’T was the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
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January 2011
On January 8, 1891, newspapers throughout the United States headlined a tragic event in the Indian troubles rocking the Sioux reservations of South Dakota. A talented and popular army officer attempting to enter a hostile encampment to talk peace had been treacherously slain by a young Sioux warrior. The death of Lieutenant Edward W. Casey shocked and saddened his legions of friends and admirers. For Plenty Horses, his killer, it was part of an ordeal that personalizes in one tragic figure the cultural disaster that befell the American Indians after dwindling land and game forced them to submit to the grim life of the reservation.
Just twenty years ago the first issue of the hard-cover A MERICAN H ERITAGE , dated December, 1954, went out to those who had risked a subscription sight unseen. Its very first cover appears at left. That buffalo hunter, painted by an unknown hand about 1840, was the standard-bearer for all the hopes of an impecunious and equally unknown young company formed a few months earlier by James Parton, Joseph J. Thorndike, and the undersigned.
Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York, houses one of the finest collections of old aircraft in America. The aerodrome’s most impressive offering is its extraordinary group of World War I fighters. Some are original, and others are scrupulous reconstructions based on the old plans and powered by engines that have been retrieved after years of neglect. They are gaunu crude machines, made of wood and canvas, and it is difficult to imagine that, in the living memory of a great many people, they were formidable instruments of destruction. It is harder still to imagine when they are trundled out for the Rhinebeck Aerodrome’s air show on summer Sundays. For Rhinebeck Aerodrome, through some odd calculation of what its spectators will find diverting, uses the planes for humorous effect.
On the sweltering night of July 22, 1934. John Dillinger stepped out of the Chicago Biograph theatre, where, cooled by “iced fresh air,” he had been watching Clark Gable and William Powell in Manhattan Melodrama . Dillinger, America’s most wanted criminal and the object of one of the greatest manhunts in history, had gone to the movie with two women. One of them, Anna Sage, hoping to avoid being deported for prostitution, had told the F.B.I. that Dillinger would be at the Biograph that night. As Dillinger moved away from under the marquee a G -man stepped out from behind a lamppost. “Hello, John,” he whispered, and as Dillinger turned toward him a half dozen guns cut the gangster down.
At last the sod may lie lightly on the bones of Liver-Eating Johnston, thanks to the efforts of the seventhgrade students of Park View Junior High School in Lancaster, California. John Johnston went west from New Jersey during the Gold Rush, fought with the Union army during the Civil War, did a turn of duty as a sheriff, and spent most of his years as a logger and trapper. When Crow Indians murdered his pregnant Indian wife, Johnston swore revenge and declared war on the tribe. Six feet tall and weighing 260 pounds, he was a formidable opponent. Legend has it that a mutual respect grew out of the feud, and Johnston eventually became blood brother to the Crow chieftain.
Johnston got his grisly nickname after a skirmish with a group of Sioux when a friend saw him cutting out the liver of a fallen Indian. Later Johnston modestly explained: “I didn’t eat any …,” just “made that man think I did.”
Like so many of his breed, he ended up penniless; the sometime mountain man lived out his last days in Santa Monica, died in 1900 at the age of seventy-eight, and was buried in the Sawtelle Veterans Cemetery.
We have received the following scholarly letter from H. J. Dring of San Francisco:
In “The Way to Alaska,” in the February, 1974, issue, Walter Havighurst refers to two schooners, Snohomish and Skykomish . To the casual reader, and to anyone familiar with the Puget Sound area, these are both local place-names; in fact, Snohomish is a county.
My challenge has to do with a careful search in Merchant Vessels of the U.S. (Dept. of Commerce Ship Registers) from 1893 through 1920. I also checked the Lyman List, which is a compendium of West Coast-built vessels. In neither of these authoritative sources did I find the above-named vessels. As a ship buff for forty years and a professional seaman, I am convinced that Mr. Havighurst used fictitious names for the two schooners.…
Last June two members of our staff attended a pleasant luncheon given in New York by James Van Alen, best known for his creation of the suddendeath scoring system of tennis and now president of the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame. In the year of tennis’ hundredth anniversary in the United States [see “Sphairistiké, Anyone?” A MERICAN H ERITAGE , June, 1971] it is most appropriate that the Hall of Fame should be housed in the handsome old Newport Casino, built by James Gordon Bennett in 1880, where the first United States Lawn Tennis Association championship tournament was held in August of 1881. Although the Hall of Fame has been there since its founding in 1954, the board of directors sees a growing need for extensive restoration and expansion of the Casino and so is offering limited membership in the nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. The luncheon, given to present the campaign to the press, was brightened by several tennis luminaries besides Mr. Van Alen, who was United States amateur court-tennis champion in 1933 and 1940.