by David Baron
William Daley—the coffin-selling carpenter who had built the Draper party’s rough observatory and also served as an undertaker—cut the body down and stored it overnight. The next day, railroad mechanic Robert Galbraith—who had allowed Edison and his compatriots to use his house and yard—served on the jury for the coroner’s inquest, which claimed it could not identify the vigilantes, calling them simply “a party of masked men to us unknown.” Lillian Heath—the scientifically minded girl who had befriended Edison’s band of visiting astronomers—now fifteen, precociously assisted with the autopsy. The doctors in charge eventually pickled the outlaw’s corpse and stored it in a whiskey barrel for experimental dissection, but first they offered Heath a keepsake. She took the skullcap, still bloody and with hair attached, which in later years she used as a crude doorstop and flowerpot. One of the doctors, meanwhile, harvested a souvenir for himself. He flayed Big Nose George’s chest, and had the skin tanned and fashioned into a pair of Oxfords. The doctor later became governor of Wyoming. It is widely reported that he wore those shoes to his inauguration.
CHAPTER 11
QUEEN CITY
JULY 1878—
Denver, Colorado
TWO HUNDRED FIFTY MILES SOUTHEAST OF RAWLINS, DOWN the spine of the Rockies, stood a frontier community of a different sort. Denver was no rude, utilitarian borough, but instead an oasis of civilization in a barbarous West. Though just twenty years old, this booming city near the base of the mountains already boasted an opera house, three hospitals, eight banks and as many newspapers, twenty houses of worship, forty-seven hotels and boarding houses, and more than twenty thousand souls. Whereas Rawlins had been created to serve the railroad, Denver had created railroads to serve itself. The city’s early leaders, intent on turning their undistinguished settlement into the region’s economic hub while amassing personal fortunes for themselves, arranged for rail connections toward seemingly every point on the compass. In the downtown business district, stout brick buildings lined a neat grid of streets. In residential areas, such as the confidently named Capitol Hill, where a large undeveloped parcel was the only evidence that Coloradans hoped someday to build a statehouse there, dignified homes sported mansard roofs and cupolas. Horse-drawn trolleys plied the broad avenues, past lush yards with shade trees and irrigated lawns, while municipal water and gas coursed underground. Although Denver lacked refinement in obvious ways—its unpaved streets turned to mud in the rain, and the stench of sewage often floated up from the South Platte—the city aspired to elegance, even enlightenment. “Let the echo go out to the country that the ‘Queen City of the Plains’ is in fact a city of progress,” crowed the Denver Daily Times.
LARIMER STREET, DENVER.
Denver attracted rugged doers: merchants and mining engineers, ranchers and blacksmiths, architects and carpenters. The population was largely male and white, and these white men clearly dictated the city’s affairs, but others found opportunity here as well. African Americans became barbers, firemen, and hoteliers; the owner of Denver’s successful Inter-Ocean Hotel was a former slave. Chinese laborers, laid off after building the transcontinental railroad, opened busy laundry establishments (although they also endured simmering xenophobia that would boil over, in 1880, in a Chinatown-destroying riot, and, two years later, federal passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act). Unmarried women sometimes toiled as servants or prostitutes, but others thrived as professionals and entrepreneurs, opening millinery shops and medical practices. People frustrated or tarnished in the East moved to Denver to reinvent themselves.
Many also came for the climate. The region’s dry, fresh air was said to be a tonic for respiratory ailments; tuberculars and asthmatics made up a significant proportion of the population. “Why, Coloradoans are the most disappointed people I ever saw,” quipped P. T. Barnum, who owned property in the state. “Two-thirds of them come here to die and they can’t do it.” The people of Denver and environs did not lack for braggadocio, and that pride extended to the astronomical event about to take place. “Sir, Colorado can beat the world in eclipses as in everything else,” a local proclaimed to a visitor from England.
