SISSYSPHUS ON THE WABASH

 

I want to take you back to a time when there were just two million Hoosiers in the whole wide world, and yet Indiana had 13 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 15 electoral votes. Today they have just nine,  and a mere 11 electoral votes. Even more improbable to modern ears, the smallest state west of the Allegheny mountains was a crucial "battleground" state, oscillating like a bell clapper, clanging first Republican and then ringing Democratic, changing six times between 1876 and 1888, swinging each time at the whim of some 6,000 reasonably fickle independent voters.

One impeller of these rhythmic revolutions came in the winter of 1885 when the dynamic Democratic Governor Isaac Gray (above), dreamed of becoming President of the whole United States. Now, such ambition was not an impossible dream, as another Hoosier politician would shortly prove – Republican Benjamin Harrison.  First step[ to achieve this ambition was for Gray to become a United States Senator.   And since at the time Senators were elected by the state legislature, which was split pretty evenly along party lines, Governor Gray came up with a clever plan to ensure himself  the stepping stone post of Senator. First the Democratic Governor jammed through a gerrymander redistricting of the state legislative offices, re-designing ten traditionally Republican state assembly seats so they would more likely elect Democrats instead. This would prove to be such an outrageous power grab, a Federal court would finally declare it unconstitutional in 1892. But that was all part of Gray's plan, because he knew the voters would take their revenge far sooner than the courts.

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So, in the summer of 1886, Grey convinced his Democratic Lieutenant Governor, Mahlon Manson. to take early retirement. Then he scheduled a mid-term election to refill that post. And as Gray had expected, the Republican base was so energized by the Democratic gerrymander, that their party was swept back into power that November with a 10,000 vote majority, recapturing seven of those redistricted Assembly seats that were supposed to go Democratic.  (The state Senate, remained unchanged at  31 Democrats and 19 Republicans.)  

But more importantly for Governor Gray, the newly elected Lieutenant Governor was a Republican, Robert Robertson. Thus, should Democrat Gray offer his resignation as Governor in exchange for his election as U.S. Senator, the Republican dominated Assembly would probably go along because that would make the Republican Robertson the new Governor. Clever. Complicated, but clever.

Yes, Grey (above) was clever enough to be worthy of Machiavelli. But his plan faced one insurmountable hurdle. Governor Isaac Grey was without doubt the most hated Democratic governor among Democrats, in the entire history of the state of Indiana. He was the original DINO -  a Democrat in Name Only.

Twenty years earlier, at the close of the Civil War, this same Isaac Grey,  had been the Republican Speaker of the state Assembly (above).  To pass the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, making ex-slaves American citizens, and giving black males the right to vote, Speaker Grey had literally locked the doors, preventing Democrats from bolting the building and thus denying a quorum to the Republican majority. While the trapped Democrats sulked in the cloak room, Speaker Grey staged successful votes for the three Constitutional Amendments. It had been a brutal scheme, again worthy of Machiavelli, - like Gray's latest plot.. But the Democrats never forgot Grey had counted them as "present but not voting",  even after he had switched to the Democrats and gave them the Governorship.  And as the Assembly session for 1887 opened, these hard liners were willing to set the state on fire if they could also burn up their Governor's Presidential dream boat.

The Indiana State Senate (above)  was about to come into session at  9:35 on the morning of Saturday 24 February, 1887, when Republican Lt. Governor Robertson entered the second floor chambers to take his seat as the new President pro tempore of the Senate.  But a flying squad of Democrats physically blocked him from reaching the dais. He shouted from the floor, "Gentlemen of the Senate, I have been by force excluded from the position to which the people of this state elected me.” But at this point the out going President pro tempore, Democratic Senator Alonzo Smith, ordered doorkeeper Frank Pritchett, to remove the Lt. Governor, “...if he don't stop speaking.”

As the doorkeeper and his assistants advanced on Roberts, the duly elected president pro tempo announced, “They may remove me. I am here, unarmed.” Smith testily responded, “We are all unarmed. We are fore-armed, though.” That belligerent mood was now general in the chamber. Republican Senator DeMotte from Porter county shouted something from the floor, and acting President Smith ordered him to take his seat. Responded DeMotte, “When he gets ready, he will.”

