The Long Memory

The Long Memory · October 24, 1852 Daniel Webster died at Marshfield on this day, and his last words, "I still live," are well remembered. Fewer people know he composed his own epitaph and had it cut on his stone. It opens "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," and admits the "vastness of the Universe" had "sometimes shaken my reason for the faith which is in me." The detail most people miss is how it ends: "my heart has always assured and reassured me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be a Divine Reality. The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a merely human production."

A grizzly once took nearly all of Jedediah Smith's head in its mouth. He was 24, and he talked his men through sewing his scalp back on. Black Hills, 1823. Smith was leading a small party of William Ashley's trappers west when a grizzly charged out of a brushy river bottom. It knocked him flat, broke several ribs, and tore his scalp open from his left eye to his right ear. Nobody knew what to do. James Clyman, who had never dressed a wound in his life, asked the captain. Smith told him to send for water, find a needle and thread, and start sewing. Clyman cut away the hair and stitched what he could. Then he reached the ear, torn nearly off, and said he could do nothing for it. Clyman told the rest nearly fifty years later, in his 1871 narrative: "O you must try to stich up some way or other said he." So he did, "through and through and over and over." Smith rode his horse into camp that day. The next spring his party crossed South Pass, the gap the wagon trains would follow west for a generation.

Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872. No member of Congress had seen Yellowstone when Moran's watercolors and William Henry Jackson's photographs from the 1871 Hayden survey went around the Capitol. On March 1, 1872, Grant signed the act setting it apart "as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." Congress then bought this painting from Moran for $10,000.

In May 1782, a tall 21-year-old enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment under the name Robert Shurtleff. Robert was Deborah Sampson. She had grown up a servant girl in Middleborough after her family broke apart, taught herself to read well enough to teach school, and then cut her hair, put on a man's coat, and signed on for the war. For about a year and a half she marched and fought with the Continental Army in New York. Nobody knew until she came down with a fever in Philadelphia in 1783 and a doctor found out. She was honorably discharged that fall. In January 1792 she asked Massachusetts for the pay she had never received. The General Court granted it and wrote into the record that she "exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism by discharging the duties of a faithful, gallant soldier." Thirty-four pounds, with interest. Years later Paul Revere took up her cause for a federal pension. The oldest proof she served is a pay resolution, and it calls her a gallant soldier.

In 1846 Abraham Lincoln ran for Congress against a backwoods preacher who had spent years sleeping in the woods with his saddle for a pillow. Peter Cartwright grew up in Logan County, Kentucky, a place so lawless people called it Rogues' Harbor. He was converted at a camp meeting in 1801 and was soon riding Methodist circuits through Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1824 he moved his family to Illinois, partly to raise his children away from slavery. His 1856 autobiography describes what a circuit rider's life was really like. He "slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle or saddle-bags for his pillow." The voters sent Lincoln to Washington, 6,340 to 4,829. Cartwright went back to his circuits and kept preaching until he died in 1872. He lost a seat in Congress. He never lost his real district: every cabin a horse could reach.

Frederic Church, Niagara, 1857. No shoreline, no foreground, nothing between you and the edge of the Horseshoe Fall. When it opened in New York on May 1, 1857, tens of thousands paid 25 cents to see this one painting, some with opera glasses. "This is Niagara, with the roar left out!" one critic wrote. (National Gallery of Art)

Oct 29, 1863: Just past midnight in Lookout Valley, Tennessee, a Confederate brigade hit Gen. John White Geary's division in the dark at Wauhatchie Station. The Union line held, and with it the new supply route into starving Chattanooga. At dawn Geary was seen standing alone on the artillery knoll over a dead lieutenant. It was his son Edward, who had enlisted at 16 and was shot through the head while sighting his gun. "I have gained a great victory," Geary wrote his wife, "but oh! how dear it has cost me." Four days later, on their wedding anniversary, he wrote that the boy was "cut down in the bud of his usefulness."

Thomas Cole died suddenly in February 1848. Collector Jonathan Sturges asked Asher Durand to paint Cole beside his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant, on a ledge over Kaaterskill Clove, and gave it to Bryant as thanks for his eulogy. Cole had put the feeling in words in 1836: gazing on "the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind." Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1849). Quote: Cole, Essay on American Scenery.

Nathaniel Bowditch left school at 10 to clerk in a Salem ship chandlery. By his mid-20s he had found about 8,000 errors in the navigation book every sailor trusted. He learned Latin to read Newton, and studied in a library that a Beverly privateer had captured from an Irish scholar during the Revolution. At sea he recomputed the tables himself. In 1802 he published The New American Practical Navigator, written so an ordinary seaman could work out longitude from the moon. Then came the test. Christmas 1803, his ship Putnam was coming home from Sumatra in snow and thick fog. He hadn't seen the sun in three days, and Salem harbor is a field of rocks and ledges. He didn't wait offshore. He ran in on dead reckoning, caught one glimpse of Eastern Point on Cape Ann, and kept going. His log, in its steady hand: "Arrived at Salem Dec. 25 in the evening." The U.S. government still publishes his book. Sailors still call it the Bowditch.

Oct 29, 1792: A British lieutenant rowing up the Columbia River wrote the first description of Oregon's great mountain. William Broughton recorded that "a very distant high snowy mountain now appeared rising beautifully conspicuous." The next day he named it for Admiral Samuel Hood. His words survive in Vancouver's Voyage of Discovery (1798). The detail most people miss: Hood had fought the Americans at the Chesapeake in 1781. And Broughton was only on that river because a Boston captain, Robert Gray, had sailed in five months earlier and named it for his ship, the Columbia. So Oregon's tallest peak carries a British admiral's name, on a river named for an American ship.

George Caleb Bingham painted this in 1845 and titled it "French Trader & Half breed Son." The American Art-Union in New York thought that too controversial and renamed it Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. It sat nearly forgotten until the Met bought it in 1933.

Eliza Lucas was still a teenager when her father sailed back to Antigua in 1739 and left her running the family's plantations outside Charles Town.

At fifteen, Mary Jemison was carried off from her family's farm near Marsh Creek, Pennsylvania, and never went home again. A raiding party of Shawnee warriors and French soldiers took most of the household in the spring of 1758. On the second night they pulled the shoes off Mary's feet and put moccasins on her. Her mother understood what it meant. Mary would be spared. The rest would not. Her mother's last words to her, as Mary recalled them 65 years later: "Don't forget, my little daughter, the prayers that I have learned you—say them often; be a good child, and God will bless you." Her parents and three of her siblings were killed. Two Seneca women adopted her. She married, raised her children in the Genesee Valley, and in 1797 was granted nearly 18,000 acres of the Gardeau Flats. She told James Seaver in 1823 that for years she repeated those prayers whenever she could. Late in life a missionary gave her a Bible, and she loved to hear her neighbors read it to her. She never could read it herself. She kept her mother's words anyway.

Oct 29, 1618: Sir Walter Raleigh, the man who sent England's first colonists to Roanoke and gave Virginia its name, was beheaded in Old Palace Yard, Westminster. He asked to see the axe, felt the edge, and said, "This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases." The detail most people miss: told to lay his head toward the east, where the Lord rose, he answered, "So the heart be right, it is no great matter which way the head lieth." He never set foot in Virginia. The name outlived him.

John Colter outran a Blackfeet war party stark naked, barefoot, across six miles of prickly pear. And lived. He had crossed the continent with Lewis and Clark. On the way home he asked to be discharged early so he could go back to the mountains and trap beaver. In 1808, near the Three Forks of the Missouri, hundreds of Blackfeet caught him and his partner John Potts. Potts fought and was killed. They stripped Colter and the chief asked if he could run fast. Colter said he was a very bad runner. He was lying. He ran until blood poured from his nose. When the one warrior who caught him lunged with a spear, Colter stopped, spun, and took it from him. Then he dove into the Jefferson Fork and hid under a raft of driftwood until dark. He walked seven days to Lisa's fort on the Bighorn, living on wild roots, his feet full of thorns. The naturalist John Bradbury heard it from Colter himself in St. Louis and printed it in his Travels in the Interior of America (1817): "These were circumstances under which almost any man but an American hunter would have despaired."

Benjamin West painted William Penn's treaty with the Lenape in 1771–72, nearly ninety years after it happened. A year before he ever landed, Penn wrote to them from London: "I desire to win and gain your love and friendship by a kind, just, and peaceable life." Penn to the Lenape, Oct. 18, 1681

The Long Memory · October 29, 1814 Robert Fulton's Demologos, the world's first steam warship, slid into New York's East River before cheering crowds. "There is now no room to doubt," Fulton wrote weeks later, "that when finished she will run from 4½ to 5 miles an hour in still water." He died that February before she was done. The minute guns at his funeral were fired from her deck.

In 1809 a Kentucky woman rode 60 miles on horseback so a country doctor could cut her open with no anesthesia. Jane Todd Crawford was 45, and her doctors thought she was carrying twins. Dr. Ephraim McDowell of Danville examined her on Dec. 13 and found no baby. It was an ovarian tumor, and no surgeon anywhere had ever removed one and kept the patient alive. He told her so. In his own 1817 report he wrote that she "appeared willing to undergo an experiment." She made the winter ride to Danville with the tumor resting on her saddle. He operated on Christmas Day. Family tradition says she repeated Psalms the whole time. It took about 25 minutes, and the tumor and its sac weighed more than 22 pounds. McDowell's next line is the one I love: "In five days I visited her, and much to my astonishment found her engaged in making up her bed." She lived another 32 years. Modern abdominal surgery began on the frontier, with a woman brave enough to make that ride.

George Caleb Bingham, "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap" (1851–52). Boone's first try at moving his family to Kentucky ended in October 1773, when his eldest son was killed on the trail and the party turned back. He went again in 1775. Filson's 1784 narrative has him calling Kentucky "a second paradise," worth "the risk of my life and fortune."

The British army once sentenced Daniel Morgan to 500 lashes. It was 1756. Morgan was a young Virginia wagoner hauling supplies for the British in the French and Indian War. A lieutenant struck him with the flat of his sword. Morgan knocked him out with one punch. The court-martial was quick. The whipping nearly killed him, and the scars ran from his shoulders to his waist for the rest of his life. Decades later, when a minister, the Rev. William Hill, saw those scars and asked about them, Morgan laughed. He said the drummer had miscounted. King George promised 500 and gave 499, "so, he has been owing me one lash ever since." He did not wait on the debt. Morgan led riflemen at Quebec and Saratoga, and on January 17, 1781, at the Cowpens in South Carolina, he routed Banastre Tarleton's army in about an hour. The wagoner the British flogged ended the war as one of their most feared generals.

The Long Memory · October 25, 1774 Fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, signed a pledge to give up British tea and cloth, calling it "a duty which we owe, not only to our near and dear connections... but to ourselves." London answered with this mocking print. The detail most people miss is a loyalist's letter home from London to his brother: "Is there a Female Congress at Edenton, too?"