As the most populous American city in the path of totality, Denver was to become the main destination for many eclipse chasers. “Tourists are coming into Denver so thick that they can hardly find hotel accommodations,” one newspaper reported. “It looks as though by the time the eclipse gets around there will be no longer room in-doors, and that tents will be the only resort of the more tardy visitors.” Overflow guests sought rooms in private residences, while others slept on cots in hotel parlors and dining rooms, and one reportedly bunked on a billiard table. The visiting hordes included prominent citizens—newspapermen, financiers, judges, U.S. senators—and with them came a less desirable lot: at least thirty assorted pickpockets, till tappers, and other petty thieves from New York, according to Denver police. But the most notable visitors were the astronomers, who grew as “thick as blackberries” in Colorado. “A cannon shot fired in any direction from a central point in that state would, it is thought, cause a sad falling off in the number of college professors who expect to report for duty at the beginning of the fall term,” commented the Washington, D.C., Evening Star a week before the eclipse.
The largest group of scientists, and the first to appear, arrived from stately Princeton. Three professors and seven former students, plus one professor’s wife and another’s son, stepped off the Kansas Pacific Railway in the first week of July. After a few nights at the Grand Central Hotel, which advertised a commanding view of the mountains for just three dollars per night, they pitched tents in a cottonwood grove a few miles southeast of downtown. The camping ground sat sandwiched between Cherry Creek and a smaller stream, the water serving as a partial moat to prevent cattle from wandering in at night and disturbing the instruments. These scientists erected a cookhouse and a privy, a darkroom for photography, and sturdy piers on which to mount their telescopes and spectroscopes. On a rope above the camp’s entrance they suspended the Stars and Stripes, flanked by two orange-and-black college flags. Although bothersome flies and mosquitoes presented a nuisance, “Camp Nassau” was an otherwise comfortable place to spend a few weeks. Of course, it helped to come from a privileged and moneyed eastern institution, and to have the conveniences of a city next door. The resourceful Ivy Leaguers hired a black cook to make their meals, and at least one professor noted in his diary that he relied on a Chinese launderer to do his washing.
The lead astronomer at the Princeton camp was a man both well-admired and well-liked in the scientific community. Known affectionately to his students as “Twinkle,” Charles Young exhibited a kind and winning personality, traits he had used to extract a favor from Menlo Park—a tasimeter, which he brought to Denver from New Jersey. The amiable astronomer had previously, at the eclipse of 1869 in Iowa, won the hearts of Maria Mitchell’s young assistants. “We were all charmed with Prof. Young, whose modesty, tho’ he was beginning to be famous, was in striking contrast to the ‘sirs’ of some of the other masculine scientists,” recalled an alumna long after.
CHARLES A. YOUNG.
Under Young’s genial leadership, the Denver Princeton camp became a social center, a place where many prominent scientists dropped by and one—British astronomer Arthur Cowper Ranyard—stayed. The Englishman and the team of Americans worked long hours, yet took time to enjoy the natural setting: building a bonfire, admiring clouds at sunset. They also engaged with the locals. One evening, it was a high school astronomy class that visited the camp. Another time, it was a band of Utes, whose leader, given his large size and angry countenance, was feared by many settlers. Chief Colorow was, with reason, bitter about white intrusions on traditional Indian lands, and in 1879 he would help command the battle that killed Major Thornburgh, but at the time that his party visited Cherry Creek in 1878, it was merely to rest and gather wild plums. “The [Princeton] students were especially interested and talked to Colorow about the coming eclipse,�
� according to a later account by one who was there. “[T]he chief was skeptical and showed it by much grunting. Even if the thing were going to happen, how did they know it?” Before long, the Utes mounted their horses and headed onto the plains in search of buffalo.
COLOROW
MANY DENVERITES INQUIRED ABOUT the eclipse—precisely when it would occur, how to view it, why astronomers were so keen to study it—and the frontier press sought to provide answers. “The eclipse will be total here for the space of 2 minutes and 46 seconds,” wrote the Denver Daily Times, adding that totality was predicted to begin on July 29 at about 3:30 P.M. The article mentioned that the solar corona “will be the chief object of study of most of the scientific parties who will observe the eclipse from this locality.” Other articles ventured to describe what the sky surrounding the corona would look like, and where one might find the hypothetical planet Vulcan. “At the time of the eclipse the star Procyon should be visible at quite a distance from the sun, almost directly below him, Venus considerably to the right of Procyon, [Castor] and Pollux above Venus, and Mars and Mercury above the sun and further to the left, with the star Regulus (the handle of the sickle in Leo) between them,” explained the Rocky Mountain News. “[I]f any new planets are discovered, they will be nearer the sun than Mars.”
