Category: History

Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.

Homesteading

In case you were wondering, public land was sold to homesteaders before the Homestead Act made it essentially free. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the price was $1.25 an acre.

The Homestead Act

From Today in History at the Library of Congress:

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The act provided settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land after payment of a filing fee and five years of continuous residence. Designed to spur Western migration, the Homestead Act culminated a twenty-year battle to distribute public lands to citizens willing to farm. Concerned free land would lower property values and reduce the cheap labor supply, Northern businessmen opposed the movement. Unlikely allies, Southerners feared homesteaders would add their voices to the call for abolition of slavery. With Southerners out of the picture in 1862, the legislation finally passed.

The National Park Service provides some additional background.

People interested in Homesteading first had to file their intentions at the nearest Land Office. A brief check for previous ownership claims was made for the plot of land in question, usually described by its survey coordinates. The prospective homesteader paid a filing fee of $10 to claim the land temporarily, as well as a $2 commission to the land agent.

With application and receipt in hand, the homesteader then returned to the land to begin the process of building a home and farming the land, both requirements for “proving” up at the end of five years. When all requirements had been completed and the homesteader was ready the take legal possession, the homesteader found two neighbors or friends willing to vouch for the truth of his or her statements about the land’s improvements and sign the “proof” document.

After successful completion of this final form and payment of a $6 fee, the homesteader received the patent for the land, signed with the name of the current President of the United States. This paper was often proudly displayed on a cabin wall and represented the culmination of hard work and determination.

Across the Pond

Charles Lindbergh departed Long Island for Paris on this date in 1927.

Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland for Ireland on this date in 1932, the first woman to solo the Atlantic.

With Lewis and Clark

Tuesday, May 15, 1804

It rained during the greater part of last night and continued untill 7 OCk. A. M. after which the Prarty proceeded, passed two Islands and incamped on the Stard. shore at Mr. Fifer’s landing opposite an Island, the evening was fair. some wild gees with their young brudes were seen today. the barge run foul three several times —on logs, and in one instance it was with much difficulty they could get her off; happily no injury was sustained, tho’ the barge was several minutes in eminent danger; this was cased by her being too heavily laden in the stern. Persons accustomed to the navigation of the Missouri and the Mississippi also below the mouth of this river, uniformly take the precaution to load their vessels heavyest in the bow when they ascend the stream in order to avoid the danger incedent to runing foul of the concealed timber which lyes in great quantities in the beds of these rivers

Lewis

Tuesday 15— rained all last night and this morning untill 7 oClock, all our fire extinguished, Some Provisions on the top of the Perogus wet, I sent two men to the Countrey to hunt, & proceed on at 9 oClock, and proceeded on 9 miles and Camped at a Mr Pip:[er’s] Landing just below a Coal Bank on the South Side the prarie Comes with ¼ of a mile of the river on the N. Side I sent to the Setlements in the Pairie & purchased fowls &. one of the Perogue are not Sufficently maned to Keep up.

Clark

Source: Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online

With Lewis and Clark

NewMexiKen is not going to include journal entries from Lewis and Clark every day of the bicentennial, but let’s get them off to a good start. This is Clark’s first entry of the Field Notes (River Journal). I should have posted it yesterday (May 14).

Set out from Camp River a Dubois at 4 oClock P. M. and proceded up the Missouris under Sail to the first Island in the Missouri and Camped on the upper point opposit a Creek on the South Side below a ledge of limestone rock Called Colewater, [2] made 4½ miles, the Party Consisted of 2, Self one frenchman and 22 Men in the Boat of 20 ores, 1 Serjt. & 7 french in a large Perogue, a Corp and 6 Soldiers in a large Perogue. [3] a Cloudy rainey day. wind from the N E. men in high Spirits

Clark

Source: Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online

Promontory Summit

Most people have heard about driving the Golden Spike at Promontory Point. The facts may be surprising. The Golden Spike Ceremony, which took place May 10, 1869, was held at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, thirty-seven miles north of Promontory Point, and nobody ever attempted to “drive” a golden spike.

Read what really happened.

And the Continent was spanned with iron

From The New York Times, 135 years ago:

GreatEvent.jpgPromontory, Utah, Monday, May 10 — The long-looked-for moment has arrived. The construction of the Pacific Railroad is un fait accompli. The inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard and the dwellers on the Pacific slopes are henceforth emphatically one people. Your correspondent is writing on Promontory Summit amid the deafening shouts of the multitude, with the tick, tick, of the telegraph close to his ear.

