January 2011

The Forty-ninth Parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two. In winter, in the town on the Whitemud, Saskatchewan, we were almost totally Canadian. The textbooks we used in school were published in Toronto and made by Canadians or Englishmen; the geography we studied was focussed upon the Dominion, though like our history it never came far enough west or close enough to the present to be of much use to us. The poetry we memorized seemed, as I recall it now, to run strongly toward warnings of disaster and fear of the dark and cold. The songs we sang were “Tipperary,” “We’ll Never Let the Old Flag Fall,” “The Maple Leaf Forever,” and “God Save the King”; the flag we saluted was the Union Jack; the clothes and Christmas gifts we bought by mail came from the T. Faton mail-order house. The games we played were ice hockey and curling; our holidays, apart from Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were shared by both countries, were Dominion Day, Victoria Day, the King’s Birthday.

When the Monitor and the Merrimac fought the world’s first engagement between ironclads at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862, the executive officer of Monitor was the very junior Lieutenant S. Dana Greene, 22 years old and only three years out of Annapolis. When Monitor’s commander, Captain John L. Worden, was wounded during the engagement, Lieutenant Greene succeeded to the command; and a few days later he wrote to his family giving a detailed account of the battle.

That letter, with Lieutenant Greene’s slightly erratic punctuation and spelling preserved, is now the property of Warren C. Shearman of Los Angeles, by whose permission it is published here. The letter was written when battle fatigue and excitement were still felt; here is what the fight looked like to one of its principals, jolted down while Merrimac was still afloat and when another engagement was expected.

U. S. Steamer Monitor

Hampton Roads

March 14/62

From one of his slow-paying subscribers, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger received in 1850 the following apologetic letter. The author, who had been billed for $1.25, was the former President of the United States, then in retirement at Sherwood Forest, on the James River.

Sherwood ForestApril 5, 1850

Dear SirYour note of the 30 March reached me by last mail and I hasten to say that as soon as I can get my crop of corn to market, now ready for delivery, I will remit the amount of your bill. You are aware that we farmers have but two periods of the year when we can with any degree of certainty command monied funds, viz. the Spring and Fall, upon the sale of our corn and wheat. I shall make no apologies for past remissness in paying my subscription to the L. Messenger, to which I have been a subscriber from the date of its first number, the best mode of compensating for neglect, being by repairing its results.

With sentiments of great respect,

Yrs &cJohn Tyler

The day of July 16, 1926, began as an average day for the residents of Seminole, but it was destined to be far different and one that they would long remember. It was a very hot day, and the people of this small farming town in Oklahoma went about their daily business not knowing that in a very few hours the course of their lives would be changed completely. The few hundred residents had no idea that in a few weeks’ time their town would be running over with thousands of people.

Business went on as usual that day. The men went to their jobs; the women did their regular household chores. In the stores men gathered to talk. One of their recent topics of conversation had been oil. This was an interesting subject to talk about, but no one suspected that it would shortly play such an important part in their lives.