Retirement of 1800s Musings

It has been a joy to post on my blog from the first post in April 2009 until now. Due to time constraints, I find that I must trim away excess activities. I hope that somewhere along the way my delving into the history of this nation has produced something of value for you as you write in the historical genre.

Be blessed!

Ruined by Gold, January 1848

John A. Sutter worked hard for a living after he came to America. After his journey from Germany, to New York, to California, all he wanted was to build a mill to produce lumber to finish his flour mill. He sought out a piece of land near Sacramento. Even though many in the city made fun of him for it and called his choices“folly", he continued to build the mill, hotel, and other buildings in the city he called Coloma.

Another “crazy” man, James Marshall, was building the mill at Coloma for Sutter. One day, Marshall came to Sutter’s office, compelled him to secure his office and lock his doors for the information he was about to share.

“He told me then that he had some important and interesting news which he wished to communicate secretly to me, and wished me to go with him to a place where we should not be disturbed, and where no listeners could come and hear what we had to say. I went with him to my private rooms; he requested me to lock the door; I complied, but I told him at the same time that nobody was in the house except the clerk, who was in his office in a different part of the house; after requesting of me something which he wanted, which my servants brought and then left the room, I forgot to lock the doors, and it happened that the door was opened by the clerk just at the moment when Marshall took a rag from his pocket, showing me the yellow metal: he had about two ounces of it; but how quick Mr. M. put the yellow metal in his pocket again can hardly be described. The clerk came to see me on business, and excused himself for interrupting me, and as soon as he had left I was told, “now lock the doors; didn’t I tell you that we might have listeners?” I told him that he need fear nothing about that, as it was not the habit of this gentleman; but I could hardly convince him that he need not to be suspicious. Then Mr. M. began to show me this metal, which consisted of small pieces and specimens, some of them worth a few dollars; he told me that he had expressed his opinion to the laborers at the mill, that this might be gold; but some of them were laughing at him and called him a crazy man, and could not believe such a thing.”

Then, Gold Fever, sparked by the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, January 1848, started a downward spiral in Sutter’s life. “What a great misfortune was this gold discovery for me. It has just broken up and ruined my hard, restless, and industrious labors . . .”

Read Sutter’s entire article on his gold find at http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/gold.html. Above quotes taken from Sutter’s article in the Hutchings’ California Magazine, November 1857

What One Little Light Can Do

If you mention "The Waving Girl" in Savannah, everyone immediately knows you are speaking of Florence Martus. She had become a legend in her own time when, as a nineteen year old, she greeted every ship entering the Savannah seaport and bid farewell to every ship leaving. 

In 1887, Florence's father had become employed with the Lighthouse Service. The family moved into the lighthouse keeper’s house on Elba Island. Another account of the story states that Florence was the light keeper’s sister and actually moved to the island with her brother.

Florence took it upon herself to wave at each ship with a handkerchief by day and a lantern by night. She was quoted as saying, "I was never too sick to get up when one (ship) was coming in, and I could always hear them coming."

Obviously, the blue-eyed girl, who never married, stirred imaginations and romantic legends about who she was and why she spent so much time at her post. On the east end of River Street in Savannah, a seventeen-foot statue of a girl waving her handkerchief, collie at her side, was erected in her honor.

Photo taken by Mike Stroud and is posted courtesy of The Historical Marker Database at http://www.hmdb.org/

City of Roses or The Un-Heavenly City?

The rat-infested dank catacombs under Portland, Oregon, concealed unthinkable illicit secrets for nearly a century beginning in 1850. If you were one of the lucky ones who fell through one of many trap doors, you didn’t wake up until after you had been drugged, kept with rats, and were hundreds of miles out to sea on your way to the Orient.

The practice called Shanghaiing thrived in Portland. Every building from China Town to the downtown area was connected and tied together in a series of basements, some separated by archways. The purpose of the underground originally lent itself to aid those delivering incoming shipments thereby expediting their arrival at each store by not having to travel through busy Portland streets.

However, ship captains loved the design of Portland’s underground because it enabled them to build their crews. Many waited in the Willamette River port at the opening of the tunnels, for hired middle-men (bar owners, Chinese, labor groups, opium den owners) to kidnap unsuspecting drunks. The drunks were usually given knockout drugs, shoved through trap doors, and placed in holding cells in the underground maze until ships came into ports. $50.00 a head became an attractive tradeoff for the risk of dealing in the trafficking.

