“My illustrious predecessor has taught you that all forms of the ‘social evil’ are bad. I would teach you that some of these forms are more to be avoided than others. So, in concluding, I say, ‘If you must gamble away your lives sexually, don’t play a Lone Hand too much.’ When you feel a revolutionary uprising in your system, get your Vendrôme Column down some other way—don’t jerk it down.”
SOURCE: Copy in New York Public Library.
IF IT’S ELECTRIC IT’S BETTER
Among the products of the late nineteenth century were Dobbins’ Electric Soap (not to be confused, as an advertisement warned, with Magnetic Soap or Electro-Magic Soap), Philadelphia Electric Soap, and Dr. Scott’s Electric Hair Brush. The products were not electrical, of course (what would electric soap be?), but the word “electric” was in their name because the word had a magic sound to it. Dr. Scott liked the word so much he even farsightedly sold an electric toothbrush—in 1880.
SOURCE: Edgar R. Jones, Those Were the Good Old Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), p. 25.
GARFIELD WRITES THE CLASSICS
James A. Garfield was a very talented and skillful man. Being ambidextrous, he could write with either his right or his left hand. Because of his classical education, the twentieth president was literate in both Greek and Latin. But the last president to be born in a log cabin had another ability. While writing Greek with one hand, Garfield could, at the same time, write Latin with his other hand.
SOURCE: Kevin McFarland, Incredible! (New York: Hart, 1976), p. 14.
JAMES GARFIELD’S EERIE TALK WITH THE SON OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
During his life James Garfield never voiced special concern about his own safety—except once.
The ex–Civil War soldier was a fatalist and believed, as he told a friend shortly after he was elected president, that assassination “can no more be guarded against than death by lightning; and it is not best to worry about either.” But one day, four months into his term as president, Garfield suddenly and unexplainably became preoccupied with the possibility of death. He called in his secretary of war, Robert Todd Lincoln, to discuss the murder of the secretary’s father.
Garfield, of course, knew all about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The irresponsible guard . . . the hole drilled in the wall behind the president’s head . . . the escape of John Wilkes Booth over the edge of the balcony. Every American knew these facts. But Garfield wanted to know what the tragedy was like to someone on the inside, to someone who had known the touch of Lincoln’s fingers and the slap of his hand.
With some difficulty the secretary of war recounted the story of the tragedy: the shock, the pain, the rush of events. Garfield asked a few questions and attempted to re-create the scene at Ford’s Theater. He tried to imagine what it must have been like to be Booth, Robert Todd, or Lincoln himself. After a little more than an hour the secretary departed.
The meeting with Robert Todd Lincoln took place on June 30. On July 2, Charles Guiteau fired two shots at President Garfield and mortally wounded him—only two days after the President had expressed concern about death for the first time in his life.
SOURCE: Archie Robertson, “Murder Most Foul,” American Heritage, August 1964, p. 91.
JAMES GARFIELD WAS NOT SAVED BY THE TELEPHONE
On July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot at the Washington railroad station. The first doctor on the scene gave him half an ounce of brandy and a dram of spirits of ammonia. Garfield promptly vomited.
D. W. Bliss, a leading Washington doctor, appeared and immediately tried to locate the path of the bullet in Garfield’s body through the use of a heavy “Nelaton Probe.” The instrument was introduced into the wound and turned slowly, probing for the point of least resistance, which, the doctor hoped, would be the bullet track. Unfortunately, the President was a muscular man and had been walking briskly when shot. Now he lay on his left side with muscles relaxed. When Bliss’s probe suddenly slipped downward and forward three and a half inches into the President’s body, it did not follow the course of the bullet. The instrument did, however, become stuck between the shattered fragments of Garfield’s eleventh rib, and was removed only with a great deal of difficulty, causing the President terrific pain. Bliss next inserted his little finger into the wound, widening the hole in another unsuccessful probe for the bullet. When other expert doctors arrived from around the country, they, too, were unable to locate the bullet. A large black-and-blue spot did form, however, exactly where doctors assumed the bullet was and, coincidentally, where Dr. Bliss had originally probed.
