“History is not made only by kings and
parliaments, presidents, wars, and generals. It is the story of people, of
their love, honor, faith, hope and suffering; of birth and death, of hunger,
thirst and cold, of loneliness and sorrow.”— Louis L’Amour.
* * *
“What is history but a fable
agreed upon?”
--Napoleon Bonaparte
* * *
In recounting the event, he noted that the
miners and gamblers who had gathered for the tournament were so awed by his
shooting ability that they called him “Deadwood Dick”. That moniker became
famous to many Eastern readers of Edward Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick dime novels.
While others (besides Love) also claimed the name at one time or another,
Wheeler’s first book in the series was published in 1877 and entitled Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road, or,
The Black Rider of the Black Hills.
The term ‘black’, no doubt, conjured up
images of an anti-hero or avenging angel, but perhaps not. Nat Love, the man
who claimed to be the original Deadwood Dick and at the very least had gained
some fame in real life, had been born in 1854 and spent his childhood on a
plantation in Tennessee as a slave.—Out
of Many: A History of the American People.
* * *
American cowboys were drawn from multiple sources. By the late
1860s, following the American Civil War and the expansion of the cattle industry, former
soldiers from both the Union and Confederacy came west, seeking work, as did
large numbers of restless white men in general. A significant number of African- Aerican freedmen also
were drawn to cowboy life, in part because there was not quite as much
discrimination in the west as in other areas of American society at the time. A
significant number of Mexicans and American Indians already living in the region also worked as cowboys
Because cowboys ranked low in the social structure of the
period, there are no firm figures on the actual proportion of various races. Census records suggest that out of the estimated 35,000 cowboys who worked
during that time period (from the end of the Civil War to the 1890s), about 15 percent were of African-American ancestry—ranging
from about 25 percent on the trail drives out of Texas, to very few in the
northwest. Similarly, cowboys of Mexican descent also averaged about 15 percent
of the total, but were more common in Texas and the southwest. Other estimates
suggest that in the late 19th century, one out of every three cowboys was a
Mexican vaquero, and 20% may have been African-American.
Regardless of ethnicity, most cowboys came
from lower social classes and the pay was poor. The average cowboy earned
approximately a dollar a day, plus food, and, when near the home ranch, a bed
in the bunkhouse,
usually a barracks-like
building with a single open room.
--From Wikipedia and Texas State Historical Association
* * *
Amendment
XIV to the United States Constitution (July 28, 1868)
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized
in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States and the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or
enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of
the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Amendment
XV to the United States Constitution (March 30, 1870)
Section 1. The right of citizens of the
United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or
by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
* * *
John
Donne, the 16th century clergyman, was speaking of the
interconnectivity of men (whether well-bred or of lowly state) when he
wrote his brief and tidy poem destined to become one of the more famous in the
Western Canon. In making his point, he used the imagery of his island country
in its juxtaposition to the larger land mass of Europe.
“No man is an island, entire of
itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be
washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death
diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to
know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
(By the way, promontory means a high point
of land.)
* * *
Ernest Hemingway, over 300 years later,
borrowed John Donne’s poem for the
epigraph and title of his novel about the Spanish Civil War—For Whom the Bell Tolls. He had covered
the conflict as a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance, working
from the Republican side of the battle lines. Hemingway used his first-hand
observations, along with his imagination to create this work of realistic
fiction.
The civil war had broken out in 1936 when General
Francisco Franco and other influential generals of the Spanish Army rose up
against the democratically-elected government—the Second Republic of Spain.
This military coup was supported by conservatives and reactionaries, known as
the Nationalists, including the fascist Flange.
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy quickly lent
military and diplomatic support to the uprising. Great Britain, France, and the United States
took a neutral position in the war, although France apparently provided some
behind-the-scenes assistance.
Unfortunately, this neutrality left the
Republican forces (as the supporters of the government were called) with the
Soviet Union as the main source of military supplies. That help would prove to
be a mixed blessing.
After the military coup was launched,
thousands of volunteers from other countries, including the neutral Western
democracies, traveled to Spain and joined the Republican cause. Among them was
George Orwell, a British writer and socialist.
He nearly became a fatality in the combat.
