Journal Notes

President Lincoln wrote this letter after an aide told him about a Boston widow whose five sons had been killed fighting for the Union armies.  As Carl Sandburg wrote, “More darkly than the Gettysburg speech the letter wove its awful implication that human freedom so often was paid for with agony.”  Here is an American president understanding that agony, sharing it, and performing a heartfelt rite, as Sandburg put it, “as though he might be a ship captain at midnight by lantern light, dropping black roses into the immemorial sea for mystic remembrance and consecration.”  In a letter dated November 21, 1864, President Lincoln wrote the following to Mrs. Bixby in Boston, Massachusetts.  “Dear Madam, I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.  I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.  But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save.  I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.  Yours very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln.”  We now know that Lincoln had been misinformed:  two of Mrs. Bixby’s sons had been killed in action, one was taken prisoner, and two deserted.  The error does not stand in the way of the letter’s deserved fame.  Mrs. Bixby’s loss and sacrifice hardly could have been greater.  Lives are still being lost to save a nation. 

It might seem as though the idea of exercising and eating right was a notion unheard of prior to the 21^st century, but that’s not the case.  According to the December 9, 1882 edition of the New York Medical Gazette, women physicians, however rare they were at the time, subscribed to the belief that a “healthy diet and a brisk turn about the neighborhood is good for the mind and body.”  I personally don’t care how far back the idea of exercise and eating right extends.  I hate to exercise or eat right.  When I think about it, the only exercise program that has ever worked for me is occasionally getting up in the morning and jogging my memory to remind myself exactly how much I hate to exercise and to pick up another box of Cap’n Crunch next time I venture out of my office.  Walking?  Walking?  If it’s so good for you, how come my mailman looks like Jabba the Hut with a quirky thyroid?  But I digress.  In the summer of 1882, a patient who wanted to lose weight visited Doctor Phyllis Groussin of Denver.  Doctor Groussin put the 252 pound woman on a brown rice only diet and told her to march around her the neighborhood twice a day.  After a week the dieter returned to the doctor complaining of “giddiness, headaches, difficulty in walking, and a want of accuracy in manual movements.”  Fearing apoplexy, Doctor Groussin turned all her attention in that direction and prescribed purgatives, mustard footbaths and bicarbonate soda to dilute the blood.  The doctor found out by accident that her patient was mixing the footbath water with whiskey and drinking it.  The patient thought the concoction would help her in her efforts to “march around the neighborhood.”  Now that’s a fitness goal.  If you’re interested in learning more about women physicians of the Old West read The Doctor Wore Petticoats.  Visit www.chrisenss.com for more information.    

While traveling to Rawlins, Wyoming from Salt Lake City I stopped at a spot that used to be a bustling army fort from 1868-1886. Fort Fred Steele was established by Major Richard I. Dodge, 30^th U.S. Infantry in Carbon County, Wyoming.  Dodge named the fort after Colonel Frederick Steele of the 20^th U.S. Infantry.  Fort Steele was one of three military forts designed to protect the Union Pacific Railroad route through Wyoming. It was established at a strategic point where the railroad crossed the North Platte River. Original military structures at Fort Steele included a commanding officer’s quarters, two large warehouses, a powder magazine, two enlisted barracks and a number of smaller structures. After the post closed in 1886 a small community grew up in and around the abandoned fort. In 1922 the transcontinental Lincoln Highway was routed right along the edge of the fort but it was rerouted in 1939 and the town faded away. There were no other tourists around the day I visited Fort Steele.  At times it was so quiet I could almost hear history.  Then a 21st century train would come through and it drowned out any imagined sounds of the past.   

Wyoming and Montana are lovely states.  Getting there — not so much.  I got lost a couple of times while trying to locate the spot where a crime was committed in 1910 and needed help.  I resisted asking for directions because often times the conversation begins with “You want to head north seven miles…”  Head north?!  I would but I left my compass back in, that’s right, the fourth grade.  I’d be so much better off if folks would just point.  And then there’s air travel.  Flying anywhere has become an amazingly arduous process. I’m always stuck behind a guy who takes forever to get situated.  He’s clogging the aisle like a piece of human cholesterol jammed in the passengerial artery.  He folds his sport jacket like he’s in the color guard at Arlington National Cemetery.  There’s a lot of terrorism in the air, but you know when you walk through the airport and see the crack security people manning the perimeter, I think we all sleep the sleep of angels.  Can you hear my eyes rolling?  In spite of the hassle it was a fruitful research trip.  I stood at a section of the Oregon Trail and imagined the brave souls that traveled along the way.  A little company of Astorians, fur hunters by trade, were the first to make out the long road down the valley of the Platte which became the primary artery of travel to and from the northern Rockies.  I can’t imagine how difficult travel must have been in the early 1800s.  I’m guessing they had compasses.  That would have made it much easier for sojourners when they stopped for directions and a kind soul told them, “You want to head north seven miles.”

