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“I like America, just as everybody else does.
I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.”
Bob Dylan
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It’s only 500 words
long but it may be one of the best pieces of journalism produced in America in
the 19th century. Every sentence holds a precious revelation about
human nature that takes us to places Hawthorne, Thoreau and Whitman (but not
Poe) scarcely dared imagine. Since returning from the South Seas where he lived
among cannibals, (as one did in those times) Otis Massachusetts resident Edward
Hazard has scratched a living as a carny attraction, thrilling his audience
when he remarks that he still has “a yearning for roast baby”. Now he has been
sentenced to a month’s jail for raiding an old neighbour’s pork barrel. Hazard is
unrepentant when a local farmer sneers, “Yer’d better have stuck to man meat
and let the pork alone.” “I wouldn’t want to chew your tough old carkiss,” he
snarls back. You can hear the tobacco juice thud on the sawdusted floor. “Only
five cents to see the oldest cannibal in Berkshire County”, the placard outside
his tent reads, reminding us in its unassuming way that there are several other
human flesh eaters out there in the Massachusetts woods. That world is long
gone now and when you read this article think of the line Jack Nicholson’s
character George Hansen came out with in Easy
Rider. “You know, this
used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with
it.”
The man above is not Edward Hazard but it isn’t hard to
believe it could be. Sometimes it seems there is hardly a portrait of a 19th
century American who doesn’t look like a hell raising Baptist, a liquor crazed
assassin or some other fanatic.
In the 19th
century the US was a wonderful place to be religious. The only restrictions on
belief were what your denomination placed on them and if you disagreed with
those you could always stat your own church. Hundreds did, including John
Noyes. The Oneida community he established in the late 1830s (contemporaneously
with Mormonism) is famous for two things. One was its doctrine on sexual
practices, a litany of codes of conduct that included ‘complex marriage’
wherein every man in the community was married to every woman and two people
could not live together exclusively without a third’s permission. ‘Male
Continence’ required that men should not ejaculate inside women, an idea that
stemmed from Noyes’ wife Harriet delivering several stillborn children and his
subsequent notion that he had wasted a fair bit of seed in the process.
“Ascending Fellowship’ was the most dubious. Younger members had to learn the
distinction between sex and love ad one way was to introduce virgins to other
members ‘closer to God’, that is, older. It meant of course that older men in
the community had their choice of virgin girls though the older women were expected
to break in the boys. By the 1880s the communities scattered across the north
east of the USA had started to fracture and one tried and tested American way
to reunite them was to form a joint stock company, so Oneida Inc was formed,
becoming famous throughout the US as the manufacturer of silverware and cheap
ceramics. Later it branched into garden furniture.
Given the
proliferation of heretical, communistic, free love sects blossoming across
America in the 1840s and 50s, you might think Catholicism was regarded as fairly
staid, yet no other denomination was regarded with greater suspicion or had as
many rumours of dark practices attached to it. The girls in this tintype were
either photographed in Maine or in Canada, in which case they’d most likely
either be of Irish or French descent.
The newspapers of
the late 19th century are full of news stories of people going mad
on their wedding night, brawling with the in-laws, with jealous suitors and literally
in Adam Symes’ case. In January 1879 he married Jennie Graham after what to all
appearances had been a normal engagement. Around 11 the wedding party broke up
and the newly titled Mr and Mrs Symes went to bed. About an hour later Adam
Symes left the house, only partly dressed (whatever precisely that means, but
it was mid-winter) and wasn’t seen till Sunday, five days later, when the
owners of a hotel in a nearby village brought him home. He had no recollection
of being married and didn’t recognize his wife. The next stop was the asylum.
A slower fuse burned
in Uriah Wales’ brain. After his wife made a joke about his church, the Free
Christians, he announced that he would not speak to her until she’d ‘seen the
error of her ways’. From then on
all correspondence was conducted with their son as the go-between. Ten years later
Wales was in church when his wife entered, walked to the front and announced,
‘I do not believe any man who is truly religious can ignore his wife for ten
years. Uriah, get down on your knees, be awakened to the error of your ways and
ask forgiveness for your sins.” Shocked, or embarrassed, Wales ran out and
wasn’t seen by anyone until the next Sunday when he suddenly appeared at the
church door, walked down the aisle and embraced his wife. “The Lord has
forgiven all,” he announced. ”And I am a Christian at last.” Good to hear.
Maybe the humour has
dated but 120 years ago people laughed at the same things we do, especially
marriage. He has been off to the Married Men’s Club. Such places still exist,
mostly it seems as support groups, that is, in complete agreement with, men who
want to have affairs or spend a few guilt free hours at a strip club.
Cupid looks on
approvingly as she burns an impressive stack of letters. Was this an actual
ritual back then? The peculiarities of marriage make you think it may have
been.
Heartbroken at the news the boy she was betrothed to had
been killed at the battle of Wilson’s Creek, the girl took to her room with a
chicken as her only companion. They ate meals off the same plate and her family
overheard her having long conversations with it. Somehow – the newspapers
skipped over this bit - a dog killed the bird. Thereafter she sat by the
window, refusing to speak to her family or take food, and stared out the window
at the clouds.
A few years later Elizabeth Krehber, 20, appeared before a
magistrate in Brooklyn claiming her husband had beaten her. When the husband,
Christian Krehber, appeared to answer the allegations an alternative story
emerged. Mr Krehber, 75, said he had arranged for the marriage with a certain
Caspar, peddler and occasional bride finder. Christian at least confirmed
Elizabeth’s assertion the marriage was not happy. He stated that she frequently
beat him about the head, once with an axe. She also broke one of his fingers.
