January 2011

Your excellent article “The Real Gold at Bodie” (April) failed to mention the story about the little girl who moved to Bodie from nearby Virginia City. Her father was a miner who had found a better-paying job in Bodie. Virginia .City’s paper, The Territorial Enterprise , miffed at losing a subscriber, reported that as the family left town the daughter cried out, “Good-bye, God, we’re moving to Bodie!” The Bodie Free Press had its own version. The little girl, it reported, cried out not in anguish but in joy: “Good! By God we’re moving to Bodie!”

I was pleased to read Bill Merrell’s fine article on historic Bodie. As a thirdgeneration Californian I would like to cite an error in referring to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. There is no terminal s. The singular, plural, and possessive of Sierra is Sierra .

Mr. Block and his companion will not really have completed their odyssey (“Hunting Buffalo,” April) until they have been to Buffalo Bend, Nebraska. My family and I had the opportunity to learn more about the town of Buffalo Bend than we cared to when we were stranded there during a sudden winter blizzard in 1987.

Buffalo Bend is a barely measurable widening of Highway 30, just west of Potter, with a population of fewer than ten souls, including a wonderful couple who manages the restaurant (featuring chicken-fried buffalo steak).

I hope Lawrence Block visits my Buffalo when he goes Buffalo hunting in Virginia this September. Buffalo Gap, a tiny village at the junction of Highways 254 and 42 in the west-central part of the state, is the birthplace of my maternal grandmother. She was born in 1862 in a two-story log house near a fork in the Middle River. About 1876 the family joined the westward migration, but tender memories of her first home lingered in grandma’s heart until she died in 1942. That is why I call Buffalo Gap, Virginia, my Buffalo.

One more for the multiplying herd: The Buffalo Creek that runs through Greensboro, North Carolina.

Mr. Block’s suspicion that toads had something to do with the naming of Toad Suck, Arkansas, is at least partially correct, according to an article in a Little Rock newspaper. The story reported that Toad Suck got its start as a town on the Arkansas River that contained several bars at which boatmen “sucked on the bottles like toads” upon coming ashore.

Peter Andrews’s excellent article about George H. Thomas ("The Rock of Chickamauga,” March) is most informative. I was confused, however, by his statement that Thomas had been rewarded with the three stars of major general. The grade of major general was and is designated by two stars. Thomas was appointed major general of volunteers in April 1862. Two and a half years later he was appointed to the same grade in the regular Army. This would be his permanent rank.

Bainbridge Island, Washington, where I live, seemed to me amazingly unspoiled for a suburb of Seattle until one afternoon last spring,when I borrowed a neighbor’s kayak and for the first time pulled my way up Port Orchard Channel. I was top-heavy and a little ungainly with my dripping paddle, so I kept close enough to the beach to wade ashore in case I capsized. But the water was clear all the way down to the barnacled stones scattered along the bottom, and it was agreeable slipping north among the widgeons and pintails, cormorants and gulls.

The road that parallels the beach turns to gravel half a mile past my house and begins a treacherous climb back from the steep shoreline. So I always assumed that the houses had to leave off not much farther on and that from the end of Crystal Springs a mile or so to Fletcher Bay I would find nothing but woods.

It’s amusing and sometimes provocative for historians to ask questions like “What would Hamilton do about the state of the economy if he were alive today?” Or “What would Washington do about foreign policy, Madison about civil liberties?” But the answers to such questions are inevitably a reflection of what the author of such a piece himself believes should be done about the matter: the only thing we can know for sure that any historic figure would do about anything at all is what he actually did do in his own time given his own problems, opportunities, and character.

We know American folk art mainly from the great East Coast collections- the ones at Colonial Williamsburg and at Shelburne, Vermont —and from several landmark exhibits at New York City’s Whitney Museum. And certain often-seen pieces have become old friends to those who are won by the offhand grace and spirited coloring of works embedded in the American grain.