike, and now Hearst managed to buy McLaughlin’s share for $3500. He was so excited he rode back over the Sierras (150 mile trip) to raise the money.

 

    Judge Walsh paid Henry Comstock $11,000 to buy out his claim. Comstock bragged to friends he had fooled “the California rock shark.”

 

    Soon Walsh and Hearst were shipping ore 160 miles by muleback and another 80 by steamer, to SF, and still making a fortune, it was so rich. By 1859 most placers in California had played out. The hydraulic operations were in a lull, with most of the snow melt having passed; in September a Sacramento observer noted that as many as a million men roamed the city streets. “Never before have I seen so many people looking for work and can’t get it,” he said.

 

    Now mules, horses, picks, shovels, wash pans and provisions were in demand. “From the crack of dawn to the shades of night, nothing is heard but Washoe,” said one SF gentleman. Stagecoaches and mule trains were booked up days in advance. Men packed one stage so tightly that when it overturned no one was hurt. The road was bad and stagecoaches “whirled around blind bends, the passengers…looking hundreds of feet downward to the churning American River while the wheels dusted the brink.” When the road was too steep, they got out and walked and pushed the stage along.

 

    J. Ross Brown, a writer, remembers trying to get a room for the night at Placerville, and his failed effort to get some sleep. Nadeau writes:

 

…People were rushing through the corridors all night, he wrote, “in and out of every room, banging the doors, calling for boots, carpet-sacks, cards, cock-tails, and toddies; while amidst the ceaseless din arose ever and anon that potent cry of ‘Washoe!’ …” In the midst of the pandemonium his door burst open.

 

    “I say, Cap!” cried a disheveled intruder wearing a wide-brimmed hat and long underwear. “Are you the man that can’t get an animal for Washoe?”

 

    “Yes, have you got one to sell or hire?”

 

    “No I hain’t got one myself, but me and my pardner is going to walk there, and if you like you can jine our party.”

 

    When Browne agreed, the door was closed, only to be opened again. 

    “I say, Cap!”

 

    “What now?”

 

    “Do you believe in Washoe?”

 

    “Of course; why not?”

 

    As the prospectors passed along the streets of Placerville each day, onlookers shouted, “Go it, Washoe!”

 

    Accommodations along the way were primitive. You could stop at Dirty Mike’s and pay for the privilege of a place on the floor. Hundreds of men gathered nightly at Strawberry Flats, which boasted a saloon.

 

    Browne again:

 

    At the first tinkle of the bell the door was burst open with a tremendous crash, and for a moment no battle-scene in Waterloo … could have equaled the terrific onslaught of the gallant troops of Strawberry. The whole house actually tottered and trembled at the concussion, as if shaken by an earthquake. Long before the main body had assaulted the table the din of arms was heard above the general uproar; the deafening clatter of plates, knives, and forks, and the dreadful battle-cry of “Waiter! Waiter! Pork and beans! Coffee, waiter! Beefsteak! … quick, waiter, for God’s sake!”

 

    Here a traveler might share a floor with 250 others and wash up the next morning at a horse trough before heading east. At Genoa, on the far side of the Sierra, you could find a bunk to sleep in, but might share it with one or two others.

 

    Storms hit the Sierra Nevada range in November, stopping all but “the most frantic rainbow-hunters,” as American Heritage calls them. Snow piled in 60 foot drifts; animals and men were frozen until next spring when a thaw came. Winter also meant the closing of supply routes and food became scarce and expensive in the new mining region. Spring brought a rush of freight-packers, anxious to cash in on the high prices. Sleighs were tried; but too many barren rock stretches made them useless. You could ride a mule – if you were willing to pay $30. As the thaw increased the trail became “nothing but one trough of mire from two to three feet deep” of mud. Broken down wagons and dead animals littered the route. When one caravan made camp in the forests one night, two of the travelers had to stay up at all times, waving torches to protect their bacon supply from grizzly bears “grumbling and gnashing their teeth.” By April 1860 around 150 Californians were reaching Washoe every day.  The Deseret News in Salt Lake City made an effort to suppress the news but Mormons still came. So did disappointed prospectors from the Pike’s Peak rush of 1859. “Nevada would soon boast that the best of America came to California, and the best of California came to Washoe,” Nadeau writes.

