Eternal Truths

When I was growing up people filled my head with information—the days of the week, the months of the year, the alphabet. Stuff like that. Eternal truths.

I liked memorizing stuff, once I got the hang of it. When I had the alphabet down through W X Y Z, I wanted more. What comes after Z? (And no, I didn't know of Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra or I might have his extra letters memorized to this day.) My mother told me (probably to shut me up) that there were no letters beyond Z, but there were other alphabets, and gave me the Greek alphabet to memorize, which I did, two letters at at time through upsilon, and the last four all at once. I memorized other things that caught my fancy—the sequence of geological ages, the order of the planets outward from the sun, and probably other stuff. In school I learned other eternal truths—the words to the pledge of allegiance, that our President was Eisenhower and our vice-President Nixon, that our country consisted of forty-eight states.

Now I've got to tell you, it's kind of hard to shake the stuff we learn in our formative years. Even though I was a child when Alaska and Hawaii became states, somewhere in my mind they are "extra" states, so to speak. The "real" states are the forty-eight, and Alaska and Hawaii are somehow—I don't know, honorary states or something like that. Jupiter has twelve moons and Saturn nine; it's just like the seven days of the week and the twelve months of the year—these are basic facts.

On the other hand there are certain things I never bought into as a kid. The books we had showed ages called Mississippian and Pennsylvanian between the Permian and Devonian periods, but for whatever reason I never considered them real. To me the "real" period was the Carboniferous, which wasn't even mentioned in our texts. (I might have got that from my father; he had a considerable knowledge of the geological periods and the kind of fossils that turned up in them, and maybe that was his take. But I don't really know.)

And by the same token, I never regarded the words "under God" as part of the "real" Pledge of Allegiance; even though we were taught them in kindergarten, visiting adults never seemed to know them, which made them seem bogus to me. (In real life they had just been added, but I didn't learn that till many years had gone by.)

What got me thinking about all this is a pointless matter. I keep up with scientific developments, sort of, as best I can. I'm aware, for example, that birds are regarded as descendants of dinosaurs, and that Pluto is no longer a planet. Both of these are changes from what I learned as a child. And yet my, shall we say, emotional reaction is very different to the two developments. Somewhere, deep inside, I remain unconvinced about the bird-dinosaur thing. Something inside me "knows" that dinosaurs never had feathers, that they were oversized cold-blooded reptiles like modern-day alligators and they looked and lived very much like the pictures in Life's The World We Live In. On the other hand Pluto not being a planet—that feels right to me. Pluto as a planet has bugged me ever since I can remember.

I don't absolutely know why. We had some very old reference books around when I was young, and some of them (I'm quite sure) predated Pluto's discovery. Maybe the old solar-system diagrams without Pluto influenced my thinking. Conversely, there were so many things that were uncertain then about Pluto in contrast to the other planets; maybe that made it seem less real to me. Or maybe it was something really lame. None of the other planets, after all, were named after Disney characters. A planet called Mickey Mouse might have given me the same feeling.

Another thing that bothered me as I learned the sizes and characteristics of the various objects in the solar system was how arbitrary the division between planets and satellites seemed to be. Some of the satellites—our own Moon, Ganymede, Titan—were pretty substantial objects in their own right. It seemed like a fairly arbitrary distinction to consider them a different class of things from say Mercury just because they orbited another planet instead of orbiting the sun. And however you wanted to look at it, Jupiter and Saturn seemed like very different creatures from say Earth and Mars. At one point I sat down and "classified" the objects of the solar system into three groups (not counting comets): gas giants, real planets, and space junk. (I don't know what terms I actually used, if any; I just remember the categories.) The gas giants were Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The real "planets" would have included Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Io, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Triton. Things like Phobos, Oberon, and Ceres were just so much space junk as far as I was concerned. Pluto made me uncomfortable; there was too much that was simply unknown about it. Even its size was uncertain, if I remember correctly. (I think the inspiration for this was a book my Uncle Marvin helped me buy on a visit to California; it was called Pictorial Astronomy, and I still had my old copy of it us till very recently. I'd like to take a quick look at it and confirm (or deny) my impressions, but alas, it is gone.) I'm pretty sure, though, that I included Pluto in the planet category, but I really don't know now.

Dinosaurs, on the other hand—I don't know how much I really knew about them. Of the major dinosaurs I knew which belonged to which geological period—Brontosaurus belonged to the Jurassic and Tyrannosaurus to the Cretaceous, for instance. (And yeah, Brontosaurus is the real name, not that unreal Apatosaurus thing.) I knew the difference between Saurischia and Ornithischia, and that Pterosaurs and Ichthyosaurs weren't actually dinosaurs, even if they lived at the same time.

For many years I had a little booklet my brother had started, but then was finished by a kid who lived across the street from us and was a couple of years older. It had everything in it I mentioned above, and quite a bit more. Each dinosaur was assigned to its period and family, and details of its size and presumed habits (meat-eater, swamp-dweller) were included. For quick reference it was invaluable, though it had its limitations. The pronunciations given for each beast, for example, were the way the kid across the street pronounced them, and differed from those given in actual printed works in some cases. I may still have the booklet somewhere, though I don't have it right in front of me, but I've seen it recently enough to have some idea of the things we knew and didn't know about dinosaurs.

And there was nothing in that booklet about dinosaurs having feathers. Or being warm-blooded. Or looking after their young. They were big reptiles, scaly toothy critters out of some surreal nightmare. They probably would have eaten their own young if they could catch them—the carnivores anyway. It was hard to picture how they could have fit into a world that had people in it. It was a good thing they'd all died out at the end of the Cretaceous period.

And that was another eternal truth. We would never know what killed the dinosaurs off. There were theories. Maybe tiny egg-eating mammals had done them in by preying on their unprotected unborn young. (Yay for our egg-eating ancestors!) Maybe the climate changed, becoming cooler, so that the cold-blooded dinosaurs couldn't cope and just died off. Maybe they just plain got too big and died off from over-specialization. Maybe disease did them in. Maybe it was some combination of causes. Whatever it was, it had undoubtedly been a gradual event taking millions of years, not some catastrophe like a gamma-ray burst from a nearby supernova.

(My brother and I were both fond of the idea of some extra-terrestrial cause, even though the authorities were against it. I see from a quick bit of googling that gamma-ray bursts weren't discovered until we were in our teens, but I know we discussed possible extra-terrestrial causes from way back. My favorite was that an alien race had used Earth as a big-game hunting ground until they had driven everything huntable into extinction and moved on.)

In any case, we would never know. That was one thing you could take to the bank; whatever had happened, it had happened so long ago that there was no conceivable evidence that could ever be produced that would give any plausible answer. Fossil skeletons could tell us the size and shape of the critters, radiometric dating could tell us how long ago they lived, comparison with living beasts could give us some idea even of what they ate and how they lived, but there was nothing, nothing at all, that could solve the mystery of their extinction.

Now I don't go by my childish feelings about stuff to decide what to consider as probable or what to reject as impossible. I'm perfectly willing to accept that some dinosaurs had feathers, or that astronomers now classify Pluto as a dwarf planet. Pluto, yeah—that fits with some long-time prejudices. And a comet causing the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction—that feels satisfying But there is a very basic part of me, deep inside, that knows damn good and well that dinosaurs never had feathers. And that there are forty-eight states in the union. And that the words "under God" are not really part of the Pledge of Allegiance. And I don't think anything—not seeing the feather impressions, not hearing the pledge—will ever entirely shake the eternal faith of the child inside me.

John Quincy Adams' Highest and Most Important Role

One of the problems with being self-educated (and I use that term very loosely) is that I have great gaping chasms of ignorance surrounding various isolated peaks of knowledge. I've read quite a bit in James Madison's writings, public and private, for example, and in Thomas Jefferson's, but in John Quincy Adams'—not so much. I have nothing against the guy, but Jefferson and Madison were architects of the nation I live in, and Adams was merely its sixth president.

Quick—name three things he did. (No cheating now.) If your first thought was the Alien and Sedition Acts, you're wrong—that was his dad. (Adams was the first and only son of a former president to be seated as President until George W. Bush came along.) Think Tariff of Abominations and you'll be closer. But really, it wasn't an administration given to the stuff of legend.

So, anyway, when I read in "History Forgotten" (or whatever name you want to give it) that Adams was the chairman of the American Bible Society and regarded it as his highest and most important role I wasn't inclined to challenge it. Of course he wasn't actually chairman (strictly speaking the ABS doesn't have such a position, though there are chairmen of various committees); it turns out he was a vice-president. One of twenty-five vice-presidents.

Okay, but still—maybe he threw himself into the work with enthusiasm and gusto? Something of the sort?

