January 2011

Early in 1910 the solemn boy on the opposite page stood at a podium in his velvet knickers and, with halting eleven-year-old gravity, addressed a hundred Harvard professors and advanced mathematics students on “Four-Dimensional Bodies.” Though his speculations were too abstruse for some in the audience, Professor Daniel Comstock of MIT followed them all and, at the end of the talk, assured baffled reporters that the boy, William James Sidis, was destined to become one of the great mathematicians of the age. Papers across the country picked up the story, and for a while Sidis was the most famous child in America.

For reasons not yet fully explained, many Americans appear to have grown fond of setting up great big colorful statues of characters real or imagined—the Golden Driller of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, or Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, in Brainerd, Minnesota, or the really big buffalo that stands outside Evanston, Wyoming, doing nothing much.

Alone among our national holidays, Mother’s Day commemorates a death. Thanks to the tireless, even obsessive, labors of Anna Jarvis of West Virginia, we honor all our mothers on the second Sunday in May, the anniversary of her own mother’s death in 1905.

By the 1890’s, when Denver telegrapher George Lawton began collecting the curious photographs on this and the following pages, the era of the Western badmen was coming to an end. The old hiding places were no longer secure: marshals, sheriffs, Pinkerton agents, and bounty hunters swarmed everywhere, eager to claim the rewards posted by banks, railroads, and stockmen, and descriptions of outlaws and their movements could be flashed across the West in an instant by telegraph. Scores of bandits fell to posse bullets; many more were hanged or jailed. The shrewdest turned themselves in, following the advice of Frank James, who had seen it all coming and surrendered a decade earlier. “I have been hunted like a wild animal from state to state,” he said. “I have known no home, I have slept in all sorts of places—here today, there tomorrow. … I am tired of this life of taut nerves, of night-riding, and day-hiding. … I want to see if there is not some way out of it.” (There was: after serving some years in prison, James is said to have become a floorwalker in a St.

The Plains Acrossi The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60

by John D. Unruh, Jr. University of Illinois Press Illustrations, tables, maps 565 pages, $20.00

The overland migration—that extraordinary journey to California and Oregon made by a quarter of a million Americans in the 1840’s and 1850’s—was “palpable suicide” or a trip “merry as a marriage bell,” depending on whom the emigrant consulted before setting forth. The truth, as we learn in this fascinating and definitive study, was somewhere in between. Unruh shows that the mortality rate on “the plains across” was probably not much higher than for those who stayed home. And disease was the main killer, not Indians. In fact, “many overlanders rarely saw an Indian during the entire trip.” On the other hand, the journey was grueling work, particularly for migrating urban dwellers who weren’t accustomed to hard physical labor.

LOWELL SPEAKS AGAIN PRIDE OF ANCESTRY “AUX BARRICADES!”-TUXEDO PARK HANGS ON, SORT OF THE MIGHTY LINCOLN ALBUM OF CHARLESTON, ILLINOIS CHICKEN-PLUCKIN’ CONTROVERSY

In “Voices of a Vanished Amoskeag” (October/November, 1978), men and women spoke of what it was like to work and live in Manchester, New Hampshire, when the great mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company composed the largest textile center in the world. Established in 1837 and patterned along the same company-town lines as the more famous Lowell, Massachusetts (and built and controlled by many of the same Boston-based interests), Manchester, as we reported, went through a period of accelerated decline through much of this century, until by the late 1960’s there was little physical evidence remaining of the old way of life. As one former textile worker recalled, “Today, everything is falling down. If our old parents, who worked so much in these mills, if they’d come back today and see how these mills are, it would really break their hearts.”

John Demos’ article “Entertaining Satan” (August/September, 1978), brought forth a note of startled delight from reader Frederic D. H. Gilbert of Briarcliff Manor, New York: “Imagine my astonishment on opening A MERICAN H ERITAGE to be confronted with the account of my seven-times-great grandmother, Lydia Gilbert, late of Windsor, Connecticut. …” It was the early Gilbert who in 1654 was accused of conspiring with the devil in such a way as to cause one Thomas Alien’s musket to go off and shoot to death one Henry Stiles during a militia drill. For this presumed murder by proxy, the unfortunate “witch” Gilbert was sentenced to death and summarily executed. “This is pretty potent witchcraft,” seven-times-great grandson Gilbert goes on to declare, “to kill a man with another man’s gun without ever being anywhere near the place where it happened. One cannot help but be a little proud of an ancestor who could wangle a job out of Satan like that!”