A Pocketful of History

by Jim Noles

  With the onset of winter, the Corps waited out the season in the realm of the Mandan Indians, near the site of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. On April 7, 1805, Lewis and Clark resumed their journey. Toussaint Charbonneau, a French trapper, now aided them, as did his young wife Sacajawea. Sacajawea was one of Charbon-neau’s two Indian wives, a sixteen year-old Shoshone Indian with her infant son in tow. Her resolute nature and skill with languages would become an important asset in the months to come.

  Crossing into modern-day Montana, the expedition reached the Great Falls of the Missouri by the middle of June. The Great Falls and associated rapids necessitated a grueling eighty-five-mile portage before they could rejoin the river and ascend up one of its tributaries (a river they named Jefferson in a moment of political astuteness). Eventually, the Corps left Mr. Jefferson’s river altogether to climb toward the Continental Divide.

  By August, the Corps had reunited Sacajawea with her Shoshone brethren. In early September, pressing up through the Bitterroot Mountains, the expedition encountered its first snowfall of the season as it crested the Continental Divide. It was a punishing march that brought it into the land of the Nez Perce and, finally, to the Clearwater River.

  The Corps followed the Clearwater to the Columbia River, which in turn led them to its estuary on the Pacific. By November 7, 1805, Clark was able to write in his journal: “Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocean, this great Pacific Ocean which we [have] been so long anxious to see.” Several days later, Lewis carved into a tree overlooking the Pacific, “By land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.” In all, according to Clark’s calculations, he and his companions had rowed, sailed, rode, marched, and climbed 4,121 miles to reach that point.

  The Corps wintered at what it named Fort Clatsop, near modern-day Astoria, Oregon, and after four months of making salt to preserve meat for their return trip and otherwise replenishing their supplies, they set off for home in March. For the most part, the expedition retraced its route, splitting at the Great Divide to explore the Marias and Yellowstone rivers. By late summer, they rejoined one another and on September 22, 1806, paddled the last few miles to St. Louis.

  At St. Louis, the town’s 1,000 residents thronged the riverbank to see the return of the buckskin-clad adventurers. As Lewis, Clark, and their canoes landed, the crowd greeted them with three celebratory cheers. The Corps of Discovery, by beginning and ending in Missouri—the future Show Me State—had just shown America how to reach the Pacific.

  Together, the two men had charted what seemed, in 1806, to be the most direct and convenient route across the continent to the Pacific’s shores. They had discovered 178 new plants and 122 species and subspecies of animals and had established contact with Indian tribes that, until their arrival, had never seen a white man.

  Quite simply, in the course of their 8,000-mile round trip, they had set the standard for expeditions to come.

  Such a rote listing, however, threatens to reduce the Corps of Discovery’s accomplishments to a mere ledger of objective achievement. The late Stephen Ambrose’s prosaic cataloging of Lewis’s (and Clark’s) exploratory deeds does a far better job.

  [Lewis] had seen wonderful things. He had traveled through a hunter’s paradise beyond anything any American had ever before known. He had crossed mountains that were greater than had ever before been seen by an American, save the handful who had visited the Alps. He had seen falls and cataracts and raging rivers, thunderstorms all but beyond belief, trees of a size never before conceived of, Indian tribes uncorrupted by contact with white men, canyons and cliffs and other scenes of visionary enchantment. A brave new world. And he had been first. (Ambrose 1997, 404–405)

  Little wonder, then, that in 2001, when Missouri Governor Bob Holden asked his constituents to “show” him design concepts for the state’s quarter, the more than 3,000 submissions he received in response included representations of the Pony Express, the nation’s westward expansion, a riverboat, and a commemoration of Lewis and Clark crafted by noted Missouri watercolorist Paul Jackson. Those were among the concepts forwarded to the U.S. Mint, which responded with four candidate designs.

  After an online vote, Missourians picked Jackson’s “Corps of Discovery 1804–2004” concept. In 2003, after raising Jackson’s ire by amending his original design, the U.S. Mint produced 453.2 million quarters. Such issues of design aside, the quarter nevertheless succeeded in showing the world that the Corps’ great expedition began and ended in the Show Me State.

