Category Archives: history

An 18th Century Dying Syphilitic, an Old West Killing, a Legendary Couple, and a Famous Western Song

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(Preface: I once heard the Sons of the Pioneers explain the difference between country music and western music.  Western music is about the outdoors—the trails, the mountains, the clean air; country music is about indoor stuff—fightin’ and lyin’ and dyin’)

Funny how things are connected.

A few days ago I was writing a new episode of Across Our Wide Missouri about Big Nose Kate, the girlfriend of Doc Holliday. She once lived in St. Louis and there is some story, legend, myth or whatever that while she was there in 1872 she met a fresh graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Dental School, John Holliday, who was there visiting a classmate during the summer.

What’s ahead is another example of how historians start pulling on a loose string and before long there’s a tangled heap of interconnected threads. Hang on because we’re going to unravel a whole historical sweater today.

Part of Kate’s story has her in Dodge City, Kansas working at Tom Sherman’s Barroom in some capacity or another. She already had a reputation of selling her services, if you will.

In the vicinity was a young Iowa native named Frank Maynard, who wrote poetry to keep himself occupied in slow times.  His poetry isn’t bad. One of his works reminded me right off of the writings of Robert W. Service who authored the great poems of the Yukon—The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Spell of the Yukon, The Land God Forgot, and the Cremation of Sam McGee:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

One of Maynard’s poems begins:

There’s a wild and rocky canyon

Where the panther rears its young

And where somber, gloomy shadows

By the Cedars are flung.

There’s no signs of human presence

How e’er closely you may scan.

Yet within its dark recesses,

Dwells an exiled, ruined man.

Sorry, folks, one of the dangers of researching and writing is how easily one is distracted.  That’s one of the joys of doing research—and one of the frustrations because sooner or later you have to get back to what you came for.

Tom Sherman was a great big guy, even in our times—six feet-six or seven—and apparently at times as mean as a snake—as on the day that he killed a man named Burns (first name maybe Charley) at his bar in Dodge City, Kansas.

Young Frank Maynard noted the incident briefly in his journal for March 13, 1873 and later wrote in his memoir, “I could see some fellows gathering and I could discern a man down and moving his legs & arms. Possibly he may have had consciousness enough to feel that he was fleeing from his pursuer with whom I almost collided. This was Tom Sherman, a big blubbery fellow, who ran with a limp. He had a large caliber revolver in his hand which he was emptying into the boy that was down…Tom, panting for breath, said to those gathering, ‘I’d better shoot him again, hadn’t I boys?’ He stepped at once to where he lay struggling, stood over him holding the big revolver in both hands, aimed at his forehead and fired. The bullet went a little high and scattered his brains in his hair…All I could learn was that Sherman had killed a friend of Burns and thought it would be safer to have him out of the way.”

The incident led to the creation of a poem that became one of the most famous songs to come out of that frontier era.

A few years ago, Maynard’s memoir and his poems were put into a book by folklorist Jim Hoy, an English Professor at Emporia State Univeristy and published by the Texas Tech University Press.

Maynard was an Iowa City, Iowa boy who headed west of the Missouri River when he was sixteen and wound up in Towanda, Kansas, a town then of fifty people or fewer southwest of Kansas City (just off I-35 today).  He soon was a buffalo hunter and later he and his father (the rest of the family had moved to Towanda) ran a freighting business between Emporia and Wichita. He became a real “cow boy” in 1872 when he was part of a crew that drove a herd of horses from Kansas to north central Texas. When he went back to Towanda, he became one of the drovers on a cattle drive.

Three years later he witnessed the killing in Dodge City.

In 1876, Maynard was wintering a herd of horses on the Kansas-Oklahoma border until the Wichita market opened. “I had often amused myself by trying to write verses, and one dull winter day in camp, to while away the time, I began to write a poem which could be sung to the tun of ‘The Dying Girl’s Lament’ in which a dying young woman says her lover did not tell her he had syphilis.” It began:

When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure

When I was a young girl I used to drink ale.

Out of the ale house and down to the jailhouse

Right out of a bar room, shown to my grave.

Its 18th century antecedent, perhaps dating back as far as 1740, was The Unfortunate Rake, an English folk song about a young soldier also dying of venereal disease. It began:

“As I was walking down by the “Lock”  (the hospital)

As I was walking one morning of late,

Who did I spy by the own dear comrade

Wrapp’d in flannel, so hard is his fate. “

In one version the rake tells his friend:

“Get six jolly fellows to carry my coffin

And six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.

And give to each of them bunches of roses

That they may not smell me as they go along.

Muffle your drums, play your pipes merrily

Play the death march as you go along

And fire your guns right over my coffin

There goes an unfortunate lad to his home.”

Maynard explained to young newspaper reporter Elmo Scott Watson for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Telegraph edition of January 27, 1924, the poem, called “The Dying Cowboy” that he “sang it to the boys in the outfit. They liked it and began singing it. It became popular with the boys in other outfits who heard it and after we had taken our herd to market in Wichita the next spring, and from that time on I heard it sung everywhere on the range and trail.”

It began:

“As I rode down by Tom Sherman’s bar-room,

Tom Sherman’s bar-room so early one day,

There I espied a handsome ranger

All wrapped up in white linen, as cold as the clay.

‘I see by your outfit that you’re a ranger,’

The words that he said as I went riding by.

‘Come, sit down beside me, and hear my sad story,

I’m shot through the breast and know I must die.”

The chorus was:

“Then muffle the drums and play the dead macrhes;

Play the dead march as I’m carried along;

Take me to the churh-yard and lay the sod o’er me,

I’m a young ranger and I know I’ve done wrong.”

Maynard’s ranger was a cowboy who rode the range tending and herding cattle.

