No one can tell exactly how many colonists were loyal to the throne: “Loyalist” was a term that embraced those who actively supported the British cause, those driven from their homes to seek protection behind British lines, and those merely scorned as “Sunshine Patriots.” Tory property had been seized and distributed or sold as early as 1776. By 1782 all the states had passed acts of confiscation. “With malice toward none” was an idea whose time had not vet come.
By the time it was all over, some one hundred thousand Loyalists had fled the country; about half of them to Canada. The last group left New York on April 27, 1783, their exile hastened by the imminent departure of the British army. On April 15 Congress had ratified the text of the provisional peace treaty signed in Paris.
Almost five hundred families sailed in eighteen ships on a bright day. Their goal was Nova Scotia (“Canada” then was two provinces, Nova Scotia and Quebec) and the port town called Shelburne. The government in England had allotted land—five hundred acres per family—and tools: picks, shovels, axes, and muskets. Their work was cut out for them in yet another new world, but they were ready. “As soon as we had set up a kind of tent,” wrote the Reverend Jonathan Beecher, “we knelt down, my wife and I and my two boys, and kissed the dear ground and thanked God that the flag of England floated there…”
1883 One Hundred Years Ago
“The Green Sward Our Carpet, Azure Canopy Our Canvas, No Tinsel, No Gilding, No Humbug! No Side Shows or Freaks.” So declaimed the posters created by press agent “Arizona John” Burke for “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s great Wild West Show which opened at the fairgrounds in Omaha on May 17.
The show had had a sort of tryout the year before. William F. Cody’s fellow citizens in North Platte resolved to put on an “Old Glory Blowout” to celebrate the Fourth of July and asked Buffalo Bill to take charge.
They assumed he would produce a rodeo of some kind, but Cody had long been thinking along other lines and he seized the moment. He hired Indians, bought the old Deadwood Stagecoach, and, with the help of local cowboys, reproduced a famous stagecoach holdup. There were horse races and a sharpshooting contest, and it was all a sensational success. “I tried it on my neighbors and they lived through it and liked it, so I made up my mind right then I’d take the show East.”
He had a partner, a sharpshooting dentist named A. W. Carver, with show-business aspirations. They started out with only the haziest notions of how such an enterprise must be managed on the road, and chaos ensued. The transportation problems were enormous, the cowboys—often joined by Cody—got drunk and missed performances, but it staggered along somehow and was much admired by the press and patrons. The internal pressures created a rift between the partners: Carver said he couldn’t bear the strain. They flipped a coin for the property, Cody won, and they went their separate ways. Cody’s way, of course, was on to glory.
1933 Fifty Years Ago
No mere flick of a switch would do to open Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition on May 27: The Genius of Science and the Industry of Man were to be celebrated. A wondering public learned that the miles of neon tubing were set aglow by rays from the star Arcturus focused on photoelectric cells, transformed into electricity, and transmitted to Chicago. These rays, they were told, had left Arcturus at the moment the Columbian Exposition had opened forty years earlier.
But it was not all Science and Learning. The New York Times remarked that ”… to some extent the hiatus between what science knows and what the public knows will be bridged. At the same time the average sensual man will have his needs ministered to and will not be asked to strain his intellect.”
And where would this average sensual man turn for relief? To the midway, where, at the “Streets of Paris” review, an unknown entertainer called Sally Rand (nee Helen Gould Beck) danced slowly to the strains of Claire de Lune clad only in a coating of white powder and clutching two ostrich fans.
The battle thus joined between Sensation and Thought seems to have been won by Miss Rand: a local reporter noted that “the Adler Planetarium is playing to poor business; 40 men could toss a medicine ball around in the Hall of Science and never bother the customers.… But Sally Rand dancing nude on the Streets of Paris has been jamming the place nightly. ” Her salary at the start of the Exposition was $125 a week: by the end of the summer this was raised to $3,000. Progress indeed.
