Joe Louis, as pointed out in “America’s Great Black Hope” (October/November, 1978), remembered his 1938 championship fight with Max Schmeling vividly. Many ex-fighters, boxing fans will attest, do remember their best fights, and sometimes their worst fights, and sometimes all their fights, and are willing to talk about them in minute, frequently numbing detail.
But not David John Lewis, apparently. He was born in Penderin, Glamorgan, South Wales, in 1845, and by the time he emigrated to this country in 1869 as his grandson, Thomas H. Lewis of Bethesda, Maryland, tells us, he had become the bare-knuckle heavyweight champion of Wales. He was a coal miner and labor organizer by trade, moving from state to state to follow the work, and boxing all the while—this in the days when a knockdown was the end of a round and a knockout the end of a fight, and bouts often went on for hours. Lewis fought in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Washington during his American career, and must have accumulated a rich body of anecdotes along the way. If so, one could never tell from a.letter written five years before his death in 1927, and passed on to us by his grandson:
“I will try to tell something about the Ring and my SaIf now. you wanted to now the names of the Boys that i fought in the Old Country I was only a Boy my Salph at that time, the first yong man that i fought was wat Porot I won in 15 round, the next was… Wm Jones. I won in 18 round, and then I fout Jack Issac for 10 Pound a side it was a draw fight in 1 hower and 45 minutes, a cusin to old Dave Issac he is in Seattle now. and thats all in Wales and then I Came to America.
“About my fights in amerca. Fighting is a Bad game it tis Bad for the Eyes, my first fight was with a man of the name Barney Cambell for $1000 a side and after Fighting 87 Rounds in one howere 50 miniutes they called a foule on me.
“A man I Fought the name was J’f6rge McLeary 10 Rounds I won at Braysville. the next man was Jack Thomas 6 Rounds I won at Lucas Iowa. I Fought Barney Cambell again to at Ledville Colorado. I won in 4 Rounds with gloves the next I fought was Mike Alegre 10 Rounds I nock him out in 2 Rounds. I Fought a man at Franklin Wash. I forgot his name I won in 7 Rounds that was the Last.”
A MOUTHFUL OF DUST
Bits of glass and clay, buttons, coins, the occasional pipe bowl—these are the unprepossessing stock in trade of archaeologists who are working to reconstruct the daily life of the earliest American colonists. The time in which they lived seems almost impossibly remote to many of us, and it usually takes a gifted historian to reassemble the pieces, consult the written record, and make it all come alive again. But archaeology alone sometimes unearths facts so brutally compelling that they seem to speak to us directly.
Such a find is the skeleton below, recently discovered in Virginia by archaeologists Ivor Noel Hume and Eric Klingelhofer, who work for Colonial Williamsburg under the auspices of the National Geographic Society. It apparently belonged to an English victim of one of the first major Indian attacks in our history, and the time of his violent end can be pinpointed almost to the minute.
The skeleton was found on the newly discovered site of Wolstenholme Towne, one of the many small settlements interspersed with plantations that already dotted Virginia in 1622, just fifteen years after the founding of Jamestown. Relations between the colonists and the mighty Powhatan confederacy seemed friendly enough in the spring of that year so that on the morning of Good Friday, March 22, settlers throughout the colony invited tribesmen in to share their breakfast and to trade. As the sun reached the angle of eight o’clock, the Indians seized weapons from their startled hosts or produced them from beneath their own clothing and attacked. Almost 350 settlers were killed. The Indians struck hard at Wolstenholme Towne, too, as the skull of the skeleton grimly attests. It is fractured from behind, and broken again on the side, as if another blow had been struck while the unfortunate man lay senseless on the ground. He probably never knew what hit him, the killings having been so sudden, as Captain John Smith wrote, that “few or none discerned the weapon or blow that brought them to destruction.”
The palisaded town was burned to cinders by the Indians—the archaeologists have found its ashes—and the colonists who lived in the surrounding countryside fled for their lives, apparently pausing just long enough to scratch out a shallow grave for their fallen neighbor before racing toward Jamestown and sanctuary.
SURVIVOR
Our “Readers ‘Album” department in August, 1978, featured a baremidriff ed photograph of Union Major General Henry A. Barnum, who lived a long and successful life despite a bizarre Civil War wound that never healed. It reminded the late Bruce Catton of another wounded Union soldier whose story is perhaps even more remarkable and we asked him to write it up:
“They did have some tough characters in the Civil War, and sometimes the toughness developed in an unlikely place. Toughest of all, it may be, was General Joshua Chamberlain, who was mortally wounded in the fighting in front of Petersburg in 1864 but somehow carried the wound around with him for the better part of half a century, building a great career on what a modern army doctor would probably consider total disability.
“Chamberlain was from Maine, a professor of theology and modern languages at Bowdoin. He wanted to go to war, could not get a release from his campus obligations, took a sabbatical year to study in Europe, went instead to the governor of Maine and was made lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine Infantry. He was on his way.
“At Gettysburg he commanded the extreme-left-flank element and beat off a Confederate assault at Little Round Top that would have won the war for Robert E. Lee if it had succeeded. He served through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg campaigns, winning from U. S. Grant a battlefield promotion to brigadier general; winning also a bad abdominal wound that perforated the bladder and never did heal. He returned to action anyway, finished the campaign with distinction, and for reward was given command of the troops that accepted the surrender of Lee’s army. He scandalized fireeating patriots but gratified future generations by calling upon his troops to salute when the Confederates came sadly in to lay down their arms.
“War over, Chamberlain—who had been wounded six times in all—went back to Maine, with a silver tube in his innards and pain for a steady companion. He served four terms as governor of Maine, then became president of Bowdoin, wrote copiously, made many speeches—and finally, in 1914, succumbed to the wound received in 1864, thus becoming almost certainly the last Civil War soldier to die of wounds received in action.”
“CHRISTMAS HERITAGE” A TELEVISION GIFT FROM US TO YOU
We are pleased to announce that American Heritage Publishing Company, in association with WGBHTV, Boston, will present a special hour-long program for the holiday season. It is called “Christmas Heritage” and will include several unusual, highly personal views of the Christmas season in America: Oliver Jensen, former editor of this magazine, will show a selection of delightful and complicated antique toys and trace the surprising evolution of Santa Claus; N. Scott Momaday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of House Made of Dawn, will take us on a visit to the Navaho Indians of the Canyon de Chelly for the traditional winter storytelling; Alistair Cooke will show us how the movies have celebrated Christmas through the years; and Paul Engle will narrate a dramatization of his own “An Iowa Christmas,” a warm childhood memoir that has been a Christmas classic since it first appeared in our pages in December, 1957.
“Christmas Heritage,” which is made possible by a grant from the Sun Company, will appear on the PBS network twice—once on the evening of Thursday, December 21, and again on Christmas Eve. Consult local lightings for the exact time in your area.
