Historian Forges the Past, Perhaps Permanently

A strange and sad story from the National Archives broke today: National Archives Discovers Date Change on Lincoln Record.

Washington, DC…Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time Lincoln researcher from Woodbridge, VA, confessed on January 12, 2011, to altering an Abraham Lincoln Presidential pardon that is part of the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives. The pardon was for Patrick Murphy, a Civil War soldier in the Union Army who was court-martialed for desertion.

Lowry admitted to changing the date of Murphy’s pardon, written in Lincoln’s hand, from April 14, 1864, to April 14, 1865, the day John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Having changed the year from 1864 to 1865, Lowry was then able to claim that this pardon was of significant historical relevance because it could be considered one of, if not the final official act by President Lincoln before his assassination.

NARA made an excellent short video of the discovery:



I think that NARA is handling this potential scandal exactly right by getting it all out into the open and making it a teachable moment. Over at Civil War Memory (where I became aware of this story) in the comments section Kevin Levin wonders how many subsequent historians have used this falsified document in their description of Lincoln's last days. With Google Book Search we can begin to answer the question. Lowry published his research based on the faked document in a 1999 book Don’t Shoot That Boy: Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice. In Google Books I did a search for lincoln + pardon + "patrick murphy" restricted from 1999 to 2011.

As you see there were only three hits, and one of those is Lowry's book. One of the others is Joshua Wolf Shenk's respected Lincoln's Melancholy. Shenk actually uses the false anecdote that Lowry created to offer a poignant counterpoint to Lincoln's pending assassination on the last page of the last chapter:

It is a wonderful piece of historical writing and it is a shame (and no fault of Shenk) that it is not true. Edward Steers makes similar use of the story in his 2005 book Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "Murphy's case travelled all the way from California through the tangled military bureaucracy to reach Lincoln's desk on April 14," Steers tells us. "Lincoln studied the file and picking up his pen wrote, 'This man is pardoned and hereby discharged from service. A. Lincoln April 14 1865.' Patrick Murphy would live."

This search through Google Books is not definitive--due to copyright most recent books are available only in snippets and sections from the service and others are not available at all. Probably other recent books use the story as well. The sad thing is that now this story--doomed president granting life to a condemned soldier, only to be himself assassinated hours later--will never go away. It is in print and online, and there is no mechanism for recalling or correcting the thousands of copies of the above books. Though training and peer review should keep it out of future academic biographies, other people will find the story and repeat it in History Day presentations and seminar papers and popular biographies. Long after the disgrace of Thomas Lowry is forgotten, his rewriting of our history will endure.

What Happened to Google News Archive Search?

Update: Paul Jeffko of SmallTownPapers (which looks to be worth checking out) points out that Google does have a page listing all of their digitized newspapers. Thanks Paul!

I have been pretty enthusiastic (giddy, really) about Google's project to put historic newspapers from Spokane and other cities online. Though this has been an incredible resource in my local history courses, it was never easy to get to the historic newspapers, with the search function buried several layers down in the advanced menus at Google News.

The, sometime late this summer, Google News was redesigned and the ability to get to the historic newspapers disappeared! The good news is that the newspapers are still online and the search function for them still exists, you just cannot navigate to it from the Google News site. So, dear reader, here you go:

Google News Archive Search - Advanced Options

I have no idea why Google buried the link or what this means for the future of historic newspapers at Google. The official Google News Blog is silent--though maybe if I combed through the About News Archive Search pages I'd find out.  If you have any rumors or speculation, feel free to share them in the comments.

["Auto Carrying Giant Potato..." from the Spokane Daily Chronicle, June 22, 1915 p. 2.]

Patrick Henry Said What?: Or, How to Fact-Check an Internet "Quote"

An unfortunate side effect of this information superhighway thing is that a lot of the information that gets passed along is wrong. This is as true of historical information as any other kind. The web is crowded with imaginary black confederates, crank constitutional theories, and historical "quotes" that no one ever said.

A former student of mine is always putting up one historical "quote" or another from Brainy Quote or ThinkExist on his Facebook page. These sites are full of made up and real quotes side by side (Mark Twain in particular suffers terribly at their hands, along with the Founders and Yogi Berra). And these websites seem to plagiarize one another with abandon, so once something is out there, it is everywhere. So now I tell students to trace their quotes back to the source: "Find me the document by that person that is the origin of the quote," I tell them.

Case in point, the following "quote" for Patrick Henry, which is so widespread that it gets over 800,000 Google hits: "The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."

Sounds great, patriotic and stirring and making a political point that has considerable modern-day relevance. But Patrick Henry never said it. He never wrote it. It is fake.