  25

  ARKANSAS

  Diamonds Are a State’s Best Friend

  Millions of years before the idea of a state quarter was the merest flickering of an idea, a geologic formation known as a volcanic pipe—later named the Prairie Creek Pipe by modern scientists—began to form some 93 miles beneath today’s Pike County, Arkansas. The pipe allowed red-hot magma—full of magnesium and volatile compounds such as water and carbon dioxide—to surge upward toward the earth’s surface.

  As the magma rose and pressure decreased, the volatile compounds transformed rapidly into gases. That sudden gaseous expansion propelled the magma through the earth’s surface in a shallow supersonic eruption like a giant champagne cork. To carry the alcohol metaphor even further, the result was, if viewed cross-sectionally, a martini glass–shaped deposit of volcanic materials that included a remarkable garnish of diamonds carried up from the earth’s lithospheric mantle and strewn across the pipe’s extinct crater.

  As time passed, the ancient volcano’s crater eroded, exposing the volcano’s payload of diamonds to the elements and, in the summer of 1906, to the amazed eyes of local farmer John W. Huddleston. Shortly after buying a farm atop the crater earlier that year, Huddle-ston caught sight of what he later described as a “glittering pebble” in the Arkansas soil.

  “I knew it was different from any I had ever seen before,” Hud-dleston later told the Arkansas Gazette. “It had a fiery eye that blazed up at me every way I turned it. I hurried to the house with the pebble, saddled my mule and started for Murfreesboro . . . riding through the lane, my eye caught another glitter, and I dismounted and picked it up out of the dust.”

  With his careful eye, Huddleston had managed to discover what state geologist John C. Banner and chemist Richard N. Brackett had failed to uncover nearly two decades earlier—the eighth-largest diamond deposit in the world.

  Shortly after Huddleston’s discovery, Charles S. Stifft, a Little Rock jeweler, broke the good news to Huddleston: The farmer had discovered two blue-white diamonds, one weighing 2.6 carats and the other 1.4 carats. Overnight, Huddleston earned the nickname “Diamond John.”

  In once-sleepy southwestern Arkansas, Huddleston’s discovery sparked a veritable diamond rush. Thousands of hopeful prospectors besieged Murfreesboro, where the Conway Hotel was forced to turn away as many as 10,000 would-be guests. Not to be deterred, the overflow erected a tent city in the sand hills and pine forests on the outskirts of Huddleston’s farm.

  Meanwhile, a more well-heeled group, consisting of a collection of Little Rock businessmen led by Samuel W. Reyburn, took a more comprehensive approach in their prospecting. Paying Hud-dleston $36,000, the group secured options on most of his land and the adjacent properties and began tilling and sluicing the rocky, humus-enriched soil—what the mine workers called “black gumbo”—for diamonds.

  Reyburn’s venture, which eventually operated under the auspices of the Arkansas Diamond Company, enjoyed some initial success. In fact, in 1924, one of its workers, Wesley Oley Basham, unearthed a 40.23-carat diamond dubbed the “Uncle Sam”—after Basham’s own nickname, rather than the government’s. Basham’s gem still holds the record as the largest diamond ever discovered in the United States. It still registered 12.42 carats after being cut.

  Despite such successes, the Arkansas Diamond Company and its competitors, such as those spearheaded by Austin and Howard Millar, only managed to scratch out hand-to-mouth existences. The Arkansas Diamond Company’s mining
petered out in the late 1920s; bankruptcy and an arsonist’s blaze in 1919 spelled the end of the Millars’ efforts.

  In the years following World War II, as Americans once again returned to the nation’s highways and byways, the prospect of car-borne tourists promised another opportunity for landowners sitting atop the Prairie Creek Pipe to make a buck on its scattering of diamonds.

  For a time, two competing operations—Crater of Diamonds and The Big Mine—waged a fierce billboard war in the battle for the attention and attendance of amateur rock hounds and passing tourists. The competition ended in 1969, when Texas-based General Earth Minerals bought both properties. Like so many of its predecessors, however, it also decided that mining—commercial or recreational— at the crater was simply not viable.