 

    Naturally, speculators, gamblers and members of the world’s oldest profession, usually dressed in men’s clothing for the trip, joined the rush. Julia Bulette was one. When an epidemic of influenza struck the Lode, she nursed many of the sick men. Soon they were calling her the “Queen of Washoe.” “Fighting” Sam Brown arrived – having already killed several men in California – and another in Carson City. Now he got into an argument with a monte dealer and wounded two bystanders in the fight. John Mackay, an Irish immigrant, arrived. Eilley Orrum was there, running a boarding house. Eilley had already been married and divorced twice; but she had her eye on a new man, an eligible boarder named Sandy Bowers. Another guest was “Old Virginny” Fennimore, who had had a small claim in the Comstock discovery, and gave it up for a broken down horse. He gave the new town a name, “Virginia Town,” soon to grow into “Virginia City.” New arrivals slept in wagon beds and tents and under the stars. Newcomers in the spring of 1860 were less than impressed. “Imagine a flood in hell,” said one arrival, “succeeded by a snow-storm…”

 

    Said another of the town:

 

    Frame shanties, pitched together as if by accident; tents of canvas, of blankets, of brush, of potato sacks and old shirts, with empty whisky-barrels for chimneys: smoky hovels of mud and stone: coyote holes in the mountain side forcibly seized and held by men: pits and shafts with smoke issuing from every crevice …

 

    Everywhere, there are “sharps” trying to sell shares in rich claims. The talk is all of “lodes,” “dips,” “angles” and “indications.”

 

    “Nobody had any money,” one newcomer remembered, “yet everybody was a millionaire in silver claims.” A man digging a cellar hit a rich lode. New discoveries in nearby canyons would lead to fresh rushes; always the first to know tried to quietly load their mules and get there first; but the news always leaked. A rich vein did run along the side of the mountain, with each owner tunneling closer to it. Many men carried magnifying glasses to study ore samples. Shares in a mine worth $10 one morning might be worth $1,000 when news came that the mine had struck the vein. One young easterner, Nadeau writes, arrived in San Francisco and bought two shares in Washoe for $1,000; a few months later he sold out for $20,000 and sailed home, never having gone to the mines or turned a shovelful of dirt. Stock prices boomed and busted. By the fall of 1860 there had been 4,000 claims located in Washoe. Only 300 had been opened; and experts said only 20 were sound investments. As one Washoe observer put it to SF’ers: “fools at your end of the telegraph were deceived by knaves at our end…” An uprising of angry Native Americans further tarnished the reputation of the new diggings. Peter O’Reilly had sold out for $40,000, lost his wealth in speculation, and spent the next few years looking for a second strike, eventually losing his mind. Comstock’s path led downward in years to come, too, and he ended in suicide. “Old Virginny” died in a fall from his horse. Bulette was robbed for her jewels and murdered. She was given Virginia City’s “greatest funeral and her slayer its most elegant hanging.” Sam Brown bullied the wrong man, “an inoffensive innkeeper,” who chased him down the street and dropped him forever with the blast of a double-barreled shotgun.

 

    Hearst made a fortune.

 

    So did Mackay; he rose steadily from miner to mine superintendent, then owner. In the early 1870s he and three partners gained control of the Big Bonanza, a huge new lode – and a second boom carried Virginia City to fresh heights and, temporarily, splendor. Judge Walsh sold out too soon and lost a chance at a fortune. Eilley and her third husband, Sandy Bowers, made millions. They built a fabulous mansion, Washoe Hall, traveled in Europe, spent freely, and by the time Sandy died, had little money left. His widow got by, charging curiosity-seekers to tour her decaying home.

 

    In 1877, two miners rode a handmade boat fifteen miles down a steep, curving flume, completing their wild ride in eleven minutes. Later they said they’d never do it again, even for all the silver in Nevada.

 

Browne’s articles are actually online.