Well, it kinda doesn't look that way. I had a hell of a time finding anything about Adams and the ABS, but in a book by Samuel Hanson Cox called Interviews: Memorable and Useful; from diary and memory reproduced (New York, 1853) I found on pp. 270-73 an address Adams delivered to that organization in 1844. In his opening comments he said:

Thirty-five years have passed away since, in the State House at Boston, the capital of my native commonwealth, I became a member of the Bible Society; and although I have followed, with a deep interest, their continual exertions and the various fortunes of their success in distributing this Book, I think I have never been able to attend another meeting of the society from that time to this. Since that time one generation of mankind has passed away—another has arisen.

Two meetings in thirty-five years? (Actually that thirty-five years can't be right; it would place the date of his membership before the organization was formed.) It doesn't really sound like he was that involved with the group. He justified himself by observing that

in the maturity of manhood I associated with my brethren of that age, for spreading the light of that gospel over the face of the earth, by the simple and silent process of placing in the hands of every human being who needed, and could not otherwise procure it, that Book, which contains the duties, the admonitions, the promises, and the rewards of the Christian gospel.

He expressed his view

that this book has been furnished him [mankind], by the special providence of his Maker, to enable him, by faith in his Redeemer, and by works conformable to that faith, to secure his salvation in a future world, and to promote his well-being in the present. If this be true, the improvement of successive generations of men in their condition upon earth, and their preparation for eternity, depends in no small degree in the diffusion and circulation of this volume among all the tribes of man throughout the habitable globe. This is the great and exclusive object for which, in the last generation, this society was instituted. The whole Book had then existed upward of eighteen hundred years ; and wherever it had penetrated and heen received, it had purified and exalted the character of man.

And he looked forward to the point of the society's labors,

that consummation of human felicity promised in this book, when—The wolf, also, shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the young lion, and the failing together; and a little child shall lend them.

Now all this is all very well and good, but there is nothing in any of it that shows any special activity on his part in the society. Adams admired the Bible. He respected the work the ABS was doing to spread it to the four corners of the earth. He did his part by supplying Bibles to people who needed them, and who, for whatever reason, were not otherwise able to obtain them. But it's really hard to square this with the claim that he regarded his position in the ABS as his highest and most important role. On the available evidence he invested more energy in his position as Massachusetts' representative in Congress (this after his presidency, by the way) than he did in his vice-presidency of the ABS.

Oh—and by the way, one thing I did know about Adams: he was a Unitarian. (Score one for Unitarian sunday-school after all these years.) And it's said that he refused to take his Presidential oath of office on the Bible, using instead a book of laws. Not exactly congenial company for the average "History Forgotten" buff. He was no atheist either, though—by all accounts a deeply religious man. Some day—should I live so long—I'll have to look into the guy a bit more. But for the moment, this was an interesting glimpse of an early American president—and the last of the bunch before Ol' Hick'ry Jackson launched the infamous spoils system and started shipping native Americans off west to clear the way for honest god-fearing rednecks to—what was that Firesign Theatre line?—oh, yeah, to carve a new life out of the American Indian. By contrast Adams had his points. But if he really regarded his tiny part in the ABS as his highest and most important role, he had a skewed sense of priorities. There's no getting around it.

As Thyme Goethe Bye

When I did a series a while back on "Forsaken Roots" (or whatever you want to call it) I ended up establishing a text for it, mostly because there was no authoritative source, and I'm picky about my texts. If I'm going to take the time to write a commentary on something, I want to be sure that I have something resembling a definitive text to work with, else what's the point? For my purposes at the time I simply picked four texts sort of at random—but not quite. I looked for older examples, and I wanted examples that were textually divergent. If the textual tree had branches, I wanted samples from as many as possible.

Actually I already knew that the tree had at least two branches, a longer recension and a shorter one. I'd picked that up pretty quickly when I went to Ed Brayton's commentary with questions from the longer recension only to find he didn't cover them; his commentary was based on the shorter recension. I suspected the most likely explanation was that the longer recension had grown by accretion from the shorter recension, but I didn't assume anything, which was just as well, as that hypothesis proved incorrect.

Since for technical reasons (the width of my screen mainly) I wanted to restrict my comparison to four versions, I decided to pick two from the longer recension and two from the shorter. If I could construct something resembling a reasonable text from them then I'd be off and running with my real purpose—doing the commentary. Close enough for jazz.

When my laptop died one of the things I lost—I'd never bothered to copy it—was the "Forsaken Roots" synopsis I'd used to construct the text. I figured I was done with it. But as I see new versions of it surface again like a goddamn hydra my textual sleuth keeps being activated—there's another one of those, I say to myself, noting the missing word "Supreme" in front of "Court" and the telltale period after "first" and before "Harvard". Where are they coming from? Idle Googling produced some answers (those missing-Supreme copies for example all go back to a website published by one Mary Jones), but I kind of wanted to know a bit more. I didn't particularly want to repeat the work I'd done, but I wanted something. I decided to see if I could establish a text for the longer recension.

So I went back to hunting for these things, examining example after example, looking for particular textual characteristics. Most examples turned out to be either from the shorter recension or from the Mary Jones family, neither of which were any use to me. A kind of sadness came over me as I examined these things in their original context, often a blog entry or a comment thread. First the text itself would appear, typically cut-and-pasted from the Mary Jones or some other familiar site. Next would come the admiring comments. This one is pretty typical:

Thanks for sharing. This was very informative. Neither in my secondary or college education, do I recall this information be read, taught or discussed. It shines a brighter light on the foundation of America for me.

(If you're wondering about the text of the version immediately above this comment, it's from the longer recension, but not part of the Mary Jones family, which, if the date is correct, had yet to be established.) All the elements are there—gratitude, admiration for the research, enthusiasm for the Christian light on early America, and curiosity (or anger) about why this information had been suppressed. Missing is the clear light of common sense which, for some reason, nobody ever seems to think to switch on. Is it bloody likely that these guys would have said or written the sorts of things attributed to them here? Would Patrick Henry really refer to this "great nation" before it had been established? What conceivable set of circumstances would have prompted Congress to pass a resolution recommending the Holy Bible for use in all schools? (The "1782" is a particularly nice touch on this one.) What on earth does it mean for the Bible to be quoted 94% of the time?

Sometimes the next question will be, Did you write this? And the reply comes (if at all) No, I got it from the internet. From the internet. Words from on high, I guess, supplied by the Internet Genii for the benefit of us lesser mortals. What do you mean, you got it from the internet? You might as well have said you found it blowing in the wind alongside the road one day, or you found it scurrying through the fields of Elysium. The internet? Somebody wrote those words, and somebody did the research behind them, and, you know, that somebody deserves credit.

Now, in all fairness, in this case not a lot of credit. The writer/researcher here has simply bundled together a clutch of remaindered misinfo, and retailed the package to the gulls. He or she may even be quoting from memory for some of them; there are pointless variations in them from the authentic text (though speaking of the authentic text of a forged passage seems a bit on the paradoxical side). The fake Madison is a case in point:

We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments

sounds more like a fuzzily-remembered

We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government: upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God

than a poorly-copied one. (It is quite possible that a skip of the eye from the first capacity to the second caused the omission of the one genuine bit of Madison in this whole farrago—the capacity of mankind for self-government; that wouldn't explain the mangling of what follows, however.)

Occasionally—not often, but occasionally—somebody will question the item. Once I noted somebody actually asking the key question—what are your sources? More often it will be a remark to the effect that this can't be true, since the Founders were all deists, and anyway, what about the treaty of Tripoli? or something like that. And then maybe somebody will contribute a story about some kid they heard of from a friend of a friend who wasn't allowed to bring her Bible to show-and-tell, or some such idiocy. (Okay, I made that one up, but it's always something in that vein.)

But the thing that really gets me is the pitiful sense of gratitude emanating from these comments. Children picking up pretty pieces of broken glass and telling themselves they are diamonds. Playing with them, passing them around. The pathos of it all starts to overcome me. I almost want to depart from my rôle as observer and help out. The "Forsaken Roots" I could write for them! Oh, it probably wouldn't have Madison in it, but there are many famous names among the Founders, and I can cherry-pick with the best of them. Of course that would only be what Archie Goodwin calls fancy lying, rather than Forsaken's plain lying—a matter of taste, really, I suppose.

But, getting back to the textual issues at hand—the one thing that really bothers me, and for which I can see no answer whatsoever, is—what on earth created the shorter recension in the first place? Some horrible and malign force, early in the transmission history of this bagatelle, blew two large holes in it, seemingly at random. And yet, and yet, the disseminators of this savagely shattered version went right on distributing it, never noticing its broken condition, as mindless as those ants who, upon running out of food, start cutting off the back ends of their larvae to try to keep the front ends fed. And the hosannas of joy were just as heartfelt, regardless of the presence of palpable nonsense like

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed ... to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments?

(And that question-mark is part of the original text.) Did they not read what they were writing? How do you go about instructing a student to lay Christ as a foundation for our children to follow anything at all, let alone the moral principles of the Ten Commandments? It's madness—but nobody seems to notice.

And the other hole that makes it look as though Thomas Jefferson, rather than John Quincy Adams, was an officer in the American Bible Society—this is greeted as a welcome new discovery, rather than as a sign of the corruption of the text. And they say random mutation can't generate new information! Tell Jefferson! He never would have made president of the ABS without it.