On April 19 1897
Kansas farmer Alexander Hamilton added his story to the hundreds of other
reports of the strange aircraft seen over the plains in the last year. Most
witnesses had played it down, describing a ubiquitous cigar shaped machine that
did little more than emit a loud hum and scare the livestock, but Hamilton
claimed he’d seen one of the occupants lean out, lasso one of his heifers and
haul it on board. The dead animal was discovered on a neighbour’s property the
next day, with no hoof-prints nearby. The problem was – this came out much
later – Hamilton belonged to a liars’ club. He and his pals passed the time in
the general store making up tall tales, which says something about the dearth
of entertainments available in those times. Go forward six years and another
from those parts, William Martin, began producing real photo postcards of giant
corn-cobs, potatoes, apples, rabbits and locusts. The same down-home sense of
humour intended to raise the same dry chuckles, but Martin can be credited with
helping to create an indigenous vernacular. In a few years exaggeration
postcards like his would be all over the Midwest.
The real mystery of
the 1896 – 97 UFO sightings incidentally is who was flying a powered dirigible
over the Midwest of the US and why did he keep his identity hidden. Aeronauts
already acknowledged that such a vehicle was feasible and whoever first
successfully built one stood to become rich.
What did Americans
think of that land above the 60˚ parallel? Canadians did burn down the White House
in 1812, which no doubt left some with a grudge that would live on through the
generations (technically speaking it was the British but they came from across
the border), and they spoke French up there, which was reason enough not to
trust them, but mostly you think the country itself was considered a vast
wasteland of snow and forest, until gold was discovered on the Klondike River
in 1895. The Yukon was probably the worst place in the world to find gold;
officially the climate is considered sub-arctic, but that only means it could
hit lows of -50˚ in the winter while the summers were short, brutally humid and
infested with mosquitoes and black flies. So what inspired a group of New York
women from the city’s wealthiest and most notable families to establish the
Woman’s Klondike Expedition Syndicate in 1897? You might want to think they had
a grand dream for women to seize the control of capital but the scheme involved
travelling by Pullman coach across the US, by steamer to arrive in Dawson City
then leave for the goldfields in a series of supremely outfitted horse drawn
vans complete with sleeping quarters and wait-staff. Before leaving New York
the women were expected to buy some of their own provisions including a small
pillow and two corduroy dresses lined with flannel. “This expedition,” the
prospectus read, “goes out in the early Spring, thoroughly equipped and
bounteously provisioned.” Among the crew would be a surgeon, an assayer and a
photographer. Somehow, but you have to say not surprisingly, the Woman’s
Klondike Expedition Syndicate quietly disappeared from the news pages.
Whoever produced
this postcard ignored one of Martin’s essential rules. You weren’t seriously meant
to think his images were genuine but you were expected to wonder why they
looked like they were.
See Niagara Falls
and die. A lot did, some accidentally though you wouldn’t say by chance when
their barrel smashed on the rocks below, while others were drowned attempting
to navigate the whirlpools in a reckless effort to get as close to the cascades
as possible. But Niagara Falls was also a favoured destination for suicides. This
is understandable; anyone who leaped from the top knew they couldn’t survive.
The odd thing is that to get to the Falls from Toronto or New York, where most
of the suicides came from, required time, money and effort, three things likely
to dissuade any but the most determined. Niagara Falls was a very public place
to do yourself in. At any time of the year it was full of sightseers so suicide
was an exhibition, a display of revenge against a world that had disappointed.
No real surprises then that most jumped with a broken heart. Nothing else is so
likely to make sensitive souls feel that the world is against them.
No surprise either
that Niagara Falls was the honeymoon capital of North America. What could be
more romantic than facing nature’s awesome power while holding the hand of your
new spouse? Where else could you experience the sheer magnitude of your life-changing
decision so viscerally? What’s a little hard to understand then is why so many
honeymooners chose to be photographed in a studio with the Falls as a painted
backdrop when the real thing was just metres away? It would be considered very
peculiar today to travel to Niagara Falls and be photographed against a studio
prop. Back then the photographer’s studio was an essential stop of the
honeymooners’ itinerary.
He looks like the
culprit behind this story reported in 1872 – long before he was born, but
that’s not important. At a school picnic in Idaho a boy kills a snake, species
unspecified, and wraps it around a girl’s neck. She screams, understandably,
and can’t be consoled, throwing a dampener on the event. A week later however
she seems to have recovered and leaves her house. On the street she meets the
boy, is convulsed with panic and drops dead.
But he called also
be the boy known only as Jaggers. Offended that he was asked to donate money
for the hungry children of India, he reasoned that their life was better than
his. He after all didn’t have the opportunity to hunt tigers or go about all
day dressed in nothing more than a loincloth. Gathering ten of his school
friends together, he had them to dress in rags and coat themselves in coal dust
then they marched to Sunday School where he announced that he was founding a
new religion and the Christians ought to donate to their charity. A severe
caning was enough to persuade him to fear the Lord.
We – non-Americans,
that is – still think America is strange but when we say that these days it’s
usually with the implication that something has gone wrong, or been lost. The
carnival sideshow is a thing of the past. You have to be in your fifties to
remember an actual half man/half woman, boxing tents and girlie shows, and a
bit older than that to recall a time when you couldn’t leave the grounds
without having your photo taken in a studio car, boat or plane. People will say
that the freaks moved out of the sideshow and into the streets but America
staked its credibility on being open to outsiders, and excess, so no one was
too surprised to hear of cannibals living in the Massachusetts forest and to
make your new religion work you had to sell notions that were far fetched
enough to convince some you couldn’t be making it up. Look at the faces of
these two. This is the stuff that has really been lost, a belief in the power
of innocence.
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