WRITING STORIES - The Lawless Early Days of Print

 

I doubt you could have missed the pair, seated in the Swan tavern on Fleet Street in London, that 28 March,  1716.  Last to arrive was the infamous publisher, pornographer and plagiarist Edmund Curll, a scarecrow of a man, tall and thin, splayfooted, and with gray goggle eyes that threatened to burst from his pale face like a cartoon character. He was so ugly no image of him survives.

Waiting for him like a spider on his web was one the greatest poets in history, the oft quoted and revered deformed genius Alexander Pope (above), with a Roman nose and a spine so twisted he stood barely four feet six inches tall from his stylish shoes to the top of the hump on his back. 

Curll (above, right) thought he had been invited to settle their disagreements. Pope (above, left) intended upon doing just that, by poisoning his guest's beer. 

Later Pope joyfully wrote a mocking obituary of his victim (above), under the name of an Eye Witness. It was titled   “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, bookseller...To be published weekly”. Curll was not killed, but he did projectile vomit until he wished his was dead. It was like a scene from Animal House. Ah, good times among the 18^th century London literati. 

Publishing was in its youth, as young as the internet is today, and just as chaotic, dishonest, unregulated, and unencumbered by a functional business model. 

In 1688 there were only 68 printing presses in London, all controlled by members of the Stationer's  Guild.  But in 1695 Parliament refused to renew that company's monopoly, setting off a decade of pure anarchy. 

Daniel Defoe (above) of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders" fame, noted, “One man studies seven year(s), to bring a finished piece into the world, and a pirate printer....sells it for a quarter of the price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament".  

In 1702 Defoe himself was fined and sentenced to be pilloried (above), but his fans threw flowers instead of rotten fruit. Then, finally, in 1710 Parliament obliged with The Statue of Anne - she was queen at the time - which created a 14 year copyright for authors. 

Still, six years later one author felt required to poison a pirate printer – by making him vomit for 24 straight hours, and then attacking him again in print with his obituary set to rhyme .

“Next o'er his books his eyes begin to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug.”

Alexander Pope (above)  The Dunciad (1728)

Pope's public justification for the poisoning of  Edmund Curl was as revenge for embarrassing him in eyes of the smart and lovely Lady Mary Montagu (above). 

The morally pompous and socially inept poet Pope (above, right), so famous for his version of Shakespeare and translations of Homer that he was nicknamed “the Bard”, was smitten with the lady. They even maintained a correspondence.  And then Pope privately published one of her poems, under a pseudonym of course, since  nobility were not supposed to engage in actual writing or publication – it smacked of stooping to actually earning a living.  But copies of the ladies' poem were discretely passed about the English court. 

But soon, Curll was selling bootleg copies on the streets for 3pence, humilating the lady and by extension, Pope who had set her up for this dishonor. So Pope could claim he was defending the lady's honor, and not his own when he poisoned Curll.

Pope then attacked Curll  again (among others) in an epic insulting poem, published under the title of “Dunciad”.  

Curll responded by pirating the poem about his own attempted murder, even publishing an annotated version, also called a “key”. Mocked Curll, “How easily two wits agree, one writes the poem, one writes the key”.

Of course, Edmund Curll was not quite the “shameless Curll” Pope portrayed – not quite. He was infamous for keeping a revolving stable of struggling quill drivers “three in a bed” in the “low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses” jammed into Grub Street (above), just off the Fleet Street when his own offices were. 

Originally “grub” referred to the roots and insect larval uncovered when the street was originally scrapped out. Eventually the address was adopted as a badge of honor by the poverty stricken occupants (above), like the eventual great biographer Samuel Johnson, or Ned Ward, who considered his own profession as “scandalous...as whoring....”.

These grubs were hack writers, named after the ubiquitous horse drawn Hackney cabs that plied London's streets, going where ever their paying passengers demanded. 

Which usually meant, obscenity, which as today, always sold well, as did insults and visual attacks on the pompous and well to do - like Pope (above). The occasional advance, paid to a hungry writer was called a “grub stake”, and the pitiful meals they could afford were “grub”.  

The Irishman Jonathan Swift (above), eventual creator of “Gulliver's Travels”, grandiosely referred to this literary sub-culture as "the Republica Grubstreet-aria." But like Johnson, Swift was clever enough and lucky enough to eventually escape the life as a mere grub.