The whole thing reeks of corruption. Fake quotations, themselves misquoted, and then further mangled through copying errors. False interpretations given new false twists, without anybody apparently bothered enough by any of it to even check the goddamn internet, their source for it all. Random holes fixed by random guesses—

Seriously, how much trouble is it to Google something? No, it looks like it's easier to just plain guess. Here's an example. The original text read:

However, in 1947, there was a radical change of direction for the Supreme Court. It required ignoring every precedent of Supreme Court ruling for the past 160 years. The Supreme Court ruled in a limited way to affirm a wall of separation between church and State in the public classroom. In the coming years, this led to removing prayer from public schools in 1962. Here is the prayer that was banished: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen.”

The Mary Jones version dropped a piece of it here, producing:

However in 1947, there was a radical change of direction in the Supreme Court. Here is the prayer that was banished: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

(Note also the change of "direction for" to "direction in"; this is one of the seven distinguishing characteristics of the Jones text. Of course the omission that follows is another.) And here's how one transmitter "fixed" the problem:

In 1947, it all changed! The Supreme Court removed the prayer that had been used for over 100 years at the opening of each session of the Court. "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

Again, is it likely that the Supreme Court began each session with a prayer begging the blessings of God upon parents and teachers? Doesn't this sound more like a school prayer? Hello? Is nobody awake in there? And this version is supposedly reprinted from the February 2005 edition of the Liberty Tree newsletter. No checking, even with the quasi-immortality of print in view? Just guesswork?

I guess. Sometimes my sense of exasperation overcomes my feelings of pathos. People this unreflective deserve to eat garbage.

But nobody deserves this. Not even those poorly-informed clowns who blather on about how Jefferson invented the concept of separation of church and state when he wasn't even in America at the time the Constitution was being written—how would he know anything? And besides, wasn't it some unknown justice named Hugo Black who decided to pull it out of an old forgotten letter written to the Danbury Baptists, of all people, and foist it off on all of us as settled law?—yeah, not even these crackers deserve this kind of treatment. Even canonical critics and flat-earthers deserve better.

Well . . . maybe not canonical critics.

Quotation of the Day

Stupid people are little different from mosquitoes. They’ll always be around, and although they are not fundamentally responsible for being the loathsome creatures they are, they’re pests in the extreme who are ideally avoided via physical barriers or some other form of repellent.

Kevin Beck

A Brief Pause To Listen to Myself Breathe

I'm sorry about falling behind here; I have been busy, though, adding entries to my Fake History blog at Wordpress. The last series has been devoted to fake or questionable quotations attributed to the American Founders, each entry dealing with a single item. Most of these I've already taken a bash at here, but usually as part of a longer critique or diatribe. Sometimes it's nice to be able to point somebody to a place that gives specific information about a specific item; it can be tough here picking the relevant part out of the lush verbiage when in pursuit of a particular quarry.

So I'm putting together a series on common quotations, mostly fake, to make quick reference to them easier. At the moment all of them deal with the US Founding Fathers (I think) but if I keep this up (Allah willing) I should have fake quotations from other eras as well. My most recent entry (the one that kept me from writing anything much here) takes on Patrick Henry's alleged words on the Bible being worth more than any other printed book. It's not exactly fake (unlike, say, that 1782 school-bible turd salad), but it isn't exactly Henry either. It falls somewhere betwixt and between, in that nameless valley of historic curiosities lying between the pit of credulity and the summit of skepticism, in that place of wonder we call the twilight zone.

I try not to know exactly where I'm going with these blog entries, so sometimes my provisional title ill accords with the actual substance of the piece. I was just about to publish this one when on preview I saw my title and winced. My original title: "Tom Swift and His Electric (fill in blank)."

Hot Summer Day

Long summer dream
Sliding round my mind
Those long summer dreams
Are leaving me behind
Hot summer day
Carry me along
To its end where I begin.

It's a Beautiful Day

One hundred forty seven years ago the Civil War was raging in North America, the Taiping Rebellion was cooking away in China, and France was busy intervening in Mexico. In England Victoria was already a quarter century into the interminable reign that would wind up gasping in the very foothills of the twentieth century. And on 4 July a mathematician set out on a river excursion with a fellow clergyman and three little girls, a trip that would change the face of English literature forever.

Charles Dodgson, soon to be known to a wider public as Lewis Carroll, was already an accomplished story-teller that July day in 1862 when he started to entertain the three Liddell sisters—Lorina (13), Alice (10), and Edith (8)—with an improvised adventure featuring a girl named Alice. He had entertained his own sisters with stories and drawings when younger, and had moved on to amuse other children as time passed; we may assume his art improved with practice. These tales, as Dodgson put it, "lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon."

What happened on this particular afternoon to make things different? Ten-year-old Alice Liddell begged Charles Dodgson to write the story down—and, as things turned out, she was persistent enough to get him to actually do it. In the first burst of enthusiasm Dodgson wrote out the headings for the book—soon to be titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground—the very next day, but how far he got past that is unrecorded. He did not start writing the extant manuscript until November of that year, and he finished it in February of 1863. Illustrating it took still longer, and it was not until 26 November of the next year, 1864, that he finally presented it to Alice. By then he was already hard at work on a revision that would become the published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Now it would be naive indeed to suppose that Alice's Adventures Under Ground is an exact transcript of the story Charles Dodgson told the Reverend Duckworth and the three Liddell sisters that 4th of July. (And of course nobody does make that supposition.) The author himself tells us that "In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock". On the other hand it must have borne some passing resemblance to the story as originally told.

The question that I have wondered about for years, nay decades, is just this: What exactly was the tale that Charles Dodgson told that 4 July now nearly a century and a half ago? Obviously there is no way directly to find out, short of coming up with a time-machine and some sort of audio recorder, but there are hints and indications. First, we may start with what the author tells us, "I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards." As the long fall, the arrival in the little hall, and the attempts to get out through the small door into the garden all follow reasonably naturally from this, we may reasonably assume that they had some counterpart in the Ur-Alice.

On the other hand there is material that seems unlikely to have belonged to the original sp0ken story. The Mouse's tale, for example, that weaves tail-like across the page. This is a visual joke, and while we can imagine Charles Dodgson perhaps indicating by gestures what Alice was picturing, it seems more naturally at home in the written manuscript. Again, "the driest thing I know", lifted from Chepmell's Short Course of History, is a joke more likely conceived in the study than while rowing up the Isis on a hot summer day.

And another thing—the it-was-all-a-dream conclusion. Did Charles Dodgson reach a conclusion on this expedition? Several things make this unlikely. Alice Liddell tells us, in her recollections as quoted by Dodgson's nephew, that he would break off a story in the middle saying, "That's all till next time," to which the girls would reply, "Ah, but it is next time." That this may well have been one of those occasions when the story did not continue at once we have Dodgson's own diary entry for the 6th of August, over a month later, when he tells of continuing his "interminable fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures"—some indication that this was an ongoing performance. And it's very tempting to suppose that he told the girls the episode of the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon after the Liddell sisters sang "Beautiful Star" for him on 1 August 1862; the song is burlesqued as "Beautiful Soup." (On the other hand it is possible that Dodgson's burlesque of the song inspired the sisters to sing it for him correctly, or even that the two had no particular cause-and-effect relationship.) Another song ("Sally Go Up"), burlesqued in the same scene however, the Liddell sisters sang the very day before the 4 July expedition. Maybe "Beautiful Soup" was one of the additions to the written tale.

One odd feature of the book is worth noting here—there are two distinct parts to it. In the first part Alice is constantly changing size; at first she has no control over the situation, but then, thanks to advice from a caterpillar, she acquires the parts of a magic mushroom that allow her to control her own size. In the second part of the book, however, this is all forgotten. Once Alice finds her way into the garden the mushroom is never mentioned again, and in the original story her size (as far as we can tell) stays constant. (In the published version she starts growing uncontrollably during the trial scene.) She is said to be fifteen inches high in the MS (a foot in the published version), but the fact is that it is difficult to tell exactly what size she is. She interacts with playing cards as though she were in the same size range (three inches, maybe?), but the game of croquet is played with ostriches for mallets and hedgehogs for balls—are we supposed to picture them as miniature ostriches and hedgehogs? Or are the cards gigantic? The size thing, which is such a major feature of the first part of the book, has gone completely out the window by this point.

The point where this change happens has its own interest. Abruptly, just after the encounter with the pigeon in the MS (just after the Mad Tea Party in the book), Alice sees a door in a tree. She goes inside and finds herself back in the dark hall with the little door to the garden where she had been at the beginning of her adventures. This time, thanks to the magic mushroom, she is in control of her size and manages to make it through the door into the garden with ease. And it is from this point on that the mushroom and the size changes so evident up till now are forgotten.

