January 2011

When the rock formation known as the Old Man of the Mountain crumbled into rubble in New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch State Park this spring, the entire state went into mourning. How long the outcropping existed is unknown. It is mentioned in local Indian lore, though stories of Indians actually worshiping the face seem to have been exaggerations. The first recorded white men to see it were Francis Whitcomb and Luke Brooks, who spotted it in 1805 while surveying a road. As early as the 188Os the Appalachian Mountain Club reported that the face was slipping, a victim of the same natural forces—humidity and extremes of hot and cold—that had created it. In 1916 a Massachusetts quarryman named Edward H. Geddes spent eight days installing a system of adjustable steel cables to shore it up. Further supports were added in almost every subsequent decade.

The Gone Stone Face WHY DO WE SAY THAT? POSTER OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE ON EXHIBIT SCREENINGS CIVIL WAR IMPRESSIONS EARLY INNINGS EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF JACKSON’S BET

Thank you for the article on Harry Truman and the price of victory ("History Now,” April/May 2003). I’m a World War II veteran who was trained in amphibious naval beach battalions. Our job was to follow the Marine landings and supply ship-to-shore communications. As part of the “dungaree” Navy, those not assigned to man-of-war ships, we considered ourselves “gun fodder” for the landings of Japan proper. Later, when many of us saw how steeply those volcanic slopes entered the sea, we wondered how many men it would have taken to have made that invasion.

The great article “Liberty Inn” (June/July 2003) could have gone even farther in demonstrating how much early-day taverns influenced the American landscape. My book, Peculiar, Uncertain, and Two Egg (Cumberland House, 2000), lists a number of communities, almost all in the East, that have names taken from taverns of yesteryear: Bird in Hand and Broad Axe (Pennsylvania); Three Tuns and Seven Stars (New Jersey); Blue Ball and Cross Keys (Delaware), to name a few. There are many more. Incidentally, the caption on page 28 did contain one minor error. It states that the “Murdock Alehouse would have been perfectly recognizable to Colonel Murdock.” Not quite, not as long as that one-eyed monster is in the corner on a shelf.

I enjoyed Scott Banks’s article on the Aleutian Islands very much (“Empire of the Winds,” April/May 2003), but I’m sorry there was no mention of Shemya. Shemya is a small island (only two miles by four) 40 miles east of Attu. As the saying went, I spent a decade there one year. In the 196Os Shemya was occupied by the Air Force and a few of us from the Army, along with a couple of Navy types. I was a Russian linguist in those days, and my unclassified job title was “voice intercept operator.” Since Shemya was less than 500 miles from the Kamchatka Peninsula, you can probably figure out what I was doing.

Shemya had no trees and no port to speak of. We flew to Attu for our R&R. If memory serves, there were about 200 men on the island. During World War II it had been populated with families, and those of us who followed them two decades later fixed up one of their old abandoned homes as a clubhouse where we could hang out, away from the barracks.

A tour on Shemya lasted 50 weeks, and we had little to do except play cards, watch movies, and wander along the coastline.

Many of us now believe it was a mistake to end the draft. As a former trial judge and now supreme court justice, I have seen how much young men and women are missing by not serving, even in peacetime. Character, maturity, experience, discipline, and accountability are just a few of the traits we obtain from such service to our country. Although Congress has discussed a universal service program, no legislation has been forthcoming.

We are very pleased to be able to announce that Kevin Baker, our prolific “History in the News” columnist, has won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Paradise Alley , his novel about the 1863 New York City draft riots. The Cooper Prize, awarded biennially by the Society of American Historians, honors the best historical novel published during the two preceding years. We’re also glad to report that for the second year in a row, American Heritage has won the Western Heritage Wrangler Award for the best article on the history of the West. Last year the prize went to Sally Denton for her account of the Mountain Meadows massacre; this year Robert M. Utley won with his story of the Texas Rangers, which appeared in our June/July 2002 issue.

Leslie Alien’s article “Comparing Notes With Lewis and Clark” (April/May 2003) brought back memories of my own efforts to do just that. On the first leg of their expedition in August 1804 the explorers traveled up the Missouri River through South Dakota. Exactly to the day 155 years later three of us set out in a 14-foot fiberglass boat at Pierre, South Dakota, and attempted to retrace part of their journey. We motored and floated downstream and from the expedition journals felt that we could identify the areas of their campsites. Each evening, after establishing camp, we would investigate the natural features of the area, including geology, flora, and fauna. At a site near Crow Creek the journals describe a near-disaster when a steep bank collapsed and threatened to swamp one of their boats. The next morning our boat was nearly submerged by a similar slide. For a time we were all a little spooked.

Near the small village of Iona, the wind became a gale and we decided we had experienced enough history; we took up the boat and went home.

The author writes that the Japanese lost three carriers at the Battle of Midway; in fact it was four: the Hiryu , the Soryu , the Kaga , and the Akagi .