23 Robert J. Casey, The Texas Border and Some Borderliners (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950): 124; James Cook, Fifty Years on the Old Frontier (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1925): 12; E.O.C. Ord to F. A. Binney, July 19, 1878, Edward Otho Cresap Ord, 1818–1883, Correspondence and Papers, Box 1: Outgoing Letters, 1852–1881, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
24 Williams, Texas’ Last Frontier: 262, 260; Report of the Secretary of War, 1879–80, 1: 20–21.
25 Francis Paul Prucha, A Guide to the Military Posts of the United States, 1789–1895 (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964): 109. The fort was named after Commodore Robert Field Stockton, a hero of the Mexican War.
26 Report of Sergeant J. D. Bingham to the Assistant Adjutant General, March 16, 1869, “Fort Stockton,” Box 1083, Office of the Quartermaster General Consolidated Correspondence File 1794–1915, RG 92, NARA.
27 [Peter Cleary, post surgeon], Medical History of Post, 1870–71: 12.
28 The Army and Navy Journal, 9 (July 20, 1872): 785; and 20 (January 13, 1883): 526.
29 Captain John G. Bourke, cited in Edward L. Glass, The History of the Tenth Cavalry 1866–1921 (n.p., 1921): 21; Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas: 299.
30 Sanitary Report of February 1875, Records of Fort Stockton (M1189), NARA.
31 Medical Records of Fort Stockton, October 1878: 97–98.
32 Patricia Y. Stallard, Glittering Misery: Dependents of the Indian Fighting Army (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1978): 13; Sanitary Report, May 31, 1878, Records of Fort Stockton, National Archives, M1189, roll 3.
33 Bigelow, cited in Erwin N. Thompson, “The Negro Soldier and His Officers,” The Black Military Experience in the American West, ed. John M. Carroll (New York: Liveright, 1971): 259; Arlen L. Fowler, The Black Infantry in the West, 1869–1891 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996): 47.
34 Jack D. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1974): 55.
35 Christian Recorder, March 5, 1864; cited in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982): 198–99; New York World, December 13, 1864; McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: 203.
36 Sherman to Ord, December 26, 1865; cited in William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981): 259.
37 William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967): 26.
38 Cited in Haley, Fort Concho: 263–64. Historians of the frontier army agree that black soldiers performed well and exhibited less negative behavior in proportion to their numbers than their white counterparts. Marcos Kinevan, in Frontier Cavalryman: Lieutenant John Bigelow with the Buffalo Soldiers in Texas (El Paso, Tex.: Texas Western Press, 1998): 158, writes: “Desertions of blacks … were dwarfed by those of whites,” and gives the statistics to prove it. While noting that their general lack of basic education created some problems, Robert M. Utley observes that the black soldiers “excelled in discipline, morale, patience and good humor in adversity, physical endurance, and sobriety. Above all, they performed well on campaign and in combat. Even their severest critics testified to their exceptional record of field service.” (Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian 1866–1891 [New York: Macmillan, 1973]: 26.)
39 Letters Received, Inspector General’s Office, File No. T 21, RG 159, NARA.
40 J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1868): 260; January 24, 1878, John Bigelow, Jr., Journal January-November 1878, John Bigelow Collection, Union College.
41 The report is not signed, but the post surgeon, whose responsibility such reports were, was Peter Cleary; Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind: 278.
42 Whitman, The Troopers: 34. George Armstrong Custer was one officer who preferred being a lieutenant colonel in a white regiment to becoming the colonel of a black regiment.
43 Thompson, “The Negro Soldier and His Officers”: 262.
44 Report to the Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Texas, November 21, 1872, RG 393, Pt. 1, NARA.
45 N. H. Pierce, The Free State of Menard: A History of the County (Menard, Tex.: Menard News Press, 1946): 137.
46 Report of the Secretary of War, 45 Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1877), 1: 80–81.
47 Roberts, cited in Garna L. Christian, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899–1917 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995): 42; Frank N. Schubert, “Black Soldiers on the White Frontier: Some Factors Influencing Race Relations,” Phylon 32 (1971). 415.
48 Report to Adjutant General, San Antonio, November 13, 1899, AGO file 292843, RG 94, NARA.
49 Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History: 64; Leckie, Buffalo Soldiers: 98.
50 Dr. Pope, Medical Records of Fort Stockton, vol. 362: 18.
51 Pope, Medical Records of Fort Stockton, vol. 362: 19; Cleary, “Medical History of Post, 1870–71”: 7.
52 “ses Tried by a General Court Martial,” PP3542, JAG, RG 153, NARA. The charge of mutiny was reduced to”unauthorized conduct,” which mitigated the severity of the punishment.