As the Lt. Governor was dragged toward the rear doors of the Senate Chamber a Republican Senator shouted that if he went, all the Republicans were going with him. President Pro tem Smith shouted back, “They can go if they want to. They will be back, ” he predicted. At this point Republican Senator Johnson challenged the chair directly, telling him, “No man will be scared by you.” “You're awfully scared now, “ said the Democrat. “Not by you”, answered the Republican. It sounded like five year olds had taken over the state senate.

A general fight now broke out in the Senate chamber, with the outnumbered Republicans giving such a good account of themselves that one Democrat drew a pistol and – BANG! - shot a hole in the brand new ceiling of the still unfinished statehouse. Into the acrid gun smoke and sudden silence this unnamed Democrat announced that he was prepared to start killing Republicans if they kept fighting.

With that, Lt. Governor Robertson was thrown out of the Senate and the doors were locked and bolted behind him. As the official record notes those were “...the last words spoken by a Republican Senator in the 55th General Assembly.” The Senate then tried to get back to business, appropriately taking up Senate bill 61, setting aside $100,000 for three new hospitals for the mentally insane. It was decided it was self evident the state was going to need them, and the measure was approved by a vote officially recorded as 31 Ayes, 0 nays and 18 “present but not voting”. Ah, revenge must have seemed sweet for the Democrats – for about half an hour.

Outside in the central atrium, the gunshot had attracted a crowd, mostly from the Republican controlled House on the East side of the capital. Faced with a bruised and enraged Robertson, the Republicans caught his anger. Similar fights sparked to life in the chamber of the House of Representatives, and a “mob” of 600 angry Republicans descended upon every wayward Democrat in the building, punching and kicking them, and, if they resisted, beating them down to the marble floors of the brand new “people's house”.

Eventually, the pandemonium returned to its source; the Republicans laid siege to the Senate chamber. They beat against the doors, and smashed open a transom. Vengeful Republicans poured in and the haughty Democrats were assaulted in their own chamber and thrown out of it. By now Democrat Governor Grey, down in his offices on the first floor, had heard the ruckus upstairs, and had called in the Indianapolis Police. Four hours after the legislative riot had begun, order was restored to the capital of Hoosier democracy. History and many newspapers would record it as the “Black Day of the Indiana Assembly.”

The following Monday the triumphant Republican dominated Assembly dispatched a note to the battered Democratically controlled Senate, that the Repubs would have no further correspondence with the Dems. Snap of finger dismissal. The Senate counter-informed the lower house, ditto, and same to you.. State government in Indiana had ground to a halt. Lt. Governor Robertson never presided over the Senate, and Governor Gray never served as a Untied States Senator. He came to be known as the “Sisyphus of the Wabash”, after the legendary Greek king, renown for his avariciousness and deceit. A few years later Hoosiers elected to choose their Senators by popular vote,  I suppose under the theory that the general population of drunks and lunatics could do no worse then the professional politicians had already done.  And they were most certainly correct.

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TO TIMBUKTU

 

I have to say that Mansa Musa made quite an entrance. He materialized out of the Sahara desert heat shimmers like a mirage in 1324. His unexpected arrival stunned the Islamic potentates of Cairo and Mecca out of their smug self assurance, and shocked the European Christians out of their complacency. Because when Mansa paused in Cairo to stock up on souvenirs, he paid in gold. And he bought a lot of souvenirs. Mansa was leading 80 camels just to carry his gold. He came from a land whose ancient name was Kaya Magha, which meant “King of Gold”.  And Mansa was certainly that.

Mansa spent so much gold on his Hajji, his religious visit to Mecca,  that for the only time in all of recorded history, the price of gold in all of Europe and Africa and the Middle East was determined by one single man. And no one had ever heard of Mansa before, nor of his kingdom of Mali, nor of the city he claimed to have come from, the mysterious and mythical, Timbuktu. In the Berber language of the desert tribes, the name means “the well at the end of the world”.

The river Niger begins as a tiny spring in the West African highlands of Ghana, just 150 miles from the Atlantic. But the Niger immediately turns its back on the ocean and instead flows eastward. As it does the river collects vast amounts of gold, which could easily be extracted from it's waters.

