January 2011

Food tastes better outdoors, and it always has. Nowadays this rule, which every child learns early in life, can be seen in operation at tailgate parties at football games or wherever spectator sports are in season. You can see it under more elegant circumstances throughout American history, beginning with the Pilgrims’ first alfresco party for the Indians. It reached some sort of apogee in the nineteenth century, in the period brought back to us so hauntingly in the writings of Washington Irving and on the canvases of the painters of the Hudson River school.

Miss Mary Ewing Outerbridge was unquestionably one of New York’s most respectable young ladies. Her Staten Island family was socially impeccable and correspondingly well-to-do; she was seen in the best places at the right times. It was therefore a considerable shock when the attractive Miss Outerbridge, returning from a holiday in Bermuda in March, 1874, had trouble getting through customs in New York.

Certainly she looked like anything but a smuggler, but in her luggage the inspectors found some curious and unidentifiable objects. There was a long, narrow net that did not seem to be designed for catching fish; there were several implements with long handles and webbed heads. Were they rug beaters? Snowshoes? Butterfly catchers?

They say a tree is best measured when it is down. Allan Nevins is gone, at last, although he seemed imperishable, and we at AMERICAN HERITAGE feel a poignant sense of loss. We measure him now by the length of the shadow he cast, and by the abiding influence he had upon us and upon the magazine we serve. We also think of the friendship which he extended to everyone who knew him, and that is immeasurable.

No single battle in American history has won more attention from more writers than the relatively insignificant defeat of a handful of cavalry by a few thousand Indians on the Little Bighorn River in 1876. How could there be anything new to say about it? Yet there is—the recollections of the Indians themselves—and that is the story we have to tell in this collection of reminiscences gathered before the survivors all died and translated by David Humphreys Miller, the author of several books on Indians, including Custer’s Fall (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1957), and a writer for motion pictures. An artist as well, Mr. Miller has done all that any man can to bring to life once again this desperate moment in American history.

Indian country—the sprawling Sioux and Cheyenne reservations—lured me to the Dakotas and Montana in 1935, when I was sixteen. Having sketched, painted, and written since I was old enough to hold pencil or brush, I was prepared to fill many sketchbooks and notebooks with all I expected to see and hear.

Only seven years after the last spasm at Wounded Knee, a white storekeeper named James Freeman from Mount Pleasant, Michigan, a financial casualty of the Panic of 1893, got a job with the U.S. Indian Service at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There, as a hobby, he took up photography and recorded the life of a people in the throes of cultural transition.

The Great Sioux Reservation—all of present South Dakota west of the Missouri River—had been set aside for the seven tribes of Teton Sioux by the Treaty of 1868. Pine Ridge Agency, established in 1878, was where the Oglala were driven after Ouster’s defeat.

About a dozen years ago Carol Burnett’s nightclub repertoire included a number, “I Made a Fool of Myself over John Foster Dulles.” In 1971, in an era of massive discontent with American foreign policy, Miss Burnett would be unwise to restore it to her program. For even though the song is pure camp, some youthful member of her audience would certainly jump to his feet with a denunciation of Dulles as the archetypal villain of the foreign-policy establishment he repudiates. To the new generation Foster Dulles stands condemned as thevery model of the Modern Cold Warrior. To them he is the moralist whose platitudes reduced the world situation to a struggle between Western “good” and Communist “evil” and the brinkman who stood poised on the edge of Armageddon and revelled in the confrontation. His veto of United States assistance in the building of Egypt’s Aswan Darn, the indictment further runs, alienated Gamal Abdel Nasser and began the fatal series of steps that led to a massive Soviet influence in the Middle East, against which we are now contending.

I always felt at home in Edgar Lee Master᾿s quarters in the Chelsea Hotel. It was all so much like a Petersburg, Illinois, law office that I might have been back in Papa Smoot’s office overlooking the courthouse square. Edgar Lee, plain and short and stocky, sat in a straight chair near a big desk. there was the same smell of books and tobacco. The same southern light filtered through the braches of the ailanthus trees, and the court behind the Chelsea was almost as quiet as the empty Petersburg square with its big elms. there was even a spittoon on the floor near Master’s chair.

If you can identify the period when gentlemen wore genuine ormolu lobs attached to their watches and the butcher threw in a slice of liver for the eat when he wrapped up the meat order, then you are close to establishing the date of the Golden Age of Secret Remedies. No family circle was complete without the brown or green bottle on sideboard or shell. Sometimes the contents were murky, mysterious, evil in taste and smell. Sometimes they looked like whiskey, smelled like whiskey, and lasted like whiskey, for the best of reasons: they were whiskey. The presence of generous amounts of ethyl alcohol was necessary, according to a familiar explanation, lor the “preservation” of the medicinal ingredients. Two tablespoonfuls, taken before a meal, produced an agreeable sense of well-being or levitation, thai walking-on-air feeling often associated with a dollop of the Good Creature.

Gerald Carson, a frequent contributor to this magazine (see “Sweet Extract of Hokum” on page 18 of this issue), dropped us a note after perusing the headlines about newsworthy occurrences that appeared in our February issue (“Through History With the Times ”). Herewith his remarks:

To amuse myself while suffering a winter cold, I tried your A MERICAN H ERITAGE headline game; of course, it is really the New York Times headline game too, but I very much enjoyed.your collection of world events as that august and restrained newspaper might have covered them if it had existed far back in history. I enclose four candidates: