“WILD BILL” HICKOK

by William H. Benson

August 1, 2002

     Unlike the Lone Ranger or Roy Rogers or Gene Autry or the myriad other fictionalized Westerners who rode horses and were quick with pistols, Wild Bill Hickok was an actual person who lived during the lawless days of the Wild West.  Although archivists have only rare specimens of his signature, they do exist–proof that he was not thought up by a dime-store novelist.

     And the most amazing thing about the West of the latter half of the nineteenth century is that the more colorful characters, such as Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Wild Bill Hickok, entered into the Western mythology at the same time that they were living.  

     James Butler Hickok left his home in Troy Grove, Illinois shortly after his father died, and he headed west.  He drove wagons for Russell, Waddell, & Majors, where he met Bill Cody, who was riding horses for the Pony Express.  He sided with the Union during the Civil War and then scouted for General George Armstrong Custer during the Indian Wars.

     He claimed to have wrestled a bear with only a knife and lived to tell about it.  In Rock Creek, Nebraska, he quarreled with some young thugs and ended up killing them all but was judged innocent by reason of self-defense.  Above all, he worked hard at building up his reputation.

     But he impressed people wherever.  An officer at Fort Riley wrote home.

     “I forgot to tell you about our guide–the most striking object in camp.  Six feet, lithe, active, sinewy, daring rider, dead shot with pistol and rifle, long locks, fine features and mustache, buckskin leggings, red shirt, broad-brim hat, two pistols in belt, rife in hand–he is a picture.  He goes by the name of Wild Bill, and tells wonderful stories of his horsemanship, fighting, and hair-breadth escapes.  We do not, however, feel under any obligation to believe them all.”

     His real claim to fame though was as a Sheriff in the lawless cowtowns–Hays City and Abilene, Kansas.  After weeks of driving the cattle north to the railroad, the Texas cowboys strode into town ready to party.  They gambled, drank, and shot up the town, but they also had to contend with Wild Bill Hickok who ruled with an iron fist, and enforced the law that no guns were permitted in town. 

     In 1872 Wild Bill traveled east, where for two years he appeared in numerous traveling Wild West shows, including Buffalo Bill’s, sealing his fame as a larger-than-life Westerner.  But he quickly wearied of life on the stage and returned to the West.

     On August 2, 1876 at 4:10 p.m. Jack McCall walked into the No.10 Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territories and shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back of the head.  It seems that Hickok’s enemies had convinced McCall that he should do this.  But whatever the reason, the bullet passed through Hickok’s body and eventually lodged in Captain Massey’s left forearm, where it remained.

     Hickok normally sat with his back to the wall, but that day the three others at the gambling table would not let him have that chair.  So he sat exposed.  Legend has it that he held two black eights and two black aces–which is now called the Dead Man’s Hand.  Wild Bill Hickok was buried atop Mount Moriah overlooking Deadwood.  He was thirty-nine years old.

     In the trial, Jack McCall was initially declared innocent and released, but in another trial in Yankton, he was found guilty and on March 1, 1877 was hanged.

     Wild Bill Hickok was the point man for the law’s push west onto the frontier.  Sworn to uphold the law, he tried to bring order.  For it is law and order, meaning that the two go hand in hand; one does not exist without the other.  What ensures American citizens’ their order and their liberty is the law.  The Statue of Liberty holds upright the flaming torch of liberty in one hand, but tucked up next to her heart is a tablet of laws.  The Founding Fathers understood that liberty and order exist and flourish in an atmosphere of rightly produced and executed laws.

     Keeping a lid on lawlessness is civilization’s ongoing battle.  It was so during Wild Bill Hickok’s life, and it is today.

TRAGEDY

by William H. Benson

July 18, 2002

     On July 18, 64 A.D. a fire started in the Circus Maximus in the city of Rome that raged for the next nine days and laid half of Rome in ruins.  The story goes that Nero, the emperor, from a safe place had watched the fire and played his fiddle and then recited a poem that described the burning of Troy.  The Romans initially blamed him, not for starting the fire, but for not caring.

     But then another story began circulating that he, in fact,  had deliberately started the fire so that he might see what a burning city looked like.  And so later he caught the blame.