In fact, Curll employed no more Grub Street warriors than any other Fleet Street baron. But he was particularly adept at supplying what the public wanted - licentious sex, and manufactured controversy. Curll paid grubs to engage in a “pamphlet war” - much like the Fox News' war on Christmas and on American democracy.

...as in the 1712 trial of Jane Wehham (above) for witchcraft - she was convicted and executed several times over on grub street and with much profit on Fleet street.

Curll also printed cheap pirated books that sold for a mere shilling, thus undercutting the actual author's authorized editions. Acknowledged one critic, Edmund Curll, “...had no scruples either in business or private life, but he published and sold many good books.”  The dirty and stolen books he published illegally paid for the good books he published legally. 

With Pope's urging, Curll was convicted of obscenity in 1716, and twice more in 1725. In 1726, Curll struck back by befriending the mistress of a Pope confident. 

She passed to Curll several letters in which the arrogantly moral Pope admitting to lusting after the Blount Sisters, Terresa and Martha. In one purloined missive Pope wrote,  “How gladly would I give all that I am worth, for one of their maidenheads.” Embarrassed and angered, Pope helped engineer yet another Curll conviction in February of 1727. 

This time the outrage could not be hushed up and the frustrated and exasperated royal court fined Curll and ordered him pilloried for an hour. At the mercy of the mob, Curll was spared the usual bombardment of rotted food and manure when, before he made his appearance, a pamphlet was read to the well armed crowd, claiming Curll was being punished for defending the recently departed Queen Anne. Thus misinformed, the mob threw nothing and after his hour in the block, carried Curll home on their shoulders. Pope was infuriated and determined to even the score.  Which was probably the real reason he poisoned Curll. 

One of Edmund Curll's most profitable ventures was what came to be called “Curlicisms”. When a well known figure died, Curll would advertise a forthcoming biography, and ask the public for any anecdotes about or letters from the deceased. Then, without validating the submissions Curll would hire a Grub street hack to string them together into an instant and usually inaccurate biography, creating what one potential subject described as “one of the new terrors of death.”

Curll had done this when the Duke of Buckingham died in 1721. But Buckingham had been a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and that body summoned Curll for interrogation. 

Curll was unrepentant, since it was not a crime to publish writings of a peer without their permission. So the Lords made it illegal, and in this Pope saw a new opportunity to again injure Curll.

In 1731 Curll announced a upcoming “Curlicism” of Alexander Pope, himself; “Nothing shall be wanting,” Curll assured his potential readers, “but his (universally desired) death.” Again Curll called for submissions and a mysterious figured identified only as “P.T.” offered letters written by Pope to the Lord of Oxford.  

In 1734 Curll published his vicious biography of Pope which quoted from the Lord of Oxford letters. The next year Pope published his own “Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years”, including the same letters to Oxford.  But the details in Pope's version did not match those published by Curll, as Pope pointed out when he alleged Curll had violated the privilege of a member of the House of Lords and worse, slandered the Lord of Oxford while doing it. The trap was sprung.

The only problem was, Curll again refused to repent. Called again before the Lords, Curll quipped, "Pope has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.” And in fact as well. 

The Duke of Oxford (above) still had the original letters in his files and Curll was able to call them to be examined by the Lords.  Surprise! The texts of the originals did not match those supplied by the mysterious P.T.  So, asked Curll, where had P.T.'s inaccurate versions come from? Curll produced P.T.'s letters so the Lords could judge for themselves who was implicated by the handwriting. 

For a few days, the city of London, or that section that cared about such things, held its breath. And then an ad appeared in a small newspaper offering 20 guineas if P.T. would come forward to admit he had “acted by the direction of any other person.”  

P.T., of course did not collect the reward. And the ploy fooled no one – Pope had written the originals and the fakes and even the ad, and everybody knew it. The House found a political solution; since the published letters were fakes, the law had not been broken. Case closed, except Pope now had even more egg on his face.

Wrote Curll, “Crying came our bard into the world, but lying, it is to be feared, he will go out of it.”.

And so he did.  Pope died on 30 May, 1744, and Edmund Curll followed him in December of 1747.

Thus, Curll earned the last word. He described his relationship with Pope this way, “A fitter couple was never hatched, Some married are, indeed, but we are matched”.

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THE POISON OF CAPITALISM

 

I have noticed that in all things, drama attracts drama. Forty miles east of Coeur de'Alene, Idaho, there is proof of this. Through fissures opened by dramatic continental collisions over a billion years ago, water percolated up through sedimentary rocks. And where it pooled and cooled it left behind veins of silver, lead, and zinc. 

