January 2011

Here is a bit of the old West nobody knows—or almost nobody—the West generally overlooked by both the fastdraw myth-makers and the scholars from the Land of Ivy. The cowpoke and the cardsharp, the sodbuster, the gunslinger, the prospector, the men who went down in the mines or up in the trees, ladies of the night and gentlemen of the road have all been popularized and exploited, analyzed and monographed. But scarce a word about poor Jack, who kept it all together out where the dust stopped short.

This is too bad, for there was both color and substance to his life. More men risked death at sea in the West than ever stood off Indian attacks; there was quite as much danger in reefing sail during a nor’wester as there was in descending the pit of a hard-rock mine; there was as much violence in a seaman’s strike as there was in any range war; and the smell of salt spray makes for better romance than the taste of dust at the back end of a herd of cows.

All you joggers out there dodging garbage trucks at dawn, listen to this: “I am fully convinced that exercise is bosh. … Find ways to exert yourself and you find ways to harm yourself. … Do not stand when you can sit; or sit when you can lie down; or just lie down when you can nap. Do not run if you can walk. … To have a strong heart it is essential to give up all unnecessary exercise.”

In a day when sixty-year-olds train for marathons, middle-aged cyclists rack up the miles on their ten-speeds, and tennis players of all shapes and sizes crowd the courts, the advice sounds strange. But it was written little more than a generation ago by Dr. Peter Steincrohn, a reputable physician. His view was shared widely at the time. For anyone beyond the flush of youth, strenuous exercise was thought to carry the risk of heart strain. Now most physicians hold the precise opposite to be true: failure to engage regularly in vigorous exercise is believed to increase the risk of heart disease.

In December of 1620, a group of English dissenters who “knew they were pilgrimes,” in the words of William Bradford, stepped ashore on the southern coast of Massachusetts at the site of the Wampanoag Indian village of Pawtuxet. The village was empty, abandoned long enough for the grasses and weeds to have taken over the cornfields, but not long enough for the trees to have returned. The Pilgrims occupied the lonely place and called it Plymouth.

It was pestilence that had cleared the way for this tiny foothold in New England, and the shadow of death would be a major factor in giving the settlement form and substance in the months ahead.

Labor history is too often told in one of two equally unsatisfactory ways—in the icy language of economics, or in the fiery rhetoric of ideologues. Either way, the real people get overlooked. The story of the mighty Amoskeag textile mills at Manchester, New Hampshire, for example, is most often seen simply as a textbook case of industrial paternalism trying to outlive its time. The bare facts are simple enough, certainly. In 1837 the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company bought a fifteen-thousand-acre plot along the canal that bypassed Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack and began to build an industrial town like the one its Boston-based founders had already established at Lowell, Massachusetts. The first workers were farm girls who eventually were displaced by successive generations of immigrants willing to work cheap—mostly Irish at first, then Germans, Swedes, Scots, French Canadians, and others. In the 1880’s the corporation began implementing a master plan to create a model industrial city, and by 1915 Amoskeag was the world’s largest textile center, with thirty major mills employing seventeen thousand men, women, and children.

Just as this issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE went to press we had bad news from Michigan: our distinguished senior editor Bruce Cation, who was intimately associated with the magazine from its beginning, died there near his boyhood home on August 28. Worldwide fame as a Civil War historian never affected the unassuming friendliness Bruce exercised toward his editorial colleagues, or his down-to-earth judgments on manuscripts, or the consummate ease with which he edited articles for publication. He will be missed enormously in this office. We are planning a fuller tribute to him in a forthcoming issue; meanwhile we want to quote, in memoriam, a paragraph from an essay Bruce Cation wrote for the first issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE in 1954, and which we still think of as the quintessence of our editorial credo.

Philip Myers, whose memories of the Gettysburg reunion of 1913 con- tributed greatly to Bruce Catton’s “The Day the Civil War Ended” in the June/July, 1978, issue, has sent along an addendum to the story: “There was a Confederate veteran shoemaker in Westminster, Maryland, where I attended college. He had been to the reunion, so we had much in common, despite the disparity of our ages.

” ‘You saw [the re-creation of] Pickett’s charge,’ he told me one day. ‘You saw the Stars and Bars waving. You heard the Rebel Yell. But you can’t claim to be a Yankee veteran if you have never smelled Confederate powder. I’ll fix that.’

“In his tiny shop that winter day in 1914 a small egg stove glowed redly. He opened a chest, pulled out an envelope from which he shook some black flakes into his open hand. He drew me closer to the stove, held me tightly, and commanded: ‘ Smell! ’ A small cloud of white smoke filled the air as the gunpowder fell on the hot metal. I sniffed deeply.”

In a “Postscripts” feature on Dr. Mary Edwards Walker and her Congressional Medal of Honor in the December, 1977, issue, we repeated the familiar story that 864 members of the 27th Maine Regiment had received medals during the Civil War “through some clerk’s error,” and because of that the medals were rescinded in 1917 by an Adverse Action Medal of Honor Board.

Not exactly, a number of readers have pointed out. The men of the 27th Maine had been promised the medals by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, with the approval of President Lincoln, in exchange for re-enlisting to bolster the defenses of Washington, D.C., during the week preceding the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Upon reflection, the 1917 board decided the re-enlistment did not qualify as action “above and beyond the call of duty,” and forthwith stripped the down-Easters of the nation’s highest military honor.

Carin C. Quinn’s “The Jeaning of America—and the World” in our April/May, 1978, issue brought forth some interesting sidelights. The first came from Arthur H. Hahn of Washington, B.C., who tells us that he was particularly diverted by the Levi Strauss advertisement showing Michelangelo’s David clad in a pair of cutoff blue jeans. “It strikes me,” Mr. Hahn says, “that there must be a sort of affinity of Levis for Michelangelo. Remember the great Sistine Chapel ceiling, with God’s finger stretched to that of Adam? Well, some time ago, during a trip to Denmark, my wife and I saw a large billboard. Its central theme was the foregoing—except that the fingers were supporting the familiar blue denims!” The Sistine Chapel diversion was, like the David statue, one of a series of somewhat irreverent advertisements launched by Levi Strauss & Co. in Europe. Art lovers were not amused, however, and the series was discontinued.