Western pioneers, by and large, were not a wordy lot. Nor were they much given to complaint. But the following letter surely sets some sort of record for taciturnity in the face of hardship. It was written from Fort Worth, Texas, in 1878 by James Fitzwilliam, an ex-Confederate who had headed west after the Civil War, to a sister back East from whom he had just heard after a period of years. Her half of the exchange is lost, but she evidently had suffered a severe reversal of some kind and had written to see whether he might send her some money to tide her over.
His letter begins with an expression of sympathy for her “altered circumstances” and a promise to help out just as soon as he can. He, too, had had some reverses, however: he had a new job “sampling cotton,” but pneumonia laid him low for a time, and he ran up some eighty dollars worth of bills with his landlady and the local doctor. And then he had some other bad luck: “My Wife and little girl was kill’d by the Indians. House and everything in it burn’d. They took 27 head of horses. I was out after cattle. When I came home everything was gone. I with 9 others took their trail and followed for 8 days. Came on the band numbering about twenty-five. We kill’d 7 and we lost one man kill’d. I was shot in the arm with an arrow and the first-finger of my left hand was shot off. I came back to my ranch and sold out what cattle I had and what horses I had for $700 and went to New Mexico. Bought 1500 head of sheep. Drove them to Texas and the first Winter lost about 900 of them caused by Snow—cold Weather and Wolfs. Sold the remainder out for less than cost as I did not have Snow Sheds. I then went to work running cattle and worked a year. Made $300 dollars. I then went hunting Buffalo. Hunted them for three years. Quit that with about $900. Went to Henrietta Clay Co. this state and bought an interest in a Hotel. Run it about 8½ month and lost money at it. While hunting I contracted a catarrh in my nose. It has disfigured me considerable. In fact for the past five years I have had a terrible hard time.”
A month later, Fitzwilliam wrote to his sister again, according to his greatgrandnephew, James L. Cunningham of Des Pères, Missouri, who sent us the letter, and he enclosed the battered tintype above, displaying his maimed hand—all that he had left to remind him of his life on the frontier.
AND STRAUSS, CREATED HE THEM
Carin C. Quinn’s “The Jeaning of America—and the World” in our April/May, 1978, issue brought forth some interesting sidelights. The first came from Arthur H. Hahn of Washington, B.C., who tells us that he was particularly diverted by the Levi Strauss advertisement showing Michelangelo’s David clad in a pair of cutoff blue jeans. “It strikes me,” Mr. Hahn says, “that there must be a sort of affinity of Levis for Michelangelo. Remember the great Sistine Chapel ceiling, with God’s finger stretched to that of Adam? Well, some time ago, during a trip to Denmark, my wife and I saw a large billboard. Its central theme was the foregoing—except that the fingers were supporting the familiar blue denims!” The Sistine Chapel diversion was, like the David statue, one of a series of somewhat irreverent advertisements launched by Levi Strauss & Co. in Europe. Art lovers were not amused, however, and the series was discontinued.
A more recent advertising gimmick for the venerable pants may have better luck. It is a genuine hot-air balloon (opposite) lovingly shaped into an immense pair of blue jeans. Waist: 1160 inches; inseam: 1198 inches; patch: 108 inches by 84 inches; capacity: 65,000 cubic feet. Manufactured by Cameron Balloons Limited of Bristol, England, the balloon reportedly is floating around somewhere in the Netherlands.
Finally, we received a report from Robert White, who insists that he is the corresponding secretary for the Poor Boy Syndrome Therapy Group #1 of Billings, Montana. “Despite our general approval of Miss Quinn’s story,” he writes, “we regret to report that we have a Committee on Nit-Picking. … Miss Quinn states in her second paragraph that Levi Strauss invented blue jeans. Not so, our Committee contends. What Levi invented were Levis. … There were blue jeans around before Levi came along, and as evidence we cite … ‘Blue Jeans’ Williams,” who, Mr. White goes on to remind us, was governor of Indiana from 1877 until his death in office in 1880. Like many another politician of his era, Williams capitalized on his rural background and as his personal symbol chose the homespun clothing of his boyhood—Kentucky blue jeans, not only as pants but sometimes as complete suits, including one lined with silk and given to the governor by “ladies of Louisville, Kentucky.”