It's very satisfying that Alice manages to achieve the goal that frustrated her earlier, but it's also arbitrary. The door in the tree that leads to the dark hall comes from nowhere; it has been prepared for in no way, and it's really unnecessary. To put it another way, if Alice had never got through the door into the garden, but instead had further Pig and Pepper style adventures, we would never have noticed the omission. If Alice had come to the garden via another route, we as readers would have been perfectly happy. It is true that getting into the garden is the one element of the story that provides anything resembling purpose—but it's hardly a major element. In fact Alice's determination to somehow get into the garden is only mentioned once between the two hall episodes—just after the pigeon encounter.

While I'm not pretending to have exhausted the possibilities here, there is one plausible reason from the author's perspective why it may have been necessary to return to the little hall and the exit to the garden: because that's how the story already went. If, to put it as simply as possible, in an earlier version of the story Alice had made it out into the garden at the end of the first hallway episode, and had subsequent adventures there; and if Dodgson had decided to add at this point some of those "fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock" that take Alice away from the hallway, then it would be necessary at some point to get Alice back to the hallway to continue with the earlier version of the story.

Let's see how this plays out, then. On this hypothesis the pool of tears, the encounter with the mouse et al (including both the driest thing I know and the mouse's tale mentioned above as unlikely to have been part of the original oral version), the adventures at the white rabbit's house, the encounter with the caterpillar (including the advice about the mushroom), and Alice's confrontation with the pigeon who thinks she's a serpent—all these will have been additions to the earlier story. It is these adventures that contain and elaborate on the changing-size motif. The reason, then, that the mushroom and size-changing aspects of the story disappear when Alice gets to the garden is simple. They weren't part of the earlier version of the story. Once Dodgson gets back to the earlier version of the story those elements disappear precisely because they were later elaborations.

Another point: one of the things that irritated me about the hallway episode when I was a child is this: Alice, when she's nine feet tall, is able to unlock the door and peer out into the garden. But, when she accidentally shrinks down to about three inches and runs back to the door, it's once again locked and the key is back again on that glass table. Now that just seemed plain arbitrary to me. How did the door get itself locked again? (Yeah, I know it's a dream, but still—) And for that matter why on earth didn't Alice either hold onto the key, or put it down somewhere where she could reach it when she was small enough to get through. Hell, why hadn't she simply left it in the keyhole? We are supposed to imagine, apparently, that after looking out through the door she relocked it and thoughtfully placed the key back on the glass table where it would be inconveniently out of reach the next time she was small enough to get out through it—and all this without a word of narrative to support it.

Now let's suppose for a moment that the original narrative had gone something like this:

As she said this, she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to find she had put on one of the rabbit's little gloves while she was talking. "How can I have done that?" thought she, "I must be growing small again." She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: soon she found out that the reason of it was the nosegay she held in her hand: she dropped it hastily, just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether, and found that she was now only three inches high.

"Now for the garden!" cried Alice, as she hurried back to the little door, and then she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flowerbeds and the cool fountains.

Although as I've mentioned size is ambiguous in this final section, at three inches Alice would have been a reasonable height to interact with playing cards. (The ostriches and hedgehogs are unreasonable whether Alice is three inches or fifteen inches high, however.)

So as I've indicated this hypothesis explains quite nicely some of the features of the narrative that are otherwise puzzling. Is there any reason to suppose, however, that Dodgson would be likely to work in this manner—slicing a narrative open to insert new material?

Yes, there is. The Hunting of the Snark grew from a three fits eight by the addition of episodes between the opening two fits and the closing one. Sylvie and Bruno clearly shows signs of this same hollowing-out process; the original plot-line, abandoned after chapter 12 of Sylvie and Bruno, resumes abruptly at chapter 20 of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, picking up with the same themes and plans that had vanished in the previous volume. In each case Dodgson cut the work apart to insert new material into the innards, though in the case of Sylvie and Bruno at least some of the new material was actually older than the surrounding text into which it was inserted. And in the change from the MS to the printed version of Alice's Adventures itself we can see the process continuing; the new Pig and Pepper and Mad Tea Party episodes are added between the pigeon and second hallway episodes. And with their insertion we can see how material becomes displaced from its original context.

In the MS we find:

It was so long since she had been of the right size that it felt quite strange at first, but she got quite used to it in a minute or two, and began talking to herself as usual: "Well! there's half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another! However, I've got to my right size again: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?"

Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a doorway leading right into it. "That's very curious," she thought...

In other words we are reminded immediately before Alice sees the doorway leading her back to the hall of her intent to get into the garden. But in the book we have:

"...how is that to be done, I wonder?" As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.

Two chapters later, after the Pig and Pepper and Mad Tea Party episodes Dodgson returns to this moment:

"At any rate I'll never go there again!" said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. "It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!"

Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. "That's very curious," she thought.

Note how he gets here. Dodgson has taken the original phrase "Just as she said this" and used it twice in the resultant text, leaving on it ("As she said this she came suddenly upon...") and then returning to the original text with it ("Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees..."). In the process of making this insertion the original preparatory text about Alice's plan to get into the garden has become separated by two chapters worth of material from its payoff (the door in the tree), and that small duplication shows us exactly where the incision was made.

Now there's no exact verbal duplication that seems to mark the point of the original incision (nor does there have to be, but it's helpful when there is), but I suggest that "as she hurried back to the little door" (original episode) may well be parallel to "then she walked down the little passage" (second hallway episode). The reference to the little passage is wrong in any case; the door was behind a curtain and led to a little passage out into the garden; there was no little passage leading to the door. I suspect Dodgson here engaged in a little careless rewriting.

And another thought: we know that Dodgson continued working on the story even after the MS had assumed its final form. Note where he added the two new episodes (Pig and Pepper and the Mad Tea Party): directly at the end of the earlier new material, by this hypothesis. True, not all the new material was added here; he expanded the trial scene considerably, for one thing. But it is interesting; it is as though the MS froze the story at a particular moment in time as it was being developed. Dodgson starts writing the material for the insertion; he cuts it short so that the MS actually gets finished and he can present it to Alice; but for the book he simply keeps on going from that same point.

Okay, I could continue elaborating on my thoughts, and in fact have started and abandoned a couple of paragraphs that do just that, but there's a barbecue waiting for me down the street and I want to get this published some time in the foreseeable future. So let me cut to the chase. Is there any remote chance that the tale as I've recovered it, shorn of the various parts I've mentioned as probable additions, represents what Charles Dodgson told Alice and her sisters that long-ago 4th of July?

Probably not. It might be a stage closer, but, well—the thing is, there was almost certainly at least one manuscript between the MS we have and the story as it was told. In pre-computer days it was standard to create a manuscript (rough draft) before typing up or hand-lettering the presentation copy. Everything about the extant MS (including the fact that it was a presentation copy) suggests that it is a final copy, and Dodgson will have prepared it from a rough draft of some kind. That rough draft will have been where he worked out the changes and revisions that created the present tale. The earlier version that I have tentatively reconstructed, even if it be valid, is just as likely to have been an earlier MS draft as the oral story itself.

And another thing—there were months between Charles Dodgson's first telling of the story and his creation of the extant MS. Months to forget, to alter, to blur the details of the original story. Now we can assume that he had something to go by—he himself tells us he wrote out the "headings" for the story the very next day, and with any luck he will at least have had that to go by.

Now here's my fantasy of how we might have at least the outline of the story as told on 4 July 1862. (There are too many speculative elements now for me to even call this a hypothesis.) We know Dodgson wrote out the "headings" for the story the next day. Canon Duckworth tells us that Dodgson told him "that he sat up nearly the whole night, committing to a MS. book his recollections of the drolleries with which he had enlivened the afternoon." Now maybe Canon Duckworth is confused, and the MS he's thinking of was the one we have, the presentation copy to Alice, and he was just flat wrong about when it was written and how long it took. But what if his story is correct? The MS book in this case would be a lost rough draft, precisely the sort of thing that could have formed the basis for the final MS copy we actually have, and exactly the sort of thing that my reconstructed Ur-Alice would look like. Maybe, just maybe, we are this close to the tale as told.

Now one of the consequences of this is that we have gradually been losing some of the best parts of the Wonderland story as I've been going through this. Of course we already knew that the Mad Tea Party formed no part of the story that memorable day, but now we've lost the caterpillar as well. And maybe the croquet scene—remember those troublesome ostriches and hedgehogs? And of course the trial was a mere sketch of what it would eventually become. And the gryphon and the mock turtle may have been part of story told at a later time. What was it about the story, then, that so enthralled Alice, whose enthusiasm ultimately enriched us all?

Well, we'll never know, and that's probably how it should be. For some things, you just had to be there.