How can I be so sure? Google books is often a good source for getting to the facts. Here is the search. We see that the Henry quote appears in ten books from the last 15 years, including the Congressional Record (apparently by Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, and 
Chuck Norris' magisterial Black Belt Patriotism.

Yet the alleged quote appears not at all in any earlier works--not in any of the hundreds of books of Henry's writings, books about the constitutional debates, or biographies of Henry that are in the Google Books database. In fact it first pops up in print in 1994 (dawn of the internet era!) in a political book. If Henry really said something so quotable in his lifetime it is inconceivable that no one thought to quote it until 1994. The quote is a fake.

Further evidence that the quote is spurious is that it does not sound like Henry, who was after all an anti-federalist and opposed to the constitution, which he considered a Federalist plot. Hell, Henry refused an invitation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, famously explaining "I smell a rat."

I could have performed this exercise with hundreds of other "quotes" from the Founders that you see plastered on bumper stickers and misspelled on Tea Party signs. So where do we look for real, verified historical quotes? My first suggestion is to read the primary sources. If you want to know what any one of the Founders thought about the Constitution read his collected writings. You could begin here. These are men whose thoughts on government were for the most part highly nuanced and sophisticated. No one-sentence take away, even if it is verified, is going to capture the richness and complexity of their thought.

OK, some of you are not going to do that. If you must go to a quotations website, use Wikiquotes. A spin-off  of the Wikipedia project, Wikiquotes tries to raise the bar by organizing the quotes into three categories: "Sourced" for verified quotes, "Attributed" for quotes whose provenance is uncertain, and "Misattributed" for things that are flat out wrong. It is a good idea, but crowd sourcing is only as good as the crowd, and as of this morning their Patrick Henry page included the fake constitution quote as "Sourced!" I fixed it--let's see if it stays fixed.

Online Resources at the Washington State Historical Society

I began working on a post about the new Columbia magazine website, but along the way found a treasure trove of other history resources at the Washington State Historical Society. So I will begin with the magazine and branch out from there.

I see that Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, the journal of the Washington State Historical Society, has a new and improved website. Those of you who are familiar with Columbia know that it is a superb journal of popular history, with articles and book reviews that present recent scholarship to a popular audience. The website does not contain everything that has appeared in the journal but many of the articles are available in full text. (This article is excellent.)

There are many other online resources available from the WSHS, including lesson plans, featured collections, women's history resources, and information about visiting the WSHS locations in Tacoma and Olympia. The featured collections is an especially rich resource, and includes digital collections of maps, American Indian Photographs, Columbia River Photographs, a Gustav Sohon Collection, and a Sheet Music Collection. The collections are very much oriented to the west side of the state (a search for "Spokane"  results in zero hits!) and are presented in ContentDM. But within these restrictions there tremendous things to be found at the WSHS site.

Asotin County Frontier Justice Records Now Online

The Washington State Archives, Digital Archives has placed a fascinating set of records online, with more to come. The records are the Frontier Justice records for Asotin County. The Frontier Justice Collection consists of the court records of the Washington Territory, from 1853 to 1889. These court records from the tumultuous frontier period of Washington offer an exciting and decidedly unvarnished view of our past, and include cases for adultery and debt collection, gambling and fraud, selling liquor to Indians and violence including murder. A full description of the record series is here. The Digital Archives has had a finding aid to the cases online for several years, but actually viewing these fascinating records has required a trip to a regional archive branch where the records are available in paper or microfilm. Now, thanks to the hard work of Eastern Region Archivist Jeff Creighton and his staff, the original documents for Asotin County have been scanned and are available online.The records for Walla Walla county are to follow, and it is hoped that the rest of the counties will be done in the coming years.

The records are searchable by any of our metadata fields, including the names of the plaintiff and defendant or by date. Unfortunately they are not browseable. You can get around this by searching for a date range that will include all the records (say 1800-2000) and then set the "records per page" display to its maximum of 100. The search results will show every record for the county, which you can then sort by clicking on any of the columns. Here is an example, sorted by cause. Click on the document icon to pull up a scan of the original. These are handwritten manuscript records, and not all are easy to read. The DeJa Vue document viewer plug-in used by the Digital Archives is helpful, allowing the user to zoom in, print off, or save the images.

These records open up new fields of research to historians and students. Indian are prominently mentioned in many including actions they themselves initiated. See for example this 1887 case in which William Stingy, a Nez Perce, accuses Indian George of horse theft. One wonders why Stingy used the white government's court system to seek justice rather than tribal remedies, and if the "Indian George" in the case is the same as the Nez Perce man of the same name who General Howard used to try and broker a peace with Chief Joseph in the Nez Perce War just ten years before. Other obvious topics from the records include gender relations including adultery and divorce, debt and bankruptcy, efforts to regulate the morals of early Washingtonians, including alcohol consumption, and the really striking levels of violence. These records would also make a great teaching resource.

