January 2011

No other book of American history this season has received such rousing critical acclaim. Carl Carmer called it “one of the major masterpieces of American historical writings.” Orville Prescott in the New York Times prophesied it would win the Putilizer Prize or the National Book Award “or both.”

Senator William Morris Stewart, Yale ’53, the Father of American Mining Law, a quick man with a Colt’s dragoon revolver and admittedly the possessor of the most magnificent whiskers in the entire West, stepped from the swinging portals of Dave Naegle’s Oriental Saloon and reached for the grab iron on the side of Jack Lloyd’s Panamint & Lone Pine Stage. Hard on his heels, breathing richly of Naegle’s Old Noble Treble Crown Straight and struggling with the bafflements of an Inverness cloak of interesting pattern, strode the possessor of the second finest beard anywhere west of Council Bluffs. Senator John Percival Jones, capitalist of noble properties everywhere, which included a great hotel in New York, a Turkish bath in San Francisco and reclamation rights to what seventy odd years later was to be Hoover Dam, hated to leave Panamint City, but numerous board meetings in San Francisco called and he too had an outside place on Lloyd’s stage.

As I write this, crowds of sidewalk superintendents are peering down at the foundations of a great new office building to be erected on a bombed site in the heart of the City of London. What has drawn the crowds is the discovery, in the excavations, of a Second Century temple to Mithras, the God of Light so widely worshiped in the Roman army; the discovery not only of a “Mithraeum” but of the fragments of a fine statue. It is safe to say that few Londoners had heard of Mithras a week or two ago, and that what draws them is not any very scientific spirit. But their sudden wave of curiosity, the sudden, possibly a little artificial, indignation at the impending bulldozing of the site, reflect very well the English attitude to history: that is, a deep, reverential sense of unity with a remote past. This was Londinium; this is London.

Ever since May, 1948, a remarkable operation has been going forward at Columbia University in New York, a program aimed at one of the most perplexing problems facing modern historians. In an age almost drowned in words, printed and broadcast, one of the great sources of history is drying up: eminent men are not writing letters or keeping diaries as they did in the past. They deal on the telephone, they meet face to face; they are too busy to keep records.

The old house, many-hued in ruin, stands rotting, some thirty miles above New Orleans, farther from the changing river bed than in its youth, deserted, its records mostly forgotten; but it speaks of the land of the Acadians, of the Bayous Teche, Vermillion and LaFourche and of a distinctive people. Acadians lived here for many years. They did not build the old mansion, to be sure, for that was the work of the Creoles, the aristocrats.