Some Old Fart Doesn't Know

I'm in a nasty mood right now, so I say thank the gods for the Alvin Sun-Times of Alvin Texas. Under the title "Young People Don't Know" the Alvin Sun-Times presents a screed by one W. Edward Murphy so stunningly clueless, so absolutely idiotic, as to be my perfect punching-bag for this session. Of course it's not going to surprise you that I'm off yet again in pursuit of some poor clown who used some fake quotations to enliven his pitiful attempt at an editorial. But this is even more priceless. Here's a list of his fake quotations in order:

1. The Patrick Henry "religionists" quotation.
2. The George Washington "God and the Bible" quotation.
3. A George Washington "personal prayer-book" hodge-podge.
4. The Jefferson well-worn Bible frankenquote.
5. The Jefferson "best friend of government" quotation.

Are you beginning to get the picture? What if I added that he begins with the following claims:

1. "Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 52 of 55 were deeply committed Christians."
2. "The congress formed the American Bible Society..."
3. "The congress ... voted to purchase and import 20,000 Bibles for the people!"

Yes! Not only is this guy so pig-ignorant that he mistakes a 1956 newspaper for Patrick Henry, and a fake prayer-book for Washington's that isn't even in his handwriting, he gets the number of signers of the Declaration of Independence wrong and fancies that congress formed the American Bible Society! Yes, you guessed it—this W. Edward Murphy lifted his "facts" straight from that "America's Christian Roots" e-mail that was circulating a few years back.

Unbelievable. And Murphy wonders why we don't find these fake quotations in schoolbooks. Could it be, oh, say, because they're all fakes? No, it has to be some sort of crazy conspiracy.

It occurred to me, like a lightning flash, reading the quotes of these great men, that the degradation of our morality, of our political corruption, can be laid at the feet of our public educational establishment.

In the next column I will be specific about the history and decline of our educational establishment, and the ravages it has wreaked on our nation, particularly our children.

Okay, fine, but I believe I'll pass on that somewhat dubious pleasure, W. Edward Murphy. Quasi-plagiarism and fake quotations do not inspire me with any confidence in anything whatsoever you might have to say. Get your facts straight, and do your own damn research instead of lifting it from some idiotic e-mail, and then maybe you might have something to say that's worth listening to. Until then, forget about it.

Quotation of the Day

...is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, of that a man should tell a lie ? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

Thomas Paine, Age of Reason
h/t James F. McGrath

Still More New Sightings of Old Fakes

Still flogging away at those same old dead horses, sbh? Well, yeah. How dead can they be when they keep turning up again and again in new documents?

From Abbie Smith's country comes an insane "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality," sponsored and perhaps written by local legislator Sally Kern. (See Ed Brayton for the details.) It is brim-full of crazy, but I'm only going to examine two of her seventeen Whereases, the two Ed Brayton conveniently put in bold. The first of the two is the pseudo-Madison "ten commandments" quotation, and the second is the pseudo-Henry "religionists" quotation.

About the pseudo-Henry quotation I have written ad nauseam; the language alone shows it could not have been by Patrick Henry (or his uncle as one ludicrous suggestion has it); it was of course written in 1956 for The Virginian, a short-lived pro-segregation periodical. (See here for a summary view.) Only a fool or a liar would continue to quote this after it has been so thoroughly debunked. (The entire "proclamation" suggests that the author may well be both.)

About the other fake quotation, the pseudo-Madison, I've written relatively little, partly because I am aware that Chris Rodda is going to do her usual thorough demolition on the thing, and I'd really like to see what she's turned up before engaging in my own observations. Still, my research gives us a picture of the course of events in the development of this fake, and I'm going to make a few notes on it here.

First, the forger has taken for his inspiration something Madison actually did write in the Federalist Papers (XXXIX):

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican? It is evident that no other form would be reconcileable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolution; or with that honourable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible.

The portion in bold above became the basis for a new quotation that surfaced some time in the 1930s. (My notes show that I had found an example from 1933; today's Google book search only came up with examples from 1954.) Here is the new creation:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it, but upon the capacity of mankind for self-government.

The portion in bold the forger boldly lifted from the genuine bit given above. I have previously noted objections to the words future and civilization as used here; Madison preferred to use future as an adjective rather than as a noun, and typically used civilization in its sense of the process of becoming civilized, rather than as here the result of that process. However.

A second, seemingly independent version of the saying also circulated. In this case the circulator, and possibly the author, was Dean Clarence Manion, one-time right-wing radio commentator. In a 1950 speech he said:

"The Founding Fathers of the American Republic remembered this when they wrote our Declaration of Independence, and The First American state and Federal Constitution. As soon as these documents had been promulgated, one of the most erudite of the Founding Fathers, James Madison, said that 'we have staked the whole future of our American Political Institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self government'. He meant the Constitutional freedom of the American citizen will last just so long and only so long as that citizen keeps the capacity to govern himself according to the moral and legal standards of personal conduct that run through the Christian era all the way back to the time of Moses. [Cleveland Bar Association Journal, 1950, page 21]

Of particular interest is the reference to "our American Political Institutions," the words perhaps suggested by Madison's original "all our political experiments". Were it not for the part about staking the whole future this might pass as a misremembered version of the genuine quotation. With this Dean Manion version, however, we can see the "ten commandments" fake quotation in embryo. Note that the sense of the "ten commandment" version is found in Manion's interpretation immediately following the fake quotation. Indeed, making it even tighter, Manion earlier defined self-government as "the government of each individual person by himself according to the set-standards of the Ten Commandments". With this the stage was set for what would be the definitive version of this fake Madison quotation.

That came when some unknown person took the two versions and melded them together into a single Frankenstein quote, adding material to the end very like Manion's commentary. To make the process clearer I have placed the words taken from the first version in blue, those from the second (Dean Manion) version in orange (the struck-out words were not used by the forger), and the part seemingly suggested by Dean Manion's commentary in red:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the whole future of our American political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government: upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

It is notable that in all this verbiage one fragment of genuine Madison survives: the phrase "the capacity of mankind for self government." All the rest is completely bogus.

As far as I've been able to determine this version first appeared in the 1958 calendar of Spiritual Motivation, a source I personally have never seen. At least this is where Frederick Nymeyer says he got it in a piece of column-filler on page 31 of the January 1958 issue of Progressive Calvinism: Neighborly Love and Ricardo's Law of Association (PDF). From here we find it showing up in works by the usual suspects: The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) by Rousas John Rushdoony p. 541; Listen America! (1980) by Jerry Falwell p. 51; America's God and Country (1994) by William J. Federer p. 411, and so on. Liars for Jesus, all of them.

These two tired fakes (the pseudo-Patrick "religionists" and the pseudo-Madison "ten commandments" quotations) have been repeatedly debunked, and even some in the lunatic fringe have begun distancing themselves from them. Isn't it time to retire them permanently? I know I'm ready to see them shipped out to the south forty of the old propaganda homestead, plowed under, and used for organic fertilizer.

Alterations are Going on as Usual during Business

A quick note here: today (well, yesterday, now) I had no internet from 5:16 in the morning until at least 8:00 at night, at which time I quit checking. It's well after midnight now, and the internet is back, sort of, although it's very sluggish. My internet provider (half-rhymes with Bombast) has promised to send out somebody to look at things tomorrow (well, today, now), so maybe things will be back up soon.

I'm not holding my breath. Service has never been Bombast's strong point, and as an internet provider, the company sucks. If it weren't a monopoly, I would switch to somebody else. Unfortunately it is, and I'm stuck with them.

Still, maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time they will actually solve this goddamn problem, which has been a continual annoyance ever since we signed up with them. As I've indicated, I have my doubts. Upgrading to business class (their suggestion) didn't help; switching to their phone service (their suggestion; I must have been out of my mind) didn't help; I don't suppose that whatever they suggest tomorrow will make any difference either. If they suggest anything. The last time somebody came out the signal suddenly improved while the Bombast people were here, and then returned to crap once they were gone.

Anyway, maybe this entry can serve as a place-holder until the internet is back, assuming that it ever does come back.

American Trinitarians during the Founding Era

Tom Van Dyke at American Creation calls attention to this fascinating letter from Dr. Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, dated 25 May 1786. Dr. Rush gives his estimate of the percentage of Trinitarians in the United States at the time:

A small pamphflet [sic] addressed by you to the Congress, and the legislature of each of the States, upon this subject, I am sure would have more weight with our rulers than an hundred publications thrown out by the citizens of this country. It will only be necessary in this pamphflet to be wholly silent upon those subjects in Christianity which now so much divide and agitate the Christian world. The wisest plan of education that could be offered would be unpopular among 99 out of an 100 of the citizens of America, if it opposed in any degree the doctrine of the Trinity. Some of the members of the reformed Episcopal Church in the middle and southern States complained of the note you published with my letter in the English newspapers. It has injured them in the opinion of some of the English clergy. You will perceive from their prayer book, that their Articles, tho' reduced in number, are equally Calvanistical with the Articles of the old English Church. [emphasis added]

Now of course there is no reason to suppose that Dr. Rush took a scientific survey of his fellow citizens; it's far more likely that he just pulled the numbers out of his ass. Nonetheless he does give us numbers in an area where guesswork has been the general rule, and his is at least a contemporary guess.