53 “leary, Peter J. A.,” Personal Papers of Medical Officers and Physicians, Box 114, AGO, RG 94, NARA.
54 “leary, Peter J. A.,” Personal Papers.
Chapter 4
1 Charles S. Merchant, Brevet Brigadier General, recommendation for promotion, March 30, 1866, ACP of John Clous, no. 247, RG 94, NARA.
2 Letter of November 16, 1867, to Major General L. Thomas, Adjutant General, Clous ACP File.
3 Correspondence in Clous ACP file.
4 William H. Leckie describes Armes as “an able but contentious and controversial officer. His long military career was dotted with arrests and quarrels with his superiors. He was dismissed from the service in June, 1870, but the dismissal was later amended to provide an honorable discharge. He returned to the Tenth Cavalry in May, 1878, and was retired in 1883.” (Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967] : 22–23n.)
5 George A. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer (Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1900): 2-3, 297.
6 Stephen Vincent Benet, A Treatise on Military Law and the Practice of Courts-Martial, 6th ed. (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1868): 78.
7 Mrs. Hart’s husband, Captain Daniel Hart, died at Fort Stockton in March of 1878. Geddes, his replacement, arrived in May of that year. Since the Harts had been about to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary when the captain died, Mrs. Hart, like Mrs. McLaughlen, was a woman of a certain age.
8 Clayton W. Williams, Texas’ Last Frontier: Fort Stockton and the Trans-Pecos 1861–1895, ed. Ernest Wallace (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982): 224.
9 Robert Safford to John Bigelow, March 9, 1879, Bigelow Diaries, USMA Archive.
10 Cesare Lombroso, introduction to Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Criminal Man (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911): xv.
11 Cesare Lombroso, Crime, Its Causes and Remedies, trans. Henry P. Horton (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918): 35.
12 Nancy A. Harrowitz, Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994): 142n., notes that “Lombroso’s theories had the most influence in the United States. The Lombrosian school was quickly and frequently translated into English.” Discussing Lombroso’s physical description of the criminal, Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965): 130, states that “facts are powerless against it.”
13 Stephen Schafer, Theories in Criminology: Past and Present Philosophies of the Crime Problem (New York: Random House, 1969): 191–92; James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985): 100–102.
14 Reflecting the nineteenth-century popularity of phrenology, its entry in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, 1911) 21: 534–41, was seven pages. In the fifteenth edition this entry had shrunk to five sentences.
15 Robert Grierson to Alice Grierson, in The Colonel’s Lady on the Western Frontier: The Correspondence of Alice Kirk Grierson, ed. Shirley A. Leckie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989): 56.
16 William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967): 36, calls Carpenter “one of the finest officers on the frontier.”
17 Homer W. Wheeler, Buffalo Days: Forty Years in the Old West, 2d ed. rev. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925): 250–52.
18 Entries for May 15, and May 27, 1879, Bigelow Diaries, USMA Archive.
19 This comment was Bigelow’s reaction to first hearing about the Geddes-Orleman scandal. Entries for May 15, July 15, and March 25, 1879, Bigelow Diaries.
20 Entry of July 3, 1879, Bigelow Diaries.
21 Entry of May 20, 1879 [sic], Bigelow Diaries. In the second week of June, Bigelow began forgetfully dating his entries “May.”
22 Entries of July 22, and June 11, 1879, Bigelow Diaries.
23 Numerous commentators on nineteenth-century American life refer to a widespread emphasis on purity. Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975): 160, is representative in claiming that middle-class women of the time were “inundated with the value of female purity.”
24 Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820–70, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993): 314.
25 Robert T. Francoeur, A Descriptive Dictionary and Atlas of Sexology (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991): 702, offers this definition: “An intact hymen, a tight vagina and bleeding during defloration are commonly said to be signs of virginity although none of these signs guarantees that the female has not had vaginal intercourse. Likewise, their absence is not proof that she has had coitus.” A popular manual, Ruth K. Westheimer, Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex (New York: Continuum, 1994): 279, is more emphatic: “While an intact hymen has historically been used to verify a woman’s virginity … this is a totally false notion.”
26 I am indebted for this explanation, and for information on changes in the female breast, to Thomas Lowry, M.D., formerly a clinical associate of Dr. William Masters at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis.
27 Judith Lewis Herman, with Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981): 11.
28 Sigmund Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918), in The Standard Edition of the Completed Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 11: 193.
29 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 167n.
30 Hammond Diary, January 31, 1844, Library of Congress; cited in Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982): 242.
31 Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: 242, 290.
32 Philip Sheridan to William T. Sherman, November 30, 1872, Sherman Papers, Box 8, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
33 John D‘Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988): 70.
34 Young might have had a motive to be unfriendly to Geddes. On August 29, he complained to Colonel Grierson that Joseph Friedlander, Geddes’s good friend, was attempting to trade with soldiers in the field although he, Young, was the only authorized post trader.