Daily bulletins on the President’s health worried the American public. One citizen, Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, had a brainstorm. With one of his telephone receivers, he rigged up an electrical induction system with a primary and secondary coil, which, when brought into close proximity to a metal object, such as a bullet, created a slight disturbance in the balance of the circuit and sounded a faint hum in the telephone receiver. Because of Bell’s worldwide fame, Garfield’s doctors agreed to give the timely invention a try.
At the appointed hour, Bell arrived at the White House. The President was propped up in his bed and the equipment was put in place. While Bell stood behind the bed with the telephone receiver to his ear, an assistant slowly moved the coils around Garfield’s abdomen and back. When the coils crossed the black-and-blue spot, Bell’s face lighted up. He heard a hum. The experiment was repeated several times, once with Mrs. Garfield listening to the receiver, and each time a faint hum was detected as the coils crossed the black-and-blue area. The bullet was there, Bell confidently informed the President’s doctors, but it was deeper than they had estimated. The doctors, however, judged that a major operation, when the exact location of the bullet was still somewhat uncertain, would be too hazardous.
But days later, when the President’s temperature began to climb, the doctors reopened their previous incision and enlarged it outward and—as Bell had recommended—downward. Still they found no bullet. Garfield’s condition wavered over a month longer. He finally died on September 17, 1881.
According to some medical historians, Garfield probably would not have died had he simply been left alone. What killed him, they say, was not the bullet, which became wrapped in a protective cyst, but infections caused by unsterile instruments and hands—infections that Garfield’s body could not resist because the President had become weak after staying in bed for two months. Of course, Garfield’s doctors, some of the best in the country, did not have the benefit of present-day knowledge.
And the bullet? In the autopsy it was located a full ten inches from where the doctors and Alexander Graham Bell had said it was. Bell’s contraption had been no more accurate than a divining rod. Did Bell and Mrs. Garfield want to hear a hum so desperately that both simply imagined it? Or was it perhaps the sound of the President’s metal-spring bed? It is impossible to say. Bell’s invention, however, was not a total failure. Later, in a more elaborate form, it worked—for the army in the detection of land mines.
SOURCES: Rudolph Marx, The Health of the Presidents (New York: Putnam’s, 1960), p. 242; American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents of the United States (New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1968), p. 530.
Bell trying to locate the bullet in Garfield’s body. (Leslie’s Illustrated, August 20, 1881, p. 421.)
The corpse of President Garfield being embalmed. (Leslie’s Illustrated, October 8, 1881, p. 85.)
THE NEAR DEATH OF A PRESIDENT
The best-kept secret of the Chester A. Arthur administration was that the president was terminally ill with Bright’s disease and spent his last years in office knowing he could very well die before his term ended. Because of the unstable economic and political situation, Arthur reasoned that the public should not be told about his health problem. Already he labored under the burden of stepping into the White House upon the death of James Garfield. To announce that the new president might not live out h
is term would seriously damage his ability to govern. Instead, Arthur filled the White House with laughter and pretended nothing was wrong. The President knew that the more active he was the greater his chance of succumbing to the disease. Yet he even made a halfhearted attempt to gain his party’s nomination for another term. Arthur survived his nearly four years in office, and did not die until a year and a half later, in 1886.
SOURCE: Thomas C. Reeves, Gentleman Boss (New York: Knopf, 1975), pp. 367, 374.
JESSE JAMES: THE ROBIN HOOD OF AMERICA
Folk legends surround the life of Old West outlaw Jesse James. Once, it has been told, while Jesse and his brother Frank were riding in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains with the Younger brothers, they stopped at a small, out-of-the-way cabin to ask for food. The sole occupant of the house was a poor, saddened woman whose husband had recently passed away. Overcoming any apprehension, the woman kindly agreed to throw some scraps together and feed the strangers. Once inside, however, Jesse sensed that something terrible was troubling the widow.