He wrote that other trail herders changed the lyrics over time and replaced “Tom Sherman’s Barroom” with “Streets of Laredo” and the song evolved into the more familiar version we hear and sing today.

In 1949 Ray Evans and Jay Livingston wrote a version as a theme song for a motion picture, Streets of Laredo¸ starring William Holden, McDonald Carey, William Bendix and Mona Freeman.  The three were outlaws who rescue Freeman’s character from a racketeer.  Two of them later joined the Texas Rangers while the third continued his outlaw ways. The movie ends in a big showdown in which, as one source put it, “loyalty, love, and vengeance collide.”

Doc Holliday died at in Glenwood Springs Colorado at age 36 in 1887. He and Kate never got together again. It is said that when he died, he had a derringer given him by Kate later acquired for a large sum of money by the Glenwood Springs Historical Society.  But its authenticity has been seriously questioned and the society offered to give back donations used to buy the weapon.

Big Nose Kate died in 1940, within a few days of her 91st birthday.

As for the young cowboy poet—

Maynard was “weary of the hardship and the tragedy incident to life on the plains” when he headed home to Towanda in 1877. ‘it is not to be supposed that I had wandered all these years heartwhole and fancy free, for I had had my dreams of love and home that ended with a rude awakening, and now at the age of twenty-four I was growing cynical and I had often exultantly declared to myself, ‘I will die as I have lived, a wild free rover of the plains.’”

But he was invited to a party and found “one pair of eyes that held a strange fascination for me. They seemed to wear a far away expression, and in their luminous depth there seemed to be a touch of ineffable sadness. Somehow the thought came to me, ‘Here is a woman that I might love, that might save me from the reckless life I have been drifting into.’”  Her name was Flora Longstreth.

However,  “When I finally screwed up my courage to put the question, which would have such a bearing on my future, I did not get a direct reply.” When she refused his invitation to a party, he wentt back to cowboying in the spring of ‘78, finally concluding the relationship would never work. He wrote her a farewell letter and spent the season herding cattle, fighting a prairie fire, and having some brushes with Indians unhappy with the encroachments on their lands.

But he never forgot Flora and eventually he  convinced the girl with the faraway eyes his cowboy days were over. They were married April 24, 1881, moved to Colorado Springs six years later where Maynard made a good living as a Carpenter. He probably started compiling his reminiscences about 1888. He died March 28, 1926.  Hoy notes the headline on his Denver Post obituary read, “Plains Bard and Pioneer of Earliest Cowboy Days is Dead.” Flora, born three years after Frank, outlived him by five, dying in 1931.

Frank’s reminiscences include his early days as a buffalo hunter, days in which hundreds of the animals were killed for their hides. He wrote without pity about those times although by the end he laments to the fate of the buffalo and the people who relied on them for so many purposes.

Names of people who are now legends drift in and out of his thoughts and his life; Dave Rudabaugh once was a herder with him and later a member of Billy the Kid’s gang in New Mexico.  Bat Masterson, Bill Tighlman, and the Earps are part of the narrative as are Buckskin Joe, Colorado Bill, Prairie Dog Dave and Tiger Bill, whose barroom murder he likened to the death of Wild Bill Hickock; the Northern Cheyenne chief Dull Knife and many others forgotten or only words in history books were part of his world. .

He wrote of the ending of his era:

On Boot Hill they’ve built a schoolhouse

And the W.C.T. U.

Holds an annual convention

Where once corks and stoppers flew;

There are sermons, there is singing,

Where was pistol rack and flame.

Dodge, the erstwhile wicked city,

Has built a better name,

And the lamb now skips and gambols

Where was heard the grey wolf’s wail,

The survival of the fittest,

Marks the ending of the trail..

As with so much of the story of Doc and Kate, the real story of the free range west is part of legend and Western myth and preserved history.   The only thing that seems certain is that a young cowboy named Frank Maynard witnessed a killing on a Dodge City street at a tavern where Kate once worked and he wrote a poem about it. It was included in a book of his poems published in 1911. His poems and some other writings are in the Texas Tech book.

One of the joys of studying history is the people you meet along the way, the people who kept diaries or wrote memoirs in which we see how those we see in movies or on television really were—just people in a gritty time when law was tenuous and life sometimes was cheap.  But in those writings, they’re alive in their time with never a thought of being  a legend.  Good or bad, they become real and the mental images of their days carry with them new understandings of the humanity of our ancestors.

One string leads to another and to another, and one beyond that and maybe more.  And in the end, a historical sweater of many colors becomes a pile of string.  But oh! What fun the unraveling has been!  And how richer we have become in the unraveling.

(Photo credits: Kate and Doc: Tom Kollenborn Chronicles; saloon—facebook; Book—Barnes & Noble; album Tower Records; Flora—the book)

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Tom’s Bears

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I got a call the other day from my longtime friend Tom Sater to talk about bears.  Tom is a former architectural conservator for the state.  He was involved in restoring the Governor’s Mansion to its Victorian splendor many years ago, was the restoration expert for the House of Representatives and the Senate and led some of the early restoration efforts elsewhere in the Capitol that would have continued if September 11, 2001 had not happened.

As I recall, something like eight-million dollars had been set aside for continued architectural restoration but when the economy went south after the terrorists attacks, that money had to be withdrawn and put into the general operational budget of the state. Many years later, under the auspices of the Capitol Commission, architectural restoration has resumed, the most prominent feature being the Herman Schladermundt’s epic stained glass window over the grand stairway and the restoration of that entire area to the color scheme of 1917.

Tom has long been fascinated by the state seal and when the House was redone in 1988, the state seal was of special interest. For many years, the bears in the state seal had been painted white.  They’re grizzlies, not polar bears so Tom in all of the state seal work he has done through the years has painted the bears brown.