We have room for improvement in our presentation of these records. The court cases, some of them 80 pages of longer, are chock full of names that are not currently indexed or searchable. Browsing would improve the functionality of the series. And ultimately it would be great to see some sort of crowd-sourced transcription of the records (though that is a long ways off at present).

Are you using the Frontier Justice records in your research or teaching? Drop me a line, I would love to hear from you.

Whitman College's Online Northwest Archives

Whitman College has put online a small but well-chosen set of books and documents from its excellent northwest history collection. Some of the highlights include a 1913 picture of an "Indian War Dance," a handwritten Journal of Lieutenant John Mullan, and Marcus Whitman's missionary certificate, pictured above.


Whitman College has one of the most impressive collections of source material for early Northwest History (check out the collections guide), and it is great to see some of it going online. I had the pleasure of meeting Whitman archivist Michael Paulus at THATCamp PNW in the fall and he is forward-looking archivist who understands the new digital realm. This is a site for PNW historians to keep an eye on.

Digital Updates at the Washington State Library

The Washington State Library has been adding items to its excellent digital collections. This entry at the WSL blog describes the updates, which includesuch items as Authentic account of the murder of Dr. Whitman and other missionaries by Fr. J.B.A. Brouillet, Reminiscences of Washington Territory by Charles Prosch (pictured below), and Seattle General Strike , an "account of the Seattle general strike from the point of view of the unions, written by the History Committee of the General Strike Committee."

I have just begun dipping into these resources, but I will share with you this excerpt from Prosch's memoir of early settlement and the Civil War in the territory:

At an early stage in the great civil war it became appar-
ent that there were in California, Oregon and Washington,
men ready to aid in the destruction of the Union by every
means within their power. They were creatures who had not
the courage to face the dangers of the battle field, else their
zeal would have led them to remain at the east or induced
them to go there and openly espouse the Confederate cause
by taking up arms in its defense. They were northern cop-
perheads and doughfaces, (so called then) far more despicable
and treacherous than the worst of those in open rebellion
against the best government on earth. Here, thousands of
miles from the theater of war, it was safe to hatch treason, and
they lost no time in availing themselves of the opportunity
their isolation afforded. In secret they plotted, here and
elsewhere on the coast, to dismember the Union, with a view
to aiding their confederates in the Southern states.

If you want to see where this story goes you will have to read it yourself!

Historic Spokane Newspapers Online!

Wow--when did this happen?

Google and the Spokesman-Review have scanned and placed online a huge run of the Spokane Daily Chronicle. It appears that they have digitzed the paper from about 1890 through its demise in 1982. The articles are full text, searchable, and free. They are also deeply buried, so pay attention boys and girls.

The path to the newspapers is: Google News => Advanced News Search => Archive Search => Advanced Archive Search. At the last page, be sure that you enter Spokane in the "source" box.

I had a lot of fun trolling the archives for Spokane history, A search for "Chief Joseph" before 1920 (to screen out articles about Chief Joseph dam and such) turned up some wonderful primary sources, such as Old Foemen Met Again .Chief Joseph And General Howard Sat Side By Side--Famous Red Warrior Talks to Young Folks. The 1904 article reports that Joseph gave a speech to the graduating class of Carlisle Indian school. Also of interest were Spirits Helped Chief Joseph Outwit Whites, Says Indian, and an article entitled Howling In The Hills. The latter is something of a racist rant by the Chronicle devoted to complaining that the some regional tribes were planning a powwow, "a copper-colored carnival of dancing, horse-racing, gambling, getting drunk, and painting the forest a primeval a bright carmine tint, spotted with purple and vermilion."

Surprisingly, the Chronicle seems not to have reported Joesph's death, which occurred on September 21, 1904, six months after his Carlisle speech.

Some other finds include this account a 1912 Spokane speech by Theodore Roosevelt, an 1898 story about a doctor arrested for performing an abortion, and a 1908 editorial about a development plan that would alter the falls on the Spokane Falls.

We are lucky indeed, as Spokane appears to be one of only a handful of cities available for free in the Google News archive. A bit of thrashing around in the archives reveals digitized historic content for St. Petersberg, Florida and a bunch of newspapers in New Zealand that seem to have been digitized as part of an independent project and are merely indexed via Google.

