One morning in July, 1966, a lone buffalo bull grazed near the highway on the mountain between Virginia City and Ennis, Montana, unmindful of the click of camera shutters or the rustle of hesitant tourists getting in and out of automobiles. Nor did his tail rise and kink at carloads of miners and cowboys and store owners and the rest of us, come up from the towns below. After awhile he crossed the highway, stopping on it just long enough to pose for the picture that appeared in Virginia City’s weekly newspaper, The Madisonian , showing him astraddle the center line. He was a bachelor bull, alone in the way of bachelor bulls for ever and ever, roaming a range which a hundred years ago had held so many buffalo that the valleys below stank of them. Today he roamed the thousands of acres of forest, unaware in his typical bachelor solitude that he was one of the few buffalo on earth—and lucky to be here at that—a curiosity.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
The young Virginia women in this collage would have been outraged to see themselves thus displayed. They gave their pictures to Fred R. Hynson—the sober gamekeeper in the picture—around 1910, when he was living in Williamsburg. A portrait was not casually conferred on a young man in that place and era, and each of the donors probably thought herself unique in Hynson’s affections. But he committed an even greater betrayal when he eventually wed a Yankee girl.
1979_6_109
The young Virginia women in this collage would have been outraged to see themselves thus displayed. They gave their pictures to Fred R. Hynson—the sober gamekeeper in the picture—around 1910, when he was living in Williamsburg. A portrait was not casually conferred on a young man in that place and era, and each of the donors probably thought herself unique in Hynson’s affections. But he committed an even greater betrayal when he eventually wed a Yankee girl.
Among the photographs of outlaws alive or dead or about to be dead that were collected by telegrapher George Lawton in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see “The Wilder West of George Lawton,” April/May, 1979) was one of the notorious Tom Horn, shown with a rope of hair woven with his own hands.
Relying on a notation by Lawton himself, we identified the rope as the one that was used to hang the convicted man in 1903.
Not likely, says Philip H. Reisman, Jr., of Larchmont, New York: “Most accounts of Horn’s two-year imprisonment … mention that he passed the time doing what he called his ‘hair work’—weaving horsehair into hat bands, hackamores, lariats, love knots, and other ‘cowboy jewelry’ which he sold or gave away to his admirers. Examination of your photograph … strongly suggests that what he is holding is a lariat, tastefully woven of spirals of light and dark horsehair.…
The Winnebago Indians called him 0Ke-wah-gah-kah (“Man Who Takes the Pictures”) and he certainly did that, over a career that spanned more than four decades. His name was Henry Hamilton Bennett, and the landscape he spent most of his life recording was that of the Wisconsin Dells, a region of ancient sandstone through which the Wisconsin River had carved a witchery of caves and palisades and curious rock formations.
But the river had other uses. Like the state’s other major streams—the Chippewa, the Black, and the St. Croix— each spring between the 1830’s and the 1880’s the Wisconsin became a river of wood, as great lumber rafts of roughcut Wisconsin pine were pieced together from the winter “harvest” and floated to markets as far south as St. Louis. This was no puny trade: by the end of the nineteenth century, one estimate has it, the four Wisconsin rivers had floated nearly 46 billion board-feet of logs and lumber.
by W. J. Holmes Naval Institute Press 35 photographs and maps 231 pages, $11.95
The story of breaking the World War II Japanese code has been told before, but never from the inside. Holmes, a retired Navy captain, spent the war in the naval intelligence center—Fleet Radio Unit, Pacific or FRUPac—at Pearl Harbor, and he tells about the baffling task of that most unmilitary office as only a participant could.
Navy cryptanalysts, hidden away in a basement with their complex machines and masses of disparate data, sweated over their seemingly impenetrable puzzles or sometimes simply played hunches. Their sources included weather reports, documents salvaged from a sunken enemy submarine, even a count of privies on an enemy-held island. Again and again, when they had succeeded in breaking part of a code, it would suddenly be changed, “like blowing out a candle,” Holmes says, leaving FRUPac to start all over again.
by W. J. Rorabaugh Oxford University Press 30 line cuts 224 pages, $13.95
Until 1830, Americans seem to have spent their days in an alcoholic haze. Practically everyone drank spirits regularly at home, starting at breakfast, and consumed startling amounts on every public occasion, including trials and quilting bees. In this well-documented book, Rorabaugh tells what our ancestors chose to drink and why they drank so much of it. He also traces the rise of the temperance movement, which, by the end of the 1830’s, had turned our sodden citizens into “the world’s most zealous abstainers.” A lively, surprising book.
by Otto Friedrich Simon and Schuster Photographic section 416 pages, $12.95
Historians generally have assumed that Clover Hooper Adams, Henry Adams’ wife for thirteen apparently idyllic years, killed herself out of grief over her father’s death. But the puzzling fact that her husband never mentions her name in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams , published years later, led Otto Friedrich to suspect that the reason for Clover’s suicide could not be that simple.
His sensitive, urbane biography is convincing. On that bleak day in 1885 when Clover went up to her room and drank potassium cyanide, she left no note of explanation, but the author has carefully drawn together enough revealing threads of Hooper and Adams’ backgrounds, tastes, and reticences to suggest half a dozen reasons for Clover’s lethal depression.