Then 190 million years ago this shattered wreckage was struck again, theatrically folding forested ridges upward until they broke, then shoving the amputated segments atop their own abandoned limbs, stacking the veins haphazardly through the new mountains. Fifty million years ago erosion found the weak points in the fault lines, opening the land to the human drama of ambition and greed.

Burke Canyon Creek (above), like a hundred other streams in the panhandle of Idaho, divides two of these ridges. To the southeast the 6,000 foot high twin Grouse Peaks are separated by a mile from the 6,000 foot high Tiger Peak to the northwest. Between them, at just 2,500 feet above sea level, snakes the 300 foot wide “Silver Valley”.  

Burke Canyon is so narrow, in the winter the bottom receives only two hours of sunlight. Shopkeepers had to close their awnings when the narrow gauge trains carried  the ore out of the mines and down the center of the canyon. Human dead had to be carried out the same way, since there was no space to bury them in the canyon.

 But by 1891, the 11 mile long, constricted, twisting valley was dotted with one-street towns and the 100 mines they served; The Bunker Hill, The Burke, The Star-Morning, The Standard-Mammoth, the Hercules, The Gem, The Poorman Tiger, The Union, The Sunshine, the Frisco, The Tamarack. and The Hecla were just the biggest of the mines.

In less than a hundred years humans would extract from this dramatic landscape $5.5 billion worth of metal, including 37,00 metric tons of silver – half of all silver mined in the United States - 8 million tons of lead, and 3 million tons of zinc These were no paper profits. This was production,  rare metals pried from the earth. But the handful of owners who risked their capital to exploit this bonanza, and the 3,500 hard-rock miners who risked their lives a mile and more beneath this canyon for $3.50 a day, were all digging their own graves.  And their grandchildren's graves too.

In the fall of 1891 the railroads which transported the ore once it was out of Burke Canyon, announced they were raising their rates $2 a ton. The Mine Owners Association, which effectively owned the canyon, responded by shutting down production. Three thousand miners were laid off, and untold store clerks, cooks, maids and laundresses lost their incomes as well. 

The standoff continued until the following April of 1892, when a compromise was reached and the mines announced they would reopen. But because of increased overhead the mines would rehire only 2,000 skilled miners, would add six hours to an already six day workweek, and for the 500 hundred unskilled miners, there would be a pay cut of fifty cents a day.

The workers at each mine responded by forming unions, and were unified in their demand - $3.50 a day for all workers, skilled and unskilled. The Owners Association refused, and in June began advertising for replacement workers. Soon, every train which arrived in Wallace, Idaho, at the foot of the canyon, carried miners (“scabs”) from Michigan and Wisconsin, Kentucky and Pennslyvania. Union miners took to greeting the new arrivals with fists and clubs. 

The Owners hired Pinkerton “guards” to protect the replacement workers. Tensions increased, threats increased, violence increased. Two of the mines reopened with union miners, and two, the Gem and the Frisco, reopened with non-union miners.

When the sun rose over the narrow canyon on Monday, 11 July, 1892, the hills overlooking the Gem were covered with armed union men. At first light, the shooting began. After several hours of unproductive gunfire, the miners switched to more familiar weapons. A black powder bomb exploded a building (above) housing one of the great stamps which broke up the ore before shipment. After a little more shooting the company men surrendered. The human cost was three dead. 

The union men marched their prisoners across the narrow street to saloons in the town of Gem, while company men still on mine property began sniping at them. Women and children ran for their lives, fleeing either up or down the canyon. Fifty more company men arrived and surrounded the saloons where their men were being held. Three more men were killed, this time union men, and eventually, the union men surrendered in their turn.

Meanwhile, shooting had also begun at the Frisco mine, and three more company men were killed. Yet another surrender prevented further loss of life. The sheriff and Federal Marshals escorted these company men down the canyon to Wallace. Pro-union forces now occupied both mines and had captured 2,000 rounds of ammunition, stockpiled by the mine owners. All of this had isolated the largest mine further up the canyon, the Bunker Hill, in tiny Burke, Idaho.

On day two of the “Burke Canyon War”, Federal troops arrived in Cataldo, twenty miles to the west, but the union men threatened to blow up the mines if they moved any closer. That left the company men in the closed Bunker Hill Mine cut off from support, heavily outnumbered and now out gunned. 

