Road Trip Through History: A Little Piece of the Great River Road
A while back, My Own True Love and I had to abandon our plans to take a three week drive down the Great River Road, which winds from Minnesota to Louisiana along the Mississippi. This last weekend we treated ourselves to four days and the brief stretch of the river that runs along the edge of Illinois from Nauvoo to Quincy. Instead of roots music, regional food, and lots of historic sites, we had a home-grown musical, a Maid-Rite sandwich, missing (or at least elusive) historical markers, and lots of Mormons.
We spent most of our time at Nauvoo, where the Mormons built a thriving community from 1839 to 1846, after being driven out of Missouri. They spent a number of years in Nauvoo before once again being driven out, this time making the trek across the plains to Utah. Today, Nauvoo is effectively a Mormon pilgrimage site.
There are two different clusters of sites commemorating the Mormon history of Nauvoo, run by two different off-shoots of Joseph Smith's original congregation. The Church of Latter Day Saints offer twenty-some reconstructed buildings and businesses with volunteer docents--the general feel is a small-scale Williamsburg with a Mormon emphasis. The surviving historical sites are in control of the Community of Christ, which broke off from the Latter Day Saints in the early 1850s .* Community of Christ volunteers give walking tours of the sites. We left knowing more about Mormon history than we knew when we arrived--and with several big unanswered questions about the relationship between the Mormons and their neighbors in both Missouri and Illinois.
A small but useful exhibit run by the local Chamber of Commerce puts the Mormon years of Nauvoo in a larger context that included a communal settlement of Icarian socialists,** immigrants who fled the 1848 revolutions in Germany, and an engineering project on the Mississippi led by then Lt. Robert E. Lee.
Some of the high points of the trip included:
• A brief ride in an oxen-drawn wagon, with a very knowledgeable guide. We were surprised to learn that oxen are simply cattle trained as draft animals. Oxen were cheaper and stronger than horses, easier to drive,** and able to feed themselves by grazing on a long trek.
• A living history program about making bricks.
• Driving on a county road along the Mississippi early on a beautiful Sunday morning
• The Villa Katherine in Quincy Illinois: a home built in the Moorish style in 1900 by a man who can most politely be described as an enthusiast.
We've got lots of River Road left to travel.
*One of the sources of disagreement was over who was Joseph Smith's legitimate successor after his murder. The splinter group who became the Community of Christ believed that Smith had anointed his eleven-year-old Joseph Smith III as his successor and were prepared to wait until he had grown old enough to take his rightful place. This reminded me of the Sunni/Shia split over Mohammed's successor. Déjà vu all over again?
**Worth a blog post of their own. Coming soon to a history blog near you.
***As long as they'd been trained to yoke. If you were desperate and hooked an untrained pair of cattle to a yoke, you were asking for trouble.
History On Display: Amazing Grace, the Musical
Earlier this week, My Own True Love and I took a chance on the "pre-Broadway world premier" of a musical by a new composer/playwright based on the historical story of John Newton (1725-1807), the slave trader turned Anglican minister and abolitionist who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace". At a minimum, we knew there would be at least one good song.
Newton's story--complete with love story--would be a gripper even without the personal transformation that inspired the song. He was impressed into the British Navy in 1744. After deserting ship, he was captured, flogged, demoted and eventually traded to a merchantman involved in the Triangular Trade between England, West Africa, and the West Indies. Dogged by bad luck--often brought about by a bad attitude and questionable choices-- he became the prisoner of a powerful and highborn West African woman, worked as her factor in the slave trade, was rescued,* and almost died in a horrific storm at sea.
Amazing Grace, the musical, turns Newton's story into a powerful drama, with themes of love, redemption, and freedom. It does an excellent job of portraying the brutality of the West African slave trade, the lesser brutality of the British Navy in the mid-eighteenth century, and the heroism of those involved in the British abolitionist movement. I suspect that some of the details of Newton's life were tweaked to make a more dramatic story. For instance, nothing I've read suggests that Newton's father headed the mission to rescue his son or that his life-long love Mary Catlett was part of the abolitionist movement.** (The production makes up for slight in accuracies by providing an excellent study guide on line.)