Benjamin Rush's defense of the Bible as a school book also makes interesting reading in light of contemporary controversies.

The Case of the Laundered List pt 2

I gave a brief and inadequate account of the lists of atrocities that circulated in old Oregon country as anti-Indian propaganda in the first part of this series; before I continue I'm going to elaborate a bit on our sources. Relationships among texts fascinate me, as I'm sure you're all too aware, but indulge me for a moment.

1. The Todd list [T] as I mentioned in the previous installment appeared as part of House Misc. Doc. 47, 35th Cong. 2nd Sess. It is the oldest of the five and Drew explicitly acknowledges it as a source. It doesn't seem to be available online.
2. The first Drew list [D1] appears in Senate Misc. Doc 59, 36th Cong. 1st Sess. Drew used the Todd list as a source (and often repeats it nearly verbatim), but clearly had another source or sources.
3. The second Drew list [D2] appears in the Report of the Secretary of the Interior for 1863. This list is distinctive; the sources may well be the same as for the first Drew list (or the first Drew list may have been his source), but this list is padded out with some really dubious entries.
4. The Sutton list [S] is found in a March issue of the Portland Bulletin. Drawn up by a pioneer named Sutton, it has an annoying and nebulous relationship with the first Drew list. In some items the Sutton list seems to be based on the first Drew list, and indeed, in one case I think the evidence is conclusive. But there are other places where it almost looks as though the Sutton list is a source for the first Drew list. In particular it seems to avoid items on the Todd list, behavior explicable if it were an independent source used by Drew in addition to the Todd list, even though the Sutton list was published later. (Sutton is known to have been keeping such a list.) So as a piece of speculation let me try to reconcile the lines of evidence by suggesting that Sutton made a list; that list was used by Drew in compiling his list along with the Todd list; Sutton added some material from the first Drew list to his list when he prepared it for publication by the Portland Bulletin. I don't actually know that the data supports this hypothesis; I'm just noting it as a possibility.
5. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin list [E] likewise appeared during 1873. The items appear to have been entirely selected from the second Drew list, though I suspect there was a written transcript of some kind in between; perhaps nothing more than the reporter's notes.

Okay, in this installment many of the incidents are related to the laying out of the Southern Emigrant Road through the heart of Modoc country. Lindsay Applegate left us his account of the establishment of the road against the efforts of the Hudson's Bay Company; it was part of the struggle between Great Britain and the United States for the control of Oregon country, as well as part of the competition between Oregon and California for settlers, as well as between southern Oregon and the Willamette valley. For our purposes it is probably enough to say that settlers in the Oregon-California border region found it politically advantageous to lay out a road through Shasta and Modoc territory to attract settlers, and they seem to have been relatively unconcerned about the fact that there were no forts near enough to secure the road, and no treaties with the peoples in whose country the road was run. There were consequences to this act. So let us begin with

Item 4
A Sick Immigrant
(Fall 1846)

In the fall of 1846, a sick immigrant was killed on the southern Oregon immigrant road, near Lost river, by Modoc Indians. [T]

Okay, to start with, this is everything we know about this alleged incident. Oddly, Lindsay Applegate, who was actually in the territory at this time, says nothing about it. Drew left it off his first list, and it doesn't appear in Sutton either, but Drew does mention it in the preface to his second list:

Their history [that of the “Klamath Lake, Modoc, and Pah-Ute … tribe”] … begins with the summer of 1846, the date of the first overland emigration via what is now known as the southern Oregon emigrant road. Their operations that year were mainly of a thieving character, the emigration having been a surprise to them, and allowing no time to mature a concert of action for more bloody purposes, such as they adopted in subsequent years. They made a beginning, however, by murdering one, if not more, of that year’s emigration, and committing many thefts and robberies. Their point for attack was at a place on Rhett or Tule lake, now known as “Bloody Point,” and situated ten miles southeast of the “Natural Bridge,” on Lost river. [D2]

There is a lot of extra verbiage here, but as far as the facts are concerned, it still boils down to one thing: the Modocs murdered one immigrant in 1846. The general statement that the Modocs used to use a place the settlers called Bloody Point for their attacks is true; it has no necessary application to this incident. Here's what the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (SFEB) writer made of it:

The history of their depredations and massacres begins with the year 1846, when warriors of the [Modoc] tribe killed one white man at a place in their country now known as “Bloody Point.” [E]

As far as we can tell the SFEB writer need have had nothing more in front of him than the second Drew list. He has taken the general statement about Bloody Point and turned it into the specific place for this alleged incident, but there's nothing to show any actual extra knowledge here.

All that can be said in our present unsatisfactory state of knowledge is that Todd may well have had some sort of evidence for this claim. No one else, however, seems to know anything about it, though that doesn't stop them from elaborating on it. Drew's statement to the effect that the Modoc, Klamath, and Piute peoples were virtually one tribe gives us little reason to trust his other statements, by the way.

Item 5
Garrison
(Summer 1847)

The following year, 1847, Levi Scott, of Oregon, and of the previous year’s emigration, returned with a small party along this route to make further explorations, but, on arriving near Goose lake, was attacked by Indians, wounded, and had one of his party, named Garrison, killed. [D2]

This is the first of several additions in the second Drew list that appeared neither in the first Drew list or in the Todd list. Unlike some of the later additions, this one seems to have a solid basis. According to Lindsay Applegate Levi Scott led a party out to meet incoming immigrants. At the same time he attempted to find a way to shorten the road by taking a more direct route at one point. While he and a man named Garrison were out exploring they met with a couple of Indians who seemed friendly. It looks like appearances were deceiving. Abruptly the two raised their bows and started shooting. Garrison was killed; Levi Scott, though wounded, managed to drive their attackers off. At least that's the story as told by Lindsay Applegate. Applegate knew Levi Scott, which puts him in a good position to be well-informed. He does preface the story with the words "it appears," which would seem to indicate some sort of reservation on his part, though it might well just be that he was reporting something at second hand.

The SFEB list contains an abbreviated version of this item.

Item 6
Train of Twenty-Three
(Summer 1847)

At the same time an entire train—twenty-three persons or upwards—were massacred at Bloody Point. [D2]

This is the second of the peculiar additions that first appear in the second Drew list, and it is a rather suspect one. We are asked to believe here first that Todd overlooked this major event—twenty-three people killed—during a time when the road was being actively patrolled, and second, that Drew himself had somehow overlooked it when putting together his first list. And on top of this the event went entirely unreported in the newspapers of the time. Indeed, Jesse Applegate, Lindsay's brother, actually reported in October 1847:

Except an old wagon, abandoned by Judge Burch near Rogue river, every vehicle which took the southern road arrived in the valley, the teams in good condition, and their owners in fine health and spirits, having suffered, from all sources, a comparatively trifling loss of animals. [Oregon Spectator]

Now, while I'm trying to take these events in chronological order, this is one time when it's necessary to skip ahead. The very next item in the second Drew list is a similar claim about a party of eighteen who were likewise massacred at Bloody Point. As with this one there is no supporting evidence and neither the Todd list nor the first Drew list contained it. I don't have a specific piece of counter-evidence to cite in this case, but it had really happened, you'd think there would be something more positive to point to.

These items share several peculiarities. First, no names are given. Second, the massacres are said to have happened at Bloody Point. Third, the numbers are oddly precise, considering that the rest of the information about the incidents is so vague.

For me the reference to Bloody Point is a good place to start. A fellow named Ben Wright (whom we will hear of again) named this place in 1852 during conflicts that year with the Modocs. There is no question that attacks occurred here in 1852. It is, however, extremely unlikely that many attacks occurred before that date; all indications are that the settlers were surprised by events. When I read the contemporary accounts there is no indication whatsoever of a history of trouble on the road, no reference to earlier slaughters there, nothing of the sort.

The numbers mentioned are interesting too. In 1852 when a survivor of a Modoc attack arrived in Yreka a party went out to patrol the road and bury the dead. According to contemporary sources about twenty bodies were found and buried; this is reasonably close to the numbers eighteen and twenty-three given for these two unattested items. The lack of names is also suggestive; the people whose bodies were found and buried were unknown. My best guess at this point is that both these items (assuming that Drew didn't simply make them up altogether, which, given his low regard for truth, is by no means out of the question), are distorted reflections of the events of 1852, which made a big impression on settlers, and continued to generate ever more elaborate stories for decades to come.

Something of the effect these grisly discoveries had on people may be indicated by Lindsay Applegate's account of a similar discovery in 1846:

One day, during our march through this country, Capt. Scott and myself, leaving the party on the west side, crossed the river for the purpose of hunting, and, while pursuing a band of antelope, came upon wagon tracks, leading away from the river towards a rocky gulch among the hills, two or three miles distant. Several wagons seemed to have been in the train, and on either side of the plain tracks made by the wagon wheels in the loose sand were numerous bare-foot tracks. Following the trail into the mouth of the gulch, we found where the wagons had been burned, only the ruins being left among the ashes. We found no human remains, yet the evidences were plain that a small train of immigrants had been taken here not a great while before, and that they had perished at the hands of their blood-thirsty captors, not one having escaped to recite the awful tale of horror. Possibly the bodies of the victims had been thrust into the river. Possibly the drivers had been compelled to drive their teams across the sage plains into this wild ravine, here to be slaughtered and their bodies burned. By a more extended search along the river and among the hills, we might possibly have found some of the bodies of the victims, and might have obtained some clue as to who the ill-fated immigrants were, but even this was not practicable at the time, and we could only hurry on with sad hearts to overtake the train far up the river.