Some Coloradans were eager to help the professional astronomers by making detailed studies themselves. “[I] will endeavor to show my patriotism and interest in the advance of science by taking observations from some point,” a Reformed Episcopal minister in Boulder wrote to Simon Newcomb in early July. “A few of our citizens have interested themselves to attend to the matter here—and doubtless others will in other parts of our state.” In Denver, several citizen scientists volunteered to assist astronomers on the day of the eclipse, and a visiting team from the Chicago Astronomical Society devised a way to harness the energy of the locals through a coordinated study of the solar corona.
Though often described as a halo, the corona is not a simple, uniform ring around the sun, but a textured, frilly, dynamic radiance that was extremely difficult to photograph using nineteenth-century technology. The human eye can perceive far more detail and a much greater range of brightness than cameras of that era could record, and therefore, at the 1878 eclipse, accurate drawings of the corona were deemed especially valuable. Totality would last, however, less than three minutes, hardly enough time for even an accomplished artist to make a thorough sketch. Elias Colbert, director of Chicago’s Dearborn Observatory, aimed to address this problem through an early form of crowdsourcing. He put out the call for Denverites to participate in a joint corona-drawing exercise, and he invited volunteers to attend a class at the high school. Twenty people showed up—men and women alike, including a teacher, a jeweler, a clerk, and a surveyor. Colbert stood before a blackboard and drew a rough sketch of the corona. He indicated key features to look for: the corona’s overall size and shape, whether its rays were straight or curved, whether they extended all the way down to the sun’s surface. He then divided the class into teams and the corona into quadrants. On the day of the eclipse, each team would be tasked with drawing, in as much detail as possible (and with the aid of opera glasses), just its assigned piece of the whole. Members of most teams would draw one quarter of the corona; those on another team would ignore the corona and concentrate on the flame-like protuberances at the edge of the sun. After totality, Colbert would combine these partial images into a full, composite sketch that he hoped would become the definitive image of the total eclipse as seen from Denver in 1878.
In their workaday lives, the people of Denver, like those of the rest of America, spent most of their time with their heads down, focused on earthly affairs of commerce and production, but even this go-ahead city saw reason to pause for what was about to happen overhead. “Many persons went down to their graves at the ripe old age of three score and ten, without witnessing so sublime a spectacle in nature as a total obscuration of the sun’s disk by the moon,” wrote a local correspondent in the Rocky Mountain News. “The people of Colorado may thank fortune they are in a position to see this great event in nature to the best possible advantage.” The week before the eclipse, the Denver Daily Times offered a suggestion: “Wouldn’t it be an excellent idea for our business men and bankers to close their places of business next Monday from 1:30 to 4 o’clock p.m., giving employers and employes [sic] alike a chance to witness that which has brought visitors from all parts of the world to Colorado.”
Of all the visitors coming to the frontier, one in particular continued to transfix the locals. “His name is Edison, the great inventor, who declares he knows no more about astronomy than a pig does about learning Latin, and that he comes West to try one of his little inventions which he calls the tasimeter,” the Denver Daily Tribune reminded its readers. As late as mid-July, even after Edison had arrived in the region, the people of Colorado had not yet learned that the famous inventor had shifted his destination from Denver to Rawlins. Rumors circulated that he would join the Princeton party on Cherry Creek. The Denver Press Club planned a special reception to welcome its celebrity guest. Then, on July 21, under the headline EDISON’S GO-BY, the Tribune revealed the disappointing news. “After all the expectation which has been created on the subject, it has now been affirmed and the statement confirmed that Professor Edison will not visit Colorado for the purpose of observing the coming solar eclipse. THE TRIBUNE regrets this as much as anyone can, because we were anxious that Denver should enjoy the distinction that such a visit would have given it.”
