January 2011

Rex Brasher, 86 years old and living in quiet retirement in Gaylordsville, Connecticut, is the only man who is known to have painted all the birds oi North America. This prodigious I eat was accomplished alter a lifetime spent tramping by loot over a large part oi the country, sketchbook in hand, slipping along the seaboard in a small sloop, lying motionless and observant in meadows and fields, hiding on river banks, crouching beneath thorn bushes—and developing the patience of Job. It has resulted in a collection of paintings of 1,120 distinct species and subspecies of American birds painted from life, a collection famous among ornithologists lor its accuracy and beauty.

On the night of May 23, 1861, the First New York Fire Zouaves led the march across the Long Bridge, headed for Alexandria, Virginia. It was the very beginning of war, and the lovely moonlit scene, the steady tramp of boots, and the Hashing rows of bayonets made a lasting impression on the boys who were there. For each of them it was the beginning of a great adventure, and at this particular moment war was a splendid thing to be a part of, full of bright uniforms and waving banners, with the promise of quick victory and lasting glory. It was the kind of night to make men eager for all that was to come, and for none of them did the future seem to hold more promise than for their young colonel—Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth.

The power of the imagination to triumph over the world of practicality has so Car i’ound its chieC American exemplar not in any creative artist, philosophical visionary, or religious zealot but in a gold brick salesman. His name was fames Addison Reavis. He lent the full range of his talents to only one undertaking, but in so doing he accomplished what neither Indian tribes nor foreign nations were ever able to achieve. For twelve years he held the upper hand in a struggle with the United States over a major slice of its continental territory.

The man who became architect of this gaudy and complex crime had an otherwise undistinguished history. Born in Henry County, Missouri, on August 20, 1841, he was brought up on a farm. Following service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he drove a streetcar in the clays when such vehicles had whiffletrees. Like another famous Missourian, he peddled haberdashery. After a brief look at South America, he drifted into the real-estate business in St. Louis, still a shark waiting for its pilot fish.

Today furniture is often made from just one kind of wood. In the old days, when people knew wood better, a simple rocking chair might contain as many as seven kinds of wood. The hard woods were used for pegging, with still harder wood to peg the pegs; soft wood cradled the load and springy woods carried the weight. Old chairs creak during weather changes, and creaking has much to do with their longevity. Wood, as the early craftsmen knew, “breathes” with the weather, warping, contracting or expanding with each change of humidity and temperature. The art is to match woods which react in opposite manners and thereby keep joints tight. So the creaking you often hear in an ancient house during weather changes is only the natural movement of healthy wood as one piece settles comfortably against the other.

One day during the winter of 1831-32, an excited John Randolph of Roanoke sat at his desk inside the lonely plantation house in Charlotte County, Virginia, and began to write a letter. With his quill, he set down five jerky sentences, folded and sealed the paper, and on the Iront scrawled this address:

To the Honorable Waller Holladay, Esquire, of the county of Spotsylvania, of the State of Virginia, of the United States of America, of the Western Hemisphere, of the Globe.

A correspondent first for the Chicago Times and later for the New York Herald, Sylvanus Cadwallader was attached to Grant’s headquarters during the greater part of the war. Years after the war ended he wrote his memoirs. They offer a highly intimate picture of the famous general, and if Cadwallader’s recital is accepted as authentic they constitute a source which no student of Federal army operations in the Civil War can afford to overlook.

Proudly the sober Philadelphia type foundry of MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan issued the new 1869 edition of their Bog-page, eighteen-pound quarto book of type faces and commercial printing cuts. “We have aimed to give it a becoming artistical appearance,” they announced, “so that its multitudinous Specimens of Types and Ornaments may captivate at first sight …” But it was at second sight, studying the samples, that customers noticed that the usual dummy type and alphabetical gibberish were missing, and that instead some mid-Nineteenth-Century amateur humorist had got loose, terribly loose, in the empty white spaces.