On September 5 the first of many thousands of Texas longhorns were packed into twenty waiting cattle cars of the Kansas Pacific Railway and left Abilene, Kansas, for Eastern slaughterhouses. The event marked the birth of the era of great cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail and the culmination of Joseph McCoy’s work. He had first bought the 480-acre town for twenty-four hundred dollars, then made a deal with the railway company and persuaded ranchers to drive their herds to his Northern shipping point. He built holding pens near the depot and a hotel where the cowboys could flop at the end of their long drives.
The earlier railheads had been in Missouri and New Orleans, impractically far from much of rural Texas with dangerous territory in between. Moreover, a growing number of Missouri counties were prohibiting longhorns for fear of Texas cattle fever. McCoy’s depot site lay safely to the west of these settlements when it opened. After Abilene, cattle towns would continue to move west with the railheads, out of the way of encroaching settlements.
McCoy, a transplanted cattleman from Abraham Lincoln’s Sangamon County, Illinois, had been inspired by tales of stranded Texas herds, withering far from market. A reliable trail and gathering point would coax more ranchers to send their longhorns North. Thirty-five thousand cattle did, in fact, come through Abilene in McCoy’s first year. The route followed by most of the drovers came to be known for an Indian trader whose wagon ruts had worn it over the years—Jesse Chisholm. By 1871 seven hundred thousand cattle had followed the Chisholm Trail to be packed off at Abilene and slaughtered in Kansas City and Chicago. New depots at Wichita and Dodge City, and competition from the Santa Fe Railroad, eventually led to Abilene’s losing its pre-eminence among the early cow towns.
1892One Hundred Years Ago
Fighting’s Kinder, Gentler Era
With twenty-five thousand dollars and the heavyweight championship at stake, John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett met for twenty-one rounds at the Olympic Club in New Orleans on September 7. The New Orleans police had agreed to sanction the bout only if the contestants observed the Marquis of Queensberry Rules and wore big, civilizing gloves, making it the first title fight of boxing’s gloved era. Each round was to last three minutes under the adopted system, instead of ending whenever a fighter was thrown down, and grappling, made more difficult by the gloves, was outlawed. Boxing had always been notorious and popular; now it could be legal too.
Sullivan had made his early reputation as a road fighter by shouting “I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the house!” as a salutation when entering saloons. But since claiming the title, he had done nothing more strenuous than drink and tour in his own stage show for several years, offering to defend his belt against anyone who could raise a prohibitive ten thousand dollars. Corbett found the money among some local sportsmen and forced a match. He was a smoothie by boxing standards, a departure from the bareknuckle challengers Sullivan had grappled with in earlier illegal bouts staged on barges or in fields. Though the crowd at the Olympic Club booed him for his elusive tactics, Corbett successfully infuriated and tired Sullivan over twenty-one rounds. The gloves, though satisfying the police, served mainly to protect the fighters’ hands; Sullivan’s nose was broken early on.
At the end, when the fat, old champion had been helped to his stool by his sinewy challenger, who had just dropped him to the floor, the Great John L. was the first to observe that an era had passed. Only three years earlier he had fought “seventy-five red rounds with Jake Kilrain,” according to the poet Vachel Lindsay, in the last championship bare-knuckle encounter. “Gentlemen,” Sullivan announced wearily to his fans, “it’s the old story. I fought once too often. But I’m glad it was an American who beat me and that the championship stays in this country.”
The Deadly Center
The thriving railway traffic of Chicago had grown so thick and constant that many in the city were worried for the safety of visitors to the coming year’s Columbian Exposition. A Harper’s Weekly reporter visiting the town in September observed that “the slaughter and mangling and maiming of the citizens by the railroads go on, and is unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The people of Chicago may be said to know that each rising of the sun ushers in a day in which a human life will be taken by some train of cars, so nearly do the murders in each year approach the sum of one a day. And that is saying nothing of the daily mangling.” The hopes of the city lay in moving the depots back from the center and connecting them with a circular railroad—”an elevated road, most persons predict.”
