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“California is surpassingly rich and worthy the efforts of Christians and Philanthropists to bring her people under right influences. You can form no adequate idea of the depth of sin and moral degradation to which most of the people are sunk or rather sink themselves…There are a few however, who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” — From a missionary’s letter, Mariposa County, January, 1853...
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In Praise Of Wildness
When we consider how soon some plants which spread rapidly, by seeds or roots, would cover an area equal to the surface of the globe,…how soon some fishes would fill the ocean if all their ova became full-grown fishes, we are tempted to say that every organism, whether animal or vegetable, is contending for the possession of the planet.…Nature opposes to this many obstacles, as climate,...
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“Seventeen dead bodies were found on one road alone within the last four months and no clue to the perpetrators of this wholesale slaughter has as yet been discovered. California is yet sadly wanting in an effective judicial and constabulary organization…” — Letter from n former New York siliooltenclicr Io Ins brother, dated Feather River, March, 1852 .
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“We entered the Eldorado House and such a scene I never beheld…around the sides...
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“I am perfectly enraptured with California.…It is so healthy and such a delightful climate. I have not seen a poor person since I have been here, nor a stingy and penurious one. I never saw such liberality in my life as there is here. The whole country is a perfect picture.” — From a lady settler’s letter to her family in the East, 1852 .
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Christmas Eve
There was little cause for joy in the Union Army, or among its loved ones at home, as Christmas approached a century ago. Everywhere the columns in blue seemed to have bogged down, and General William Tecumseh Sherman was writing to his brother, the Ohio senator: “I see no end, or even the beginning of the end.” So it was that the painting on pages 2 and 3, attributed to young Thomas Nast—and...
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Miss Beecher In Hell
Many times by the presentation of such an awful theme ( THE ENTERNAL IRREMEDIABLE LOSS OF THE SOUL ), I have brought the young to me with tears and willing docility, and to the question ‘What can we do to be saved?’ my shut-up heart was ready to exclaim ‘Nothing,’…I have been so burdened [as] to take every lawful mode to turn my thoughts to other less exciting themes.” The eternal...
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Czar Of The House
Strangers to Washington, particularly Englishmen who are used to the House of Commons, are surprised and disappointed, in modern times, by an actual view of Congress in session—the usually deserted chambers, the inattention to the speeches, the rare appearances m their chairs of the so-called Presiding Officers, the abysmal level of the oratory, the manner and even the dress of the members....
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We Mutually Pledge To Each Other Our Lives, Our Fortunes And Our Sacred Honor
When the Continental Congress opened its session of Friday, August 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the major business of the day was to continue a somewhat moribund debate on the Articles of Confederation. An incidental piece of business was the signing, by all the delegates to the Congress, of an engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence—a matter which John Adams did not consider...
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The Death Of The Prophet
THE MORMONS—PART II On April 6, 1830, six poor but enthusiastic young men organized the Church of Christ, later named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ceremony, or organization, was held at the farm of Peter Whitmer in the town of Fayette, Seneca County, New York. The members immediately began the distribution through sale of the newly published Book of Mormon, which...
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Power Is The Prize
As World War II drew to a close, the great industrial empire that was the Ford Motor Company seemed to be reeling madly downhill. At the root of its troubles was Henry Ford himself, whose grip upon the levers of power was failing. Who would succeed him? Therein lies a tale worthy of Machiavelli. Involved, to begin with, was the no-holds-barred rivalry of two subordinates, Charles Sorensen—the...
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Gold!
The gold-rush letters and diaries in the margins of this article come from the extraordinary collection of California manuscripts, many hitherto unknown, assembled by Edward Eberstadt...
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The Lewis Albums
In the closing years of his life, around the turn of this century, a Philadelphia banker named George Albert Lewis compiled a truly remarkable series of family albums. He and his wife Anne (their pictures appear on pages 76 and 80), in setting out to record for their grandchildren the story of their forebears and the homes they had inhabited, were merely obeying an urge common to many elderly...