*****

Announcement in Washington of the Completion of the Road- Scene in the Telegraph Office

Special Dispatch to the New York Times

Washington, Monday, May 10 — The completion of the Pacific Railroad has monopolized public attention here to-day to the exclusion of everything else. The feeling is one of hearty rejoicing at the completion of this great work. There were no public observances, but the arrangements made by the telegraph company to announce the completion of the road simultaneously with the driving of the last spike were perfect. At 2:20 this afternoon, Washington time, all the telegraph offices in the country were notified by the Omaha telegraph office to be ready to receive the signals corresponding to the blows of the hammer that drove the last spike in the last rail that united New York and San Francisco with a band of iron. Accordingly Mr. Tinker, Manager of the Western Union Telegraph Office in this city, placed a magnetic bell-sounder in the public office of that Company, corner Fourteenth-street and the avenue, connected the same with the main lines, and notified the various offices that he was ready. New-Orleans instantly responded, the answer being read from the bell-taps. New-York did the same. At 2:27 P.M., Promontory Point, 2,400 miles west of Washington, said to the people congregated in the various telegraph offices:

“Almost ready. Hats off; prayer is being offered.”

A silence for the prayer ensued. At 2:40 the bell tapped again, and the office at the Point saPOSTID:

“We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.”

Chicago replied:

“We understand; all are ready in the East.”

Promontory Point: “All ready now; the spike will be driven. The signal will be three dots for the commencement of the blows.”

For a moment the instrument was silent; then the hammer of the magnet tapped the bell. “One, two, three,” the signal; another pause of a few seconds, and the lightning came flashing eastward, vibrating over 2,400 miles between the junction of the two roads and Washington, and the blows of the hammer upon the spike were measured instantly in telegraphic accents on the bell here. At 2:47 P.M., Promontory Point gave the signal, “Done,” and the Continent was spanned with iron.

Harry S Truman…

was born on this date in 1884. NewMexiKen presents this excerpt from a recently located Truman diary, first published here last August.

January 6, 1947 — Arose at 5:45 A.M.[,] read the papers and at 7:10 walked to the station to meet the family. Took 35 minutes. It was a good walk. Sure is fine to have them back. This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone. While I work from early morning until late at night, it is a ghostly place. The floors pop and crack all night long. Anyone with imagination can see old Jim Buchanan walking up and down worrying about conditions not of his making. Then there’s Van Buren who inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor as did poor old James Madison. Of course Andrew Johnson was the worst mistreated of any of them. But they all walk up and down the halls of this place and moan about what they should have done and didn’t. So-you see. I’ve only named a few. The ones who had Boswells and New England historians are too busy trying to control heaven and hell to come back here. So the tortured souls who were and are misrepresented in history are the ones who come back. It’s a hell of a place.

Still is.

Always Coca-Cola

The very first Coca-Cola was sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta on this date in 1886. Dr. John S. Pemberton created the formula, which until 1905 had extracts of cocaine, as well as caffeine-rich kola nut. Bookkeeper Frank Robinson coined the name and it’s his handwriting we know from the trademark.

And on the seventh day it became a tent show

The Library of Congress tells the story of the Monkey Trial:

On May 5, 1925, high school science teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in one of Tennessee’s public schools. Scopes had agreed to act as defendant in a case intended to test Tennessee’s new law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in its public schools. On May 4, the day before Scopes’s arrest, the Chatanooga Times had run an ad in which the American Civil Liberties Union offered to pay the legal fees of a Tennessee teacher who was willing to act as a defendant in a test case. Several Dayton residents hatched a plot at a local drugstore. They hoped that a trial of this type would bring much needed publicity to the tiny town of Dayton.

The men enlisted several local attorneys and one easy-going teacher who believed in academic freedom and in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which states that all organisms developed from earlier forms through a process of natural selection. While volumes of scientific evidence support the theory of evolution, many felt that it contradicted the story of creation as described in the Bible and thus did not want evolution taught in schools.

The trial pitted famous labor and criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow against former senator and secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, who worked for the prosecution. The trial was such a media circus that, on the seventh day in the courtroom, the judge felt compelled to move the proceedings outdoors under a tent due to the unbearable heat and for fear that the weight of all the spectators and reporters would cause the floor to cave in.