35 Bigelow, USMA Diaries.
36 John H. Kellogg, Ladies Guide in Health and Disease, Girlhood, Maid enhood, Wifehood, Motherhood (Des Moines, Iowa: W. D. Condit, 1883): 208–9.
37 Orson S. Fowler, Creative and Sexual Science (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1875): 891.
38 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “‘The Female Animal’: Medical and Biological Views of Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 60 (September 1973): 340.
39 Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses, vol. 1 of The Bourgeois Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984): 73.
40 Dee Garrison, “Immoral Fiction in the Late Victorian Library,” American Quarterly 28 (September 1976): 72.
41 Nathaniel Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, January 19, 1855, in The Letters, 1853–1856, ed. Thomas Woodson et al., The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 23 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962-87), 17: 304.
42 William Perry Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835–1909: A Biography (University: University Press of Alabama, 1951), is the source of all biographical data on Wilson.
43 Augusta Evans Wilson, Infelice (New York: A. L. Burt, 1875): 61.
44 Wilson, Infelice: 132.
45 Wilson, Infelice: 132–33.
46 : Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, “‘The Female Animal’”: 340.
47 Gay, The Education of the Senses: 213.
48 Entry of August 18, 1877, Bigelow Diaries, Box 1, USMA.
49 Wilson, Infelice: 128.
50 Wilson, Infelice: 134.
51 Wilson, Infelice: 134.
52 Wilson, Infelice: 387–88.
53 Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer: 469. See Marcos Kinevan, Frontier Cavalryman: Lieutenant John Bigelow with the Buffalo Soldiers in Texas (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1988): 116–18, for a full discussion of the Bigelow-Blunt affair; see also entries of March 20 and April 12, 1879, Bigelow Diaries.
Chapter 5
1 Cited in entry of July 3, 1879, Bigelow Diaries, USMA Archive.
2 Geddes to Absalom Baird, letter of April 12, 1880, QQ1387, Box 1927,JAG, RG 153, NARA. QQ1387 is the Geddes court-martial of 1879, along with related documents.
3 QQ1387: Exhibit Qq.
4 The defense called Colonel George L. Andrews, commanding officer of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, because Andrews had been on the retiring board which considered Orleman’s case. Andrews denied that Ord had given the board Geddes’s deposition, but there is no other explanation for their having it.
5 R. G. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, or Winning West Texas from the Comanches (Washington, D.C.: Eynon, 1935): 458.
6 Carter, On the Barder with Mackenzie: 458–59.
7 Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie: 481.
8 January 9, 1979, Headquarters, Department of Texas, Letters Sent Vol. 2: No. 35, RG 393, pt. 1, NARA.
9 Medical Certificate for Leave of Absence, San Antonio, March 11, 1879, ACP File of Napoleon Bonaparte McLaughlen, RG 94, NARA.
10 McLaughlen had been ill before, but whether previous illnesses were related to his final decline is not clear. His health may have been undermined by a brief stay in Libby Prison in 1865. By 1872 he was suffering from “chronic rheumatism of all the extremities” and of some internal organs as well. He was given a ninety-day leave. A request to extend this leave described him as suffering from “a neuralgic affection [affliction?] of the bladder and bowels, the result of exposure while on duty with his regiment in Texas.” McLaughlen’s ACP file.
11 McLaughlen ACP file.
12 Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer: 466.
13 Cited in Williams, Texas’ Last Frontier: 105.
14 Graham Hughes, “The Crime of Incest,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 55 (1964): 328, describes a study of incestuous father-daughter relationships in which the daughter participant “was passive and coerced.”
15 Entry of March 25, 1879, Bigelow Diaries, 1867–79, USMA Archives.
16 Dr. Taylor to Adjutant General, Department of Texas, Telegram, July 18, 1879, RG 393, pt. 1, Letters Sent, vol. 11: no. 1080, NARA.
17 Entries for July 16, and July 22, 1879, Bigelow Diaries, USMA
Archive.
18 He applied for a hearing before a retirement board on August 31, 1878, Records of Fort Stockton, M1189, NARA.
19 Commission, March 23, 1864, 0159 CB 1866*, AGO, RG 94, NARA.
20 All medical records are taken from 0159 CB 1866*.
21 John D. Hall, Medical Records of Fort Stockton: 104.
Chapter 6
1 The two copies of this report in the National Archives, one in the ACP file of Andrew Geddes, the other in court-martial file QQ1387, have pages out of sequence and inconsistently numbered, some on the front side of the sheet, some on the back, some not at all. Obvious hiatuses in several places indicate that some pages are missing.
Ungentlemanly Acts Page 25