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“People are arriving and departing daily and hourly. I have no doubt 400 people have already arrived from Oregon. They usually camp for a day or so near us, look about, swear at the high prices and disappear in the grand vortex.…It is impossible to get at anything like truth, but that the amount of gold in these mountains exceeds any previous calculation I have no doubt.…” — Letter from...
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“I do not like to be apacking a thousand dollars about in my coat pockets for it has toar my pockets and puld the Coat to peaces.” — From a miner’s letter to his wife .
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Sir Winston Churchill As A Historian
In slightly fuller form, this remarkable article was presented earlier this year as the Founder’s Day Address at the Huntington Library in California; it appeared in the Library’s Quarterly, but deserves, we believe, wider notice. A. L. Rowse, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and authority on Elizabethan England, has written the history of Sir Winston’s family in two...
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“We left Panama the 7th of March on the Bark Emily…we had very light winds and long calm…the thermometer stood at from 100 to 120. We had not been out long when disease and Death made its appearance among us. There was from 30 to 50 sick at one time myself among that number. There was from 2 to 3 shoved over board some days, some of them before they had fairly breathed their last. There was...
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“You can have no idea of the suffering among the emigrants traveling down the Humboldt and crossing the desert for more than one hundred miles before reaching the Sink…There is no grass of any consequence, the water is slippery stuff resembling weak lye as much as anything; from the Sink to Carson River is a distance of forty miles, the last twelve deep sand.” — An emigrant’s description of...
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“Many young men who have come out full of high anticipation have paid the penalty of their lives…You wrote that Sylvanus had been somewhat afflicted with the Gold Fever. Tell him should he or had he come out he might (like some others) when arriving in S.F. been so sick as to take a Pistol and shoot himself. I have heard several cases of that kind.…” — A discouraged gold seeker to his mother...
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“Jane i left you and them boys for no other reason than this to come here to procure a littl property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any longer…i think that this is a far better country to lay up money than it is at home, if a man will…tend to his business and keep out of licker shops and gambling houses, that is the...
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“I suppose you have read some large stories about the mines but they arc not half of them true; no two men tell the same story. Some men make $16,000 in one day, but it is only one chance out of a thousand; the average is from ½ to 2 ounces per day.…I shall stay up to the mines all winter, if I can make an ounce a day.” — From a miner’s letter, September, 1849 .
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Reading, Writing, And History
At the Edge of Glory Rock of Chickamauga The Other Hill
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At The Edge Of Glory
One of the fascinating subchapters of history is the story of the man who did not quite make it—the talented man, richly deserving, who rises very near to the top and then, in a sudden moment of crisis, sees all that he has gained slip away from him. Looking back afterward we may see clearly that his solid achievements greatly outweigh his failures. Taken all in all, his career has been a...
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Rock Of Chickamauga
The man who succeeded Rosecrans, of course, was General George H. Thomas, who saved the day at Chickamauga and was known as “The Rock” forever after; a man whose fame was immeasurably enhanced by the very defeat which put Rosecrans’ own fame under an enduring cloud. Yet if Thomas won national acclaim for what he did at Chickamauga, he remains another general who, almost unaccountably, was...
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The Other Hill
Back to Chickamauga again: this time to take a look at the Confederate side. One of the gifted soldiers there was a withdrawn, somewhat cantankerous man named Daniel Harvey Hill, who commanded an army corps under Braxton Bragg and who, like most of Bragg’s other top commanders, emerged from the battle feeling that the Confederacy had missed a great opportunity because of the failings of the...
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How We Got Guantanamo
  By May 28, 1898, the uncertainty was over. Admiral Cervera’s fleet had been run to ground in the cliff-ringed harbor of Santiago de Cuba. “There can be no doubt,” cabled Admiral William T. Sampson to the Navy Department, “of presence of Spanish squadron at Santiago.”After weeks of war nerves, punctuated by rumors of Spanish cruisers off every port on the Atlantic coast and by much...
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Middle Passage
Long before Europeans appeared on the African coast, the merchants of Timbuktu were exporting slaves to the Moorish kingdoms north of the Sahara. Even the transatlantic slave trade had a long history. There were Negroes in Santo Domingo as early as 1503, and the first twenty slaves were sold in Jamestown, Virginia, about the last week of August, 1619, only twelve years after the colony was...
