January 2011

Among the paintings of American cities that ran last April was one showing a cyclone reaching down over the rooftops of St. Paul, Minnesota. Thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society, we have learned that this view was not a work of imagination by the artist Julius Holm, but a literal copy—right down to the twin spires and the grain elevator—of a dramatic photograph of the Lake Gervais cyclone.

Toward the end of the sultry afternoon of Sunday, July 13, 1890, the sky clouded over and a lashing rain fell on St. Paul while, a few miles to the north, the cyclone struck Lake McCarron. It spun along for more than five miles, devastating the communities of Little Canada and Lake Gervais, and killing five people and injuring fifty more before it blew itself out.

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In 1918 Arthur Mole, a Chicago commercial photographer, climbed a seventy-foot-high tower at Camp Sherman, a U.S. Army training base in Ohio, and took this awesome shot of officers and enlisted men massed together to form the familiar profile of President Woodrow Wilson.

THE WAR THAT NEVER WAS “THE WHISTLES STARTED GETTING TO ME…“ CYLONE THE EDISON OF GREASE THAT HONORED HAND T. R. AND THE TROLLEY

Robert David Lion Gardiner is a large landowner on Long Island, a successful developer and an impassioned preservationist. What makes Mr. Gardiner exceptional is that he also represents the eleventh generation of a family which has continuously owned the same land since 1639, making the Gardiners the oldest nonaboriginal landowners in America as well as the first American family to found a still-flourishing fortune based primarily on land. Were Long Island still a province of Great Britain, as it was for nearly a hundred and twenty years, Mr. Gardiner would be called “Your Lordship,” as his ancestors were until the Revolution, and would rather like it.

From urne to time A MERICAN H ERITAGE has published articles on the Supreme Court. The following may be of interest:

∗Remember the Alamo

The patriotic story that most Americans call to mind when they remember the Alamo is largely mythology, and it is a mythology constructed on the northern side of the border. The facts of that short, bloody prelude to our war with Mexico are just as grim but far less romantic.

An unusual account of this battle from the Mexican side was written by a young Mexican lieutenant colonel named José Enrique de la Peña, who was present on that murderous day in March, 1836, and who kept a diary of the siege and assault. Entitled With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution , de la Pena’s diary has now been translated for the first time by Carmen Perry and will be published later this month by the Texas A&M University Press. The following article is an excerpt from this little-known document.