The Twisting Road of History

Peaks of Dos Cabezas seen from New Mexico state line

We have arrived at last! We were six days on the road, rather than the usual five, owing to an unexpected, migraine-motivated, two-night stay in Alamagordo, New Mexico. (We had also stayed two nights in Springfield, Illinois, but that was planned and enjoyable.) We were able to make the last leg of our cross-country journey on Tuesday, however, and it was an easy drive on a clear, sunny day. My heart leaped up when I spotted the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas as we crossed the state line from New Mexico into Arizona, and later on, everything in the car dragged into the cabin, as we prepared to hit the road once again, briefly to stock up at the grocery store in Willcox, we were both thrilled to see the moon rising gloriously over the mountains. 

For me, the drive from central Illinois to southeast Arizona presents not only challenges of the road and beautiful scenery and whatever surprises we encounter in towns we visit along the way — it’s also puts front and center in my mind the history of our country. For instance: we see enormous bales of cotton (size and shape of the large round hay bales sometimes seen back in Michigan), and I wonder how it was that the growing of cotton moved west to Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas and even as far as Arizona and how much of that crop’s westward migration story is tied to the larger story of slavery and the Civil War and the migrations of Southerners to the West and Southwest and when the growing of cotton on former buffalo lands came about and how it affected the lives of the Plains Indians. A bit of searching on my phone delivers a fact that surprises me: that the Choctaw began planting cotton in 1825. Unsurprisingly, cotton's history in the second half of the nineteenth century was complicated, to put it mildly. If you're interested, the link is there to follow and read more.

But every mile of the road is saturated with history and the effects of history’s unrolling on the present. Cities are booming, in the Great Plains as elsewhere (we avoided cities as much as possible so as not to deal with the traffic), but across the country the pain of nearly forgotten small towns is palpable. On the two-lane roads we travel -- sometimes detouring a bit off the road to find what is called hopefully a business district -- we see towns where beautiful old buildings stand empty of commerce, wide streets empty of traffic, towns with not a soul on the sidewalks. The scene is the town correlate of the abandoned and derelict farmhouse, an empty house falling into ruins among sheltering trees as cattle graze up to the edge of the front porch, farms having grown larger and larger although country cemeteries tell of larger populations in times past.

Intersection of brick streets, Medicine Lodge, KS

We detoured off the road Saturday morning to explore one formerly prosperous Kansas town and admired beautiful brick streets and buildings in our search for breakfast but were unable to find a single place open for business. We fared better down the road in Medicine Lodge, another town of brick streets. The “Welcome” sign on Frosty’s Donut Shop was contradicted by a “Closed” sign on the same door, but down the block a few doors we found an open cafe. (I neglected to photograph the front of the business but think I recall its name as Latte-Da.) Fancy European coffees have penetrated the heartland! We stuck with straight American brew, fresh and dark and delicious. The sweet white china cups were so much more luxurious than mugs and light years better than gas station styrofoam! Avocado toast, my menu choice, came to the table topped with cheese and a fried egg and was a breakfast worth the wait and the search that had led us to Medicine Lodge. 

Medicine Lodge calls hard on history for recognition. Along with being the one-time home of temperance agitator Carrie Nation (there is an oxymoron for you: temperance agitator), it was also the scene of 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty between the U.S. government and “more than 5,000 representatives of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho and Kiowa-Apache nations,” joined soon by members of the Southern Cheyenne. The town of Medicine Lodge celebrates the colorful treaty gathering annually, despite its short-lived success. 

…[C]ontinual attempts to renege on the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty came to a head in 1903 in the landmark Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock case, in which a member of the Kiowa nation filed charges against the Secretary of the Interior. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the right to break or rewrite treaties between the United States and Native American tribes however the lawmakers saw fit [my emphasis added], essentially stripping the treaties of their power.

Read more at this site from which my quote is drawn. 