(Hat tip to the often-useful Eastern Washington Genealogical Society blog for discovering this resource.)

Alexander Ross Describes an Indian Breakfast

I just wanted to share this wonderful passage from Alexander Ross' account of the failed Astoria adventure (the attempt by John Jacob Astor to establish a string of fur trading posts across North America). This passage is from Ross' wonderfully entertaining account, Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River:

On the 17th, we were paddling along at daylight. On putting on shore to breakfast, four Indians on horseback joined us. The moment they alighted, one set about hobbling their horses, another to gather small sticks, a third to make a fire, and the fourth to catch fish. For this purpose, the fisherman cut off a bit of his leathern shirt, about the size of a small bean; then pulling out two or three hairs from his horse's tail for a line, tied the bit of leather to one end of it, in place of a hook or fly. Thus prepared, he entered the river a little way, sat down on a stone, and began throwing the small fish, three or four inches long, on shore, just as fast as he pleased; and while he was thus employed, another picked them up and threw them towards the fire, while the third stuck them up round it in a circle, on small sticks; and they were no sooner up than roasted. The fellows then sitting down, swallowed them—heads, tails, bones, guts, fins, and all, in no time, just as one would swallow the yolk of an egg. Now all this was but the work of a few minutes; and before our man had his kettle ready for the fire, the Indians were already eating their breakfast.

When the fish had hold of the bit of wet leather, or bait, their teeth got entangled in it, so as to give time to jerk them on shore, which was to us a new mode of angling; fire produced by the friction of two bits of wood was also a novelty; but what surprised us most of all, was the regularity with which they proceeded, and the quickness of the whole process, which actually took them less time to perform, than it has taken me to note it down.

Keep in mind that Ross was writing with quill and ink! Ross later married an Indian woman and his accounts of native people are often far more sympathetic than those of his white contemporaries. His Fur Hunters of the Far West is another great primary source for the early northwest.

[Picture of Alexander Ross take from this Manitoba Historical Society page, which has links to more of his writings.]

"I never intended to kill him": Exploring the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal

Plateau Peoples' Web Portal: "This portal is a gateway to the cultural materials of Plateau peoples that are held in Washington State University's Libraries, Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC), the Museum of Anthropology and by national donors. The collections represented here here have been chosen and curated by tribal consultants working in cooperation with University and Museum staff."

This is an exciting new site that already has a lot of content. The idea--to create a single portal for multiple institutions with materials about Plateau Indians--is a good one. And the execution is superb. The site is nicely designed and easily navigable.

The best thing about the project is the way that it seems to have been designed with the full input, cooperation, and most importantly control by the native peoples. According the the website: "The materials in the portal have been chosen and curated by the tribes. Tribal administrators, working with their tribal governments, have provided information and their own additional materials to the portal as a means of expanding and extending the archival record." Tribal administrators can add content, flag items that are culturally sensitive and should not be displayed, and add tags and other metadata to create "a rich and complex foundation for the exploration of Plateau peoples' histories."

Currently the Umatilla, Yakama, and Couer D'Alene tribes are part of the project, Each is represented by a tribal "path" that brings together all the information for that tribe under a set of nine categories (such as "Land," "Language," etc.). It is pretty clear from the architecture of the site that the plan is to bring in other native groups as well.

So let's go exploring in the site!

The title of my post comes from this letter from 1858, written by George Wright at a "Camp near Sacred Heart Mission." Wright writes: "I have determined to release the old chief Polatkin." He explains that "I never intended to kill him, or hurt him in any way. I only wanted to bring him to the mission in order that he might see how I treated the Indians here." Though Wright does admit that he hanged an unnamed Indian, one of Polatkin's friends or allies, along the way. "I hung the man taken with the chief because he had murdered two miners April last, and besides that man was at Ft Walla Walla with Father Ravelli and professed great friendship for us, and then came up here and joined the hostile Indians."

If you look at the item page for this dramatic letter you can see some of the sophisticated interactive features at this site. Registered users may flag an item as culturally sensitive, transcribe an item, or add comments either as text, audio, or video.

The Plateau Peoples' Web Portal is a model digital history project. It combines an appreciation of the sensitivity of its materials, cooperation with diverse groups, and some state-of-the-art Web 2.0 features. All of us working in digital history and archives should take note of the site.

Wyoming Newspapers Project

Friend Pecay (of BibliOdyssey fame) tipped me off to a great resource: Wyoming Newspaper Project. "Available through this website are all the newspapers printed in Wyoming between 1849 and 1922, in an easily searchable format." All Wyoming newspapers through 1922! I mean, we know that Wyoming is sparsely populated but that is still an amazing feat. Half of the 900,000 images are online right now with the rest to follow over a few months.