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The Poster Craze
“Is there anything under the sun which people will not collect?” the famous French novelist Balzac once asked. “They collect buttons, walking sticks, fans, political pamphlets and newspapers. One day,” he added contemptuously, “they may even collect posters.”And so, inevitably, it came to pass. By 1890, forty years after Balzac’s death, poster designing was very much an art, and poster collecting...
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Journey’s End: 1865
In the fall of 1864 William S. Porter, a young man from the sleepy southern Illinois town of Jerseyville, was mustered out of service with the 145th Illinois Infantry. He was just sixteen, but the war had left a man’s lines in his face. A few days after his discharge he became a brakeman on the Chicago and Alton Railroad—riding on the tops of trains, setting hand brakes and couplings. From the...
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“Then and there the child Independence was born"
 Few freedoms are more fundamental to our way of life—and few so clearly differentiate our democracy from the rival system which seeks to bury it—than the freedom from the midnight knock on the door, from the arbitrary invasion of a man’s home by soldiery or police. Enshrined in ihe Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the right is nevertheless still a matter of contention: almost every...
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The Prairie Schooner Got Them There
 One of life’s ironies is that no generation knows what history will make of its doings, or upon what symbols the future will seize to sum up the past’s greatest strivings. The bold, pioneering emigrants who led the way across the Great Plains would never have suspected that their symbol would be the humble and utilitarian vehicle in which they made their journey. As the long ride and the...
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The Millionaire Reformer
 It is the evening of June 20, 1912; the scene, a large room in the Congress Hotel in Chicago. About twenty men are present. Perhaps a dozen of them are seated around a large table. Others sprawl wearily in armchairs or lean against the walls. One, a solid, determined-looking fellow with thick glasses and a bristling mustache, paces grimly back and forth in silence, like a caged grizzly. He...
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The Face Of Maine
It used to be, in the not-so-long-ago, that the faces of Americans were richly varied. At a glance, farmers could be distinguished from city folk, mountaineers from plainsmen, easterners from westerners. Something—the gradual assimilation of the immigrants, the quickening flight from countryside to city, standardization of dress, the ubiquity of television—has changed all that. In appearance we...
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The Legend Maker
 There is no more famous American legend than the story of George Washington and the cherry tree that first appeared in 1806 in a little book on Washington by Mason Locke Weems. According to Weems, one day little George, armed with a new hatchet, “unluckily tried the edge … on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked … terribly.” The next morning his father...
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Longfellow and The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
In the summer of 1852 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vacationing with his family in Newport, Rhode Island, happened one day upon the old Jewish cemetery, established in 1677. Impressed by the quiet of the ancient burial ground amid the bustle of the busy seaport, he persuaded “Mr. Gould the Tailor, a polite old gentleman who keeps the key,” to admit him into its silent serenity. The now-famous poem...
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Pearl Harbor: Who Blundered?
Precisely at 7:55 A.M. on Sunday, December 7,1941, a devastating Japanese aerial attack struck the island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. When it was over, the battleships of our Pacific Fleet, moored by pairs in their Pearl Harbor base, had received a mortal blow. Our army air strength in Hawaii—the Japanese found its planes ranged neatly wing to wing on airfield ramps—was a tangled mass of...
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Billy Mitchell’s Prophecy
In the fall of 1923, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, then Assistant Chief of the young Army Air Service, was sent on an inspection tour of the Pacific. Upon his return, Mitchell publicly voiced opinions about the inadequacies of our Pacific defenses and the very real threat of Japanese aggression that caused a furor in the War Department. Among other things Mitchell warned that the...
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If…
An Enraged Actress.—Stanwix Hall, Albany, was the scene of what might have proved a tragedy a few days since. Miss Henrietta Irving—one of the Irving sisters—was the heroine of the affair. She entered the room of J. W. Booth, who was stopping at the Stanwix, and attacked him with a dirk, cutting his face badly. She did not, however, succeed in inflicting a mortal wound. Failing in this, she...