If you want to see his version of the state seal up close, drop in at the Missouri River Regional Library which occupies the area that was the home of Robert W. Wells, the designer of the seal.  We have one of Tom’s seals on display there.

Wells was the third Attorney General of Missouri (1826-1836) then was federal district court judge 1836-1864. He died while still serving.

Wells’ design of the state seal was adopted on January 11, 1822. The seal legislation provides the confusion about what color the bears are, but not what kind of bears they are.

Here is the official description—

The device for an armorial achievement for the State of Missouri shall be as follows, to wit: Arms, parted per pale, on the dexter side; gules, the white or grizzly bear of Missouri, passant guardant, proper on a chief engrailed; azure, a crescent argent; on the sinister side, argent, the arms of the United States; the whole with a band inscribed with the words `United We Stand, Divided We Fall.’ For the crest, over a helmet full faced, grated with six bars, or a cloud proper, from which ascends a star, argent, on an azure field, surrounded by a cloud proper. Supporters on each side, a white or grizzly bear of Missouri, rampant, guardant proper, standing on a scroll, inscribed with the motto: `Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto,’ and under the scroll the numerical letters MDCCCXX. And the great seal of the state shall be so engraved as to present by its impression the device of the armorial achievement aforesaid, surrounded by a scroll inscribed with the words, “The Great Seal of Missouri,” in Roman capitals; which seal shall be in a circular form, and not more than two and a half inches in diameter.

The Missouri Conservation Department has said, “The bears on the Great Seal of the State of Missouri are grizzly bears, which never resided in the state.” Although the Seal specifies grizzly bears, many think the 19th century renderings of the state seal shows semi-cuddly black bears. bears, which were and now again are located in Missouri. Not until late in the 20th Century were they recognized as Grizzlies.

Why, then, was the phrase “the white or grizzly bear of Missouri” get into this law?  Tom thinks he has figured it out.  It’s the fault of Lewis and Clark. Several entries in their journals refer to bear sightings. The first time they encountered a Grizzly was October 7, 1804 when Clark wrote,  “we Saw the Tracks of White bear which was verry large” at a place 15 miles downstream from present Mobridge South Dakota. Note the phrase that refers to “tracks of white bear,” not “a” white bear. Just “white bear.”

Tom thinks they referred to “white” bears to distinguish them from the black bears they had seen and recorded downstream.

The first publication of some of the journals was in 1814 by Philadelphia banker and historian Nicholas Biddle, later know for his feud with Andrew Jackson about the Bank of the United States. In 1810, Biddle  met with William Clark. Meriwether Lewis, who was supposed to write it, had died a few months earlier. Biddle became Clark’s choice as Lewis’ replacement.

Tom thinks Robert W. Wells, the circuit attorney in St. Charles 1821-22, then a state representative 1823-1826 when he became Missouri’s third Attorney General and later a federal district judge 1836-1864 (his death) had read the Biddle account.

Although descendants of Rep. George Burkhaltter claim he designed the seal, most sources credit Wells for a couple of reason. He was living in St. Chrles when the first legislative session met in 1821 and Governor McNair complained about the inconvenience of not having a state seal) and thus likely was appointed to design the seal. Burkhartt at the time was a Justice of the Peace in far away Chariton County at that time and was elected to office in 1822, the same year Wells was elected to the House . If he designed the seal, he must have been very quick.

The logic of most sources is that Wells’ proximity to the first legislature meetings in St. Charles and his position that enabled him to mix with the first governor and the timing of the sequence of events leading up to the approval of the seal make him the more likely designer.  Burkhartt died in 1828. Nineteen years later Wells wrote a lengthy description of the meaning of the elements of the seal that was published in the March 23, 1847 issue of the Missouri State Times.In the article he referred to himself as “I am the original author of the original suggestion of our coat of arms, I suppose the explanation would come from me as from others.”

He explained the white, or grizzly bears;

“The white or grisly bear is unlike any other and was believed to be unknown except on the Missouri and in the neighborhood and was adopted on account of its vast power, great courage, and prodigious hardihood; emblematical of the great resources of the state and the courage and hardihood of its citizens.”

So Tom has solved the mystery of the white bear and is proud that he has restored the brown color of the “grisly” to its rightful places in our capitol.

Sometimes we wonder if Missourians understand that those bears symbolize—courage and hardihood.  Our state seal tells us, however, as the old saying put it:

“If you’re going to be a bear, be a Grizzly.”

An Old Testament Story for Our Times

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With President Trump, some of his cabinet members, and his evangelical supporters finding Bible verses from either testament to justify what has been going on since he resumed office, we thought we would offer an Old Testament story that should be a cautionary tale for our situation.

We have enjoyed several of Malcolm Gladwell’s perceptive books (and are likely to enjoy more) one of which carries the title of the story from the Bible that gets to today’s situation in the Mideast.

Here’s Malcolm telling the story.

The unheard story of David and Goliath | Malcolm Gladwell

Our President is learning that being big is no guarantee of being superior. We are sure, given his statements about his favorite book that he has read the seventeenth chapter of First Samuel. We wonder, therefore, being the student of the Bible that he claims to be, why he hasn’t connected the dots.

There’s a cease fire as we write this. It’s a great chance for the Iranians to stock up on more stones.

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A Noisy Awakening 

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Nancy’s newest birth anniversary was last Friday. I took her out to eat and then to see a movie.

Kind of the way things were back in our courting days.

We went to our GQT Capital 8 Theatre and we bought our popcorn and our sugar-free soft drink and sat down in some nice roomy seats.  Just as the pre-movie trivia game was about to start for the three of us in the theatre, one of the theatre employees told us tornado sirens were blowing and we needed to take refuge in the bathrooms.

After an hour or so in what became two unisex bathrooms, the theatre folks gave us passes for some other night.