1917Seventy-five Years Ago
Politics of Lard
The women’s magazines, customarily a mixture of romance stories and homemaking advice, had been almost entirely devoted to the war effort since spring, and the September issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal was a grim case in point. In a section called “Questions That Women Ask Mr. Hoover” (then head of Food Administration), readers were advised to eat more potatoes and to put a temporary end to their four-o’clock teas for the sake of the boys they were sending abroad. H. G. Wells’s thoughts on “The God of This New Age” replaced the past discussion of French hats, and cooking tips now took on a greater urgency in morality tales such as “How Mrs. Black Sent Lard Up.” She did it (sent the price up, that is) by throwing away the fat from her roast rather than using it for her biscuits later. Readers also learned that by eating young pig they cheated the market out of the tens of pounds of bacon, ham, lard, and skin (good for leather substitute and saddles) that a fat, grown pig would have yielded, “which your country needs.” And the Journal’s editors converted the nation’s awesome war loan of seven billion dollars into something graspable—$6.94 per minute over the 1,007,575,200 minutes since the birth of Christ.
War or no war, for those in the market for an elegant automobile, WillysOverland’s new thirty-five-horsepower Overland model “Eighty-five four” ran for $895. And the price of Caruso in your living room, a state-of-the-art Victrola XVH, was $250; cheaper Victrola models started at $10.
1942Fifty Years Ago
Miss America Goes to War
When the last wartime Miss America was crowned in September, Miss Chicago took the loss particularly hard and wept without restraint on the Atlantic City stage. No one knew, of course, how long the war might last, and the winner, Miss Texas, or JoCarroll Dennison, began an indefinite reign. Her clinching song in the musical portion of the competition, “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” brought mighty cheers from servicemen in the audience. In addition to noting Dennison’s anatomical statistics, Life magazine reported that she could rope, ride, take dictation, and had vowed not to marry until the fighting was over.
Japan released the first pictures of American prisoners of war in several government-propaganda magazines. One publication, Freedom, showed captured Americans enjoying camp meals of “juicy meat” and others gathered in a drab circle around a radio. “Music and merriment reigns in Shanghai concentration camps,” the magazine explained.
1967Twenty-five Years Ago
Why Were We in Vietnam?
On September 10 Putnam released Norman Mailer’s savage hunting parable, Why Are We in Vietnam? The book follows the story of a man and his son from Dallas—"Tex” and “DJ."—who go after Alaskan grizzlies, bragging and killing and swearing their way across the wilderness. This twisted tale was Mailer’s answer to the question posed by his title, and his implied psychological portrait of Lyndon Johnson’s White House as an imperial hunting party provoked many of the same harsh feelings as the war his book was lampooning: some reviewers panned it for the grotesque the author had made of the American attitude; others agreed with Mailer’s sentiment but found the analogy between the hunters’ mission and the U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia strained and overlong. For his puzzled colleagues who claimed to see no relation between the book’s essayistic title and the swearing bear-shoot inside, Newsday’s Mike McGrady explained, “It’s about violence and brutality, fear and power, thwarted and misdirected sexuality, the Texas way of thinking.”
After an initial splash the novel stalled at bookstores. “A number of my readers would think Why Are We in Vietnam? was my best book,” Mailer claimed years later. “I thought I had never written a funnier one.”
By summer an undeclared presidential candidate who had made his name in business was making the Texan President uneasy with his rising strength in the polls. George Romney, the former American Motors Corporation executive and governor of Michigan recently made famous by his strong-handed performance during Detroit’s riots, was the current favorite for the Republicans, ahead of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and others.
But then, on September 4, he gave a fateful interview. Explaining his sudden change of heart about the war in Vietnam, Romney claimed that during his 1965 visit to Southeast Asia, military personnel had given him “the greatest brainwashing that anyone can get.” Despite the growing unpopularity of the war, Romney’s comments caused his standing in the polls to drop sharply, as one commentator after another asked how a man so easily taken in by military aides would survive as President. Romney’s best response was to make a tour of inner-city battle scenes for several weeks, exploring the aftermath of recent violence around the country. By the end of September, Romney’s popularity had edged back up. A world tour in December failed to secure his stature among Republican candidates, though, and by January 1968 he trailed Nixon, Rockefeller, and California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, and quit the race two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, not sure exactly what had beaten him.
