Dr. Neal Trubowitz, survey archeologist with the Arkansas Archeological Survey, has written us to correct an error we inadvertently made in our June/July 1981 issue:
“‘The Healing Art’ provided an interesting perspective on the practice of medicine in America, but it contained at least one error that slipped past art historian William H. Gerdts and your editors.
“The caption under the portrait of Dr. John Clark says that he performed the first successful trepanning in America; he may have been the first European to have done so in America, but Native American healers had practiced trephination long before Columbus set foot in the Western Hemisphere. Trepanning was frequently practiced by the Aztecs and the ancient Peruvians, who were masters of the craft and often performed it more than once on a single patient, and I know that it was at least practiced in North America in Arkansas (see Dellinger & Wakefield, ' Possible Reasons for Trephining the Skull in the Past,’ Ciba Symposia, 1[16]: 166-169, 1939).
“Skulls from pre-Columbian archeological sites in the Americas show that the operations were often successful (the patient lived) as there is evidence of the bone healing around the removed section of skull. Sometimes precious metal or shell replacements were used to cover the exposed brain. These operations were almost certainly made exclusively with chipped stone tools and they required a great deal of effort and skill on a live patient.
“Too often those of us of European descent forget the accomplishments of the native peoples who lived here for thousands of years before Europe was aware of this land.”
SOLUTIONS
Twenty-two loyal, smart, perceptive, patient, and diligent readers submitted answers in our pick - the matching - TR - picture contest. This small historical challenge started with an astonishing Roosevelt montage we used to illustrate a story in our June/July issue. We hadn’t been able to find out much about the picture and were enlightened (as we always hope we will be when we can’t find an answer) by a reader—John Waldsmith, who owns one of the originals of this print. Mr. Waldsmith’s explanation appeared in the “Postscripts” section of our October/November issue, and we offered a free year’s subscription to the first reader sharp-eyed enough to spot the one repeat among the five hundred images of Roosevelt that make up the montage.
Two readers came up with the right answer. The first to do so—our winner—is Elizabeth E. Greene of Silver Spring, Maryland. She was not thrown off by the fact that the matching pictures were tipped at deceptively different angles, but she reports that “after staring intently at several hundred photos of TR for an hour, I find myself now haunted day and night by faces of Roosevelt in every expostulatory grimace imaginable. Hopefully it will pass.” We hope it has by now, and we are happy to extend Mrs. Greene’s subscription for a year.
Again calling on the amazing attentiveness of our readers, we published a picture that we titled “Drag Bunt” in our August/September “Readers’ Album.” The picture showed a baseball game in which the players were all dressed in late nineteenth-century women’s clothing, though at least some of them—those adorned with mustaches, for instance—were clearly men. Why they had padded and togged themselves out in skirts and fancy bonnets would be hard to reconstruct, we felt, but we hoped that some vigilant readers might recognize the setting and be able to tell us where the ball game was played.
And indeed they did. Several readers identified the mountain in the background as Whiteface Mountain, with Lake Placid Lake, in Lake Placid, New York, at its base. We were then able to confirm this identification with the town historian, Mrs. Mary MacKenzie, who recognized the setting exactly, named the buildings, and dated the picture in the 1890's. One reader even had a pretty convincing suggestion for why the men were gotten up as they were, too: they were giving themselves a handicap, she speculated, to make the contest more even. And undoubtedly, stuffing themselves into women’s clothing was a cause for much merriment.
OLD RING
In the portfolio of Civil War photographs that ran in our June/July 1981 issue, we identified Colonel Joseph Plympton, on page 50, as a Northerner—which was true enough. What wasn’t true was the implication that he’d served in the Civil War. Colonel Jack Rudolph, who wrote the article on Yorktown which we ran in the October/November issue and who knows his military history, tells us that Colonel Plympton “didn’t have anything to do with the Civil War, having died in June, 1860.”
A regular who joined the army in 1812, Plympton served in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. He was apparently pretty tough: “His nickname,” says Colonel Rudolph, “was ‘Old Ring/ derived from a cute little punishment he used: a soldier awarded garrison punishment had to chop wood with an axe that had a sliding metal ring on the handle. Every time he swung it, the ring slid down and whacked him on the hands. Since he was chained to the axe handle, he couldn’t drop it.
“But although he didn’t live to see the Civil War, Plympton may have had a hand in starting it. As a captain in the 5th Infantry during the autumn of 1837, he took command of Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Shortly after his arrival he was attracted to the parade ground one afternoon by a sudden uproar. There he found a badly frightened post supply officer—a little guy—fleeing for his life with the post surgeon in hot pursuit and waving a brace of horse pistols and roaring at his prospective target to stand and take it like a man.
“Plympton halted the chase and, as the quartermaster cowered behind him, demanded an explanation. A few minutes earlier the surgeon had come upon the supply officer delivering sheetmetal stoves to the officers’ quarters and requested an extra one for his black man servant. The stock QM reply (none available for extra issue) being the answer, one word led to another until the doctor called the other a liar. Despite the disparity in size—the medic was a big, tall man—the QM punched him in the snoot. Returning to his quarters, the infuriated surgeon grabbed his pistols and went hunting for the now thoroughly scared supply officer.
“The affair blew over after much excited talk of a duel and the departure of the surgeon to St. Louis. He was Dr. John Emerson, and the servant over whom the fight started was his slave, Dred Scott. The latter’s plea in the celebrated case twenty years later was based on his stay at Snelling while Emerson served there with the 5th Infantry.”
THE ULTIMATE COMPROMISE
The story of the singularly inept ghouls who attempted to snatch Lincoln’s body (page 76) is a bizarre one, but he was not the only celebrated nineteenth-century American to have his rest disturbed. This other tale was passed along to us by Professor MeI Griffiths of Ouray, Colorado: “The Ute Indian Cemetery on the eastern outskirts of Ignacio, Colorado, contains, close to its center, two whitewashed, cobblestone pyramids, one of which marks the graveyard’s most illustrious occupant: Chief Ouray.
“Ouray was probably born about 1833 near Taos, New Mexico. He spent eighteen years as a sheepherder on Mexican ranches in the Rio Grande valley, and because he spoke Ute, Spanish, and passable English, the U.S. government designated him the spokesman for all seven mutually suspicious Ute bands during the 1868 Ute treaty negotiations. He remained the paramount Ute chief for the rest of his life, devoted always to steering a middle course between the inexorable growth of white power and the legitimate claims of his own people. He took a major hand in negotiating the Ute treaties of 1863, 1868, and 1880. With the help of his wife, Chipeta, he induced the renegade Northern Utes who had precipitated the Meeker massacre in 1879 to give up their women hostages; he then refused to turn over the twelve ringleaders to local or state courts because he knew they could not receive a fair trial.
“Ouray died near Ignacio in 1880. To capture the honor of burying him themselves, one band of Utes snatched his remains, wrapped them in a blanket, and secreted them under a large boulder on a butte south of Ignacio. In August of 1924 the body of his wife, who had been exiled with her fellow tribesmen to a reservation in Utah by the Treaty of 1880, was brought back for burial at Ouray’s old homestead near Montrose, Colorado. Montrose leaders importuned the Ignacio Utes to disclose the whereabouts of Ouray’s bones so that they could be buried beside those of his wife. The Indians would not hear of it, and after almost a year of wrangling, the Southern Utes disinterred Ouray’s remains and reburied them in the Ute Cemetery at Ignacio, on May 24, 1925—a sort of quid pro quo for Chipeta’s burial at Montrose.
“A curious misunderstanding arose during the preparations for Ouray’s reburial. Catholic and Protestant factions each wished to have the chief buried in their half of the cemetery. Unable to resolve their differences, they finally removed a section of the fence that divided the cemetery and placed the grave astride the center line. The fence posts still remain as a curious ecumenical monument.
“Even in death, Ouray was subjected to compromise.”