“Won’t you tell us what’s the matter?” he questioned earnestly.
After hesitating slightly the woman opened up. Her cabin, she wept, was mortgaged to the hilt. The banker, a heartless old skinflint, was expected that very day, and if she did not have the money he would foreclose. Sobbing, the woman confessed to her guests that she did not have a dime.
Jesse ate in silence, pondering the problem. Finally he asked, “How much do you owe this man?”
“Eight hundred dollars,” came the answer.
“What does he look like and how will he be traveling?” Jesse asked.
The widow told him.
Unbeknownst to her, the James-Younger gang had been doing business in the Ozark area and Jesse had a considerable sum of money with him.
“It so happens,” said Jesse, “I have that much money with me and I’m going to loan it to you.”
The woman looked at him in startled disbelief, then began to weep again. “I’ll work my fingers to the bone, but I don’t know when I can pay you back,” she cried.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Jesse reassured her. “I’ll stop by sometime, then if you have it, you can pay me back.”
“Now, you want to do this in a businesslike way,” continued the outlaw, “so you ought to protect yourself. This gentleman here,” he said, indicating his brother Frank, “will write out a receipt. Then you copy it in ink in your own handwriting. Before you pay over the money, you make the man sign the receipt. That’s the proper way to conduct business. He’d make you do the same. And don’t tell him anyone has been here. Now, will you do as I say?”
“Yes, sir,” cried the astonished widow. “I think you are wonderful.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” replied a humble Jesse. “I like to help deserving people when I can.”
Later that afternoon, long after the James-Younger gang had departed, the skinflint banker called at the house of the widow. Disappointed that he would not be able to foreclose, he quickly took his eight hundred dollars, signed the receipt, and left. On his way home, however, about three miles from the widow’s cabin, he was surprised by three mounted men. While one of the robbers held the banker’s horse, another searched the man’s belongings and, oddly enough, found eight hundred dollars. The outlaws then unbridled the banker’s horse and sent it frantically galloping down the road, leaving him on foot. Their business finished, the thieves then rode away, eight hundred dollars richer. They were never captured or identified.
SOURCE: Homer Croy, Jesse James Was My Neighbor (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949), p. 100.
ONE CANNOT SHOOT WHITE MEN
The Old West range war between the farmers and the ranchers could be fairly unpredictable. Charley Coffee, an old Texas trail driver who had settled on a ranch in the western Nebraska–eastern Wyoming area, once told how everything there was pretty quiet until 1885, when “the Northwestern Railroad came poking in.” Then the farmers, or “festive grangers,” moved in, claiming, under the Homestead Act, 160-acre tracts of open land and surrounding them with barbed-wire fences. These farmer-pioneers created problems by squatting on the best watering holes in the territory and closing them off to the rancher and his cattle. The situation was delicate because, as Coffee noted, “It was not like the Indians for one couldn’t shoot.” So Coffee did the next best thing: he opened a bank. As he later explained to a friend, “The only way I could do to get even was to go into the banking business, so I am there.” The homesteaders were generally poor folk, and Coffee’s bank was more than willing to provide them with generous loans—at high interest. Sooner or later the struggling farmers would have trouble with their payments, and Coffee’s bank would quickly foreclose on their mortgages. After a while the area’s homesteader problem cleared up, as banker Coffee acquired under fee-simple ownership the same lands that rancher Coffee had earlier used as open range.
SOURCE: Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (Cheyenne, Wyo.: S. A. Bristol Company, 1923), p. 28.
JUSTIFICATION FOR THE GHOST DANCE WAR
A month before he died, William R. Travers, the famous Indian fighter, discussed the army’s implementation of U.S. policy with regard to the Indians. The last great Indian uprising, the Ghost Dance War, was in progress and a report had come about how General Nelson Miles’s men had killed Sitting Bull.
“Been killing more Indians out west again, General,” stated a friend who was reading the newspaper account of the Indian war.
“Yes,” replied Travers, “the newspapers kill a good many Injuns. They kill more than the troops do. Why, if we killed half as many Injuns as the newspapers do, we’d be short of Injuns!”