  Three years later, in 1972, the State of Arkansas bought the land for $750,000 and created the 887-acre Crater of Diamonds State Park. In addition to riverfront along the Little Missouri River, the park includes a thirty-seven-acre diamond field. There, for a mere $6.50, visitors can enter the park, and if they want, they can rent the “basic diamond hunting kit”—a U.S. Army surplus folding shovel, a screen set, and a five-gallon bucket—for $7.75.

  To date, prospectors have discovered 25,000 diamonds since the crater became a state park, some of which have sold for as much as $34,000. The largest stone discovered since the park opened remains the 16.37-carat Amarillo Starlight, discovered by a visitor from Amarillo, Texas, in 1975, and later cut into a 7.54-carat marquise shape.

  Another impressive find came in 1990, when Shirley Strawn, of nearby Murfreesboro, discovered a 3.03-carat stone. Strawn added her great-great-grandfather’s name to the stone, christening it the Strawn-Wagner Diamond, and sent the gem to Lazare Kaplan International of New York for cutting. There, Lazare Kaplan cut the gem to perfection into a 1.09-carat, round brilliant shape “Ideal Cut” diamond. The result was certified as a perfect D flawless diamond, the highest-quality stone to ever be so certified by the American Gemological Society.

  Perhaps even better known is the uncut, triangular 4.25-carat “Kahn Canary” diamond, discovered in 1977 by George Stepp, a logger from Carthage, Arkansas. Stepp later sold the gem to Stan Kahn, who loaned it to First Lady Hillary Clinton to be worn in a special Arkansas-inspired ring setting at galas celebrating both of her husband’s presidential inaugurals. President Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, approximately thirty miles south of the crater.

  Meanwhile, diamonds continue to be discovered at the crater, where the rule remains “finders, keepers.” In 2006 alone, 486 diamonds were discovered, ending with Gary Dunlap’s discovery of a 2.37-carat white diamond on the last day of the year. He named the gem “Star of Thelma,” in honor of his wife. Dunlap’s was an impressive find; more typically, the average size of a diamond discovered at the site is a mere one-fifth of a carat.

  It was in 2003, however, that Arkansas’ diamond mining industry arguably enjoyed its greatest success. At the Crater of Diamonds that year, the park’s 47,864 visitors enjoyed better than average luck, finding 641 white, brown, and yellow diamonds. Eighteen of them registered over 1 carat in size.

  Nevertheless, none of those diamonds discovered that year could match the fame of the anonymous diamond selected to command the center of Arkansas’ state quarter. Two years earlier, Governor Mike Huckabee had announced the Arkansas Quarter Challenge as a statewide competition, a challenge that garnered 9,320 entries. After several rounds of elimination, the governor eventually forwarded three concepts to the U.S. Mint.

  Two of those final concepts were the work of Ariston Jacks of Pine Bluff and Kathy Basler of Berryville. The final was that of Dortha Scott of Mount Ida, a sixty-five-year-old who draws and sketches as a hobby. Scott’s design celebrated Arkansas’ natural resources and featured a mallard duck, rice, and, in its center, an iconic diamond to represent the Crater of Diamonds.

  “My daughter gave me the form and told me to fill it out,” Scott later explained. “She said I had only a few days left before the deadline. I sat down, drew a diamond, and worked around it.”

  Apparently, Scott—like a diamond—worked well under pressure. Her design and the others inspired four candidate designs by the Mint. The governor, asked to select one, chose Scott’s natural resources motif.

  “This design captures what we’re about as a state and as a people,” Governor Huckabee declared. “It promotes our heritage and will show America why we proudly call ourselves the Natural State. Dortha Scott has done exemplary work, and I’m confident every Arkansan will be proud of our quarter.”

  In the end, 457.8 million of Arkansas’ state quarters—composed of 8.33 percent nickel, 91.77 percent copper, and 0 percent diamond— were minted in the final ten weeks of 2003. A launch ceremony held at the Crater of Diamonds—and, fittingly, attended by Shirley Strawn as well as Governor Huckabee—inaugurated the new minting.