     Historians agree that Nero actually was on holiday in the country when the fire erupted and that he quickly returned to the city where he directed crews of firefighters, threw open certain grounds of his palace to refugees, set up tents and huts, and then imported cheap food.

In other words, he did what he could to overcome the fire’s tragic outcome.

     But the people of Rome detested Nero, for they understood he was cruel and murderous.  He had plotted the murder of his own mother, Agrippina.  He had divorced his wife, Octavia, charging her with adultery, and then he had sent the executioners.  Guilty of such heinous crimes, starting a fire, the Roman citizens believed, would be well within his character.

     Fearful of losing the people’s support, Nero, in turn, blamed the fire on the Christians, members of a new religion, and so he had them rounded up and fed to the lions in stadiums filled with cheering crowds.  And he then conducted wholesale crucifixions.  Accused of a tragedy, Nero blamed the innocent, and so that summer his viciousness rapidly expanded.  

     The summer of 2002 has been a summer of tragedy: a drought which created conditions that erupted in forest fires in Colorado and Arizona, and then in a bizarre reversal, heavy rains produced flooding in areas of Texas and nearby in Keith County, Nebraska. 

     Without the necessary snowfall last winter and without the rains this spring, the high country lay exposed and vulnerable, and inevitably the wild fires began.  The Iron Mountain fire burned nearly 88 homes.  And then in June the Coal Seam blaze flared up near Glenwood Springs.  And then Hayman exploded, choking Denver on smoke, threatening homes and property in the foothills.  Then, the Missionary Ridge fire near Durango ran wild. 

     “This is the worst fire year in Colorado history,” said Ralph Campbell, a state forester.

     Indeed, as of June 30 the Hayman fire had consumed 137,760 acres, and Missionary Ridge 71,739 acres–the first and second biggest wild fires in Colorado’s history.

     And then another fire in Arizona riveted the nation’s attention.

     The physical world, sometimes called Mother Nature, plays havoc on human beings’ intentions, and when she destroys property or human life, we label her handiwork a tragedy.  Besides drought, fire, and flood, humanity groans under her other tricks–hailstorms, tornadoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and volcanoes.  And then there are the tragedies devised by human beings.

     Whenever a tragedy strikes and for whatever reason, it is then Human Nature to fix the blame upon another person or persons.  We want to capture and possess a culprit, get a conviction, and then lock him or her away.  In so doing, society punishes the evil doer, and supposedly brings a measure of harmony into the community.

     Mother Nature acts, and Human Nature reacts.  Suffering under a tragedy, one can never be sure how individual behavior will be directed, but normally accusation and blame play a part.

     What do we do when tragedy strikes?  What do we do when we discover we have a life-threatening disease or when we are the victim of a crime or when we suffer from an accident or when we watch as suicide pilots fly into buildings or as terrorists blow themselves up on a bus?  Do we lash out with blame?  Do we work, in turn, to harm the guilty?  Do we fight, or do we yield?  How do we as intelligent and civilized human beings properly respond to the ugliness of a tragedy?  There are no easy answers.

     All tragedies tear gaping holes in people’s lives, and the walking wounded frantically search to replace that emptiness.  The quick fix is to blame somebody.

    The Romans said that Nero played his fiddle, and Nero said that the Christians started the fire.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

by William H. Benson

July 4, 2002

     On July 4, 1845 Henry David Thoreau declared his independence and moved into a cabin beside Walden Pond.  Almost 28 years old, for the next two years and two months he lived at Walden Pond to experience his own vision for a better life.

     “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.”

     Others in Concord, Massachusetts considered Thoreau an oddball, an eccentric, lazy, without a sense of responsibility, or any ambition.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the cabin and the land around Walden Pond, thought Thoreau was wasting his talents.  He could not understand why Henry chose to spend so much time outside.  Emerson wrote of Thoreau, “Instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party.” 

     Thoreau refused to marry.  One girl, Sophie Ford, who worked in Emerson’s home, asked Thoreau to marry her, but fearful of any infringement upon his own freedom, he politely said no.

     Thoreau owned nothing and further did not want to own anything.  He borrowed the ax that he took with him to Walden Pond.  Educated at Harvard, he simply never applied his talents by pursing a job, other than as a handyman and gardener for Emerson.