So we went back Saturday with our visiting daughter Liz, used our free passes and our free concessions tickets and settled into watch A GREAT AWAKENING.

We watched the charming young lady from Noovie host the various short word games or trivia questions and then theatre exploded with a deafening display of the latest in DOLBY sound technology.   Then the previews came on—one movie featuring real people and four or five featuring cartoon people.  All at beyond maximum volume, apparently to make the explosions that replace plots in today’s flicks more fearful.

Finally, we got to the feature. It was so loud I took out my hearing aids and even then it was so loud that I decided, as I told Nancy and Liz later, that I was eager to see the movie on TV so the sound level wasn’t so distracting as to spoil the story.  I walked out of the theatre that night feeling exhausted.

Not only that, but the popcorn was mediocre.  I get better popcorn at a convenience store on the other side of town.

Come to think of it, the best part of the experience was being able to go to the men’s restroom without some women in there, too.  It was a safe experience in the bathroom but a danger to my hearing in the auditorium.

The movie?  Pretty good for an almost-Hollywood production. Interesting story that, on reflection, lacked a little of the sophistication in story-telling and dialogue that the major studios produce.

It was produced by Sight & Sound Films, a Christian-themed spinoff of Sight and Sound Theatres, the company that has produced Biblical-themed shows in Branson for some time. In case you missed the point the movie was trying to make, the producers give it to you during the credits: “True liberty comes through Jesus Christ.” I found the statement in conflict with what I had just watched (or endured).

The movie tracks the unusual relationship between the passionate English Methodist evangelist George Whitefield (he pronounced it as if it had no “e” in the middle), who was trained as a stage actor, and the calculating and politically savvy printer, later inventor and sage who was a key to writing the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution, Benjamin Franklin, played impressively by John Paul Sneed.

Franklin realized he could profit from printing Whitefield’s sermons. Whitefield realized he could reach more people if he allowed Franklin to print and circulate his words.

(George Whitefield—The Genevan Foundation   (With his “lazy left eye” sometimes George Whitefield was derisively called “Dr. Squintum” by his many detractors)

Whitefield is portrayed by a young and handsome actor with no English accent and no resemblance to the real Whitefield an instantly-inspirational figure who spoke to thousands who quickly became “saved” by his dynamic sermons.  Franklin is the Franklin of our familiarity—a Christian, generally, who differ from those who think the only way to God is through Christ, which is Whitefield’s message.

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Putting Politics Back Into Our Highest Courts

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Most Missouri judges are elected, but years ago the state and its people decided the highest courts should be as isolated from partisan politics as possible. That nationally-recognized plan is under attack in the Missouri Legislature this year—and the process that created that insulated system also is under attack.

The decision was made after the collapse of the Pendergast political machine that so dominated Democratic politics in Missouri in the first forty years of the Twentieth Century that it could field a substitute for a gubernatorial candidate who died three weeks before the election and push previously obscure Platte County Judge Guy B. Park to a win by the third largest margin in state history up to that time, 61 percent of the vote against the incumbent Lieutenant Governor, Edward H. Winter.         (That winning percentage had been exceeded only twice before—Thomas Fletcher with 70.3 percent in 1864 and by John Miller, who had no opposition in1828) or after, by Warren Hearnes’ 62% in 1964 and John Ashcroft’s election in 1988 with 64.2%)

Members of Missouri’s appeals courts—which includes the Supreme Court—had been elected throughout state history until citizens had had enough of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast’s grip on state politics. A citizen-led initiative led to voter approval of “The Missouri Plan” in 1940.  The legislature tried to overturn it but voters rejected the effort. The plan was made part of the Missouri Constitution when the present document was adopted in 1945.

The plan applied to the Supreme Court and the appeals court as well as lower courts in a few counties. The changes were put in our Constitution in 1976.

Missouri rarely has been a leader in political thinking but this is a case where the state should be proud—because about forty states have adopted a version of The Missouri Plan which established a non-partisan Appellate Judicial Commission that takes applications for open judgeships handle appeals from local courts. The commission reviews applications for appellate judgeships and forwards three names to the governor who appoints one of them. The Senate does not confirm the appointment, another step to limit political influence in the makeup of our highest courts.

The commission is made up of three members of the Missouri Bar and three private citizens appointed by the Governor. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court chairs the commission.

The Missouri House Committee on General Laws has voted 8-6 to recommend the full House pass a bill junking the nonpartisan court plan and giving appointment power to the Governor with confirmation by the Senate.

If you think the similar system used to let a President pick U. S. Supreme Court Justices and federal district judges is the best way to have a non-partisan court system un-influenced by partisan factors, this bill is right up your alley. If the spectacle we see every time a new Supreme Court Justice is nominated approaches or exceeds your unbearable level, this bill is toxic.

When you have a President and a Senate under one party’s control, or a Governor and a state senate under one party’s control, there is room for discomfort about the fairness of the judicial system and whether money influences those who must confirm nominations.

Missouri no longer has political bosses such as Tom Pendergast, but it has something as bad—big-money political donors who have tried to buy state laws through the legislature or to buy sections of the state constitution (think of $43 million spent to get sports betting passed in 2024).

Moneyed political influence in shaping the laws mixed with political influence in determining the laws’ constitutionality is a dangerous combination.

There is a second dangerous move afoot in the two-thirds Republican General Assembly.  It’s the proposal saying no petition issue can be approved by voters unless it gets majorities in every one of our eight congressional districts. That means one district in which an issue fails by one vote can render positive votes in the other seven districts meaningless. Call it what it is—tyranny by the minority.

On one hand, our politically-independent upper judiciary is being threatened. On the other hand is a new threat—to the concept of majority rule, replaced with a one-eighth majority tyranny. Those backing this scheme certainly would not hold that no one could be elected to the legislature who did not carry every precinct in their district. Nor would they support the idea that no one could be elected to state office without carrying every legislative district. Or that no one could be sent to Congress without carrying every county in their district.