As Judge John T. Raulston incrementally disallowed the use of the trial as a forum on the merits or validity of Darwin’s theory, the trial swiftly drew to a close. The jury took only nine minutes to return a verdict of guilty. After all, Scopes had admitted all along that he had, in fact, taught evolution. As the trial came to a close, reporter and critic H.L. Mencken explained to readers of the Baltimore Sun and the American Mercury:

All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant. There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant. Judge Raulston finished the benign business yesterday morning by leaping with soft judicial hosannas into the arms of the prosecution.

When the defense appealed the verdict, the Tennessee State Supreme Court acquitted Scopes on a technicality but upheld the constitutionality of the state law. Not until 1967 did Tennessee lawmakers overturn the law, finally allowing teachers to teach evolution. The trial did bring Dayton, Tennessee a great deal of publicity, mostly comprised of reinforcements of a stereotype of the south as an intellectual backwater, certainly not the type Daytonians had hoped to attract.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City has all the details you could ever want.

Historian With a History

Historian Jon Wiener comments in the Los Angeles Times on the nomination of a new Archivist of the U.S.:

Go ahead, try. Name the archivist of the United States.

It’s a pretty fair bet you failed. The archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, oversees the nation’s most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The position has traditionally been one of the lower-profile jobs in the federal hierarchy, but, as its website notes, the National Archives is not simply “a dusty hoard of ancient history. It is a public trust on which our democracy depends. It enables people to inspect for themselves the record of what government has done.”

The archives collects and preserves the records of government, including many presidential papers and documents from hearings such as those conducted last month by the 9/11 commission. In the next year, the archives will be preparing the release of papers from President George H.W. Bush’s term in office.
…

The White House nominee has a controversial history involving charges of excessive secrecy and of ethical violations. Almost two dozen organizations of archivists and historians have expressed concern about his nomination, and will almost certainly speak against it at Senate hearings later this year.

The charges against Weinstein center on ethical issues involving access to research materials he used in writing two books. Other historians have not been permitted to see his documents and interviews, which violates the standards of the American Historical Assn. and the Society of American Archivists.

Professor Wiener continues.

Calamity Jane

According to her very brief autobiography, Martha Jane Canary was born in Princeton, Missouri, on this date in 1852. That may or may not be any more truthful than the rest of that short work. A decent brief biography is found at the Adams Museum & House web site.

What’s unbelievable is to watch the wonderful portrayal of Jane by Robin Weigert on Deadwood, and then think that Calamity Jane was played by Doris Day in the movie Calamity Jane (1953) and Jane Alexander in the made-for-TV movie Calamity Jane (1984).

“Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

Mary Harris Jones was born on this date in 1830 (or, more likely, 1837). She is better known to us as Mother Jones. The magazine named after her has a nice biographical essay that begins:

Upton Sinclair knew Mother Jones. The author of the best-selling exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, even made her a character in one of his novels, a lightly fictionalized work called The Coal War, which chronicled the bloody Colorado coal strike of 1913-14: “There broke out a storm of applause which swelled into a tumult as a little woman came forward on the platform. She was wrinkled and old, dressed in black, looking like somebody’s grandmother; she was, in truth, the grandmother of hundreds of thousands of miners.”

Stories, Sinclair wrote, were Mother Jones’ weapons, stories “about strikes she had led and speeches she had made; about interviews with presidents and governors and captains of industry; about jails and convict camps.” She berated the miners for their cowardice, telling them if they were afraid to fight, then she would continue on alone. “All over the country she had roamed,” Sinclair concluded, “and wherever she went, the flame of protest had leaped up in the hearts of men; her story was a veritable Odyssey of revolt.”

NewMexiKen has known about Mother Jones since the eponymous magazine first came out in 1976. What amazes me is that I had no knowledge of her before that, despite majoring in American history, and even though “For a quarter of a century, she roamed America, the Johnny Appleseed of activists.”

The essay is well worth reading.

George Washington…

took office as the first President of the United States on this date in 1789. Because neither the House nor Senate achieved a quorum until April, Washington’s unanimous election on February 4, wasn’t made official until April 14. Washington immediately departed Mount Vernon for New York to take the oath and was met along the way with parades and dinners in every little town. As Madison noted, Washington was about the only aspect of the new government that really appealed to people.