Oregon Trail

One of the students in the Sunday school class I teach is an aspiring cowboy.  With rare exception he comes to Bible study dressed as a cowboy.  Corbin believes Roy Rogers is the finest movie cowboy he’s ever seen.  I feel the same way.   A few weeks ago Corbin and I had a serious discussion about whether or not Roy Rogers knew karate.  I agreed that Roy Rogers was good with his fists, but that I’d never seen the King of the Cowboys deliver a side kick to the throat of a bad guy.  Corbin was appalled.  He insisted that not only was Rogers capable of performing a roundhouse to the temple, but did so in most every movie he ever made.  I argued the point noting that the issue of the spurs strapped to Rogers’ boots would have seriously wounded anyone he battled.  Roy Rogers might have been a little rough with outlaws, but he never cut them.  Corbin said he did because the spurs were really Ninja fighting stars.  So, I looked it up.  A cowhand did not buckle on a pair of spurs until he’d filed the sharp rowels to make them blunt. Sharp rowels made a horse nervous and Roy Rogers could never have reached the bad guy’s hideout on a nervous Trigger.  Spurs were used to signal quick action to a horse, not for cruel gigging or cutting the throat of an outlaw.  I can’t wait to talk to Corbin further about this matter.  At five-years-old he thinks he knows everything.     

Brigham Young became an explorer and hero to many when he embarked on the best-organized westward migration in U.S. history in 1847.  Motivated by a vision to find a safe haven for his religious ideas, he brought the Mormon Church to Utah and, in so doing, helped shaped the American West.  When he came upon the Great Salt Lake Valley, he said, “It is enough, this is the right place.”  For thirty years he supervised Mormon settlements in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and California.  Before Young died at the age of seventy-six in 1877 of acute appendicitis, he had more than fifty wives.

Daniel Boone, America’s most famous pioneer hero, had set off into a hostile world without roads, toting only a flintlock musket and a knife; the region was so wild he reportedly killed over ten thousand bears while he surveyed and settled vast virgin wildernesses of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri.  In 1820, at the age of eight-five, Boone west on his final hunting trip near his home in St. Charles, Missouri, caught pneumonia, and died.  Although he spent his life in the woods and claimed a lot of property for himself and family, he lost it all to the slick dealings of investors using issues of unclear titles and creditor’s liens to strip him of all but his name.  His funeral was held in his son’s barn instead of the house; hundreds showed up unexpectedly to pay their respects.  Many remember a TV show that portrayed Daniel Boone wearing a coonskin cap.  He actually wore a felt-brim hat in the Quaker style now seen on boxes of oatmeal.  The TV theme song:  “Daniel Boone was a man.  Yes a big man.  With an eye like an eagle and as tall as a mountain was he,” was also a stretch.   Boone was 5 feet 8 and weighed about 175 pounds.  He did have a keen and active mine and stayed physically fit, a fact that kept him alive long after what he currently considered retirement age.

You’re walking home from Jamba Juice one evening, you’re stopped by a young drifter who wants directions-and a smoke, if you have one.  You don’t.  You’re sorry, but you don’t smoke.  Okay, he says.  And as you walk away, he shoots you in the back of the head, your half-eaten, strawberry-banana smoothie with the shot of vitamin Q and your left eye spattering a young man twenty yards across the street.  Shortly thereafter, the police happen to pick up the drifter for jaywalking, and find him with the still-warm gun in his pocket and your still-cold smoothie in his hand.  He is then identified by the young man and arraigned.  But then, as you watch-perched on a fluffy cloud in heaven-the legal system starts to kill you all over again.  The gun isn’t admissible as evidence because it was found without probable cause.  After all, they had only stopped him for jaywalking at that point.  And the young man is discredited as an eyewitness because he usually wears glasses, and that dusky night he wasn’t wearing them, the truth being, he just needs them for reading.  Besides, the defense attorney reveals, he lives in a neighborhood with an abortion clinic, and what does that make him?  Plus, this fellow who shot you-his attorney will tell you he was once taken advantage of by one of the employees at Jamba Juice and you were taunting him with your smoothie.  Now, as you stand there next to Charles Bronson in the great beyond (that’s one of the first souls I hope to meet there) and watch this cruel and ironic Catch-22 unfold – this insane sequence of events that leads up to the dismissal of all charges against the drifter who ended your life on that fine summer evening-as you watch this bizarre, almost synaptic set of occurrences fall into place like a chain of perverse dominoes that has been kicked over by Eric Holder-all you can think to yourself is, “Hey, I know where I’ve seen this before!  Mouse Trap!  And if you think I am stretching it with that little parable, well just look at the newspaper this past week.  Most of the population thinks the only thing that’s happening in the world is the Trayvon Martin case, but last Tuesday, two hundred forty pounds of cocaine was disallowed as evidence in a drug case because the trooper who found it stopped the suspects’ car for failure to display a front license plate.  The case was thrown out because, legally, Pennsylvania only requires a rear plate.  Well you know something?  That’s just exquisite bologna.  And I know.  I eat a lot of bologna for lunch.  I also know that every ACLU hysteric who might be reading this is now jumping up on their desk screaming, “Rules of evidence!  Rules of evidence!”  But I think I speak for the general public when I say, “Take your nit-picking neurotic little rules of evidence and stick them up your understanding noses,” because quite frankly, I haven’t seen judgment this bad since I lost to that petite,  Meg Ryan look-a-like on “Search for America’s Funniest Person.”  Yeah, yeah, not that I dwell on that.  The frightening reality is every day this society seems to make its legal decisions in much the same way the Archies picked their vacation spots-blindfold Jughead, give him a dart, and spin the globe.  The whole system is maddening! And I know some of you are thinking, “doesn’t she usually write about the Old West?”  Hey, I mentioned Charles Bronson.