     Living at Walden Pond he divided his time between his vast bean garden and his writing, for it was there that he wrote Walden, in which he argued his own philosophy to simplify life.  He scorned public opinion and refused to accept the common definition of success.  For him liberty and the pursuit of happiness meant no attachments to anyone–male or female, or to anything.  “I thrive best on solitude,” he wrote in his journal.

     He attuned himself to nature.  Ralph Waldo Emerson loved to walk with Thoreau about Walden Pond because Thoreau knew the names of all the birds, animals, trees and flowers that they encountered. 

     And Thoreau considered government absolutely unnecessary.  “That government is best which governs least, . . . or which governs not at all.”  He refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail.  Where Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and Franklin had argued for a political liberty and a public independence, Thoreau insisted upon a personal liberty and a private independence.

     It is a slim minority of Americans who are so constituted that they can live without any ties to a wife or a husband, to a family, a home, a job, a business, a community, or to a government.  The few able-bodied people who accept assistance and charity without a sense of shame we label “bums”, or we see them standing in lines at soup kitchens, or we find them living in a cardboard box under a bridge.  Critics label Thoreau’s ideas as “parasitic” upon society.

     Thoreau’s philosophy if extended to a majority of Americans would result in anarchy, for we in America are everything that he was not.  Our society’s fabric and structure demands ambition and hustle and drive and a desire to own and get ahead of others.  America wants families and home ownership.  His message to simplify our lives by living alone, close to nature, and to strive for a personal liberty falls on deaf ears today.

     And yet, some of the things he wrote still strikes.  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”  “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”  “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I call evil.”  “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

     The Fourth of July for most Americans means independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and for Henry David Thoreau it also meant those same things but in his own way and upon his own terms.

     And so he ends Walden: “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.  Only that day dawns to which we are awake.  There is more day to dawn.  The sun is but a morning star.”

     Have a great Fourth of July!

JAMESTOWN

by William H. Benson

June 20, 2002

     By any definition of the word, Jamestown was an abysmal failure.  Indian attacks, fires, famine, and disease all contributed to an exceedingly high mortality rate that killed off most of the early settlers.  Of the 6000 immigrants that the London-based Virginia Company sent to Jamestown between 1607 and 1625, some 4800 died there.  Jamestown consumed thousands before the first permanent English settlement was firmly established along the Atlantic.

     In December of 1606 three small wooden ships had set sail from England carrying 144 men and boys, including the red-headed John Smith.  By June 15, 1607 the men had constructed a three-sided fort, and on June 21, 1607 the men held their first service in the new church within the fort.  But then the problems began to accumulate.

     The men did not realize that the location was a poor one, primarily in that it lacked good drinking water.  At high tide the James River was salty, and at low tide it was muddy.  And the marshland that surrounded the fort bred mosquitoes that carried malaria.  Then the same foul water that the men drank from readily accepted their waste and sewer.  As a result throughout that first summer the men dropped like flies, such that by September more than half were dead.

     Also, the leaders of the settlement quarrelled and fought about what to do.  Some wanted to copy the Spanish and look for gold and silver.  Others wanted to explore for the Northwest Passage to the East Indies.  Few of them knew how to farm.  Accustomed to an idle life back in England, these gentlemen did not come equipped with farming habits.

     Eventually Captain John Smith ruthlessly took control of the fort, and through shrewd trade negotiations with the Indians, he obtained enough food for the survivors to last that first winter.  He also insisted that the men work in the fields everyday.

     On January 7, 1608 a fire broke out inside the fort and consumed most of the buildings.

    In 1609 after John Smith had left for England, the Indians turned hostile and refused to trade further with the English.  Horrified that they were losing their land and tired of the trinkets and beads, they repeatedly attacked Jamestown, trying to drive the settlers out, and in turn the English brutally burned Indian villages and fields and murdered the Natives.  As a result the English were totally unprepared going into the winter of 1609-1610. 

     Their supplies ran out.  They could not hunt or fish or farm because the Indians would attack them.  Stuck inside the fort, they ate whatever still lived–cats, horses, dogs, and even poisonous snakes. The colonist George Percy wrote that starvation appeared, “in every face.  Of five hundred people we had only left about sixty, the rest being either starved through famine, or cut off by the Indians.”  This was the low point, and the colony’s future hung in the balance.