Visual support for the local high school team on one store window aroused my curiosity, and I looked up the town on City Data, an online site that helps me see beneath appearances, where the report (this would be from the 2010 census) told me that the Native American population of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, is 0.00%. But history is what the town has, and it’s clear they are struggling to hold onto some kind of identity.  When a young woman with a hauntingly plaintive country voice sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” in the little cafe, our feelings for the place and its people were warm, and we wished everyone well as we said goodby. I remember struggling years in Northport, Michigan, and can’t help being sympathetic to other small towns fighting an Interstate highway system, flight to cities, and online shopping. As for the burden of history, it is one none of us can escape. All we can choose is how we will go on from where we are.

I won't try to give a day-by-day or mile-by-mile or even road-by-road account of this year’s trip west but will skip now from Kansas to New Mexico, where our last stop on our last day of travel was in the town of Deming. Remembering a very pleasant visit to a little bookstore called Readers' Cove in December 2018, I had been looking forward to stopping there again this year. First, however, we sought out a downtown cafe — and again, as in Medicine Lodge, fortune smiled on us. “Rise and Shine” was drawing in others besides ourselves for their gourmet coffee, but we took a table and made it a lunch stop, as well. Then on to Readers' Cove. 

Margaret was still there, the little dog, the cat (I was told there is more than one cat on the premises), and again I found enough books to carry off a little stack, although we did not tarry as long this year, eager as we were to reach our ghost town destination. 

… And then there it was, finally coming into sight a bit farther down the road (I-10 now), the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas visible from the New Mexico/Arizona state line. (See back to my top photo of today's post, if you've forgotten.) I was so happy to see my mountains again! We took the first of the three exits to Willcox, so as to enter past the livestock auction grounds and the old town along the railroad. Later, having unpacked at the cabin and returned to Willcox for the shopping expedition, we saw the old town strip after dark, beautifully lit up for the holidays — a photo op that must wait for another evening, however, as road weariness was overcoming us. And so, home and to bed, with a short spell of reading aloud, and then to sleep, at last, in our winter ghost town stomping grounds.

Until a high desert dawn brought another day, much calmer and more relaxed than the week past has been. I note today the birthday of Michigan, Montana, and Arizona writer and our good friend, the late Jim Harrison. Here's to you, Jim! You got your work and paid your rent in the universe!

Ghost town dawn

Human-Readable Media

Owner and writer of the little book

I have written before of this little book, purchased at an estate sale, but why did I wake in the dark this morning thinking about it? Whatever the stimulus, I was motivated to pull it from the shelf once again and carefully, slowly turn its pages.

Opened from one end, it is a book of accounts, interesting for its own sake. Here is an entry for receipt of $100 for teaching four months in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, in 1853; Received of James, $42; Borrowed of William, $10; Received of Directors of Gretna Academy for services [teaching] during the month of March, $45.90. Such were items of the young man’s income.

His expenses, naturally, were more varied. In November 1853 his fare to Dunkirk was $5.30, dinner at Dunkirk 25 cents. Another $8.55 took him to Cincinnati, where he purchased “refreshments” for 20 cents and a volume of Pope’s essays and a Harper’s magazine for 50 cents. For a dollar he went to the theatre, for 50 cents bought a penknife. Clothes were not cheap -- $14 for a coat and $6 for a pair of pants – but while shoes might set him back five dollars, he had (presumably) another pair mended for only seventy-five cents.

A page of his accounts

Handwritten personal accounts from 1853. When I first got it home, I thought that was all the book contained, and yet I was well satisfied with the couple dollars paid for it, interested to see a young man recording that he had purchased [Charles] Lamb’s Works and Dickens’s Pickwick Papers for $1.75 over a century and a half ago. Many entries were in soft pencil, worn by the years. Others, easier to read, had been written in ink, but it is not still a book to be read hurriedly, and so it was quite a little while before I discovered more to it than lists of income and outgo.

Following the handful of pages of itemized columns comes something quite different, pages of closely written lines beginning,

You may wonder that I do not delight to recall the pleasant scenes of the past any more, the boyish reveries at twilight, lovely day-dream fragments of poetry that was never written but in my heart.