The company men walked out without putting up any further fight.  All non-union mines in the Silver Valley were now shut down. It was only a matter of time before all would be forced to sign union contracts. It looked like the Union had won. And then somebody did something really dramatic, and really stupid.

It happened in Cataldo, where the narrow gauge railroad met the head of navigation for the Cour d'Alene River. There had once been a Mission nearby, and as daylight began to fade that Tuesday evening, 130 company men from the Gem and Frisco mines were gathered on the dock, waiting for a boat to allow them to escape this insanity. 

They had already been shot at and some had even been blasted. Then, out of the shadows, men now appeared on horseback and started shooting into the unarmed crowd. Panicked men began running in every direction, some even jumping into the lake. It does not appear that anyone was actually killed in this shadowed fusillade, but it was claimed that 17 were wounded. It was labeled “The Mission Massacre”, and most public sympathy for the union cause died right there.

On Wednesday, 13 July, 1891, Idaho Governor Wiley placed the entire county under martial law. A thousand state militia appeared, followed by a small but vocal pro-owner army of reporters. Before the week was out 400 union men were under arrest. So backed up had the courts become, that it would be a year before some of prisoners would have their chance to defend themselves. Very few would be found not guilty. Many served years in prison. All union men were forced out of the mines, and the Owners Association reigned triumphant.

Eight years later they all did it again. This time the Bunker Hill mine was blown up. But again the owners won. 

Six years later the two sides went at it yet again,  and then Governor Frank Steunenburg (above)  called out the National Guard. This time,  he boasted, “We have taken the monster by the throat, and we are going to choke the life out of it.”  He meant the miners risking their lives deep underground.

Union men responded by planting a bomb on the gate in front of the Governor's home (above) and 

blowing up the governor . It took the skills of lawyer Clarence Darrow to keep the union man convicted of the Governor's murder, out of the electric chair . But the tit for tat never really ended, which helped ensure that by 1920 the 5,000 non-union miners in Silver Valley were the highest paid workers in the state.  They had to be, to get them to stay given the conditions they were forced to work under.  It would have been cheaper to have paid union wages, but the owners chose the more dramatic approach,

But almost unnoticed at first, the real cost of all this drama began to surface. Around 1900 farmers downstream began complaining that the spring floods on the Coeur d'Alene River had poisoned their fields and killed their livestock. 

By the 1930's the south fork of the Coeur d'Alene river had become a dead zone. People drinking from the river became sick, even losing their hair. The farmers sued the mine owners, but the courts, already used to crush the unions, now crushed the farmers. Still, there was so much lead in the Burke Canyon Creek, the miners began calling it “Lead Creek”. After the World Wars the price of silver began to fall. The mines began to close. And as they did, their political power began to wane.

In May of 1972,  91 miners died in a fire in the Sunshine Mine. And this time the disaster brought in the new Environmental Protection Agency. And what the EPA scientists found, scared them. They could find no fish in Burke Canyon Creek.  By measurement, the water carried 550 pounds of zinc every day into the Coeur d'Alene River – so much that when the stream pooled, the water was yellow.  

Twenty miles of streams in surrounding areas could support no fish, and 10 miles of tributaries of the Coeur d”Alene River had “virtually no life” in them. In those waters downstream from Silver Canyon, lead and zinc levels were fifty times the federal safe water quality standard. How had it spread so far outside the canyon?  

Every day each mine had been dumping between 40 and 60 tons of lead into the air. Rain settled this poison into the  Coeur d'Alene river, and had contaminated Lake Coeur d'Alene, which had contaminated 160 miles of the Spokane River, which flowed out of the lake. 

Water fowl were dying each year in thousands, 21 bird species were at risk of local local extinction. And human children living in the valley had the highest levels of lead in their blood ever seen - in the world.

The result was the 21 square mile Bunker Hill Superfund Site. When this cleanup is finally finished (if ever), it could cost taxpayers $1.4 billion – or just about 20% of the value of the ore removed from the “silver canyon” over the previous century, all to enrich a few mine owners. In 1996, after twenty years of cleanup effort, EPA scientists put healthy trout in water from the Burke Canyon Creek. All were dead in four hours. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality estimates their costs alone will be $2 million a year every year for the foreseeable future. 

Today, if you take a drive up Silver Canyon, you will pass a stream with no fish in it and abandoned stores and  mine buildings, all surrounded by chain link fences. Those fences were erected by the EPA, to protect curious tourists from dying of curiosity.  So much drama produces so much damage, it makes you wonder if capitalism is worth it. 

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