Yet Denver could still claim a celebrity. “Mr. Edison is doubtless the most famous inventor of this or any other age,” the Rocky Mountain News commented, “but we doubt whether he deserves more credit for his marvellous attainments in invention than does Maria Mitchell for demonstrating the capacity of women for the highest and best mental activity and scientific research.”
THE VASSAR ASTRONOMER reached Denver on Wednesday, July 24—a week after Edison’s arrival in Rawlins but still five days before the eclipse. The journey had been long and trying. Mitchell started in Boston with sister Phebe, who lived in Cambridge, and the pair then headed eight hundred miles southwest to meet Elizabeth Abbot, class of 1873, in Cincinnati. Now a threesome, they continued westward, “hour after hour and day after day . . . over level, unbroken land,” Mitchell recalled of the scenery outside. She also observed the scene within the train. “One peculiarity in travelling from East to West is, that you lose the old men,” she had written on a previous journey to the Mississippi Valley. “In the cars in New England you see white-headed men, and I kept one in the train up to New York, and one of grayish-tinted hair as far as Erie; but after Cleveland, no man was over forty years old.”
As for women, it was not uncommon to see them on western railroads, but they generally traveled with husbands. Riding trains, especially alone, proved more difficult for female journeyers—lugging heavy trunks, trying to look presentable after a night in a sleeper car. A friend of Mitchell’s, en route to Colorado in 1880, noted the flagrant inadequacy of facilities for ladies. “Thirty-three women and children and two men used our dressing-room to-day, the latter entirely without right,” she grumbled. By some accounts, rail travel was said to be—like university studies—unhealthy for women, the jostling and fatigue taking its toll on the reproductive organs. According to a doctor who studied the matter, a woman who made a habit of riding trains did so “at the expense of her future usefulness.”
Mitchell and her companions took a break from the rails and stopped for the night in Kansas City, a major transfer point for both people and animals. As the women prepared to continue west, bellowing cattle were heading east, funneled through the stockyards on their way to distant markets. Here the eclipse party again increased by one—former student Cornelia Marsh joined the expedition—and then it was on again toward Colorado, across the plains where settlers were literally carving homes out of the earth. Even in this land of sod houses and dugou
ts, well outside Vassar’s cultural sphere, Maria Mitchell’s name was known. Indeed, to some it was an inspiration. “I am thirteen years old next January and live far out on the frontier, between forts Larned and Dodge,” a Kansan—a boy—wrote to her a few years earlier. “Please tell me what books I must get in order to make myself a thorough Astronomer. I should like to know whether there is an inter-mercurial planet named Vulcan.”
It was twenty-eight hours from Kansas City, on the Missouri River, to the Colorado city on the Arkansas where the Vassar corps was to transfer for the final leg of its trip. Here, in Pueblo, the women encountered a snag. Rail passengers in the nineteenth century faced not only the risk of banditry and accidents but the inconvenience posed by inter-company squabbles, and the railroad Mitchell’s party had just left—the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe—was engaged in a nasty fight with the line they were about to board—the Denver & Rio Grande. The two roads had been racing to extend their service through the strategically important Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River to the silver mining district of Leadville, Colorado. This battle was being fought in the courts and on the land, where the competing companies sabotaged each other by cutting telegraph lines and throwing the tools of rival work crews in the river, and it would soon escalate to the amassing of weapons and paid gunslingers in preparation for armed conflict.
Mitchell lamented, “We learned that there was a war between the two railroads which unite at Pueblo,” and she was inextricably caught in the middle. The Denver & Rio Grande was refusing to carry freight and passengers under the terms of its contract with its rival. The Vassar women were told that there was “trouble” with their through-tickets. Mitchell, apparently, would have none of it. “[W]ar, no matter where or when it occurs, means ignorance and stupidity,” she complained. Somehow she got her party on the connecting train for the final, five-hour journey north, along the foot of the Rockies. Debarking at last in the Queen City of Denver, Mitchell and her three companions met the two remaining members of their group—Cora Harrison ’76 and Emma Culbertson ’77—who had arrived earlier on their own.