January 2011

How did John Rarey do itt Was there a scientific basis to his amazing feats? Does his technique stand up in the light of current theories about animal psychology? In order to answer these questions, AMERICAN HERITAGE asked Dr. F. Dudley Klopfer of the department of psychology of Washington State University to read our article on Rarey. Here is Dr. Klopfer’s opinion.

At times the behavioral scientist, L. from some lofty pinnacle of mod- eni theory, can effectively predict the behavior of anjmals and successfully recommend the best procedure for taming them. It was Rarey’s genius to discover such techniques in the absence of any theory at all and more than half a century prior to any of the observations on which modern theory is based.

Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, destined to be king of the French from 1830 to 1848, spent more than three years in American exile, from 1796 to 1800. Greedily curious, he and his two younger brothers travelled many thousands of miles in the United States, from Maine to New Orleans. The original record of their journey, long vainly sought, was discovered in 1955, when Mme. Marguerite Castillan du Perron gained access to the Orléans family papers in the strong room of Coutts’s Bank, London. She found locked in that grim prison an autograph travel journal of the future king. The substance of the record she reported in her Louis-Philippe et la Révolution Française (1963). The information she provides, added to our previous knowledge and many local memories, permits us to reconstitute the noble gentlemen’s adventures. —M. B.

At Promontory, Utah Territory, on the raw afternoon of May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford, the beefy, pompous president of the Central Pacific Railroad, hefted a silver-plated sledge hammer while David Hewes, a dedicated railroad booster from San Francisco, stood by the golden spike he had donated to complete the laying of the nation’s first transcontinental rail line. At a nearby table sat a telegrapher, his hand on the key. Across the country lines had been cleared; when Stanford’s sledge struck the golden spike, cities on the shores of both oceans would know that America was finally and forever bound by a single spine of iron. A parade four miles long stood ready in Chicago, and at Omaha on the Missouri River, whence five years before the Union Pacific tracks had started west to meet the Central, one hundred cannon were primed for a thunderous salute. Before Stanford squared himself away to swing, a crew of Chinese tracklayers from the Central stepped forward witli the last rail of the 1,775 miles of line between San Francisco and Omaha.

He was marked by that characteristic of most successful nineteenth-century Americans—sublime self-confidence. His self-confidence was well founded; for his peculiar art carried him, in less than sixty days, from the backwoods of Ohio to the glittering Court of St. James’s. His name was John Solomon Rarey, and when he came out of ncxt-to-nowhere, the village of Groveport in the Buckeye State, where he had been born in 1827, he had an asset which he parlayed into earnings of one hundred thousand dollars a year and invitations to most of the courts of Europe: he could tame vicious horses.

About one hundred years ago a roaring hurricane swept along the Mexican border with such fury that it radically changed the course of the Rio Grande—and consequently altered the international boundary. When the storm finally subsided, the village of El Paso, Texas, was about 630 acres larger, and the bawdy little pueblo of Juárez, Mexico, was that many acres smaller.

This accidental “land grab” caused prolonged and acrimonious litigation in several international tribunals, but some of the bitterness and resentment vanished on December 13, 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson and President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz simultaneously pressed buttons to dynamite the river back into a channel that restores the 630 acres to Mexico. Surrounded by cool, elegant diplomatic aides and decoratively accompanied by their wives, the two heads of state gave each other a cordial abrazo and exchanged assurances of eternal friendship between their two countries.

The Frustrated Liberals Learning to Work Together

The liberal reformers of nineteenth-century America are taken more or less on their own valuation. Since they had very high opinions of themselves, this means that they come down in history bearing excellent reputations. Everything is working for them, because they are the authorities whom the historian consults when he tries to reconstruct the past. Reformers are not always loved by their contemporaries, but they tend to be deeply admired by posterity.