This digital archive has a plain but useful user interface with strong search and browse features. You can search or browse, including browsing by city (and it is fun to see what little hamlets once had newspapers). In my experience the site is still a bit shaky, so if your search fails just come back later and try again.

All the newspapers for an entire state! What a resource this is for historians of Wyoming and the American West.

Estimable Blogs #4: A Compendium of Digital Collections

A Compendium of Digital Collections: "The goal of this project is to connect researchers with digital collections on topics of interest to them. The guide includes brief descriptions of and links to digital collections (digital projects, digital initiatives, digital libraries, etc.) created by libraries, archives, government agencies, and other institutions. Projects included cover a wide variety of subjects and digital formats, but collections that are search-able, easy to navigate, contain primary sources, and allow unrestricted use of materials are given first consideration..."

This highly useful and focused blog from the UNH Library Digital Collections Initiative is devoted to highlighting the latest digital collections. Every week sees a new historic digital collection launched somewhere, and no one can keep track of them. This blog began as my own attempt to keep abreast of digital history efforts that relate to the Pacific Northwest, but even with that narrow focus I don't feel that I am keeping up.

A Compendium of Digital Collections features a clean design and a simple formula. The title of each post is the name of the featured collection. This is followed by the URL and a one paragraph description of the collection. That is it--no commentary or editorializing, on to the next post. Right now the blog features Sheet Music from Indiana, the Mountain West Digital Library (from which the image of the petroglyphs here is borrowed), and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. The site makes limited use of tags, but they are tags across a variety of blogs--so for example clicking on the native-american-history tag brings you a results page with a lot of content from other blogs that is not very good. Fortunately you can also sort the Compendium of Digital Collections archive by clicking on the box on the left that reads "Select Category." Choosing Native American History from the drop down list gets you only the relevant posts on the Compendium of Digital Collections blog.

This is really a useful site--I've added it to my RSS reader and will exploring it at length.

Congressional Globe and other U.S. Congressional Documents

Congressional Globe Home Page: U.S. Congressional Documents: "The Globe, as it is usually called, contains the congressional debates of the 23rd through 42nd Congresses (1833-73) . . . The Globe is the third of the four series of publications containing the debates of Congress. It was preceded by the Annals of Congress and the Register of Debates and succeeded by the Congressional Record . . . Initially the Globe contained a 'condensed report' or abstract rather than a verbatim report of the debates and proceedings. With the 32nd Congress (1851), however, the Globe began to provide something approaching verbatim transcription . . . The contents of the appendix of each volume vary from Congress to Congress, but appendixes typically contain presidential messages, reports of the heads of departments and cabinet officers, texts of laws, and appropriations."

This is an enormously useful set of resources, with the full text of these important congressional records. The northwest was much on the mind of 19th- and 20th-century legislators. Some quick searches for northwest topics produce this Bill To provide for suppressing Indian hostilities in the territory of Oregon (passed in the wake of the killing of the Whitmans); An Act For the relief of Mrs. Mary Harris, of Oregon (to pay her money owed for "supplies furnished and services rendered in the Oregon Indian War of eighteen hundred and fifty-six"); and "The petition of five hundred and fifteen citizens of Washington Territory, for aid to the Seattle and Walla-Walla Railroad."

This resource opens up new avenues of research. I am particularly intrigued by the petitions to Congress, which might yeild new primary source descriptions of the Indian Wars of the northwest. Unfortunately the search function, though otherwise robust, searches only the indexes of the Globe, at least for some volumes.

Interestingly, Google Book Search seems to have most or all of the Congressional Globe as well. The disadvantage (and this is a repeated problem in using Google Book Search) is that the individual volumes are not linked in any way. On the other hand they are fully digitized and you can use Google's powerful search features to mine the text.

Classics in Washington History 4: Local History and a Gallery of 19th Century Facial Hair

(This is the fifth and last post in a series, see the others here: 1, 2, 2.5, 3.)

I think one of the least-anticipated impacts of the digital turn on the practice of history has been the way that it revitalized local history in the United States. The internet with its blogs and listservs and easy web creation has made it possible for legions of amateur historians to put their research on the web, and you can hardly Google the name of any tiny town without coming upon a Geocities page dedicated to its history. At the same time the internet gave local historians new sources of information. In too many cases local historians used to simply recirculate the stories of the first chronicler of their towns with too little critical evaluation and no original research. But now databases such as the Historical Census Browser, Google Book Search and Google Patents, Footnote.com and other searchable large-scale digital repositories make it easy to dig out forgotten facts about even the most obscure towns.