Dugout canoes then carried the gold downstream, following the river’s arc to the north, penetrating the desert. At the northern peak of that arc, in Timbuktu, slabs of salt, mined from the blistering floor of the heart of the Sahara, and carried 500 miles south across the sands on camel back, were exchanged for the gold.

The salt was then transferred to canoes for distribution a thousand miles further south in the equatorial heart of black Africa. There, the final commodity, slaves, were exchanged for the salt and then marched, locked in shackles, back upstream.

And it was at the point of contact between the two worlds, the Arab north and the African south, that the economic ties were joined. And at about the same time that William the Conquer was winning the battle of Hastings, the village of Timbuktu was founded.

What made this trade possible, what made the city of Timbuktu possible, was the Niger River and an extraordinary pack animal, the Arabian camel (Camelus dromedarius). This ungulate with three stomachs evolved in North America, but went extinct there about 1 million years ago, at the start of the ice ages. By the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, its new home range was the arid and unforgiving Arabian Peninsula.

This amazing beast can lose up to 40% of its body weight in water, and can gulp down  21 gallons of salt laden brackish water within 10 minutes to refresh itself. Either behavior would kill a lesser creature. Its mouth and throat are so soft that it can ingest thorns and bare branches without injury. It's huge soft padded feet allow it to climb sand dunes with ease. Its long eyelashes and double eyelids allow it to survive the most fierce sand storms on earth. Known in Arabic as a Jamal, the camel can easily carry 200 pounds of cargo for twenty miles a day through blistering heat. And it can do it for fifty years.

The camel was first domesticated in Arabia about 3.500 years ago, and by the time they were introduced into the Sahara by Arab traders about the second century C.E., there were few wild dromedaries left. It was these ships of the desert, combined with the great Niger river, which built the greatest of West African kingdom, Mali.

Mansa was the second Musa (or “King of Kings”) from Mali to go on Hajji. His predecessor, Kankan Musa, had appointed Mansa as his Deputy King when he began his pilgrimage. But the desert had swallowed Kankan and his party without a trace, and after a year of silence, in 1307, Mansa had been crowned Musa of Mali, Emir of Melle, Lord of the Mines of Wangara, conqueror of Ghanata and Futa-Jallon, and quite possibly the richest man in the world. Only Genghis Khan ruled a larger empire.

Mali was a multi ethnic and multi-religious kingdom larger than Western Europe, and containing some 400 cities and uncounted villages. Timbuktu was the gateway for Islam into Mali. There it thrived alongside shrines to Sango, the thunder God, and Legba, messenger to all the African gods. A devout Muslim, Mansa felt no need to convert his subjects. Instead, when he returned to Mali in about 1325, he was inspired to rebuild Timbuktu, already a mud brick metropolis of 100,000 people.

Mansa brought an architect from Muslim Spain to design his new palace, as well as the mud brick Djinguereber Mosque , (above), where 2,000 people still take their daily prayers. The cities’ University of Sankoré began attracting world class astronomers and mathematicians and Islamic scholars. A Mali proverb observed, “Salt comes from the north, gold from the south…but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu.”

The city was famous for its libraries. Leo Africanus, an Islamic historian, wrote that in Timbuktu, “There is a great demand for books, and more profit is made from the trade in books than from any other line of business.” The scholar Ahmad Baba claimed that his personal library was one the smaller ones in the city, containing only 1,600 books. The entire city and its environs was said to hold during the golden age of Mali perhaps 10,000 ancient, pre-Islamic manuscripts, more than any other library in the world.  Book copying was a big business in Timbuktu.

Musa ruled his kingdom for perhaps 25 years. He died about the year 1337. The city of Timbuktu was ruled by his descendents for another century, until the empire of Mali was replaced by the Sunni empire, which was more African than Muslim. But the stories of so much gold attracted the interest of European monarchs, and in the sixteenth century Portuguese “explorers”, pushing down the coast, reached out and destroyed Timbuktu without ever seeing the city.  First contact diseases killed thousands. Armies from Morocco then killed more when they captured the weakened city in 1591.

