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January 2011
As the fourth ice age of the Pleistocene epoch receded some eleven thousand years ago, an almost impenetrable forest of oak, elm, birch, maple, and pine trees sprang up between the coast of New England and the shores of the Mississippi. So fertile was the soil and so thick did the green canopy become that sunlight seldom penetrated to the forest floor, where ferocious beasts prowled and decaying tree trunks littered the primordial gloom. It was in this great arboreal cavern, stretching from Maine to Missouri, that Robert Rogers found himself at home. He learned the haunts of its game, the pattern of its mountain ranges, and the run of its streams and rivers.
Among the multitude lured by the pleasures of the golden strand were artists. They came to paint the sea in all its moods and the people in their seaside humor—carelessly happy, lazily content. From an amplitude of possibilities the following pages present a broad sampling of what American artists have seen by the beautiful sea—and remembered for us with their brushes.
When Winfield Townley Scott, the American poet, died in 1968, he left among his papers a warm and engaging account of his early boyhood in Newport, Rhode Island. The lavish world of Newport’s summer visitors with their fifty-five-room “cottages” meant little to him as a local boy—only providing background for a small child’s play and wonder. Mr. Scott’s memoir, entitled Alpha Omega, will be published by Doubleday later this month, and A MERICAN H ERITAGE presents some vignettes from this affectionate reminiscence.
For some two hundred years the Europeans who planted themselves on our Atlantic shoreline turned their backs on the sea or merely farmed it. Those who did not head west for new lands remained to mow the salt hay, harvest the beach plums, fish for the sacred cod, or rake up oysters from East Jersey’s abundant beds. Beaches were simply convenient places for digging clams, drying fish, or landing cargoes without the inhibiting presence of customs officers. But the seashore was scarcely thought of as a pleasure ground.
In 1880, Joseph Stanley Brown—there was no hyphen m the name then—just short of his twenty-second birthday, had a job that almost any young man might envy, as secretary to Ohio’s Congressman James A. Garfield. A product of Washington’s public schools, Brown was self-tutored in shorthand and typewriting, the latter a new and rare skill. His grandfather was an English fugitive from debtor’s prison named Nathaniel Stanley, who adopted the name of James Brown on arrival in Baltimore but whose male descendants kept Stanley as a middle name.
Young Joseph had found work with Major John Wesley Powell, the future director of the United States Geological Survey. One day Powell’s friend, Congressman Garfield, asked for a young man who could help him with his vast correspondence. The geologist sent Brown, who at once endeared himself when he appeared unidentified before Garfield and was asked: “Well, young man, what can I do for you?” “It’s not what you can do for me, ” answered Brown, “but what I can do for you, sir. ”
The road running up Burke Canyon from the little town of Wallace in northern Idaho is not too heavily travelled these days. The town of Burke, where the pavement ends six miles from Wallace, still has a couple of saloons and a small general store, and the Union Pacific branch line that freights out ore from the big Hecla silver mine still shares with Burke’s one and only street a common right of way in the narrow cleft of the canyon. But still, the little mining town is only a weather-beaten relic of its days of glory.
Why is it that American history books contain so few romantic episodes? Aside from occasional references to John Rolfe and Pocahontas, or to Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, general histories have little to say about the love affairs experienced by our famous forefathers, or about the effect of such affairs on the course of the nation’s history.
As a case in point, consider Thomas Jefferson. It isn’t easy to think of the lofty, idealistic author of the Declaration of Independence as a lover, especially when most accounts of his life ignore his relationship with a pretty, blue-eyed blonde named Maria Cosway. Yet the Virginian did fall in love with a young married lady, write stirring love letters to her, even suffer a foolish accident while trying to act the gallant in her presence. This love affair could easily have changed Jefferson’s life so drastically that the American public would never have accepted him as a candidate for President of the United States.
West Point, April 7, 1880. At reveille—6 A.M. —it was discovered that Cadet Johnson Chesnut Whittaker was not in formation. This caused a slight stir of interest, for Whittaker was an unusual cadet. He was the only Negro at West Point.
After dismissing the cadets the officer in charge directed George R. Burnett, the cadet officer of the day, to see if Whittaker was still in his room. Burnett moved quickly up the barracks stairs to the fourth floor and banged on Whittaker’s door. There was no answer, and he opened the door and looked in.
Whittaker was lying motionless on the floor, and Burnett could see that his legs were trussed to the side rail of the bed. There was blood on the floor, and the room was in disorder. Burnett left him untouched and ran to get the officer of the day.