But they will silence the voice of the people when it comes to taking their grievances against government  to the ballot  box.

It’s a one-two punch to our democracy. The last time legislative Republicans tried to weaken the plan was 2012. Voters went 76 percent against it.

Fourteen years later they’re trying again. Let’s hope voters aren’t duped this time either.

Monstrosity

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President Trump says he wants to build a 250-foot tall arch to celebrate this country’s 250th anniversary.  It is yet another project that wreaks of excess and of self-promotion.  Whatever its official name becomes, it’s always going to be known as the arch that Trump built. Arch deTrump, some already are calling it.

The only thing taller in the area that stretches from the Arlington National Cemetery east to the Library of Congress across from the Capitol is the Capitol itself, and by only a few feet.

Grace, beauty, and appropriateness have never been in his lexicon.  Gross, ugly, and inappropriate too often define him to an increasing number of people.  Last week, in an oval office reveal of the design for this monstrosity. CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe asked the President who the arch is for.  “Me,” he said.

The fact checkers who have built their careers on Trump’s lies had a day off on that one.

The Commission on Fine Arts refers to it as the Triumphal Arch. To be honest, the  letter “i” should replace the “h.”

The only manmade arch that we have been able to find that is bigger than this is the one on the St. Louis riverfront.

Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris is almost 100 feet shorter, at 164 feet.  The Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City is only 220 feet. The Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, North Korea tops out at 197 feet.

The four-sided arch that is the Pennsylvania State Memorial at Gettysburg, honoring the 34,500 Pennsylvania soldiers who fought there, checks in at 110 feet. Not far away, the National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge honoring those who wintered there 1777-78 is sixty feet high.

The top of the Memorial Arch in Huntington, West Virginia is only 42 feet from the ground. The Camp Randall, Wisconsin arch honoring Civil War veterans from that state needs only thirty feet to dignify them. The Bushnell Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Hartford, Connecticut is but 116 feet and the Washington Square Arch that commemorates George Washington’s inauguration in New York City gets the job done in 77 feet.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” he says.  Philip Kennicott with the Washington Post offers a brutal opposing view:

It is an insult to the men and women who risk their lives to protect democracy, who have fought in wars against fascism, who have actually achieved victory rather than merely declared and celebrated it. Its symbolism is borrowed and confused, and it will block a sacred vista that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the final resting place of the Civil War dead, and veterans from every major war and conflict this country has fought.

This is a subtly that escapes people such as Trump who think symbolic as well as real sledgehammers and wrecking balls are among mankind’s greatest inventions. The arch will stand at the southern end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, interrupting the flow of history from the Lincoln Memorial to the peaceful hillside that is Arlington National Cemetery, a cemetery on land confiscated from Confederate commander Robert E. Lee as a resting place for those who defended the Union in the Civil War.

Some critics say the planned arch will obscure much of he cemetery but will frame Lee’s mansion at the top of the hill beyond. Is that intentional?  Who knows, although Trump has expressed a fondness for honoring Confederate leaders.

Trump has said it will be 250 feet high as a symbol of the nation’s 250th birthday. As of last week, however, it is only colored drawings.  The first shovel of dirt for the project has not yet been turned and Independence Day is less than 90 days away.  As one critic put it, “If it isn’t going to be done this year, it really has nothing to do with the 250th Anniversary, and as Trump said, it’s for him.”.

Kennecott concludes, “It perverts a fundamentally American idea about war. We have fought them, we have died in them, and we have brought war to too many people who did not deserve our meddling with their politics and sovereignty.

“But no matter the cause, no matter how great the victory, we fundamentally honor sacrifice and service. We celebrate the end of wars and the achievement of peace, not victory. Roman victory arches are lovely to look at, but they were primarily political statements, assertions of personal power and propaganda by ambitious men”.

Caesar Trumpus wants his arch.

If it can’t be finished by July 4, maybe he can complete it in time to celebrate his glorious victory over Iran.

Ozymandias Trump  

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President Trump’s insatiable need to memorialize himself, whether it’s by putting his name on a long-standing building such as the Kennedy Center, minting gold coins, putting his signature on our currency, building a disgracefully tacky ballroom onto the White House, building a Trump Arch in Washington and now we have seen the plans for his presidential library.

All of this is his vain effort to immortalize himself as something far more than what he is brings to mind a couple of 19th Century British poet friends who engaged in a friendly competition to see whose work would be published first. They probably had heard the announcement that the British Museum had acquired an eight-ton statue of Rameses II.

Both had experienced the classical education of the day, which probably led them to a story by the First Century, BCE, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus who described a great Egyptian statue with the inscription, “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. if any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my works.”

Horace Smith wrote:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The better-known of the poems is the one with the same name, Ozymandias¸ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, considered one of the greatest of the English romantic poets, who drowned in a sailing accident at the age of 29.  This is the one we are most likely to see in our English textbooks and in the compilations of great poems.

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The poem is considered a commentary on the impermanence of power and the fleeting of time.  Litcharts.com puts it this way:

The speaker relates a story a traveler told him about the ruins of a “colossal wreck” of a sculpture whose decaying physical state mirrors the dissolution of its subject’s—Ozymandias’s—power. Only two upright legs, a face, and a pedestal remain of Ozymandias’s original statue, and even these individual parts of the statue are not in great shape: the face, for instance, is “shattered.” Clearly, time hasn’t been kind to this statue, whose pitiful state undercuts the bold assertion of its inscription. The fact that even this “king of kings” lies decaying in a distant desert suggests that no amount of power can withstand the merciless and unceasing passage of time.