Classics in Washington History offers some wonderful resources for local history. The collection includes a strong selection of "centennial" or "subscription" histories. These are town and county histories written at the turn of the previous century and printed locally in small runs and in many cases very few copies survive. They were often written by a local newspaper editor or attorney and were published by subscription. Often the histories were in two volumes with the second book being a collection of portraits and biographies of local worthies--specifically, local worthies who had agreed to buy a set of the volumes. These collections of formal portraits give this genre of publications its popular slang name among historians: "mug books." (Here is a nice article about evaluating mug books from Genealogy.com.)

Classics in Washington History includes these subscription histories for Yakima, Spokane, Chelan, Big Bend, Walla Walla, Puget Sound, and several other counties. For all their flaws, these histories are invaluable for the local historian. The include details of local history such as the names of public officials and businesses that can be hard to recover elsewhere (especially if there was a courthouse fire at some point). Centennial histories often drew on the memories of still-living pioneers who had come to their towns by covered wagons or even with the fur trade. Most centennial histories tended to glorify and even whitewash the past (which reminds me of another term for this genre--"booster histories") but depending on the author some are quite frank about the seamy side of history. And finally for many towns the centennial histories are all we have in the way of historical records for many episodes. They are to be used with caution, but you can't not use them to do local history.

But the best parts of the mug books are the "mugs"--the late 19th century portraits of American men in all their hirsute glory. After the jump, a few notables.

Representative of the Old Testament look in American beards was Dr Dorsey S. Baker, M.D. of Walla Walla. The description of Baker from Lyman's History of Old Walla Walla County, Embracing Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield and Asotin Counties (1918) is also representative, in this case of the fawning nature of the biographical sketches in these volumes:

"No history of Walla Walla and the Inland Empire would be complete with-
out extended reference to Dr Dorsey S. Baker, now deceased, who for many
years figured most prominently m the professional, commercial and financial
circles of the northwest. He stood in the front rank of the columns that have
advanced the civilization of Washington, leading to its substantial development,
progress and upbuilding."



The oldest men in these mug books have John Brown beards, as with Michael Nixon:



But if old timers preferred their beards long and chin-hiding, the next generation was more into elaborate mustachios, as we see in the portrait of the Wickersham family from the same volume:



None of the Wickershams could hold a candle, however, to Spokane County's E. G. Marston and his impressive handlebars:



Henry Kausche of Walla Walla anticipated the "poser patch" so popular today, but took it to heights that few Indie kids could match:



Whereas Joseph Rose's twisted ends just look silly, as if his mother helped him prepare his mustache in the morning:



Joseph E Stauffer, M.D. schools them all on the curvy handlebar:

Classics in Washington History 3: Delightful Ephemera

(This is the third post in a series, see the others here: 1, 2, 2.5.)

One of the great strengths of any digitization project is that way it saves obscure and overlooked records and presents them to a broad audience. When a project such as Classics in Washington History puts a classic memoir such as Lawrence Kip's Army life on the Pacific online a great public service is performed. But it does not help advance the scholarship of northwest history--we already knew about Kip and his memoir.

So I am delighted to find that many of the items in the Classics in Washington History project are not merely obscure, but downright ephemeral. "Ephemera" is a term famously difficult to define, but is often used as a catchall for printed items that are not books, such as posters, postcards, sheet music, maps, timetables, pamphlets, programs, and the like. Many ephemeral items were produced for a specific and temporary purpose. When they survive at all it is in small quantities and often in obscure locations. They are perfect candidates for digitization.

Camp Lewis (cover image above) is a example of great digitized ephemera (though at 80 pages it might be stretching the definition and coming closer to something we should call a book). Published in 1917 in Seattle, Camp Lewis is something of a souvenir and patriotic yearbook for the Doughboys and their officers who passed through the camp in America's first year of involvement in the Great War. The anonymous author writes that the booklet "will furnish a better understanding of the seemingly intricate organization, of which the soldier is a vital part, that is using every means and method to make of him a good soldier-synonymous with good citizen-to provide for his comfort and welfare and to prove to him that it is the most meritorious, efficient and energetic Army on earth; to teach him that, as a member of that wonderful body, loyalty, obedience and confidence should and must be his rule of action always." Along with the names of many of the men at Camp Lewis the booklet provides descriptions of army life and quite a few pictures of the camp and its activities.

More ephemera after the bump. (Du'oh--the "More Inside" feature is not working for me today, so here it goes.)