But although the Moroccan leader Ahmad I al-Mansur hungered for the wealth of Timbuktu, he had no conception on what that wealth was based. In 1593 he began to dismantle the economic engine by first exiling the scholars, men like Ahmad Baba, because he considered them “disloyal”. For the first time in its history ignorance reigned in Timbuktu. The economic engine had lost its spark, and slowly died.

When Europeans finally arrived in the early nineteenth century they were shocked to discover the mysterious and romantic city of Timbuktu was a dusty backwater, little more than a local market town, slowly being reclaimed by the desert from which it had mysteriously sprung.

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GETTING LOST, The Real Daniel Boone

"I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” The words were written by the real Daniel Boone. And if Daniel were to wake up from his current sleep he would be bewildered again and angry to find that most of him was back in Kentucky. Because this man who kept moving while alive life to avoid “people” , finally fell, once he was dead, into the clutches of the very "people" he hated the most - politicians and their close kin in the real estate business, lawyers.

Daniel Boone never wore a coonskin cap. He was born in Pennsylvania, the sixth child of Quaker parents. While he was still an infant his parents were forced to sell their land after two of their elder children married outside the “Society of Friends”.  Their fellow "friends" forced them out of their church.

Daniel reached adulthood in North Carolina. There he showed such natural talent as a hunter, he  dropped out of school to take it up professionally. Most of what he killed was sold in public markets. A sister-in-law taught him to read and write, and other men would later follow him because he could regal them with readings from the “Bible” and “Gulliver’s Travels”. 

When he was 21 years old he married 16 year old Rebecca Bryan. They had ten children - although when they found the time I have no idea, Daniel was away from home so much.

Daniel was a short and shy man, and taciturn except when surrounded by his family. He was not the first white man in Kentucky. He was however one of the first Europeans who managed to walk out of Kentucky alive.  

He was not a great Indian fighter, and in his old age insisted, “I never killed but three”, adding, “I am very sorry to say that I ever killed any, for they have always been kinder to me than the whites.” 

And when he walked back into Kentucky it was as the supervisor of forty lumbermen, hired to cut a trail through the forest. Boonsboro was named after him because he was in charge of the crew who built the fort.  But it was not his fort.  He had no financial share in it

In 1799, after being cheated out of his property by Kentucky lawyers, he took his family completely out of the United States, settling in what was then the Spanish territory of Missouri.   He returned to Kentucky only once, in 1810.  Missouri had changed hands twice by then, once to the French and then to the Americans. To placate the Kentucky lawyers who could now harass him, Daniel returned only long enough to pay off his debts. He immediately returned to Missouri.

It was there, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great-grand children that Rebecca died, in 1813. And it was there that Daniel Boone died in September of 1820, after eating too many sweet potatoes and suffering indigestion. He was 85.

The funeral service was preached by a son-in-law of Daniel’s son, and was held in a barn because so many extended family members wanted to pay homage to a man who had never been wealthy but had always been loved. He was buried in a coffin he built by himself, next to his beloved Rebecca, in a family graveyard on Teuque Creek.

And as was common with frontiersmen and women, the graves (above) were unmarked until the 1830’s.

Then, beginning in the mid-1840’s, as the Boone legend was created by novelists (and with hundreds of trees baring marks supposedly carved by Daniel, which increased the property value) investors in Frankfort, the new capital of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, decided that the late Daniel was just the draw they needed to attract new customers (and investors) to their new municipal cemetery.  

One booster wrote that it was “…fitting that the soil of Kentucky should afford the final resting place for his remains, ….that the generation which was reaping the fruits of his toils (should)…have in their midst…the sepulcher of this Primeval Patriarch whose stout heart would be watched by the cradle of this now powerful Commonwealth.”

Kentucky appealed to Daniel’s only surviving son, Nathaniel, describing their offer of the “Most beautiful cemetery in the west…” and assuring him that “$10,000 will be expended on the grounds and improvements”. But the answer from Nathaniel, who knew how his father felt about Kentucky, was a firm and short “no”.