Different time, different place—but the effect of this mute testimony to a past catastrophe may be the key to understanding these ghost reports. By the same token, of course, if these two were inventions, it may well be that the inventor (Drew, I would suppose) was exploiting the feelings the sight of such burned wagons evoked.

Item 7
The Whitman Massacre
(November 1847)

On the 29th November, 1847, Dr. Whitman, a Protestant missionary, his wife, two orphan children, a Frenchman, and about eleven immigrants, were massacred at and near the mission in Walla-Walla valley by Cayuse Indians. This was the commencement of the Cayuse war. [T]

This item, which appears only in the Todd list and the first Drew list, is shameless padding, as the event happened in a different part of old Oregon country from the area under consideration—the Oregon-California border region. I can only suppose that Todd and Drew were relying on the notoriety of the event and the ignorance of western geography in their intended audience back east to help make their case. And, as I don't intend to deal with it here and now, I will refer interested readers to the Wikipedia entry for The Whitman Massacre.

Item 8
Party of Eighteen
(1849)

In 1849 another train of eighteen or more persons were also massacred at the same place. [D2]

The "same place" is Bloody Point, and this item (which appears only in the second Drew list and the SFEB list) has the same problems as the earlier alleged train of twenty-three. For the general discussion, see Item 6 above.

Item 9
Captain Warner and Party
(26 September 1849)

September 26 the same year, Captain Warner, of the United States engineer corps, and several of his party were murdered near Goose lake. [D2]

This item is unique to the second Drew list (out of the five versions I know of) and is a bit out of the immediate geographical range of the rest. R. S. Williamson left us an early (14 February 1850) account of the event, reprinted in Senate Ex. Doc. No. 47, 31st Cong. 1st Sess., pp. 17-22. Captain Warner was in charge of an exploring expedition attempting to determine possible routes from the Humboldt Valley to the Sacramento River.

When Captain Warner had discovered the pass, and reached the eastern base of the range, he travelled to the southward, intending to recross the mountain on the Lassen trail. On the 26th day of September he was riding in company with the guide, a short distance ahead of his little party. They had descended a little ravine and were ascending the rugged hill on the other side, when a party of about twenty-five Indians, who had been lying in ambush behind some large rocks near the summit, suddenly sprang up and shot a volley of arrows into the party. The greater number of the arrows took effect upon the Captain and guide, and both were mortally wounded. The Captain's mule turned with him, and plunged down the hill; and having been carried about two hundred yards, he fell from the animal dead. The guide dismounted and prepared to fire, but finding he could not aim his rifle, he succeeded in mounting and retiring down the hill. He died the next morning. The party were thrown into confusion and retreated at once. Two men, George Cave and Henry A. Barling, were badly wounded. Cave died before reaching the valley, while Barling reached Benicia, was placed in the United States hospital under charge of Assistant Surgeon Deyerle, and has now nearly recovered. Captain Warner's body was visited several times, and his note-book, &c., brought to me. The Indians who made this attack are supposed to be of the same tribe, and have the same manners and customs, as those in the immediate vicinity of Tlamath lake. They caused a great deal of trouble among the emigrants by stealing their cattle in the night; and they acted with a great deal of caution, never showing themselves during the day. They have no other arms than bows and arrows, and generally go entirely naked. They seemed to have been emboldened by the presence of so small a party so far from the emigrants' trail, and presented themselves in considerable numbers in the vicinity of Captain Warner's camp for several days preceding the attack. It is difficult to make an estimate of their numbers, but they certainly can form a formidable body.

One of the reasons this item appears only in the second Drew list may well be that it is not really an instance of an innocent settlers being struck down by a savage foe, which is the general purport of these lists. Captain Warner was the leader of a military expedition into Indian country; he was in fact (even if 19th century legal theory didn't look at it this way) invading territory belonging to another people. The Klamaths (if they are the ones responsible) may well have looked at themselves as noble patriots repelling a savage invader.

Item 10
Sprink [or Prink] and Cushing
(August 1850)

August.—Messrs. Spink and Cushing, packers, were murdered, and their train and loading destroyed by Indians, on Klamath river. No provocation given and none claimed. The murderers were not punished. [D1]

The Sutton list also has this item, the only material change being that the incident is said to have happened "near the line of Oregon and California" rather than "on Klamath river." Walling devotes a couple of lines to this incident, but adds little except that the perpertrators were Shastas:

In August, 1850, two packers, Cushing and Prink, were killed on the banks of the Klamath river near where the ferry was afterwards established. Their train was taken and their cargo destroyed by Shasta Indians. [Walling]

This is one where I haven't turned up any further information; a check of newspapers from the era revealed nothing, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

#
To Be Continued
#

These parts are running much longer than I had envisioned when I started the series. The next part should concern events of, or contemporary with, the first Rogue River War (1851). There will also be material in a later section dealing with the southern emigrant road.

Come to Church; You May Not Live to Regret It

[A transcript from a 1984 episode of the BBC radio show Radio Active]

Mike Flex: Well, Radio Active is expanding all the time and it’s soon to be opening up a new religious department which should be lots of fun. And the man in charge of all this, who’s popped in to spread the word, no doubt, is here now, the Right Reverend James Wright. Hi there, how are you doing?

Reverend Wright: Uh, very well, thank you.

Mike Flex: That’s great. Good news. So, Jim, tell me, how did it—how did it all start?

Reverend Wright: Sorry?

Mike Flex: How did it all start, this Christianity bit?

Reverend Wright: Well, I suppose it all started as you put it with the birth of Jesus Christ, our savior.

Mike Flex: Mm-hmm, so he was very much the inspiration behind the whole thing, was he? But of course like so many cult heroes his work wasn’t really appreciated during his lifetime, is this true?

Reverend Wright: Well, he had a small band of followers, his disciples.

Mike Flex: Yeah, but he didn’t receive the international acclaim you feel he deserved.

Reverend Wright: Look, this isn’t some sort of pop celebrity we’re talking about; this man was the moral and religious leader of the Christian movement.

Mike Flex: And of course in many ways that’s bigger, right? Now I read somewhere that he once fed a whole crowd of people with just five loaves and two fishes.

Reverend Wright: Well that’s the feeding of the five thousand.

Mike Flex: Right, right. Great, great. So—so—so is that something you now include in your act?

Reverend Wright: I don’t have an act, I’m a minister of the cloth.

Mike Flex: Oh, right, it’s sermons with you, right?

Reverend Wright: What?

Mike Flex: Okay, well, many thanks for popping in, Jim, and I take it you’re plugging this book here you brought, the books called the Bible, and it’s available in hardback and paperback priced—

Reverend Wright: Outrageous!

Mike Flex: Well it’s a bit expensive, evidently. Well, it looks like a damn good read. Lots of fun there. Okay, thanks Reverend Jim.

I Can't Cope

News in Brief

Sri Lanka—Authorities have taken Chandrasiri Bandara, a popular astrologer, into custody to investigate one of his predictions. Defying the polls the astrologer says that changes in the alignment of the cosmic spheres on 8 October are bad news for the present government, signifying hard times ahead with rising living costs. (Economists have made similar predictions.) The prime minister, he predicted, would become president, and the opposition leader prime minister. The Criminal Investigations Department is looking into the basis for the prediction according to police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekera. It is not clear exactly what they are looking into—do they think he had political motives, or are they merely suspicious of his astrological interpretation? The arrest is condemned by the opposition. (BBC)

Los Angeles—Noted Beatles collector Michael Jackson died Thursday of possibly natural causes. The owner of such coveted Beatles memorabilia as the rights to the bulk of the Lennon-McCartney catalog, Jackson has been the subject of much speculation recently concerning the disposition of these much-coveted sentimental treasures. One theory has it that he's left at least some of his collection to ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. With the imminent re-release of the Beatles catalog in listenable condition for the first time since the advent of the CD, fans are concerned about the fate of these soon-to-be-lost tracks. Jackson's condition is unchanged. (NY Daily News)

Stockholm, Sweden—The Swedish Court of Appeals blandly ruled that Judge Tomas Norstöm, one of three judges who presided over the recent Pirate Bay trial, had no conflict of interest, despite his membership in two advocacy groups on the other side of the issue, the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Swedish Copyright Association. "For a judge to back the principles on which this legislation rests cannot be considered bias," appeals court judge Anders Eka said, apparently with a straight face. Four men involved in the operation of The Pirate Bay, which among other things makes it possible for smaller artists to share their work with others via peer-to-peer networking, were tried and convicted for copyright violations earlier this year, despite the utter worthlessness of the legal claims against them. Backlash against the verdict is considered responsible for electing a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament. (ZDNet, BBC)

Quotation of the Day

The progress of astronomy has been the constant triumph of philosophy over the illusions of the senses.

attributed to Pierre Simon Laplace

Quotation of the Day

Only those who are completely without self-knowledge think they are entirely rational on every subject, and that this licenses attacking others for their perceived failings in that respect.