     By June 1610 the few settlers still alive decided to abandon Jamestown and return to England.  They boarded their ships and floated down the James River, only to meet the incoming ship of the new governor–Lord Delaware, who brought the needed supplies, and he convinced the colonists to turn around and return to Jamestown and give it another try.

     The settlement did finally succeed, mainly because John Rolfe introduced the cultivation of tobacco which was in great demand back in England and brought a high price.

    Tenacity, perseverance, and persistence are words for the same thing–the refusal to quit.  Initial beginnings are difficult.  People everywhere go off to college, take on a new job, start a new business venture, get married, or pick up and move across the country.  The road is often tough and usually lonesome, and yet occasionally that highly-prized human attribute of perseverance will come forward, for they will stick with the venture when the personal and emotional cost is extremely high, they will enjoy some measure of success, and they will endure to the end or die in the process.

     A tradesman explained it this way.  “When I was young, I was too stupid to quit, and now that I am older and doing great, I would be stupid to quit.”

     Jamestown became Virginia, a British Colony, and then a State, and then a part of the United States, and eventually what we have today in 2002.  The payoff for the future generations of those pioneering English colonists was manifold and tremendous.

THE PENTAGON PAPERS

by William H. Benson

June 6, 2002

     What exactly were the Pentagon Papers?

     In 1967 when Lyndon Johnson was President and the fighting in Vietnam raged on fierce and endless, then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered the Pentagon to compile an objective study of the causes of the Vietnam conflict.  Classified as “Top Secret”, it required one and a half years to complete and included 3000 pages, plus 4000 pages of documentation, and a total of 2.5 million words.

     In January of 1969 the Pentagon submitted the finished document to Clark Clifford, the new Secretary of Defense under Nixon, and Clifford, for his own reasons, chose to ignore it.  So it languished in a file at the Pentagon for the next two years.

     If Clifford had thoroughly read it, he would have read a disturbing tale of U. S. involvement in Vietnam, one of duplicity and of nothing short of criminal folly.  Studded with evidence of evasion, pretense, and deceit on the part of the Federal government, the Papers told the truth.

     A couple of months ago LBJ’s tapes of his phone calls while in the Oval Office were published, and they corroborated this assessment.  At the same time that Johnson told the American public that the war was going well, he privately admitted to certain Congressmen that the war was not winnable and that he was caught in a trap–either escalate the conflict or shamefully retreat.

     Daniel Ellsberg, one of the Pentagon Papers’ writers and someone utterly opposed to the war, had access to one of the fifteen copies, and he handed his copy over to two newspapers: the New York Times and the Washington Post.

     Sunday, June 13, 1971 the headlines appeared in the New York Times–“Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement”.  Another story appeared on Monday, the next day.

     Nixon wanted to ignore this leak out of his administration, but Henry Kissinger suggested otherwise.  “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President. . . . It is damaging to your image, and it could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.  If the other powers feel that we can’t control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.”   

     On Monday evening the Attorney General John Mitchell sent a telex to the Times demanding that they discontinue the publication of the Papers.  The Times challenged Mitchell’s request, and the case was thrown into the courts, eventually appearing on the Supreme Court’s docket on Friday, June 25.  On Wednesday, June 30, the Court’s justices voted six to three for the Times‘s right to publish the Papers.

     The next day the next installment arrived at newsstands, but still the war trudged on for another three years before U.S. forces finally extricated themselves.

     Nixon and his cohorts were so outraged by Ellsberg’s “win” and their “loss” that John Erlichman ordered his Plumbers, an anti-leak unit, to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, searching for dirt with which to smear Ellsberg.  Although Nixon was unaware of this covert operation, this break-in was the point at which the Nixon administration overstepped the bounds of legality.  The next step, even bigger and more damaging, was Watergate.

     When the dust settled two years later, instead of an Imperial President, the nation had a triumphant press and an Imperial Congress that together had reversed the people’s democratic vote in 1972 that had re-elected Nixon President by a landslide– almost a surreal outcome.

     June 7 is Freedom of the Press Day, a day to honor those words from the first Amendment:   “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”  The Pentagon Papers were published because journalists have that constitutional freedom and they operate under a principle that “The people have a right to know.”