Less poetic but nonetheless powerful on its own is a quote attributed to General George S. Patton; you might recognize it as it was spoken by George C. Scott at the end of the movie about the general:

““For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”

Donald Trump  doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who would know who Percy Bysshe Shelley was (it has been widely reported that he seldom reads anything, even his daily security reports—there have been stories that staff members dumb them down for his short attention span) and while it would not be surprising to learn that he did see the Patton movie, he likely is incapable of understanding that all of his efforts to immortalize himself will someday be nothing more than the equivalent of a pile of ancient stones in the desert of history, an ancient 21st Century Ozymandias.

(Image credits: Statue—Society of Classical Poets; Trump Library—Youtube)

Reaching To the Stars

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They’re there.

Our “Star Sailors” travelling farther away from their source of life than anyone ever has traveled before, are circling the Moon today, four thousand miles beyond the flight of three men of Apollo 13, seeing parts of the noon only mechanical recording system have seen.

They are spending about six hours in their Orion spacecraft photographing places on the back side of the moon. And then they will sling shot back for a fiery return to our blue marble

Fifty-seven years ago, at Christmas 1968, three men from the planet earth saw what only had been seen with telescopes and the naked eye for millennia. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders described the black and white images we saw of a gray and black world below them as they looped around the moon.

To those of us who could not take our eyes from our television screens showing us a desolate place almost a quarter-million miles away, the event was astounding. All of the science fiction we had read since we were in grade school dissolved in the reality of what we and the rest of his precious planet were witnessing along with those three men.

The men of Apollo 8 later showed us color photographs of earthrise over the Moon and the first photograph of the round blue marble as they left it behind and to which they gratefully returned.

It was Anders who is credited with seeing the entire earth at a glance who likened it to a fragile “little Christmas tree ornament against an infinite backdrop of space, the only color in the whole universe we could see. It seemed so very finite.” This image from Apollo 8 was the first time we saw what they saw—how alone we are.

The four astronauts aboard the Artemis II flight these five decades later, are the first people since December 1972 and Apollo 17 to let us see it again. To a new generation, to whom the daring dash to the Moon by Apollo 8 is only a page in a history books, the adventure is renewed.  Its goal, different from the Apollo landings, an exciting reach for humanity, perhaps re-establishes a focus on something greater than petty politics and near-constant wars.

Perhaps in these and other photographs to come will end decades of looking inward and increasingly finding the worst of ourselves and once again lift us to rediscover a time when, as one of the original Apollo astronauts said, “nothing was impossible.”

It brings back echoes of President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962 when called for this country to send astronauts to the moon and bring them back safely.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. 

He saw he mission to the Moon would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skill.”

A new generation now picks up that challenge as the last of the old generation waits to learn what “new knowledge is gained, what new rights will be won and used for the benefit of all people.”

Carl Sagan, an astronomer of another generation whose television series Cosmos explained the wonders of the universe and mankind’s place in one tiny place in the vast emptiness of space, once showed a photograph taken far, far, farther away than these from Apollo and Artemis.

The photograph taken from 3.7 billion miles from us show only a tiny blue dot.  “Look again at that dot,” he said. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The next step will be to send a new generation of Moonwalkers to make the dangerous descent,  to find new discoveries, and—we all hope—leave new footprints behind before they come home.

Geologist Harrison Schmitt was the last man to set foot on the Moon, the only true scientist to be there so far.  But Mission Commander Gene Cernan was the last man to leave a footprint on the Moon as he climbed the ladder to the Lunar Lander behind Schmitt.  He looked forward to the return and had some advice for the next people who step onto the lunar soil:

Cernan told Politico a few years ago:

There are times when I find myself almost involuntarily gazing at the moon — looking back on a time in my life that seems unreal. Oh, I’ve been there, all right, and know that my last footprints, along with Tracy’s initials, will be there forever — however long forever is. But it is not the past that any longer challenges me, but rather the future. Our destiny is to explore, discovery is our goal — curiosity being the essence of human existence. I often ask myself if we will ever go again where humans have never been before and see again what has never been seen before. The answer is absolutely yes.

In 1969, the world took a giant leap into the future as the result of that one small step by Neil Armstrong. Many more steps were to follow Neil’s, launching us into a new era of science, technology and, perhaps most important, discovery led by a new generation of young, eager scientists, engineers and educators who were inspired to accept the challenge and committed to see their dreams fulfilled. Today’s media coverage of that epic moment seems to many like science fiction. But it wasn’t. It was science fact and continues to this day to have significant impact on our lives, on our future, and, indeed, on the entire world. The benefits that have followed were hardly imaginable at the time. One of the core lessons from Apollo is that the greatest advances in science and technology happen as a byproduct of the bold steps we take when committing ourselves to expanding human knowledge and understanding. Perhaps the most important byproduct of Kennedy’s vision that took us to the moon is the passion inspired in the hearts and minds of those generations who follow in our footsteps.

We have again reached a challenge in human history. The moon, Mars and beyond — they are calling. The technology and systems to again reach for the stars are now within our reach. The benefits are there for us to claim. However, it will take the will of the American people, a sustained political commitment, and, once again, a leader with foresight and vision. Now is the time for America to recognize with pride our nation’s exceptionalism, regain our leadership in space and lead the free world on the next giant leap for mankind.

Today’s highly evolved and improved answer to Apollo is the Space Launch System and the Orion crew exploration spacecraft. Together they can open the door to the future, providing the capabilities we need, allowing us to finally reach the furthest frontiers of space. NASA and industry are making significant progress with the development of these deep space systems. American workers across the nation are making the probability of future space exploration again attainable. If I can call the moon my home before today’s generation was even born, what challenge can be beyond their reach? The driving force is the understanding that human space exploration is essential to the vitality of our nation, providing untold opportunity for generations to come.

Bipartisan support for space has remained strong since the days of Sputnik continuing to the present time. With determined leadership from the administration and ongoing support from Congress, we can enable NASA and industry to complete their work to build the systems we need to explore beyond the moon.

