January 2011

The Big Thicket is an ecological wonder. This dense forest, sprawling between the Sabine and Trinity rivers in east Texas, constitutes a natural crossroads for plant and animal species from almost every part of the country. No less remarkable is the pioneer way of life that still flourishes where the dwindling generation of settlers’ descendants live in the Thicket’s leafy shadow, just fifty miles from downtown Houston.

When the first pioneers pushed toward Texas in the 1820’s and ’30’s, the Big Thicket was a formidable green barrier, sixty miles thick and one hundred miles long. Most were content to go around. Those who hacked their way through it never forgot the experience. “This day passed through the thickest woods I ever saw,” wrote one exhausted settler in 1835. “It perhaps surpasses any country for brush.”

Who is Colonel Tim McCoy? He is the last surviving cowboy hero of the silent screen. His contemporaries—Tom Mix. Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, Fred Thompson, Harry Carey, and lesser lights—are all gone, some of them for many years. Only McCoy remains, now as then solidly sure of the choices in life and decisively intolerant of injustice.

Timothy John Fitzgerald McCoy was born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1891. At age eighteen he went west, while the West was still a proving ground for young men of grit. He learned the skills of a cowboy, homesteaded in Wyoming, and became a rancher of sorts. The Indians of the area, the A rapahoes and Shoshones, saw in h im a man of their own spirit. He learned their language, including the sign language, and was given by them the name “High Eagle.”

John Adams was certain the second of July would be celebrated “by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival.” Writing to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776, the day after the Continental Congress had voted momentously for independence from Great Britain, Adams said of July 2:

“It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

America’s independence has indeed always been observed with such festivities, but Adams was wrong about the day. It was the adoption two days later of the Declaration of Independence, the document explaining the reasons for the separation from Great Britain, that Americans chose to celebrate. The Declaration, which was widely distributed throughout the new nation in broadside form, was of course dated July 4, 1776.

The article on the founding of the Johns Hopkins medical complex that ran in our February, 1976, issue generated some interesting mail. Dr. Ronald Rosenthal of Nashville, Tennessee, writes:

“On page 30 you have a reproduction of the famous portrait by John Singer Sargent of the four founding physicians of this great institution. Unfortunately, you have Dr. Halsted and Dr. Osier reversed; in the portrait Dr. Halsted is standing directly to the left of Dr. Welch, and Dr. Osier is sitting directly to the right of Dr. Kelly. You are calling Osier Halsted, and Halsted Osier. Friends of mine at Johns Hopkins say that during the painting of the portrait Mr. Sargent became so incensed at Dr. Halsted over one thing or another that when it came time to paint Halsted’s picture, he used inferior pigments so that Halsted’s face would fade more rapidly than the others. I have no idea whether this story is true or not; certainly in the portrait Halsted is in somewhat of a shadow as compared to the other three.”

Nearly two centuries after Crèvecoeur propounded his notorious question—“What then is the American, this new man?”—Vine Deloria, Jr., an American Indian writing in the Bicentennial year on the subject “The North Americans” for Crisis, a magazine directed to American blacks, concluded: “No one really knows at the present time what America really is.” Surely few observers were more entitled to wonder at the continuing mystery than those who could accurately claim the designation Original American. Surely no audience had more right to share the bafflement than one made up of descendants of slaves.

In late August, 1970, a band of Sioux Indians entered the sacred precincts of a National Memorial in South Dakota and bivouacked on a mountaintop there for several weeks. The precincts were sacred to the Sioux because they are in the heart of the Black Hills, long regarded by their tribe as the dwelling place of Indian gods and spirits. And, as signaled by the apprehensive behavior of park rangers who monitored the Indians closely during their stay, the precincts are also precious to the United States Department of the Interior. For there, looming high above the valley floor, gazing off across hundreds of miles of the South Dakota Badlands, are the gigantic stone faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt hewn from the primeval granite by sculptor Gutzon Borglum in fourteen years of labor on precipitous Mount Rushmore.

The twitches, convulsions, and erratic behavior of the seventeenth-century Salem. Massachusetts, girls who accused their elders of witchcraft have been the subject of speculation for nearly three hundred years. It is still not known why they acted as they did, but theories continue to abound—including a unique recent one, which enjoyed a short vogue before it was shoveled into the dustbin of the unlikely.

The twitches, convulsions, and erratic behavior of the seventeenth-century Salem. Massachusetts, girls who accused their elders of witchcraft have been the subject of speculation for nearly three hundred years. It is still not known why they acted as they did, but theories continue to abound—including a unique recent one, which enjoyed a short vogue before it was shoveled into the dustbin of the unlikely.

Grace Lichtenstein’s article, “Pronounce it Callaradda, Son” (October, 1976), inspired a letter from Mr. J. Leslie Tooher of Schenectady, New York:

“Your article states that Pueblo, Colorado, is pronounced ‘Pee-eh-blo’ by residents. This comes as a surprise. I was born in Pueblo around the turn of the century and it was my home until 1923. To my best recollection, I never heard it pronounced any way other than ‘Pwe’blo’ or ‘Pye’blo’ (both ‘e’s being short). Moreover, it is interesting to recall that among the city’s industries, there were then two smelters and a steel-producing plant. When the wind was ‘right,’ the smelter-smoke, soot, and other stenches made life in general unbearable, thus the appellation of ‘Pewtown’ enjoyed wide popularity.”