 

* 

ONE COMMON complaint among the miners was the limited menu available in rough and tumble camps. A typical miner joked that bacon and flapjacks, with coffee to wash them down, made three meals a day. It was even said that one miner got so good at flipping his pancakes he could flip one up the chimney of his cabin, run outside, and catch it on the way down.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My students used to enjoy doing a skit on the Nevada silver rush in class. It was fun to have a frying pan, and a few pancakes or frozen waffles for the skit. You could ask one of the “miners” to demonstrate his or her flipping skills, perhaps a behind the back flip. Bouncing a frozen waffle off the ceiling was good for a laugh.

 

*

 

IN MY loose notes I also have a mention of a funeral for a deceased miner. His friends are gathered beside the fresh grave. The minister is reading a prayer. One of the mourners, his eyes downcast, sees gold in the dirt piled beside the grave. “Gold! Gold, boys!” he shouts. The mourners remove the casket from the grave, set it roughly aside, and they – and the minister – go to work digging for riches.

 

*

 

July: W. S. Bodey (first name, possibly “William,” “Wakeman,” or “Waterman,” discovers gold north of Mono Lake, on the border between California and the Territory of Nevada. A “rush” quickly follows, but not much gold is found. 

    In the 1870s an entire town to be named “Bodie,” a misspelling of his name, will grow up in the desolate region, 8,379 feet above sea level, where Bodey first found gold. Population will reach 10,000; but when the gold runs out, Bodie becomes a ghost town. Winters high in the mountains prove to much. (See: Year 1877) 

    Snow could pile 20 feet deep in winter, with winds of 100 mph and temps as low as 40 degrees below zero. 

Today, Bodie is a ghost town.

    The Story of Bodie by Ella M. Cain includes some of the casual racism one could run into even as late as 1956. 

    Bodey and three companions, including Black Taylor, were panning for gold (Bodey had left his wife and two older children, and come West in 1848, by sea) in the barren hills of eastern California, when they turned up “a long string of yellow metal coiling around the edge of the pan.” 

    They drank up the last of their whiskey in celebration, and built a cabin beside a nearby mountain spring. 

    Gold proved sparse, however, and two of the men soon quit and left for better diggings. Bodey and Taylor stuck it out.

 

*

 

October 16-18: John Brown and 21 followers launch an abortive raid on Harpers Ferry. This assessment comes from I Rode with Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas (paperback edition, Premier Books, 1961)

 

    On John Brown:

 

    With a previous record as a horse thief and a murderer, he was now playing the new role of a conspirator. Full of cunning, with much experience and no little intelligence, cruel, bloodthirsty, and altogether unscrupulous, he seemed singularly ignorant not only of the white people among whom he had camped, but of the characteristics of the race for whom he was about to raise the standard of insurrection. His cause, when the time came, frightened but did not attract the Negroes, and only made them keep quiet and remain the closer to their quarters. Five of them joined him in his Raid: one of those was killed, and the others deserted him.

 

    There is nothing in all the history of fanaticism, its crimes and follies, so strange and inexplicable as that the people of New England, with all their shrewdness and general sense of justice, should have attempted to lift up the sordid name of that old wretch and, by a political apotheosis, to exalt him among the heroes and benefactors of this land. I can understand why enthusiasts and fanatics in the cause of the abolition of slavery might have sent him to Kansas and aided him with their means to keep that from becoming a slave state; but why they should have sent him money and arms to encourage him to murder the white people of Virginia is beyond my comprehension.  (20/14-15)

 

    Ridpath offers up a quick assessment of Brown:

 

    Next came the John Brown insurrection of 1859. Old John Brown, of Osawatomie, deliberately devised a scheme for a servile war and revolution throughout the South. He had been one of the leaders of the Free-State militia in the border war in Kansas. He was an enthusiast, fearless, persistent, determined to do or die, a religious fanatic who took no council of danger or defeat. With a party of twenty-one men like himself, but not his equals, he made a sudden descent out of Pennsylvania on the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, captured the place and held his ground for nearly two days. The militia of Virginia and the the national troops were called out to suppress the revolt. Thirteen of Brown’s men were killed. Two made their escape and the rest were captured. The leader and his six companions were given over to the authorities of Virginia, tried, condemned and hanged. The event was one which to the present day excites the keenest interest and liveliest controversy. Nor may it be easily decided whether an adventurer – supposing himself under the direction of the Higher Law – may in such a manner attack the abuses of a State and whether, if he do, he strikes the blow in the character of a fool and madman or as the hero and protagonist of a new era. (1219/363-64)

