January 2011

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: On April 2, 1917, President Wilson told Congress that the United States was ready to fight to “make the world itself at last free.” Four days later America entered the Great War. At once a thrill of belligerency ran through the country not unlike that which once aroused the crusaders to set olf for the Holy Land. Among those who felt that thrill was Bernard J. Gallagher, a twenty-eight-years-old native of Waseca, Minnesota, then serving his internship at the Minneapolis City Hospital. He immediately joined the Medical Officers Reserve Corps, and when his first-lieutenant’s commission came through in the middle of July, he requested active service. Young Lieutenant Gallagher thought he would be given three or four months’ instruction at the Army Medical College and then sent overseas with the American Army. Instead, when he reported to Washington on August 13, he was told that he would be given no training, but would be sent overseas just as soon as he received his equipment, and then not with the Americans at all, but as one of 1,300 young American doctors attached to the British Expeditionary Force in response to an urgent request for medical help. By late September—long before there was any sizable contingent of American troops in Europe—Gallaghcr found himself in England. After two months at an army hospital there, he received orders on November 19 to embark for France.

When I first met Elk Hollering in the Water on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in 1941, she was a frail little old lady in her middle seventies. She was short and she was spare. I doubt if she ever weighed as many as one hundred pounds. Nothing about lier appearance would remind one of artists’ conceptions of the legendary Amazons. Nevertheless, Elk Hollering in the Water was a com bat veteran in her own right, a fighting member of the most aggressive tribe of the upper Missouri. As a lively teen-ager she had accompanied her stalwart husband, Hear Chief, on raids against enemy tribes. And she had won honors by “taking things from the enemy.”

GOLF , a celebrated Scotch’game, almost peculiar to that country, is played with balls and clubs. The club tapers, terminating in the part that strikes the ball, which is faced with horn, and loaded with lead. But if this there are six sorts used by good players, viz. the common club, used when the ball lies on the ground; the scraper and half scraper, when in long grass; the spoon when in a hollow; the heavy iron club, when it lies deep among stones or mud; and the light iron ditto, When on the surface of chingle or sanrty ground.

The balls are much smaller than those used at cricket, and much harder; they are made of horse leather, and stuffed with feathers in a peculiar manner, and then boiled.

The ground may be circular, triangular, or semicircular. The number of holes are not limited; that tie pends always on what the length of the ground will admit. The common distance between one hole and another is about a quaMer of a mile, which begins and terminates every game : and he who gets his ball in by the fewest number of strokes is the victor.

To the Editors:

In your August, 1964, issue Gerald Carson ably tells the story of Charles Ogle’s viciously false speech in the House of Representatives on April 14, 1840, and the major part it played in knocking Martin Van Buren out of the White House and electing William Henry Harrison, the “log-cabin-and-hard-cider” man of the people. As Carson makes clear, the nub of the hatchet job was the untrue picture of Van Buren as a voluptuary, living in the White House in sumptuous splendor and eating from gold plates with gold spoons.

To a generation in whose memory the murder of a President is still tragically vivid, an account of tileassassination of President Lincoln reads like a bit of current history. AVc know from our own experience the shock and horror such an act of madness evokes, and the story of what happened in Washington on ihc night of April 14, 1865, has a new impact when it is read in the living awareness of what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The story has been told many times, but never with the wealth of detail contained in Twety Days a book by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and lier son, Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., which is being prepared by Harper S, Row for publication later this year. In the pages that follow, AMERICAN HERITAGE presents a long excerpt from the first half of Twety Days .

In 1875, H. J. Ramsdell, a correspondent for the New York Tribune, went to Virginia City, Nevada, to write about the gold and silver mines of the fabulous Comstock Lode, which had been discovered sixteen years before. After inspecting the mines, Ramsdell was taken up on Mount Rose to see the sawmills that provided some of the millions of feet of lumber needed yearly around Virginia City for fuel, for construction, and, most importantly, for timbering mine shafts. His guides, who were also the owners of the mills, were James G. Fair, James C. Flood, and John B. Hereford. Fair and Flood, both forty-niners, later pioneers on the Comstock Lode, and now partners in the Bank of Nevada, were two of the richest men in the West. [Two of Fair’s daughters — Theresa, who married Hermann Oelrichs, and Virginia, who married William K. Vanderbilt, Jr.— became leaders of Newport society. Their father served as United States senator from Nevada from 1881 to 1887 and died in 1894.

By 1892 Andrew Carnegie, so-called “angel of the workingman,” once a penniless lad from Scotland, had established himself as steel master of the world and majority shareholder in the all-powerful Carnegie Steel Company, focussed in western Pennsylvania. Of all the iron, steel, and coke works contained within his peerless semimonopolistic empire, none compared in magnitude and output with the unit at Homestead.

On a certain day in December, 1913, I went up to the ornate courthouse of the Appellate Division, on Madison Square, to join a numerous company of youths who, like myself, had survived the bar examinations and the scrutiny of the Character Committee of the Bar Association, and were now being admitted to the practice of law in the state of New York. Aged twenty-one, I had been employed for more than five years in a large law office. In the course of my employment I had worked my way through night law school, advanced by stages from file clerk to managing clerk, and had had my weekly wage increased, with all deliberate speed, from five dollars to fifteen.