With SLS/Orion we are ready to seek out what the heavens have to offer — it is time for our nation’s leaders to commit to a clear logical destination, a mission, a goal with a timetable, plotting a course of new discovery. It is time to re-ignite, to re-energize the meaning of American exceptionalism. It is time to recognize what it takes to inspire young minds to dream big and accept the challenges their generation faces. We have the responsibility to provide them the direction and the opportunity to once again reach beyond their grasp in leading mankind into the future of discovery.

In a later interview, Cernan said, “Their future is going to depend on what we did a half a century ago. I’d like to be here to congratulate them, to thank them, and ask them what people ask me all the time, ‘What did it feel like?’

”Enjoy. Take advantage of the opportunity. Don’t take anything for granted. Be prepared for what you don’t expect to happen, and know that you, whoever you are, can do it. Not only can you do it, but can do it better than it’s ever been done before.“

Gene Cernan didn’t make it to this day. He died nine years ago.

Those who are sharing their view of the Moon with all of us here on “the good green earth” of Apollo 8’s Christmas message are the table-setters for those who will next land. Perhaps in this new era of exploration we will rediscover a belief in ourselves that has been dwindling since those days when “nothing was impossible.”

Only four of those who walked on the Moon survive.  Buzz Aldrin is 95 and in poor health. Dave Scott is 93. Charlie Duke, the youngest man to walk on the moon at age 36, is now 90. And Harrison Schmitte, the geologist who later became a U.S. Senator from New Mexico, also is 90. A dozen other men flew to the moon but did not walk upon it. Only Fred Haise of Apollo 13 survives from that group.

Just for the record: The remaining Apollo capsules were used to send nine astronauts to Skylab, our first space station. Joe Kerwin, 94, Jack Lousma, 90, and Edward (Hoot) Gibson, 89 are still with us.

Lousma and Haise were involved in the early flights of the Space Shuttle, as was moonwalker John Young (who died in 2018 as the only man to fly in the Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle programs). Vance Brand, who would have commanded Apollo 18 if the program had not been cancelled, took part in the Skylab and Shuttle programs. He will be 95 next month.

NASA doesn’t plan a Moon landing until September 2028. We hope at least one of this generation will be here to welcome that crew back home.

(Earth pictures: NASA; Apollo astronaut Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, an accomplished artist who spent the rest of his life depicting that earlier era of moon flights died in 2018. His work that gave its name to the title of this entry, is signed by more than twenty of the Apollo astronauts. Several of his prints are available through Novaspace.com or on various other internet sies)

 

IGNORANCE

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Any good journalist abhors ignorance, even personal ignorance. Consumers of our products in all of their forms probably have no idea of the number of stories, programs, and books that spring from seeing something and thinking “?” and then learning the answer.

Most people don’t have or don’t take the time to pursue an answer. But it’s the old “who, what, when, where and how” that defines the journalist’s mind and the journalist’s work product.

I often have told people that it is the unknown that journalist face at the start of every day that makes getting up long before the rooster crows and staying up long after the sun sets. At the end of the day we have done something that science says is impossible: We have made something out of nothing. It’s called “news,” the unpredictability of life captured and the story told, a vanquishing of ignorance—-sometimes whether you want it vanquished or not.

Ignorance is dangerous whether it is in common courtesies, traffic codes, health warnings, but especially in politics where ignorance not only is preyed upon by candidates and advocates but by those who have been given great responsibility.

We are alarmed by steps being taken to erase the unpleasant parts of our past and to be dishonest about our heritage and the responsibilities we have as citizens to conquer our baser relations with others, based on how we have overcome them in the past.

Today’s observation was triggered by the appearance of President Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, who recently denied to host Joe Kernan of  CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the President’s interest in Greenland amounts to American imperialism:

“When has the United States engaged in imperialism? Never. Europe has engaged in imperialism. The reason the Danish have Greenland is because of imperialism.”

When has the United States engaged in imperialism? How about two centuries of it.  We would not be the United States if it was not for imperialism.

I reached onto my bookshelf for Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire, a volume Landry should read if he wants to rise above the ignorance that soaks this administration. What might we call the administration’s takeover of Venezuela and its threatened takeover of Cuba and Greenland and the earlier blabbering of making Canada the 51st state if not “imperialism?”  Added to that discussion is the frequent dismissal in this administration that Puerto Ricans are not Americans.

The administration in its efforts to cleanse or whitewash our history prefers we are ignorant of many things including that the imperialistic spirit was part of this nation from the beginning, when early explorers operating under an already-ancient papal proclamation that it was proper to seize lands from “infidels,” claimed lands occupied for thousands of years by others in the name of God and Country.

Just 55 years after the landing of businessmen the a few religious dissenters landed at Plymouth, the first war broke out between Europeans and Native Americans when the Europeans wanted to expand the borders of Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island. It was the beginning of a 200 year-plus takeover of territories occupied by dozens of previously independent nations.

Two especially egregious examples are the subjugation of the Cherokees, a people with their own constitution and their own written language, with their own plantations is six southern states, their own capital and their own system of slavery.  They were given a new territory to occupy in the 1830s so the Europeans could have their ancestral lands.

Throughout the rest of the 19th century, similar measures were enforced with the forced movement of other nations, some of whom wound up in the same place, a place set aside for Indians. But the attraction of unassigned territory in that area created the 1889 Land Rush when 50,000 settlers roared in to take over the area. The now-“American” area was recognized in 1907 as the state of Oklahoma.  Not until seventeen years had passed did the people displaced through the decades and now disrupted by the land rush—the people of the Indian nations forced there— become recognized by congressional action as American citizens although it was not until 1948 that Congress passed the Indian Voting Rights Act.