  26

  MICHIGAN

  Great Lakes, Great Drama,

  . . . and a So-So Quarter

  At the risk of irritating Michigan’s nearly 10 million citizens, it is difficult to ignore the obvious: Michigan’s state quarter, the first of the series to be released in 2004, is perhaps the most boring of the bunch.

  Complementing a depiction of the outline of the state and the Great Lakes system, the quarter declares “Great Lakes State.” After a twenty-five-member gubernatorial commission reviewed over 4,300 design concept submissions, which included proposals featuring such topics as iconic automobiles and the Mackinac Bridge, is a cupro-nickel-plated hydrogeography lesson the best the country can get from Michigan?

  That is not to say, however, that Michigan’s nickname “Great Lakes State” is undeserved—in fact, far from it. Michigan is the only state that borders four of the five Great Lakes (Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie), and it guards those coasts and the waters that feed into them with an impressive 124 lighthouses—over half as many as Maine, for that matter.

  Nevertheless, geography aside, it is difficult to get excited about a coin that, in reality, offers little more than a numismatic map. But if one is willing to delve into the history that played out on those same lakes, a series of dramatic tales awaits.

  Arguably, the most dramatic of all came in the early winter of 1913. In November, a storm of such ferocity slammed into the Great Lakes that for later generations, it became known simply as the White Hurricane. It was the deadliest natural disaster to ever strike the Great Lakes. By the time the skies cleared, at least 248 people were dead, twelve ships were at the bottom of the Great Lakes, and thirty-one others were run aground.

  The White Hurricane’s origins lay in the convergence of two major storm fronts, their winds combining over the Great Lakes with disastrous effect as temperatures plummeted and snow began to fall. The result was what one modern weather historian termed a “meteorological monster.” It was the kind of event another writer eventually called a “perfect storm.”

  On Saturday, November 8, however, it still seemed as though the storm might simply be a typical November gale—admittedly, no laughing matter in its own right. Centered over eastern Lake Superior, the storm covered the entire lake basin. Winds had reached gale strength on northern Lake Michigan and western Lake Superior.

  Unfortunately, on Sunday, a false lull in the storm—a so-called sucker hole—convinced a number of ships to ignore the gale warning flags still flying at harbors throughout the Great Lakes and try their luck on the open water—or to keep pressing it altogether.

  One such ship was the 504-foot-long Charles S. Price, a steel-hulled, straight-deck bulk freighter. The previous day, it had steamed from Astabula, Ohio, en route to Cleveland, with a load of coal. A crew of twenty-eight, including the steward’s wife, manned the freighter under the command of veteran sailor William M. Black.

  The Price sailed, however, without Milton Smith, first assistant engineer. Although the Price was relatively new, with such modern amenities as electric lights and hot-water showers, S
mith had not been able to shake an ominous sense of foreboding about the ship’s remaining two weeks of the year’s sailing season. Instead, Smith had debarked and took the train home to Port Huron.

  It was a decision he would recall—and thank—for the rest of his life. Despite Sunday’s lull, by that evening the two storm fronts were fully joined, spawning a storm of epic proportions as hurricane force winds screamed out of the north. White-out snow squalls and blizzards, wailing ninety mile per hour winds, and towering waves turned life on the Great Lakes into a matter of survival.

  Meanwhile, on shore, as Sunday passed into Monday, November 10, the storm dumped record amounts of snow. Port Huron was buried under four- to five-foot drifts, while Cleveland received 17.4 inches of snow within twenty-four hours. Wires and telephone poles succumbed to the weight of the ice and snow, and in Detroit, winds gusted up to seventy miles per hour.

  The storm’s duration compounded the problem. “No lake master can recall in all his experience a storm of such unprecedented violence with such rapid changes in the direction of the wind and its gusts of such fearful speed,” the Lake Carriers Association stated in a post-storm report. “[T]his storm raged for sixteen hours continuously at an average velocity of sixty miles per hour, with frequent spurts of seventy and over.”

  The storm’s power was apparent even to those without sight. Trapped in a Cleveland hotel room, Helen Keller recalled, “I knew it was storming before I was told. The rooms, the corridors—everywhere within this building vibrates with the power of the storm outside. The storm waves, like sound waves or the waves of the wireless, will not be denied by stone walls and plate glass windows.”