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The Disquieting Quaker
On a bitter Sunday morning some two hundred years ago, a frail, middle-aged man lay in the snow at the gateway to one of the Friends’ meeting houses in Philadelphia. His right leg and foot were bared to the icy winds. When passing worshippers warned him, “Benjamin, thee will catch thy death of cold!” he retorted, “Ah, you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in...
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Thanks, But No Thanks, Mr. Bell
  When ex-Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois retired from politics in 1923, he had served almost continuously in the House of Representatives for nearly fifty years, and was regarded as a master political strategist and a shrewd judge of men. But, as he sorrowfully confessed to his longtime secretary and biographer, L. White Busbey, his discernment did not extend to inventors and their...
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“down Sank The Sun, Nor Ceased The Carnage There”
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : The cause of the massacre, a portion of which we are now about to exhibit to your view, cannot be given. But a short account of the condition of the country will suffice to exhibit this tragic epoch in our country’s history in its proper light. Minnesota, the first state in the Northwest, bounded on the east by the great Father of Waters, had taken its place in...
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Peary Or Cook: Who Discovered The North Pole?
In the dim morning light of Sunday, February 28, 1909, two men stood on a snowy bluff at Cape Columbia, a bleak promontory at the extreme northern end of Ellesmere Island. With narrowed eyes they gazed northward, across the Arctic Ocean toward the Pole, 413 nautical miles away. The ice was the object of their observations. Below them, it extended endlessly toward the horizon, with no...
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Faces From The Past—VI
 Almost every day the strange figure, swathed in ancient black, might be seen walking down the street toward the Chemical National Bank. There she went directly to the vault, pulled out the trunks and bags that were stored for her under a staircase, and sat cross-legged on the floor rummaging through the masses of papers and documents that represented her fortune of more than fifty million...
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They Were All Sure Shots
Between close of the Civil War and the turn of the century, a group of unique athletes soared like rockets across the American sporting scene, rising to the heights of public adulation and then sputtering into oblivion with the dawning of a less ingenuous day. The names of Adam Bogardus, Doc Carver, and Ira Paine are all but unknown today, even among well-informed sports writers; but there was...
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Private Yankee Doodle
The night of July 6, 1776, the smell of war mingled boldly with the smell of the salt marshes. Milford, Connecticut, was infused with a boisterous, optimistic bellicosity. That spring the rebels had driven the redcoats out of Boston; now that an enormous new British expeditionary force threatened Washington’s army at New York, all of Connecticut was signing up regiments of new levies to go...
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How Papa Liberated Paris
Then there is another thing—like a sweet dream, yesterday’s rose, or last month’s pay, the event was gone before one could grasp it. From first to last it was as fantastic as Uncle Tom done by the late Cecil B. De Mille. …When the smoke cleared that night, nine of us dined at the Hotel Ritz. Officially, we were the only uniformed Americans in Paris. That knowledge made us more giddy than did the...
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Thackeray In Love
On his first visit to the United States, William Makepeace Thackeray discovered the truth of Carlyle’s characterization of America as “the never-resting, locomotive country”; he discovered Americans who were a hundred times more likable than the tourists he had encountered in London, “sulking or pushing”; and he discovered Beatrix Esmond and fell in love with her. To him the most important...
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Ocean To Ocean—by Automobile!
The American motorist has everything working for him nowadays. There is an infinite network of excellent roads on which it is almost impossible to get lost, he is never out of touch with garages and filling stations, and there is an unmatched abundance of eating places, motels, inns, and lesser conveniences, many of them extremely good. He can drive anywhere he wants to in complete comfort,...
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Secession’s Mailbag
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Sanctuary In Adobe
Pilgrims on foot, burros, mules, horses, ox carts, and on their knees have worn deep the road to the chapel they call the Santuario, yet until the flivver, Chimayo, New Mexico, was nearly as remote as Tibet. Even now, the journey from Santa Fe up through the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo is a pilgrimage worthy of saints and mystics. From piñon-dotted foothills, you look over the Rio Grande and...
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