 

    The biographer of Robert E. Lee, writing from the Southern point of view, calls Brown “notorious,” or “widely known but unfavorably talked about.” The plan was to break into the firehouse and use bayonets, because gunfire might injure many of the hostages. Stuart advanced under a flag of truce; fully 2,000 spectators could see what was transpiring. He was to wave his hat as soon as Brown rejected a proposal to surrender and Brown did, and Stuart did so. (22/100) 

    Three minutes after that signal was given, marines had battered in the door and killed, wounded or captured Brown and his men. In his report, Lee described Brown’s party as “rioters.” 

    After 23 years, Lee was still only a lieutenant colonel. He had four unmarried daughters, an invalid wife, and earned only $1205 per annum.

Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

* 

November: W. S. Bodey and a companion, Black Taylor, leave their gold camp to go get supplies at the nearby town of Monoville. The two get caught in a blizzard and separated. Bodey freezes to death, and his body is not found until the following spring, when snow at the high elevation where they were digging finally melts. 

    Cain writes: 

    The winter of ’59 came early and was severe. Bodey and Taylor were alone in their little cabin in the gulch. In November they found themselves getting short of food, and had to go on foot to Monoville for supplies. On the return trip they were overtaken by a blizzard and lost their way. Only one who has experienced a Bodey winter can realize the fury with which the blinding snow, driven by the wintry blast, can sweep those barren slopes; nor can one imagine the depth of snow which can pile up in the course of a few hours. The miners lost their way. The packs on their backs became burdensome. They left them one by one. Their safety lay in staying together. Finally Taylor realized that Bodey’s strength was failing. He tried to encourage him by saying that they were near home, that he could recognize landmarks, but Bodey, who was now lagging behind, did not seem to hear. At last he fell exhausted in the snow. In the blinding blizzard but Taylor had difficulty in even finding him. He groped in the snow banks, which were now waist deep, and called him by name. The wind caught his voice and it trailed off in a sort of wail. He finally stumbled on to Bodey’s prostate form, and, after several attempts, was able to lift it to his shoulders. He staggered on for a few hundred yards, but the wind held him back like a demon that was possessed. He finally laid Bodey in the snow, in order to rest and regain his own strength, but when he tried to lift him again it was impossible. Taylor wrapped a blanket around him, put his mouth close to Bodey’s ear, and told him they were not far from the cabin that he would soon come back. Struggling on blindly, he at last ran up against a stony cliff. He leaned against it for support. Then suddenly the fact that it was the black bluff which rose some little distance behind their cabin filtered into his benumbed brain. Some way, he never knew how, he eventually reached the cabin and staggered in. He kindled a fire, made coffee, and ate some food.

 

    The thoughts of Bodey out there in the snow were driving him mad. Putting on some dry clothing, he opened the door and again plunged into the fury of the storm. All night long he hunted for his companion, and called him by name, but no answer came back excepting the moan of the mocking wind.

 

    In the morning he staggered back exhausted to the cabin. It continued to snow the next day – and the next. On the third day, when the storm finally cleared, and the snow lay like a blanket deep and white over the mountains, no telltale spot disclosed the place where Bodey’s body lay buried. It remained for the prowling, hungry coyotes to find it; even before spring, and when Taylor at last came upon the spot, only naked bones, bowie knife, pistol and blanket told him at last he had found the place where his companion and friend had perished. Reverently he buried him where he had found him, wrapping all that remained of him and his belongings in the blanket. He made a mound of earth above him and placed a large boulder at the head as a marker.  (59/1, 59/2-4)

 

    Taylor later gave up on the claim he and Bodey had found, and drifted to the little settlement at Benton. There he built a new cabin, where he lived by himself, near a hot spring. 

    The land had long belonged to the Paiutes: 

    One night when they were on the warpath they broke into Taylor’s cabin. Although taken unaware, he grabbed his gun from above his bed and fought them back with the ferocity of a tiger. When his ammunition was exhausted he used the butt of his gun, and not until ten savages lay dead on the floor was he finally taken. They then dragged him outside into the moonlight, and amid savage yells severed his head from his body. (59/4)

 

 
A gold rush in 1875, would see the town of Bodie, named after Bodey,
but misspelled, grow to at least 7,000 people in years to come.

