January 2011

The funeral of Samuel Colt, America’s first great munitions maker, was spectacular—certainly the most spectacular ever seen in Hartford, Connecticut. Jt was like the last act of a grand opera, with thrcnodial music played by Colt’s own band of immigrant German craftsmen, supported by a silent chorus of bereaved townsfolk. Crepe bands on their left arms, Colt’s 1,500 workmen filed in pairs past the metallic casket in the parlor of Armsmear, his ducal mansion; then followed his guard—Company A, izth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers—and the Putnam Phalanx in their brilliant Continental uniforms.

Among causes célèbres the Hillmon case is unique; it was not a criminal case and no famous or notorious persons were involved. Murder may —or may not—have been clone, but there was no murder trial. It was only a young woman’s suit against three life insurance companies, the question being whether she was or was not a widow. Yet it was a political and legal storm center for nearly a quarter of a century, from before the assassination of Garfield until after the assassination of McKinley. It coincided with the rise of the Grangers and the Populists and the coming of the trust busters; and for all of them it was a ready-made and graphic story of the constant struggle of the little people against the forces of big business.

The period between the First and Second World Wars was, for the Rockies, a time of cruel suspension and uncertain change. Not even we children could pull the covers over our heads and pretend that the bogeymen were not there, for we were surrounded with the wreckage of hopes that once had blossomed as brightly as our own.

The most graphic of the ruins lay in Colorado’s Red Mountain district, a six-mile sprawl of abandoned workings along one of the headwater streams of the Uncompahgre River. By horseback across the intervening high ridges, Red Mountain was not far from TeIluride, where I lived, but by car it was a long drive around through Ouray and up the resounding Uncompahgre Gorge. Occasionally my stepfather would go there to examine moribund mining claims in which he held an interest, and the trip gave my brother and me and perhaps a friend or two an opportunity to scamper off along the weed-grown bed of the silent narrow-gauge railway for an hour of delicious prowling amidst acres of junk.

When the movie version of Lord Jim was released a few years ago, it had a special interest for me because a friend of mine, an Englishman, had been a member of the film crew that spent several months on location in Cambodia. After I saw the finished product, with its awe-inspiring scenes of some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, I remembered my friend’s reply when I asked about the hardships he had encountered.

“Hardships!” he laughed. “We lived better down there than we ever did in London. All the luxuries. If we wanted anything, a jet could fetch it from anywhere in the world within hours.”

Even by the standards of blasé Washington, it was an impressive affair. The date was February 19, 1948. The occasion was one of the great ritual feasts of the Democratic party, the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. The 2,100 guests filled two of the capital’s grandest banquet halls—the Presidential Room of the Hotel Statler and the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel. The distinguished company included President Harry S. Truman and the First Lady, members of the Cabinet, and sundry senators and representatives. They dined on terrapin soup and breast of capon and toasted their nineteenth-century patron saints in champagne.

Timothy Pickering and Richard Peters were both prominent patriots and members of the Continental Congress’s “board of war” during the Revolution. By 1806 both were ardent Federalists, and on April 13 of that year Pickering wrote Peters a letter that included this passage:

If Jefferson had not been five years our President, I should not have believed it possible for one man, controuled by precise constitutional rules and laws, to produce such a revolution in politics and morals as we now see.… The national spirit and dignity are gone—never to rise while Jefferson bears rule. And who will succeed? A man of character & ability? No! The feeble, timid Madison, or the dull Monroe. … Fools and knaves will continue to be the general favourites of the people, until the government is subverted.

From Essex Institute Historical Collections, October, 1958