So Frankfort officials dispatched an aging nephew of Daniel's, who still lived in Kentucky, William Linville Boone, along with two more animated representatives to speak to the family. Jacob Swigert was a longtime country court Judge in Frankfort, and Clerk for the Kentucky Court of Appeals for the last twenty years. Thomas L. Crittenden (above) was the 26 year old son of the American Secretary of State, and was being groomed to join the power structure in Kentucky. .

Unfortunately (or fortunately) the trio arrived in Missouri while Nathaniel was away on militia duty. So the trio descended upon Harriet Boone Barber and Panthea Boone Boggs, granddaughters of Daniel, through his deceased son Jesse. Whatever the two women told the Kentuckians, the trio decided it meant they had agreed to Daniel’s removal to the Commonwealth.

The next morning, 17 July, 1845, the determined delegation appeared at the front door of Harvey Griswold, who now owned the land Daniel and Rebecca were lying in. Harvey argued, but the lawyers from Kentucky answered every protest, promising to erect a monument to replace the missing relics of Daniel and Rebecca. And with the "approval" of the two grand daughters, it appeared the law was on the Kentucky side. Three local black men had been hired to disinter the graves; King Bryan, Henry Augbert, and Jeff Callaway. Jeff had been a slave for the Callaway family, and now as a free man he was digging up the father of his one time owner, Mrs. Flander Boone Callaway.

The work attracted a crowd of thirty to forty people, most of them related to Daniel and Rebecca. As the three men worked, the crowd grew angry, Thomas Crittenden distracted the angry relatives, assuring them that all was being done legally and properly (it was not) and that Kentucky was going to erect a memorial to the great man on this spot. They never did. Meanwhile the three black men continued to dig. The coffins had long since rotted into the soil, but the workers did not realize this until they struck bone and shrouds.

Wrote a St. Louis newspaper, “Some bones crumbled when hands tried to lift them, but the three black men put what they could in pine boxes.” Another observer noted that the bones were handled “as carelessly as if they belonged to an ordinary mortal.” The St. Louis reporter observed that “A number of local people picked up teeth and bits of bone…” and kept them as personal mementos, along with the silver cuff links from Daniel’s best shirt. The next day landowner Harvey Griswold found a jaw bone laying on the ground. It is hard not to describe what the officials from Kentucky achieved as less of a removal, and more of a hurried desecration.

On Friday, 12 September, 1845, the “remains” of Daniel and Rebecca Boone laid in state in the (old) State House. That night, the skeletons were arraigned on a table to be examined as if they were paleontology exhibits. Daniel’s skull, minus his jaw, was passed around, examined even by eight year old John Mason Brown. When the skull had finally been examined by a phrenologist, all the bones were reloaded into two elaborate coffins and finally allowed a measure of peace.

On Saturday, 13 September,  a grand procession of bands and marchers followed the hearses, each pulled by four white horses up the hill to the cemetery on a bluff overlooking the Kentucky River. Speeches were made, and prayers were said, and then a brisk business was made selling burial plots near the now sacred site where Daniel Boone’s bones now rested.

But the cemetery never allotted money to build the promised monument, and it was not until 1860 that the state of Kentucky approved $2,000 to build one. Once it was, it was not well cared for. And it was not until after years of damage by souvenir hunters that the Daughters of the American Revolution convinced the state legislature to repair the monument and erect a fence around it. What a shock; the politicians had lied to Daniel, even after he'd been dead for 25 years.

Needless to say, Kentucky never allotted money to erect the promised monument on the original grave site in Missouri. And in July of 2008, a thief stole the bronze plaque bolted to a boulder which had been placed there in 1915 (again by the D.A.R.) to mark the humble spot where Daniel had wanted to rest in peace. It is estimated it would cost the state of Missouri $10,000 to replace that plaque. It does not seem likely any modern politicians, who see no advantage in investing in America’s future, will be willing to invest that amount of cash in our past.

It puts a lie to one of the most insightful things that the self educated hunter Daniel Boone ever said, “Curiosity," he wrote, "is natural to the soul of man, and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections”.  Evidently, Daniel, that is true only if there is money to be made out of those objects, and then, everything is for sale, even the soil feed by our earthly remains.

                                     - 30 -