American Heritage MagazineOctober 1977    Volume 28, Issue 6
POSTSCRIPTS
 

ON THE WHOLE, HE’D RATHER NOT BE IN PHILADELPHIA


This hitherto unpublished daguerreo-type was found in the same cache of photographs that included the slave portraits we published in our June, 1977, issue. All the pictures were apparently collected by Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz in the mid-nineteenth century to bolster his theory of “special creations” (which held that each race was a distinct species), and later came to be stored in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

This portrait was made by Frederick and William Langenheim, Philadelphia’s most prestigious cameramen of the 1840’s, but the brooding sitter was unidentified. Nonetheless, he struck us as resembling an African Bushman. Anthropologists consulted by the Peabody agreed. But what would a Bushman have been doing in Philadelphia in the 1840’s?

Contributing unwittingly to the march of science—or pseudo science—seems to be the answer. In February, 1848, Dr. Samuel Morton, Agassiz’ collaborator, exhibited before the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia a live, eighteen-year-old “Bushman … boy,” brought to the city “under the kind and paternal auspices of Capt. Chase, United States Consul at the Cape of Good Hope.”

In his address, Morton described the boy’s curious complexion (the color of a “dried leaf”), his small nose (“so flat as to scarcely be seen in profile”), and his extraordinary tufted hair (“each hair [having] the appearance of an ordinary steel watch spring”).

Since Morton and Agassiz often exchanged their latest findings, it seems safe to assume that the boy shown here, thousands of miles from his homeland, was Dr. Morton’s celebrated exhibit.

 

MORMON MEMORANDA


Since the publication of Rodman Paul’s “The Mormons” in our June, 1977, issue, we have learned of a couple of interesting sidelights. The first concerns Nauvoo, the Illinois town from which the beleaguered Mormons fled for the safety of the West in 1844. In April of this year, one Walter Pearce was successful in his second attempt to become Nauvoo’s mayor. He was, it is reported, glad that religion was not an issue in the campaign. The point was well taken; Mayor Pearce is a Mormon.

Secondly, it will be remembered that in a sidebar to Professor Paul’s article, we discussed the vast genealogical vault that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) maintains in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah—the largest such facility in the world. Church officials recently dug into those records and came up with a genealogy for President Jimmy Carter, tracking his family down for twelve generations. In accepting the unexpected offering from Church leaders, the President remarked that “We’ve uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.”

 

THE LOVE OF WAMPUM WAS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL


A little over three hundred years ago, according to an intriguing new theory, the cluster of Dutch settlements that was to become New York City was brought to its financial knees—not by uncontrolled welfare costs, increased labor costs, budgetary bungling, or general mismanagement, but by small beads no more than 9.5 millimeters long and 3.2 millimeters in diameter. Strung together in six-foot lengths (called fathoms), these tiny ornaments, in the view of anthropologist Lynn Ceci of Queens College, New York, were a major cause not only of the Pequot Indian War of the 1630’s but also of a great wampum crisis of the 1660’s that ended in Dutch New Amsterdam’s becoming British New York without a shot being fired.

For the beads were wampum, which is to say, money, and for a time wampum, backed by the “Fur Standard,” was the principal medium of exchange in a region that had little other coinage. Most of the beads were made from certain mollusk shells by coastal tribes from Rhode Island to New Jersey and traded to the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the English of New England for cloth and other European goods. The whites then used the wampum to buy furs from the Iroquois and other inland tribes who valued the beads.

In 1637, when the Pequots of Connecticut had established control over many of the wampum-making tribes, the British, according to Ceci’s new interpretation, launched war against the Pequots to seize control of the source of the wealth for themselves. They were successful, and the consequent availability of large amounts of cheap wampum in their own hands gave the New Englanders a great advantage over their Dutch fur-trading rivals. That advantage was strengthened in 1652 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony began minting the pine tree shilling, which quickly replaced wampum as the medium of exchange among the British colonies. These were only too happy, however, to use wampum in trading with the Dutch, and the result was inflation of profound dimensions as the British “dumped” thousands of fathoms of wampum into the Dutch economy. “Dutch farmers, laborers, and soldiers,” Ceci notes, “were impoverished as the cost of goods and wages soared in New Amsterdam, the price of bread and shoes, for example, rising as much as 400 percent.”

By the 1660’s New Amsterdam was staggering, and when the Duke of York decided to seize the territory in 1664, the Dutch were helpless to resist. New Amsterdam thus became New York—the creation of a bunch of beads.

 

HE IS WHAT HE ATE


Our little feature on diners, “Slice of Pie and a Cup of Coffee—That’ll Be Fifteen Cents, Honey,” in the April, 1977, issue brought forth a note of commendation from Fred E. Magel of River Forest, Illinois. Mr. Magel knows whereof he speaks, for he tells us that “My father was a restaurant buff and a builder. I served the late Duncan Hines grading key restaurants. Perhaps I’ve dined in more restaurants than anyone else in history.”

That is entirely possible, since Mr. Magel has eaten in more than forty thousand restaurants and is listed as the champion restaurant patron in the Guinness Book of Records. “I’m the only one in the book,” he tells us, “who breaks his own record daily.”

 

OF CRUEL AND UNUSUAL DEATH SENTENCES


One hardly expects to find flights of slightly demented rhetoric in the words a judge uses to sentence a convicted felon. However, there are exceptions.

Take, for example, a diatribe said to have been delivered by Judge M. B. Gerry when sentencing Alferd E. Packer to death for having killed and eaten five companions while caught in a Colorado blizzard in 1873. (See “Postscripts” for the April, 1977, issue.) “Stand up, you man-eating son-of-a-bitch, and receive your sentence!” Judge Gerry reportedly began. “There were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, but you, you voracious, maneating son-of-a-bitch, you ate five of them. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you’re dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democratic population of the state.”

Judge Gerry’s outburst was probably apocryphal, but we have found another death sentence from the same era that is equally bizarre but apparently authentic. It was delivered in 1881:

“José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, in a few short weeks, it will be spring. The snows of winter will flee away, the ice will vanish, and the air will become soft and balmy. In short, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales,the annual miracle of the years will awaken and come to pass, but you won’t be there.

“The rivulet will run its soaring course to the sea, the timid desert flowers will put forth their tender shoots, the glorious valleys of this imperial domain will blossom as the rose. Still, you won’t be here to see.

“From every tree top some wild woods songster will carol his mating song, butterflies will sport in the sunshine, the busy bee will hum happy as it pursues its accustomed vocation. The gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses, and all nature, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, will be glad but you. You won’t be here to enjoy it because I command the sheriff or some other officer of this country to lead you out to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from a knotting bough of a sturdy oak, and let you hang until you are dead.

“And then, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, I further command that such officer or officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse, that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, coppercolored, blood-thirsty, throat-cutting, chili-eating, sheep-herding, murdering son-of-a-bitch.”

We have no information about the frustrated bard of a judge who composed this, or of the unfortunate José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales. We asked the editors of Antaeus magazine, in whose Autumn, 1976, issue we found the sentence, but they had no information other than that the case was United States of America v. Gonzales (1881), United States District Court, New Mexico Territory Sessions. We couldn’t find it, but perhaps some of our readers might know of it.