Women were warned to stay away from saloons and dance halls, because they met similar fates. The only difference when they slipped through a trap door is no one ever saw them again. They became victims of white slave trade, changing their lives forever as they were delivered to one of the many brothels that operated under the streets or to one across the seas.

The tunnels have survived numerous floods over the years and serve as a backdrop for guided walking tours today – if you can tolerate the stigma of being stuck underground for 2 ½ hours with moldy walls and runaway rats. For more info on the tours contact: http://www.portlandwalkingtours.com/tours/underground_portland.php

Political Intrigue and the Census of 1890

I came face to face with a major brick wall when researching my ancestry. The population enumeration every ten years had met a serious blow when most of the 1890 census records were destroyed in a Washington DC fire in the basement of The Commerce Building, in 1921.

Whatever remained of the eleventh census of the United States was ordered by congress to be destroyed in 1933. Only a few fragments of the census escaped destruction and have been published in numerous genealogical websites. The resulting enumeration presents only about 6,000 of the 63,000,000 citizens polled at the time.

Nevertheless, according to the http://www.archives.gov website, “the 1890 census seemed mired in fraud and political intrigue.” In March 1896, a previous fire had destroyed the special census schedules for mortality, crime, pauperism and benevolence, special classes, and portions of the transportation and insurance schedules. In 1903, a census clerk noted that the general census schedules appeared to be in good condition. Despite numerous requests that the census records be stored in a safe place, they remained in the basement of The Commerce Building. The fire of 1921 destroyed 25% of the schedules and badly damaged half of the remainder. No effort was made to preserve the copies.

It was a heartbreaking nightmare for historians and genealogists. Even after a public outcry from historical organizations and genealogical societies, the government ordered the records destroyed. The entire story can be read at: http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census-1.html

And the Winner of Survivor Is . . .

The Prairie Traveler, written by Captain Randolph B. Marcy of the United States Army, was an essential companion for the westward traveler after 1859. At the request of the army, Captain Marcy put together a compendium of travel resources, food locations, routes to travel, dangers to watch out for, and good common sense, based on his own travels west. The original title, The Prairie Traveler: A Handbook for Overland Expeditions with Maps, Illustrations, and Itineraries of the Principal Routes between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was published in 1859, by Harper and Brothers Publishers.

The Fur Company’s men of the northwest, have to be labeled the best of the survivors in the Artic regions, because of their unique diet. Among other things, each man consumed approximately 1.25 pounds of Pemmican. Trust me. It is disgusting, but I guess you do what you have to, to survive.

Quoting from page thirty-three of The Prairie Traveler: “The buffalo meat is cut into thin flakes, and hung up to dry in the sun or before a slow fire; it is then pounded between two stones and reduced to a powder; this powder is placed in a bag of the animal’s hide with the hair on the outside; melted grease is then poured into it and the bag sewn up. It can be eaten raw, and many prefer it so. Mixed with a little flour and boiled, it is a very wholesome and exceedingly nutritious food and will keep fresh for a long time.” You've got to be kidding me. Wholesome?

The Prairie Traveler can be purchased from Dover Books.

Would You Go As Far As Nellie Bly?

Six-year-old Elizabeth Jane Cochran lost her father in 1870. He failed to leave a will which forced the auction of his estate. Not too long afterward, Elizabeth’s mother remarried as a way to support her children. Elizabeth’s abuse at the hand of her step-father is thought to be the springboard that led her to champion the cause of women’s rights.

As a lonely teenager, she changed the spelling of her name by adding an “e” on the end – supposedly to sound more sophisticated. Her break into journalism came in the form of a rebuttal she sent to the Pittsburgh Dispatch newspaper regarding a sexist column in their newspaper. She went by the name, Lonely Orphan Girl. The paper loved her straightforward writing style and hired her to work for them.

Since most women of the day chose pen names when they wrote, Elizabeth’s editor, George Madden, chose the name, Nellie Bly, taken from the song written by Stephen Foster. Thus began Nellie’s investigative undercover work. After she posed as a sweat shop worker and exposed the deplorable conditions inside, she was reduced to being a fashion reporter.

At that point, she left the paper and headed for New York where she was hired as reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.One of her most noted undercover reports came when she feigned insanity in order to expose shocking conditions at a women’s lunatic asylum on Blackwell Island. Her resulting book, Ten Days in a Madhouse, prompted a grand jury to look into conditions at the asylum.