“Is it right to kill these Injuns?”
“Dancing Injuns, ain’t they? Ghost dancers?”
“Yes.”
“Well, now,” responded the general with mock gravity, “hasn’t Sam Jones, and Moody, and the entire Methodist Church been trying to break up dancing for years? Of course they haven’t succeeded. Now I’m glad that the strong arm of the government has at last united with the Church and taken hold of this dancing question. I hope General Miles will kill or convert every dancer west of the Mississippi, and then I hope the Secretary of War will call on General Howard to arrest the dancers, white or Injun, in the east—in New York and Philadelphia. I tell you dancing and chicken stealing must be stopped in this country.”
SOURCE: Melville D. Landon, Eli Perkins: Thirty Years of Wit (New York: Cassell, 1891), p. 24.
THE HORSE WITH TWO LIVES
The real West and the dime-novel West rarely overlapped. But on December 18, 1890, at the death of Sitting Bull, the two worlds collided.
At the outbreak of the Ghost Dance War, the War Department ordered the arrest of Chief Sitting Bull. Although the Sioux chief was, by 1890, quite old and had lost much of his power within the tribe, the army still feared him as a great antiwhite leader. Forty-three Indian policemen, with the backing of two troops of the Eighth Cavalry just three miles away, were sent to make the arrest.
An hour before dawn the Indian police arrived at Sitting Bull’s cabin. At first the old chief offered no resistance; but when a few policemen tried to speed things up by dressing him roughly, he became angry. A crowd of Sitting Bull supporters gathered. Almost ready to leave, the chief demanded that the Indian police saddle his horse.
Sitting Bull’s was no ordinary horse, but an equine from the staged, showtime West. It had belonged to Buffalo Bill, and Sitting Bull had performed special tricks with it when the Indian had traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. When Sitting Bull left the show to return to the Indian nation, Buffalo Bill, in friendship, gave the trick horse to him as a gesture of the showman’s gratitude.
As the Indian police dragged and pushed Sitting Bull from his cabin, words were exchanged between the chief’s supporters and his abductors. Suddenly, Sitting Bull announced that he was not going. Shots rang out, and with the
first volley Sitting Bull was struck dead, one bullet entering from the front and another from behind. Both bullets were fired by the Indian police.
Oddly, when the shooting started, Sitting Bull’s horse took the cue for his act in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. With bullets flying everywhere, Indian police and Sitting Bull partisans scurrying for cover, the horse began to perform his tricks. Right in the middle of the newly anointed battlefield, he sat down and raised one hoof. Terror-stricken, some of the Indian police thought Sitting Bull’s freed spirit had entered his horse and made the animal do the act. The battle continued for thirty minutes. Fourteen people, from both sides, were killed.
Sitting Bull’s horse, incredibly, was not injured, and an Indian policeman rode him to Fort Yates with news of the battle. Eventually, the chief’s horse was returned to Buffalo Bill, who put him back to work in the Wild West Show. In 1893, at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, the Wild West Show’s cavalry standard-bearer rode Sitting Bull’s old horse.
SOURCE: Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 362.
THE GLORY THAT WAS HARLEM
The area of New York City north of Central Park that is called Harlem was not always an impoverished ghetto. In the middle of the nineteenth century Harlem was recognized throughout the country as the rural retreat of the rich. Cornelius Vanderbilt frequently visited Harlem and ran his horses there. Toward the end of the century Harlem became the center of one of the great real estate booms in American history. Brownstones went up by the dozens overnight, land prices soared, and three elevated railroads were built connecting Harlem to the center of Manhattan. Property became so valuable that descendants of the original owners of the land started a corporation in 1883 to prove their ownership of the commons and the marshes. Among the shareholders were General John C. Frémont and former Vice-President Schuyler Colfax. By 1893 the Harlem Monthly Magazine was boasting that in the near future the village would become “the center of fashion, wealth, culture, and intelligence.”
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