The Poor Boy committee is quite correct about the antiquity of the term “blue jeans,” of course. However, our Committee on Nit-Picking the NitPickers hastens to point out that since the governor’s blue jeans were made from wool, not the tough cotton denim that was one of the distinctive characteristics of Levi’s pants, it seems to us that the ghost of Levi Strauss can rest in peace.
“GIMME AN H! GIMME AN O! GIMMEANL!…”
For more than fifty years, the “largest sign in the world”—a city block long and four stories high—perched on the side of a hill on the edge of Griffith Park, Los Angeles, cruelly treated by time and weather. HULLYWOD, its broken letters read most recently; not too many years ago, they read HOLLYWOOD, and before that, when it was erected to celebrate the site of a fancy subdivision in the 1920’s, HOLLYWOODLAND.
By whatever name, and however decrepit, the sign was a symbol—one of the few surviving relics of Hollywood’s golden era, when the great studios were run like private fiefdoms by what author Ben Hecht called “undersized magnates,” when stars were discovered sitting at drugstore counters (or sometimes on bar stools), when moviemaking was still “fairy-land on a production line,” as screenwriter Otis Fergusson described it.
But that Hollywood is dead, done in by television, corporate mergers and conglomerate takeovers, and the disintegration of the studio system that made the whole glamorous machine work. And the sign that symbolized it became a bit of history. To mark it as such, the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board in 1973 officially classified it Historic Cultural Monument No. 111.Unfortunately, monument status was little protection from wind and rain, which eventually reduced most of the letters of the sign to tatters. Having been declared a historic monument, it was now declared a dangerous public nuisance; it would have to come down, the authorities said. A fluttery movement to save and reconstruct the sign foundered on the $250,000 necessary to do the job. Then, this year, the cavalry, led by rock star Alice Cooper, came thundering to the rescue. He wanted to donate $27,000 to rebuild an O. Hugh Hefner promptly decided he wanted to fix the Y, Andy Williams the W, Gene Autry an L, Warner Bros. Records another O, and so on. Next month, a spanking new fixed-up sign will be unveiled. History lives in Hollywood.
THE SWEET SMELL OF HISTORY
Philip Myers, whose memories of the Gettysburg reunion of 1913 con- tributed greatly to Bruce Catton’s “The Day the Civil War Ended” in the June/July, 1978, issue, has sent along an addendum to the story: “There was a Confederate veteran shoemaker in Westminster, Maryland, where I attended college. He had been to the reunion, so we had much in common, despite the disparity of our ages.
” ‘You saw [the re-creation of] Pickett’s charge,’ he told me one day. ‘You saw the Stars and Bars waving. You heard the Rebel Yell. But you can’t claim to be a Yankee veteran if you have never smelled Confederate powder. I’ll fix that.’
“In his tiny shop that winter day in 1914 a small egg stove glowed redly. He opened a chest, pulled out an envelope from which he shook some black flakes into his open hand. He drew me closer to the stove, held me tightly, and commanded: ‘Smell!’ A small cloud of white smoke filled the air as the gunpowder fell on the hot metal. I sniffed deeply.”
THE 864-MEDAL MISUNDERSTANDING
In a “Postscripts” feature on Dr. Mary Edwards Walker and her Congres- sional Medal of Honor in the December, 1977, issue, we repeated the familiar story that 864 members of the 27th Maine Regiment had received medals during the Civil War “through some clerk’s error,” and because of that the medals were rescinded in 1917 by an Adverse Action Medal of Honor Board. Not exactly, a number of readers have pointed out. The men of the 27th Maine had been promised the medals by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, with the approval of President Lincoln, in exchange for re-enlisting to bolster the defenses of Washington, D.C., during the week preceding the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Upon reflection, the 1917 board decided the re-enlistment did not qualify as action “above and beyond the call of duty,” and forthwith stripped the down-Easters of the nation’s highest military honor.