“In spite of the knowledge of my sanity and the assurance that I would be released in a few days, my heart gave a sharp twinge. Pronounced insane by four expert doctors and shut up behind the unmerciful bolts and bars of a madhouse! Not to be confined alone, but to be a companion, day and night, of senseless, chattering lunatics; to sleep with them, to eat with them, to be considered one of them, was an uncomfortable position. Timidly we followed the nurse up the long uncarpeted hall to a room filled by so-called crazy women. We were told to sit down, and some of the patients kindly made room for us.”

Quoted from: Ten Days in a Madhouse. See the complete book at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html

How Cold Was It? Ice Flows Into Gulf, 1899

In January 1899, a flow of arctic air moved through the United States all the way to southern Florida. Some parts of northern Florida got two inches of snow. In Southern Florida, West Palm Beach reported that snow was falling on Wednesday, January 19.

Even more surprising than that was the event that occurred in February of the same year. A great blizzard with frigid temperatures hit the Mid Atlantic area of the country. Then in the middle of February, an ice storm hit the east coast. The winter was so bad and temperatures were so cold during that time period that weather records sindicate ice flowed down the Mississippi River and spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. The only other time ice had been recorded in New Orleans was in 1784 when ice flows blocked the Mississippi River at New Orleans.

Debilitating Kansas Snow

"The winter was perhaps the most debilitating of all the seasons. At times it seemed interminable. For days and weeks on end, the temperature hovered at zero, and often it plummeted to twenty degrees below. Compounding these freezing temperatures was an almost ceaseless wind that whipped across the plains, often reaching over fifty miles per hour. To the settler unaccustomed to such climatic extremes, this numbing weather became almost unbearable.

A winter blizzard was an awesome spectacle. Without warning, dark billowing clouds roared across the skies and unleashed blinding bursts of snow. 'They came with a might blast,' recalled one witness. 'sweeping with almost the strength of a cyclone, raking the life of stock and sometimes human beings.'

Isolated in its cabin, the frontier family braced itself against the onslaught of ice and snow. Wrapped in heavy overcoats and thick woolen blankets, they huddled around the fireplace for warmth. Yet, the searing gusts of wind outdoors seemed to penetrate every crack and crevice of the prairie house."

Quoted from Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier, written by Joanna L. Stratton

How to Have a Truly Blessed Christmas

While our Victorian ancestors lived meager lives compared to ours today, their celebration of Christmas was no less genuine. While we worry what color lights to drape around our Christmas trees, how far apart each bulb should be, or whether they blink or stay lit, the mid-eighteen hundreds found homemade decorations adorning the trees. If one were blessed to have them, candles perched precariously on the branches of a freshly timbered pine – lit only on Christmas Day and New Years Day.

The birth of the Lord, Jesus Christ, stood as the center of worship and adoration. I sometimes envy the celebration back then because the air was filled with the spirit of giving. People didn’t flip on the TV to listen to the weather or pop in a movie to get in the Christmas mood. Homemade gifts, perhaps one per person, stirred the exciting preparation for Christmas Day. They reveled in the true spirit of Christmas – God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Today, once Christmas is past and the gifts are all opened, what then? Embrace the truth of the Bible about Jesus’ birth in Luke, chapter one and two. Believe the message of the great company of angels – the Heavenly host – who proclaimed, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests.”

Have a blessed Christmas!

Yes, Virginia

First printed by The New York Sun in 1897

Dear Editor,

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

You decide. Is there really a Santa Claus?

Riding on a Rolling Pin - A Horse-Drawn Snow Roller

So far, December 2010 appears to be one of the coldest and snowiest in the Midwest. Usually, in my town, in Indiana, we can count on prompt snow removal. However thankful I am, I always wonder why the city can’t plow the street in front of our home a little closer to the drive. We live at the point of an “L” shaped street where the tendency is for the plows to make a short swing around the corner sufficing for a plowed street. Obviously, that leaves approximately five feet of the street we have to shovel before we can get to the plowed area. Oh, for the good ‘ole days.

Okay, in the good ‘ole days, no record of snowplows exists until 1862. Up until that time, most roads were made passable by animal-drawn snow rollers. If you can picture a rolling pin, you can picture a snow roller. Teams of horses pulled the rollers across the snow, compressing it multiple times, in order to make a smooth running surface for wagons and sleighs alike. The packed snow took care of badly rutted roads, so most were actually easier to travel on once the snow had been packed down and smoothed. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that most localities dispensed of the snow rollers and moved on to motorized removal of the snow.

This photo of a horse-drawn snow roller is used by permission from the Andover Historical Society in Andover, Maine.