Was this the draft of a letter or an essay or only the private outpourings of a young man’s heart? He writes that while the romantic coloring of boyhood is no longer with him, he does not despair of its return someday and meantime takes a more sober enjoyment in work.

A page written in pencil following the two previous, in ink, that began with the quoted line above is titled “Life – Its Enjoyments” and starts off with a salutation, “Ladies and Gentlemen.” So, perhaps a public lecture? The writer was clearly working through his theme as he wrote. Certain words and lines are crossed out, showing that he revised his language as he went along.

A century and a half ago, I remind myself, he sat with this book before him and applied his thoughts to the pages now before me. Did he write by candle or kerosene lamp? I cannot see the young man, but I can look into his mind and his life, thanks to his written words. How much did he pay for the little blank book? How much for a bottle of ink? For pencils? Surely he never imagined a woman in northern Michigan in the 21^st century reading what he had written!

Note that this book is not one of hundreds printed. It is unique, a “one-off,” as people say in our times. What were the odds against its coming into my hands at all?

Does anyone reading this post remember what I wrote of the little book when it first came to me? If so, you may recall that it served the young man as a diary when opened from the other end (follow the link above to read more of the life recorded in the journal), and there, like so many other writers of journals, he begins in a serious vein:

Tuesday evening. August 29. 1854. 

This is a lovely evening, and I must, therefore say something about it in my journal. I have been taking one of my old walks up in the clover-lot. There was a time when I walked up there every evening, and watched the sunset, and the sky grow dark, as the shadows of twilight gathered around, and the stars come forth, and all o’ that. And every time my enjoyment was seemingly new. It was such as I seldom feel now.

Does this journal entry echo the prepared talk at the other end of the book? It seems obvious that the talk issued from the same feelings and around the same time, although it’s difficult to guess which was written first.

What brought on the writer’s gentle melancholy? A pencil note made later under the date notes that he was 21 years old in 1854.

First page of handwritten journal

Soon, on January 5 [1855], he writes, with joyous little feeling for the day, “Birthdays are said to be mile stones on the pathway of life.” He goes on to say that he had been urged to go out to a “donation party” that evening, “but I had no mind to.” During this time of his early teaching career, he is “boarding” in two different places. “I dislike this moving about....” Away from home, living with strangers, working hard, wearing out his eyes. But when the superintendent comes to his school, everything goes well.

Sunday -- March 18, 1855 

I didn’t calculate to write any in my journal, but as I sat here that peculiar feeling came over me which always makes me look for a pen or a friend. I am at Rev. Mr. Smith’s. Elizabeth has just gone up stairs. She has been reading to me as my eye is rather bad. Cassy has gone to meeting with her father. It is all quite still....

Imagine the minister’s daughters, kind Elizabeth, exuberant Cassy, and the emptiness of the parlor when they are gone. No friend near, the young man picks up his pencil. (Despite what he wrote, he seems to have had no pen nearby.) His journal must be his confidante.

It is impossible to imagine a 22-year-old in America today in a similar situation. Today, with cell phone always in hand, friends are always only a click away. The entire world is only a click away! Can a young person today even begin to imagine the nineteenth-century journal writer’s solitude? And here’s another question: Can he or she read a single word of the faded cursive handwriting? No batteries or software are needed to make the writing visible, but the words on the page must still be read, and we are told that as young people no longer to write cursive, they have also lost the ability to read it.

But maybe our generation is too pessimistic when we imagine handwritten documents becoming inaccessible even where preserved. Maybe cursive handwriting, like cuneiform, will be translated anew by some future generation, old thoughts discovered, dead voices brought back to life.

Imagine such a future, when phone text messages and e-mails have evaporated and blogs vanished into the ether. Will our great-grandchildren take up diaries written before the Civil War as a hieroglyphic challenge? Will they feel the excitement of discovering an ancient and forgotten world?

What of today’s world, though? Our thoughts and musings and memories? Will all that be nothing but a gap in the historical record? An era of unrecorded history?

Letters tucked in between diary pages