While standing in a trench at the front lines, he was wounded in the throat.
The bullet just missed a main artery.
He also barely escaped being killed due to
the twisted political disputes occurring among the Republican partisans. When
the Communist Party (a powerful force due to its control of military aid from
the Soviet Union) outlawed the group Orwell belonged to, accusing its members
of being “objectively Fascist” and thus hindering the Republican cause, the
author and his wife (who had joined him in Spain) went into hiding.
The Orwells were able to leave the country
by train before being arrested. Hundreds
of Republican supporters, however, were less fortunate. Deemed as political
heretics, they were executed by the Communists during this purge. Many more,
including the Communists, would suffer a similar fate at the hands of the
victorious Nationalists after the war ended in early 1939.
The world barely caught its breath from the
cessation of hostilities in Spain when a few months later, in September, Hitler
ordered the invasion of Poland, a decision that launched World War II.
Orwell subsequently wrote of his
experiences in Homage to Catalonia.
Still later, the battle against the Fascists and the betrayal by the Communists
helped inspire his great story— Animal
Farm, and very likely helped inform his novel—1984—a dark story of a future world controlled by Big Brother and thought control.
* * *
In his saltwater farm on the coast of Maine,
E.B. White was as far removed from these events in Europe as you could be.
He and his wife Katherine had worked for The
New Yorker magazine, he as a writer and she as an editor. The weekly
journal was more focused on lifestyle than weighty current events.
In the winter of 1938, feeling disaffected
in New York City, he had decided on “some sort of drastic action”. As he
humorously described it many years afterwards, White wrote that “Without
considering what it would do to my wife to be uprooted from The New Yorker, or what it would do to
my son to be switched from a private school in Manhattan to a two-room
schoolhouse in the country, and without a thought of what I would be using for
money in my rural incarnation, I led my little family out the city like a daft
piper.”
In his explanation of what prompted the decision,
White said that he wanted an opportunity to try out a different voice, one
centered on personal observation and commentary rather than a corporate ‘we’
and, as he said, “I wanted to write as straight as possible, with no
fuzziness.”
As
good fortune would have it, during a lunch with the editor of Harper’s magazine two days before he
left the city White was invited to submit a column to the monthly magazine for
$300 an article.
From his decision and that forum would come
some of the finest essays ever penned, many of them published in the collection
One Man’s Meat.
While E.B. White’s farming experiences
would give us such memorable pieces as “Death of a Pig” and result in the classic
children’s story Charlotte’s Web,
White also used his monthly column to voice his strong disapproval of what
Hitler and his henchmen were doing in Europe and, just as importantly, he took
issue with the sympathy and rationales a number of Americans were expressing
towards “this new world order.”
His essay “Freedom” (written in July 1940) was
in response to comments he heard during a visit to New York City concerning the
success of the German forces against France and Great Britain. During the previous month, the British Army
had barely escaped complete disaster by successfully evacuating soldiers from
Dunkirk. This event was followed a few days later with the fall of France and
the triumphant entry into Paris by the German victors. The United States,
meanwhile, was still officially neutral, with many people (most famously
Charles Lindbergh) advocating an America First, isolationist stance towards the
European conflict.
White also spoke of the repression that the
Nazis had directed at the Jews and their advocacy of Aryan racial purity and
superiority.
“Such
remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing in their cumulative effect. They
are more destructive than dive bombers and minefields, for they challenge not
merely one’s immediate position but one’s main defenses. They seemed to me to
issue either from persons who could never have really come to grips with
freedom, so as to understand her, or from renegades. Where I expected to find
indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child
who is dully swallowing a distasteful pill. I was advised of the growing
anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be watching the phenomenon of
intolerance not through tears of shame but with clear intellectual gaze, as
through a well-ground lens.
“The least a
man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands. I
believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same
intense abandon that attended its birth on this continent more than a century
and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were
shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed
for time. Actually I do not believe I am pressed for time, and apologize to the
reader for a false impression that may be created. I just want to tell, before
I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of
long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply
suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators
merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell
rises. I pinch my nose.”
* * *
“History does not repeat itself, but it
often rhymes.”—attributed to Mark Twain.
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