Hearst redux

The Hearst Castle web site has brief but thorough biographies of William Randolph Hearst and those around him. It includes this interesting factoid, “At his peak he owned over two dozen newspapers nationwide; in fact, nearly one in four Americans got their news from a Hearst paper.”

William Randolph Hearst…

was born on this date in 1863. Was Hearst the model for Charles Foster Kane? Here is what Orson Welles had to say in 1975 (written to promote a book about Hearst and actress Marion Davies).

When Frederick Remington was dispatched to the Cuban front to provide the Hearst newspapers with sketches of our first small step into American imperialism, the noted artist complained by telegram that there wasn’t really enough shooting to keep him busy. “You make the pictures,” Hearst wired back, “I’ll make the war.” This can be recognized not only as the true voice of power but also as a line of dialogue from a movie. In fact, it is the only purely Hearstian element in Citizen Kane.

There are parallels, but these can be just as misleading as comparisons. If San Simeon hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary for the authors of the movie to invent it. Except for the telegram already noted and the crazy art collection (much too good to resist), In Kane everything was invented.

Let the incredulous take note of the facts.

William Randolph Hearst was born rich. He was the pampered son of an adoring mother. That is the decisive fact about him. Charles Foster Kane was born poor and was raised by a bank. There is no room here for details, but the differences between the real man and the character in the film are far greater than those between the shipowner and the newspaper tycoon.

And what of Susan Alexander? What indeed.

It was a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice, and much in the movie was borrowed from that story, but the man was not Hearst. Susan, Kane’s second wife, is not even based on the real-life soprano. Like most fictional characters, Susan’s resemblance to other fictional characters is quite startling. To Marion Davies she bears no resemblance at all.

Kane picked up Susan on a street corner—from nowhere—where the poor girl herself thought she belonged. Marion Davies was no dim shop-girl; she was a famous beauty who had her choice of rich, powerful and attractive beaux before Hearst sent his first bouquet to her stage door. That Susan was Kane’s wife and Marion was Hearst’s mistress is a difference more important than might be guessed in today’s changed climate of opinion. The wife was a puppet and a prisoner; the mistress was never less than a princess. Hearst built more than one castle, and Marion was the hostess in all of them: they were pleasure domes indeed, and the Beautiful People of the day fought for invitations. Xanadu was a lonely fortress, and Susan was quite right to escape from it. The mistress was never one of Hearst’s possessions: he was always her suitor, and she was the precious treasure of his heart for more than thirty years, until his last breath of life. Theirs is truly a love story. Love is not the subject of Citizen Kane.

Susan was forced into a singing career because Kane had been forced out of politics. She was pushed from one public disaster to another by the bitter frustration of the man who believed that because he had married her and raised her up out of obscurity she was his to use as he might will. There is hatred in that.

Hearst put up the money for many of the movies in which Marion Davies was starred and, more importantly, backed her with publicity. But this was less of a favor than might appear. That vast publicity machine was all too visible; and finally, instead of helping, it cast a shadow—a shadow of doubt. Could the star have existed without the machine? The question darkened an otherwise brilliant career.

As one who shares much of the blame for casting another shadow—the shadow of Susan Alexander Kane—I rejoice in this opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten except for those lucky enough to have seen a few of her pictures: Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened. She was also a delightful and very considerable person.

Archivist of the U.S. update

From Bruce Craig of the National Coalition for History and posted on H-Net

Controversy continues to mount over the Bush administration’s nomination of Allen Weinstein to succeed John Carlin as Archivist of the United States. Press coverage in major newspapers including the Washington Post, New York Times, and other major publications and wire services such as the Associated Press has helped heighten public awareness of the issue that focuses on an apparent attempt by the White House to replace John Carlin as Archivist of the United States with a person of its own choosing.

Due in part to the publicity and to a statement of concern issued by nearly two dozen historical and archival organizations (see http://www.archivists.org/statements/weinstein.asp ), the White House effort to confirm the nominee through an “expedited” appointment process appears to have been thwarted. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee — the committee of jurisdiction that will be making a recommendation to the U.S. Senate about the qualifications of the nominee –indeed will give the Weinstein nomination a full and proper hearing incoming weeks. According to committee spokesperson Leslie Phillips, “We’re just beginning the vetting process…But we will examine him [Weinstein] carefully as we do all nominees.”

Continue reading Archivist of the U.S. update