Two aspects of the play bothered me, though both made for good theater. Both Newton and Mary Catlett are attended by loyal family slaves who serve as their owners' consciences, as well as surrogates for parents who are present but inadequate. The African scenes, particularly those involving the evil Princess Peyai, had overtones of old adventure movies like King Solomon's Mine.
All caveats aside, Amazing Grace is worth seeing if it comes your way. If you can stand at the end and sing “Amazing Grace” with the cast tears in your eyes or at least a lump in your throat, you’re a tougher history buff than I am.
* Or perhaps just convinced to come home, depending on which version you read
**And if she was, I want to know more. Anyone?
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Contagion, Quarantine, Fear
Listening to a recent news report on the quarantine and eventual death of Thomas Eric Duncan, who died last week from ebola in Dallas, the aspect of the story that struck me most was how a single individual stands at the center of a circle of contacts—and possible contagion—many of whom never knew the infected individual.
The idea of a single carrier and contagion made me think of Mary Mallon, the first known “healthy carrier” of typhoid. You known her by the nickname Typhoid Mary.
Typhoid Mary was an Irish immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1884 at the age of 15. She had never had typhoid and as far as she or anyone else knew she was healthy. Like many Irish immigrants at the time, she went into domestic service, where she quickly discovered she had talent as a cook—a prized position because it was more highly paid than most domestic work. She moved from job to job—not unusual for a domestic worker at the time. What was unusual was that typhoid outbreaks followed Mallon from job to job.
Mallon was first identified as a possible carrier in 1907. New York banker Charles Henry Warren rented a Long Island summer home for his family and hired Mallon as a cook for the season. In late August, one the Warren daughters came down with typhoid fever. She was the first: eventually six of the eleven people in the house became ill. Mary Mallon was not among them.
Typhoid was known to be spread by contaminated water or food. The owners of the home were afraid that they would not be able to find more tenants unless they identified the source of the contagion. They hired George Soper, a civil engineer with experience in tracing the source of typhoid fever outbreaks. As part of his investigations, he traced Mallon’s employment history and found that between 1900 and 1907, she had worked at seven jobs at which 22 people came down with typhoid.
Soper didn’t think this was a coincidence, but he needed stool and blood samples from Mallon to prove she was the carrier.
Mallon was once again working as a cook in a private residence. When Soper approached her, she threatened him with a carving fork. After a second attempt, Soper turned his data over to the New York City Health Department. Mallon again refused to cooperate, and responded with violence, profanity and the carving fork that appears to have been her weapon of choice. It took the Health Department doctor and five police officers to capture Mallon* and take her by ambulance to a hospital, where specimens were taken and examined.** Having confirmed that Mallon carried typhoid bacilli, the health department transferred her to an isolated cottage on North Brother Island, where they tested her stool samples regularly for typhoid.
Mallon was held against her will and without a trial. She had broken no laws, and did not understand how she could be a carrier of a disease for which she showed no symptoms. She sued the health department, with no effect. The judge agreed that she should be confined for the public good.
In 1910, a new health commissioner decided Mallon could go free as long as she never worked as a cook again. Not surprisingly, she agreed to the conditions if that’s what it took to gain her freedom.
Five years later, typhoid fever broke out in the Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan. Twenty-five people became ill; two of them died. Evidence pointed to a recently hired cook as the source of the infection: Mallon working under the assumed name of Mrs. Brown. She was sent back to her isolated cottage, where she remained imprisoned for 23 years.
Mallon was not the only healthy carrier identified in New York in this period. She wasn’t the only healthy carrier to ignore health department restrictions after learning she was contagious. She wasn’t even the most deadly. But she was the only one isolated for life. And the only one to become a synonym for contagion.
*According to Dr. S. Josephine Baker, “I literally sat on her all the way to the hospital; it was like being in a cage with an angry lion.”
**None of the accounts describe how you get a stool sample from an unwilling subject. The mind boggles.