John Wilkins

An Agnostic is an Atheist too Chicken to Admit It

I used to write fiction (never sold any) and in one story I had a character who, confronted by a Gnostic, said that an agnostic was an atheist who was just too chickenshit to admit to it. I don't know that I've ever heard anybody say it that way in real life, but I've run into the attitude quite a bit. Much depends on how you define the words. Remember when old Polycarp of Smyrna was going to be thrown to the lions or burned at the stake the Romans urged him to denounce the Christians. "Say, 'Away with the atheists,'" the proconsul told him. Polycarp obliged. "Away with the atheists," he repeated, gesturing with his arm to designate the spectators, not the Christians. It's all how you look at it. An atheist, as Mark Twain might have put it, is somebody who doesn't believe in your god.

A good piece over at Evolving Thoughts discusses the meaning of the words atheism and agnosticism, looking at the changes in the meaning of the words over time. John Wilkins has got me thinking again about the oddity of this particular situation: why is it, exactly, again, that I have to pin myself with a specific label on this point? To borrow from Wilkins' piece, it's as though everybody in the world was expected to have a particular team in some sport that they identified with. Well, what about the rest of us? Those of us who just enjoy the game, for instance? And what about the people who just flat-out don't do sports?

There are a lot of things in this universe that I don't have opinions about. Things I've never studied, for instance. Things I don't know enough about. Things where there isn't enough information to even form an opinion in the first place. What influence did Beowulf have on subsequent English literature? Who would win in a fist fight, Santa Claus or Goofy? Is there a god?

I'm sorry; I actually don't have an opinion, and I really never felt the need to form one. I know some people say it's the most important question a person can face—but I just don't see it. People have sicced their deities on me in the past, saying that their god will torment me through all eternity if I don't believe in him, but unless said god can manifest himself in some more tangible way than random bluster, can do something to give me a clue as to why I should be afraid of him and not all these other deities, I can't get worked up over it.

It's like this. Say a stranger comes up to me on the street and tells me "You must believe that Shakespeare based the character of Mercutio on Christopher Marlowe. If you do not you will burn in hell for eternity." Well that would make that a pretty important thing to believe in, wouldn't it? So isn't the safe thing to do to adopt that position, to go around loudly proclaiming that Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's model for Mercutio, regardless of whether there was any evidence for it or not, because hey, if you're right, you won't burn in hell for eternity. And if you're wrong, you've only wasted your life making an asshole of yourself. It's just simple logic, isn't it?

This is where I have the problem. This argument can be framed to support anything whatsoever. Unless there's something resembling evidence that my believing or not believing in a thing will actually have an effect on my afterlife there's no wager here at all. It's more like betting on 00 on a roulette wheel with an infinite number of spaces. You might as well try to sell me celestial wax for buffing my aura. It's infantile.

It's so infantile I cannot believe that people seriously make this argument. Their faces must get awfully used to being laughed in. Oh, wait—I hear an objection from the audience. You—Mr. Strawman.

That's Dr. Strawman, if you please.

Okay, Doc, what's on your mind?

Why do you hate God so much?

Where are you getting that from, Dr. Strawman?

Well, you're spending all this time railing against Him, denying His existence.

No, actually I'm not, Dr. Strawman. I have nothing against any god or supernatural critter whatsoever. I mean, when Athena came down to give Perseus a hand killing a gorgon, I thought it was pretty cool. When Yahweh helped the Israelites escape from Egypt, that was great. And when Gandalf the Gray—

Gandalf was a wizard, not a deity.

I know, Dr. Strawman, but you're missing the point. I like Sherlock Holmes, too, but I don't believe in his existence and I sure as hell don't worship him. Oh, sorry about that.

That's quite all right. I'm a Doctor of Divinity.

Come to think of it, I take it back. There are deities I don't much care for. Cthulu, for one. There's a god worth fearing if you like. And I don't like Yahweh all that much when he's out ordering the massacre of the Canaanites or drowning virtually all mankind in a single flood—he's got a petty vengeful side, no doubt about it. And Hera can be a real bitch—

So you admit to hating God.

Maybe. Now you're confusing me. Yeah, I suppose, in the same way I'm not fond of Sauron or that vicious psycho-criminal that shows up in every Dick Francis novel. The first time I saw Othello I could hardly applaud the actor that played Iago, I was so pissed off at that unctuous smiling bastard. (That was Ashland 1966 I think; whoever you were, you did one hell of a job that night.)

But those are fictional characters.

Well, as far as I know so is Yahweh. Or Chemosh, or Ashur, or Dagon.

But that's a bogus argument. Nobody worships Chemosh or Dagon these days.

Is that the test? Popularity? The god the most people worship today is the real god? What about when the entire Roman Empire worshiped Jupiter and the rest, and virtually nobody had even heard of Yahweh? Was Jupiter the big god on the totem pole till Yahweh dethroned him? And what about Allah?

Hey, remember—I'm just a figment of your imagination. I can't answer arguments you haven't already seen addressed somewhere.

Oh, yeah, sorry about that Dr. Strawman. I kind of think this discussion's gone a little off the rails, don't you think?

Maybe. That's not my fault, though. You're the one that keeps trying to compare God with these made-up idols. What about the second commandment?

Uh, which one is that? "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk?"

Oh, that's very funny. You know perfectly well which one, just as you know in your heart that you are not right with God. That's why you rebel against His word, try to deny His existence, try to convince other people that He doesn't exist.

Dr. Strawman, I don't do any of these things. Maybe it makes you feel better to imagine that in my heart of hearts I agree with you, that I really know God exists and am denying it, no, pretending to deny it as an excuse to perform some nameless rituals in my basement. Whatever. Your believing it doesn't make it true. I don't even really think about your god all that much, except in the context of religions of late antiquity, and for all I know maybe you wouldn't even recognize the God that third-century Christians worshiped as yours. I don't know. You can make up stuff about me all you like; the fact is I can make up stuff about you, too. In your heart of hearts, Dr. Strawman, don't you know you're just telling yourself fairy-stories? You don't believe this stuff any more than I do, and you're just trying to convince other people of God's existence just so you don't feel alone.

Ha! I knew you were trying to convert me to atheism!

No, I'm not trying to convert anybody to anything; I'm trying to make a point, and you, as a creature of my imagination, ought to be cooperating with me, not tossing out random non sequiturs to throw me off my rhythm.

I thought that was my job.

No. This is why I try to avoid religious discussions; we always seem to end up talking past each other; we make assumptions about the other's hidden motives and try to address them, and instead of getting anywhere, we end up arguing in circles.

Now we're getting somewhere. Arguing in a circle is the only way a human being can reason in the presence of his Creator.

If I'm willing to accept that you really have some belief in a god—Yahweh or whoever—even though I have a hard time believing that any adult could seriously hold onto a notion like that, are you willing to accept that I really don't have some secret belief in your god that I'm just suppressing for some reason?

Nothing on earth will convince me of that, "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things."

Yeah, well, Paul wrote a lot of stuff.

And as for trying to retreat into agnosticism, the word just means ignorance. But the Bible tells us that there is no excuse for ignorance of God. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge."

And Second Isaiah says that Yahweh "sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers to him." And that he "stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in?" If people look like grasshoppers to him, how high up is he? A couple hundred feet? We've got airplanes that go higher than that. Even skyscrapers are higher. And do you really believe that the sky is made of some curtain-like material? Something Yahweh could spread out?

Now you're being ridiculous. And what was that about "Second Isaiah"? Are you trying to deny that Isaiah correctly prophesied the coming of Cyrus as king of the Persians over a century before it happened?

Huh? How'd Cyrus get into this?

The only reason you atheists came up with this Second Isaiah business is so you can deny God's power of prophecy.

Okay, that's it; I'm finished, Dr. Strawman. You win, there's a god, and I'm off to get some cosmic wax to buff up my aura.

Huh? I mean, uh, hallelujah, I guess. Praise the Lord.

And you know what else, Dr. Strawman? I actually do believe that Marlowe was Shakespeare's model for Mercutio. I know there's no evidence for it, and I have no rational reason for believing it, but I am quite convinced that you in your heart of hearts share my conviction and know perfectly well that it's true. And, Dr. Strawman, if you deny it, you will burn for eternity. So are you with me, Dr. Strawman, or against me? Isn't the answer obvious?

That's the stupidest argument I've ever heard. Do you think I'm an idiot?

Well, thank you for dropping by, Dr. Strawman.

You're quite welcome, I am sure.