The 1846 Mexican war made one-third of Mexico part of the United States. Fifty years later, we went to war with Spain and fought the Philippine War to claim that land.

Immerwahr looks at 1941 as an example of our imperialist holdings: Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states. But these also were NOT foreign countries: Philippines, Puerto Rico, Panama Canal Zone, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. (Panama was Panamanian but it was leased to the United States at the time.) One out of eight people in the United States lived outside the 48-state “logo map” as he calls it.

He also notes a “stream of smaller engagements” that have bought at least parts of other nations under our control for military bases. He cites 211 times that American troops have been deployed to 67 other countries since 1945.

The book came out before Venezuela and Iran.

Immerwahr concludes the introduction to his book, “At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen”

Landry asked, with his ignorance on full display, “”When has the United States engaged in imperialism?”  The truth is in Immerwahr’s book should he care to read it although this seems to be an administration led by a President whose questionable reading habits and abilities have been much discussed and whose preference for historical literacy seems non-existent, a “blessing” he demands be extended to all of us in a year when accurate recall of our history should be our guiding interest.

We leave you with these cautionary words from President Calvin Coolidge:

“It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.”

And ignorant.

 

 

A Congressman Steps Down; Thousands Protest 

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It would be nice if the headline reflected reality.  But in the case of Congressman Sam Graves, a native of Tarkio in the far northwest corner of Missouri, it’s not his retirement that has triggered the protests.  We’re going to offer some quick, surface, observations about these two separate events and how Missouri’s chaotic 2026 elections just got more interesting.

I remember Sam Graves mostly because he caused me some sleepless nights. More on that later.

Sam is now 62. He has served 26 of those years in Congress. He might just be hitting his prime and he’s leaving. The website legistorm.com calculates the average age of members of the U.S. House is 58 (for all of Congress it’s 61.5). However, he has served twice as long as the average length of service for U.S. Representatives. In fact, Graves is 32nd in seniority among the 435 members of the House (the Dean of the House is Kentucky Congressman Harold Rogers who is 88 and in his 45th year, his 23rd term and he will seek a 24th.).

The longest-serving Congressman from Missouri was Clarence Cannon, from Elsberry, in northeast Missouri. He died in office after 41 years 69 days and planning for more before a fatal heart attack in 1964. He ranks 29th as the longest-serving member of the U.S. House, 49th  on a list that also includes Senators.

In 1963, the year Graves was born, country music star Jim Reeves put out a song by fellow singer and songwriter Bill Anderson called “I’ve Enjoyed About as Much of This as I Can Stand.”  We don’t know if he has heard the song but in joining 35 other Republicans who are leaving, we wouldn’t be surprised if several of them felt that way (there are 21 Democrats who have decided there’s more to life, too).

Already, several fellow Republicans and at least three Democrats have filed or expressed an interest in filing for his seat and it would be no surprise if the numbers did not increase on both sides.

The Sixth Congressional District is a rural one that covers the entire sparsely-settled rural north Missouri—36 of our 114 counties. It has been solidly conservative for a long, long time.

But the political climate nationwide seems to be changing. Last weekend there were at least 33 “No Kings” rallies in Missouri, nine in the Kansas City area, eight in the St. Louis area, thirteen outstate and three more in northwest Missouri.

Here is something to ponder for the sixth district.  A “No Kings” rally in Quincy, Illinois—not listed among 33—probably had some attraction for some northeast Missourians in the sixth district. TEN of the scheduled rallies on the Missouri side of the Mississippi were in Graves’ present district.  Ten of them. Excelsior Springs, Harrisonville, Kearney, Liberty, Platte City, Madison, Moberly, Maryville, Chillicothe, and St. Joseph.

The “No Kings” movement has survived the winter and the Trump administration’s headline activities from Minnesota to Iran.  The sixth district will not have an incumbent with all of the vote-getting power that goes with incumbency.

The sixth district—in whatever form it winds up being after legislative action and courts reviews—might be more in play than it has been for two decades. And both parties know it full well.

Getting back to Sam—pardon the unfamiliarity but he was “Senator” when I covered him in the legislature and the last time I saw him I called him, “Sam,” an uncharacteristic familiarity that I almost never allow myself with present or past political figures.

There he is from the Missouri Official Manual (the Blue Book by more familiar name) for his first term in the Senate. He was in the Senate for the last years of Democrat-domination of state government.  I recall that he was collegial with good relationships on the other side of the aisle.

But the main thing about him that I recall is that he kept me up all night on at least two occasions.  Sam was not afraid of a filibuster but he rarely took a leading role and didn’t do it so often as to be tiring—as some have done more recently. And he was entertaining, something most filibuster participants never approach.

There were some senators after him who were so boring that I gave one of them a list of books to read that would at least educate those who had to endure them.  Sadly, the list went unused.

He talked about being a poor farm boy whose only pet, a three-legged dog named “Tripod,” was the star of some of his stories. The best performance, however, was the night he threatened to read the names of every high school student in his district who was graduating that year. Every time he was interrupted, he started over. As I recall, he finally forced a compromise on the issue under discussion—which is what filibusters should be for if participants respect them.

The only better filibuster story-teller than Sam Graves was Senator Danny Staples of Eminence.  I made sure I turned on my recorder whenever he asked another member, “Senator, did you know…..” because I knew what was coming.  The State Historical Society has several hours of Staples’ recordings. There are hundreds of other cassettes in the oral history collection that I have to listen to and label one of these days and there has to be some Sam Graves stories on them.  Or on the memory chips we used in later recorders.

He was a work horse not a show horse in his political career, as we observed him up close and from a distance. He’s young enough to have a long and prosperous K-Street career in Washington. K-Street is a street known for its offices of the special interest groups.

The folks in the sixth district would be well-served to seek out another work horse in November.

-o-