This undated (but probably from the 1890s) railroad brochure tells us: "The completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, spanning the northwestern portion of the United States between the headwaters of the Mississippi and the most westerly of the Great Lakes and Puget Sound , has developed in Washington Territory a region of such illimitable wealth of soil, iron, coal and lumber as fairly entitles it to the name of the "Pennsylvania of the West." Pennsylvania? See also the section on "Tacoma, the City of Destiny," and the nifty maps of Washington and of the route of the Northern Pacific in the back.


Another surprising RR brochure from the same era is Alaska via Northern Pacific R.R. by John Muir (!) published in 1891. The brochure is nicely illustrated with photographs of people and scenery along the way. There are also two more Northern Pacific RR pamphlets:
Washington the Evergreen State and Washington.

Other interesting ephemera include an epic poem, Annals of old Angeline : "Mika Yahoos delate klosch!" (see below) by Bertha Piper Venen; this very rare 1831 stock certificate from the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory, and this 1939-40 Real property survey, Seattle, Washington.

Coming up next: Local History at the Classics in Washington History collection.

Classics in Washington History, Part 2.5

The first post in this series introduced us to a great digital resource from the Washington State Library, Classics in Washington History. The second post explored one item in the collection, 12th Session of the Washington State Legislature by the artist Alfred T. Renfro. Today a look at another aspect of Renfro's work, his quirky racism. This was going to be part of the second post but it was getting too long.

It was common for cartoonists of Renfro's era to include a small figure in the foreground of their cartoons to provide additional commentary on a topic. (This tradition continues today with a few cartoonists--note the little figure of Tom Toles at his easel that always appears in his cartoons.) Renfro sometimes featured himself in his cartoons the way that Toles does, but more often his foreground character was a comic Indian figure Renfro dubbed "Si-wash." This detail of a cartoon shows the both of them:


More after the bump!

Renfro has Si-Wash capering about at the foot of nearly all the cartoons in this volume. Si-Wash is portrayed as young, cheerful, lazy, uneducated but sometimes capable of real insight. He sports a single feather from his headband, no shoes, and speaks in an unreadable pidgeon much of the time. "The jargon used by my little friend Si Wash is pure Chinook," Renfro tells us (though of course it is nothing of the kind), "If you do not understand it get some old timer to tell you."

Here are a few images of Si-Wash. In the first he sits in a dunce cap next to the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which of course plays into the stereotype of Indians being incompatible with civilization:


Here a detail of another drawing of Si-Wash riding a bird:



Here Si-Wash begs the Insurance Commissioner for a policy in nonsensical "Chinook:"

And finally there is something a little off about an Indian cheerfully offering Washington lands to the white race:

Classics in Washington History, Part 2

12th Session of the Washington State Legislature by the artist Alfred T. Renfro is one of the more endearing volumes in the Classics in Washington History digital collection (which I began exploring yesterday).

Renfro was a well-known commercial artist in turn-of-the-century Seattle. He was an architect as well as an artist, active in the Arts and Crafts movement and an important figure in creating the artists colony of Beaux Arts Village. (The massive timbers used in Craftsman style construction, Renfro noted, were "a good influence on the children.") His book, The Twelfth Session of the Washington State Legislature and State Official Caricatured by Alfred T. Renfro, is a set of humorous drawings and thumbnail biographies of the members of the Washington State House and Senate during the 12th session, from 1910-11. "I hope no one will be offended by anything which appears in this
book," Renfro writes, "We assure you no offense Is meant. Everything is given in good part and we hope It will be taken the same way."

The politicians are described in mildly colorful, mildly humorous ways. "Senator H. O. Fishback," we learn, "is the 'biggest man who ever sat in the senate,' for he weighs over the 300 pound mark. The big senator was chairman of the big committee on Roads and Bridges and was a member of ten other committees, but he is equal to the task. Even his enemies, if he has any, will tell you that he is an honest, sincere and capable man." Below we see the voluminous Fishback:

Each caricature follows the same format--jocular description, a head draw like a portrait, and the rest of the drawing a caricature of the individual. There are always some additional items in the drawing. For Fishback it is the "How Fat is He?" side and rear profiles, and also the cartoon cat (apparently a play on the fish in Fishback).


But we get ahead of ourselves. The first portrait in the volume is of Washington Governor Marion E. Hay (1909-1913), who Renfro portrays as a penny-pinching public servant:

The motto on the wall reads "Give the taxpayer a dollar's worth in return for every dollar they pay." In the lower corner a small figure (who Renfro dubs "my little friend Si Wash") mutters "No easy jobs around here now," as he carries a message to the legislature. Hays was an accidental governor who assumed the office on the untimely death of his successor and whose one term was marked by vigorous anti-corruption efforts.