Today, the population is 0.
All photos in blogger's possession, unless otherwise noted.

 

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December 2: John Brown is executed by hanging.

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“Breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains.” 

December 16: In a public meeting, in Boston (I believe), William Lloyd Garrison steps to the podium and speaks. 

A word upon the subject of Peace. I am a nonresistant – a believer in the inviolability of human life, under all circumstances; I, therefore, in the name of God, disarm John Brown, and every slave at the South. But I do not stop there; if I did, I should be a monster. I also disarm, in the name of God, every slaveholder and tyrant in the world. (Loud applause.) For wherever that principle is adopted, all fetters must instantly melt, and there can be no oppressed, and no oppressor, in the nature of things. How many agree with me in regard to the doctrine of the inviolability of human life? How many nonresistants are there here to night? (A single voice – “I.”) There is one! (Laughter.) Well, then, you who are otherwise are not the men to point the finger at John Brown, and cry “traitor” judging you by your own standard. (Applause.) Nevertheless, I am a nonresistant and I not only desire, but have labored unremittingly to effect, the peaceful abolition of slavery, by an appeal to the reason and conscience of the slaveholder; yet, as a peace man – an “ultra” peace man- I am prepared to say, “Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.” (Enthusiastic applause.) And I do not see how I compromise or stain my peace profession in making that declaration. Whenever there is a contest between the oppressed and the oppressor, -the weapons being equal between the parties – God knows my heart must be with the oppressed, and always against the oppressor. Therefore, whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections. (Loud applause.) I thank God when men who believe in the right and duty of wielding carnal weapons are so far advanced that they will take those weapons out of the scale of despotism, and throw them into the scale of freedom. It is an indication of progress, and a positive moral growth; it is one way to get up to the sublime platform of nonresistance; and it is God’s method of dealing retribution upon the head of the tyrant. Rather than see men wear their chains in a cowardly and servile spirit, I would, as an advocate of peace, much rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains. Give me, as a nonresistant, Bunker Hill, and Lexington, and Concord, rather than the cowardice and servility of a Southern slave plantation.

 

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December 22: A poem by John Greenleaf Whittier memorializing Brown’s death, is published in the New York Independent:

Brown of Ossawatomie 

John Brown of Ossawatomie spake on his dying day:
“I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery’s pay;
But let some poor slave-mother whom I have striven to free,
With her children, from the gallows-stair put up a prayer for me!” 

John Brown of Ossawatomie, they led him out to die;
And lo! a poor slave-mother with her little child pressed nigh:
Then the bold, blue eye grew tender, and the old harsh face grew mild,
As he stooped between the jeering ranks and kissed the negro’s child! 

The shadows of his stormy life that moment fell apart,
And they who blamed the bloody hand forgave the loving heart;
That kiss from all its guilty means redeemed the good intent,
And round the grisly fighter’s hair the martyr’s aureole bent! 

Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good!
Long live the generous purpose unstained with human blood!
Not the raid of midnight terror, but the thought which underlies;
Not the borderer’s pride of daring, but the Christian’s sacrifice. 

Nevermore may yon Blue Ridges the Northern rifle hear,
Nor see the light of blazing homes flash on the negro’s spear;
But let the free-winged angel Truth their guarded passes scale,
To teach that right is more than might, and justice more than mail! 

So vainly shall Virginia set her battle in array;
In vain her trampling squadrons knead the winter snow with clay!
She may strike the pouncing eagle, but she dares not harm the dove;
And every gate she bars to Hate shall open wide to Love! 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I never tried this in class, but it might work to ask students, “Suppose you lived in the South, and read about Garrison’s speech.” How would you feel. Students might be asked to choose one of the following individuals and describe their reactions: A cruel owner with fifty slaves on his plantation; and free black person living in Richmond; a Georgia slave who works as a house servant and hears his or her master discussing Garrison’s speech; a white person living in a slave state, like Kentucky or Tennessee; a minister in a Southern church, speaking on Sunday about the question; a prejudiced Northern businessman whose products are bought all over the South; some ordinary white person in the North. 

Those would be a few possibilities.