January 2011

Sarah Althea Hill was a rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed beauty of the Golden West, with spirit and a temper. By her own testimony—if no other—she could shoot a pistol straight and “hit a four-bit piece nine times out of ten.” During most of the eighteen eighties she was the sensation of San Francisco, and before she was through—in 1889—she had involved three of California’s most prominent men in a scandalous case that eventually required three Supreme Court decisions. The men were Senator William Sharon, king of the Comstock Lode; David S. Terry, sometime chief justice of California; and Justice Stephen J. Field of the United States Supreme Court. Before it was all over, Justice Field had been given a bodyguard; as things turned out, he needed one.

When in 1879 Andrew Garcia, a young Spanish-American trader, proposed to the eighteen-year-old Nez Perce girl ln-who-lise, he made her two promises: that they would be married properly, by a priest, and that he would lake her to find the graves of her father and sister. These relatives had been killed two years earlier in the Battle of the Big Hole, near present-day Wisdom, Montana, during the last rout of the Nez Perce Indians (see “The Last Stand of Chief Joseph” in the February, 1958, AMERICAN HERITAGE). In-who-lise’s sister had been shot to death as she ran out of their tepee, and her father had died two days later of a stomach wound, ln-who-lise was obsessed with finding their graves, for according to Nez Perce belief, the spirit of a dead person not properly buried would wander in eternal misery.

The regimen at West Point was not so severe in the late 1830’s that the cadets never got away for a little nonmilitary activity. Here is an excerpt from a letter, now owned by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, written by Cadet Samuel Dawson to a friend, in September, 1837:

My Dear Hogg: … It so happened that I was able to get a leave of 5 days for the purpose of distributing invitations to our ball at Catskill, Hudson and Albany and Saratoga Springs.

At the latter place, I remained three days and the pleasures I enjoyed would have been doubly relished if I had had your company. As you have never been at Saratoga, probably a slight description of the place and the manner in which visitors amuse themselves may not be uninteresting.