And here, after the jump, are some more of my favorites from this collection:

"Fighting Dick" Hutchinson:



Puppet Master and Speaker of the House Howard Taylor:



This portrait of Yakima County representative Walter Moren has an interesting load of cultural baggage attached. Since Moran was southern born, Renfro makes him a colonel, and provides as backdrop a southern belle and a stereotyped black servant with a tray of mint juleps. Renfro even provides a poem in mock "darkie" dialect:

He was born in o1' Kentuck 'neath a bright and lucky star,
And of course he is a Kurnel and a member of de bar.
He's a jedge of good mint julips, in de land of tall blue grass,
Where dey grows de blooded horses and de women you can't surpass.



Perhaps the most curious portrait is of Representative William M. Beach of Mason County, dancing in somehow effeminate Indian outfit. Renfro notes that Beach comes from the "only squaw county in the state." I have no idea what "squaw county" was meant to imply, but they sure liked to dance:



Next post: The genial racism of Renfro.

Great Washington History Resource from the State Library

This is the first in a series of posts exploring a fantastic resource: Classics in Washington History. This digital collection from the Washington State Library is "brings together rare, out of print titles for easy access by students, teachers, genealogists and historians." This treasure trove of over 100 books and documents includes a lot of classics in Northwest History, including Army Life on the Pacific by Lawrence Kip, Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin tribes by Franz Boas, and Ka-mi-akin, the last hero of the Yakimas by A. J. Splawn.

All of the above titles are also available full-text in Google Books, which is a superior format to the DjVu browser plug in that the Washington State Library employs. (I will write more on this subject later this week.) However, many of the classics are available no where else online and are real gems for doing local and regional history. The Deposition of Ranald McDonald is one example. McDonald was the son of a Scottish Hudson's Bay Company fur trader and a Chinook mother. In 1848 he purposely had himself stranded on the coasts of Japan, then a closed kingdom cut off from the rest of the world. His deposition is an invaluable source for both northwest and Japanese history, and the library also has MacDonald's autobiography online. The picture on the right is a monument to MacDonald in Nagasaki, Japan. He lies buried in obscure corner of Ferry County. Some other gems of Washington history include 12th Session of the Washington State Legislature, a delightful set of caricatures of early Washington leaders by the artist Alfred T. Renfro, and Annals of old Angeline : "Mika Yahoos delate klosch!" by Venen, Bertha Piper.

I am trying something new on the Northwest History blog this week, each day I will explore a different book or issue related to this site. Tomorrow: Amusing drawings of politicians. Let's see how it works!

First-Person Accounts #2: Many Pasts

Today's post continues the series looking at first-person historical accounts, with an eye to mining the websites for accounts of the Northwest.

Many Pasts "contains primary documents in text, image, and audio about the experiences of ordinary Americans throughout U.S. history. All of the documents have been screened by professional historians and are accompanied by annotations that address their larger historical significance and context." It is part of the terrific History Matters website from George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.

Many pasts contains over 1000 primary accounts and is searchable. A search for "Wobblies" produces an evocative anti-IWW cartoon (seen on on the right), a Wobbly poem titled “The Lumberjack’s Prayer ("I pray dear Lord for Jesus' sake, Give us this day a T-Bone Steak...), a description of the difficulties of rural work from an IWW organizer, and The Paterson Strike Pageant Program (a public page ant in support of an IWW strike, organized by John Reed and Bill Haywood).

Other northwest material include “For Oregon!” Settlers From Illinois Describe the New Territory, 1847; Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation; Congress Investigates the 1934 San Francisco Strike; and the delightful “Nobody Would Eat Kraut”: Lola Gamble Clyde on Anti-German Sentiment in Idaho During World War I.

The advanced search option at Many Pasts is very sophisticated, allowing searches limited by topic and primary source type and across different History Matters collections.

Searchable Eyewitness History

FIRP Home: "In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world."

An interesting (unfortunate?) twist to FIRP is that it indexes both free and subscription databases. A quick search for "Oregon Territory" brings us to 55 documents, every one of them part of the subscription only North American Women's Letters and Diaries database. Other searches for PNW topics also brought me to password walls more often than to freely accessible documents. Fortunately you can go to an advanced search screen and limit your search to free documents.

Digital history geeks will be impressed by the range of options on the advanced search page. You can search by the age of the person person writing or being interviewed, for example, or their year of birth, or for only unpublished sources. Setting up such a search is not great technical feat (I am told), the hard part is entering all the metadata.

There isn't a lot at this site yet for the Northwest historian, but it is worth keeping an eye on as its collection expands.

Next: Other Online Sources of First-Person Accounts