January 2011

On April 21 Hannah Dustin, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who had recently been kidnapped by Indians, turned up in Boston. She brought along two fellow captives, ten scalps, and a harrowing tale of her abduction. The Abnakis had struck Haverhill on March 15, when Dustin, age thirty-nine, was recovering from the birth of her eighth child. Her husband and the rest of their children managed to escape, but Hannah and her nurse, Mary Neff, were taken prisoner. After watching her house get set on fire and her infant’s brains dashed out against a tree, Dustin (wearing only one shoe) and Neff were marched about 150 miles and set to work as slaves for an Indian family of twelve on an island near what is now Concord, New Hampshire.

There is no shortage of material to get an aficionado started on the road. Contact the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society of De Smet, South Dakota, for material on local attractions and events and a schedule for the annual open-air pageant, held on several summer weekends (P.O. Box 344, De Smet, SD 57231-0344/605-854-3383). Walnut Grove, Minnesota, also hosts a pageant (1-800-761-1009). For more information contact the Tourist Information Center (Box 58, Walnut Grove, MN 56180/ 507-859-2358). Other sites on the Ingalls trail, including phone numbers and even suggestions for dining and lodging, can be found in The Little House Guidebook , by William Anderson, photographs by Leslie Kelly (HarperCollins, 1996). Laura Ingalls Wilder Country , by the same authors and publisher, is a large-format pictorial guide. Needless to say, the Wilder books that gave rise to all this industry are available everywhere.

When she was a little girl in Wisconsin in the 1870s, her father would take her and her sister on his knee after supper in their log house and tell them wonderful stories about bears and panthers and little boys who sneaked out to go sledding on the Sabbath. Then later she would drift off to sleep in her trundle bed hearing her father play his fiddle. Even after they left their comfortable house, and meals became unpredictable, the stories went on, as did the fiddle music. It was too good to be altogether lost. Years later that little girl wanted people to know how it had been.

The popularity of the HAA Oshkosh fly-in—which this year runs from July 30 to August 5—means this pleasant community is saturated with visitors, and advance plans and reservations are necessary if you intend to remain overnight. Many reservations are made a year ahead. But the aviators’ traits of ingenuity and flexibility can help. So can the smooth machinery of KAA (mailing address: HAA, P.O. Box 3086, Oshkosh, WI 54903-3086). KAA maintains an information hot line, 414-426-4800, and the Oshkosh Convention and Visitors Bureau operates a handy housing hot line all year long: 414-235-300"”. Next to Wittman Field, HAA runs Camp Scholler with RV and tent sites and campground showers and facilities. Its seventy thousand spaces are available for fourteen dollars a day to KAA members (you can join for thirty-five dollars a year). Although the camp has never filled to capacity, those arriving early naturally gravitate toward the best campsites. The weeklong HAA village supports convenience stores, dining halls, and even a temporary McDonald’s.

ThisJuly, more than 20,000 airplanes will make their way across hundreds and even thousands of miles of sky to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Some 800,000 people will come to see them there, topping off the local hotel facilities, sleeping in college dorms and the rented bedrooms of private homes. For a few days, a busy tent city will blossom around the planes, as America’s most impressive annual aviation event runs its hectic, buoyant course.

The Adirondack Museum is open to the public daily from Memorial Day weekend until mid-October; to escape black flies and frost, most visitors arrive in July and August. For information about special events planned at the museum, call 518-352-7311. For more general tourist information, including a listing of motels, lakeside cottages, and campgrounds, call the Adirondack Regional Tourism Council at 518-846-8016.

When a little band of optimists undertook to create this magazine, early in 1954, we decided that history benefits enormously from showing graphically how people, places, and events looked in their own times. If we had ideas, we had no picture library of contemporary photographs, portraits, drawings, sketches, lithographs, and paintings, whether high art or primitive, to add this vital dimension. But we had Joan Paterson, whom two of us had known at Life magazine in its glory days of the 1940s; she had come there from Vassar, a bright researcher.

The October 1996 “Time Machine” in its account of the birth of anesthesia omits the role of Crawford W. Long, the Georgia surgeon who began using ether as an anesthetic in 1842—four years before Dr. William T. G. Morton—but did not publish his findings until 1849.

When controversy arose over who had discovered the new anesthetic, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, an incurable punster, proposed that a monument be erected on Boston Common bearing the busts of both Long and Morton with the inscription TO ETHER . (Or at least that was the story told in Boston when I was young.)

Robert K. Krick’s article “Stonewall Jackson’s Deadly Calm” in the December 1996 issue of American Heritage portrays its subject as an imperfect icon who excelled strategically. While I would agree that Jackson was a very, very good general, I do not feel that he is deserving of the icon status bestowed upon him.

As to Jackson’s acquisition of his nom de guerre , “Stonewall,” there is scholarly, if not popular, debate. According to the account of Col. J. C. Haskell, a Major Rhett was with Gen. Barnard Bee, the South Carolinian Krick probably refers to, at First Manassas soon after Bee was mortally wounded. He stated that Bee complained that, instead of coming to the relief of his hard-pressed troops, Jackson just “stood there like a stone wall.” Haskell says that this version was also confirmed to him by Gen. W. H. C. Whiting.

Blue Mountain Lake didn’t appear that far away on the map—straight up the New York State Thruway and then west. Route 28 meandered a little, but I figured the drive from New York City to the Adirondacks would take three, four hours at most. Seven hours later we pulled up beside the cottage we had rented at Potter’s Resort. It was raining, and the mosquitoes were out in force. “You might want to bring your own meat,” one of the owners had suggested when I called to confirm our reservation. “It’s expensive here, because everything has to be trucked in.” So the two boys unpacked our hot dogs and hamburgers, my sister Abby her organic pasta sauce and decaffeinated coffee, and we wondered silently what we would do for a week if the weather didn’t improve.