crinkly old paper file

Spent about an hour this afternoon going through crinkly old paper that was all in a single file. This paper was so brittle that it fell apart when I touched it, and in some cases the print was so small I couldn't really read it.

But I felt that, for my own sake, and because I am writing about Will's life, it was important for me to record at least a little of what I learned.

Will was a (an?) historian, and at one point was made secretary, or president, of the Pottawattamie County Historical Society. He used that position to try to find out a couple of questions that were on his mind. First, were the Pottawattamie ever actually in the county? From what he knew they had lived out in Michigan, had been marched to Kansas, and were now in decline in a kind of reservation down in Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma. When he found this out he became curious. How did this county actually get its name? Did it play a role in the march and movement of the true Potawatomie?

So he wrote to government officials around the country, and one of his questions had to do with the Pottawattamie. Another was whether there was actually an Indian reserve in the county. Reserves (I may have the name wrong) were not reservations but rather places where they stayed on their way from here to there. And I may be wrong about that too. In any case his question was what role the county had played in the massive Indian wars that had proceeded his arrival in the county (in 1863).

It was generally accepted that the place had first really been "settled" by whites when the Mormons were passing through, either with their push-carts or before that, and stopped for a long layover, after which some never left. Thus the Mormon influence in the area was big and there were plenty of people around to talk about it. He had his work cut out for him. What actually was the history of the county like?

I find it interesting because in his own way he was one of the first historians to stumble on the wreckage of the Indian wars and try to make sense of it. He seemed to be serious about history, i.e. not making judgments until after one has the facts, framing it in such a way that he is not making up facts himself, etc. I like his style and his historical bent in his writing. I need to dig more into it.

While I'm here and it's on my mind, I stumbled on something many years ago that I'd like to recover; it was a short passage on the origins of the name "Iowa." I published it on one of these blogs (my main one?my professional one? I really don't know) - and I'd like to get it back.

As a historian myself, I find othing more interesting than crinkly old paper. It falls off my clothes long after I've been working with it.

Boston Transcript, Leverett Pond

I never knew there was a Leverett Pond in Brookline, but there is, and I've located it on a map. It's in the heart of a very urban territory just to the west of the central city, and though lots of roads pass through the area, it's part of a green ribbon of woods and lakes that kind of run all the way through the area.

An old article from the Boston Transcript in the 1890s outlines the history of the area and shows how the Leverett family contributed to its development, or lack thereof. It was part of a series of grants to the heavies of the early Puritan colony: the Leveretts, the Cottons, the Olivers, and a few others. Where did the colony get this land? Not sure. It was all called Muddy River back then and only later became Brookline. Nowadays it may be part of Olmstead Park.

Here I am already over my head in specific west-Boston geography. The article outlines the boundaries of what became the park, but it's clear that what exactly was Thomas', upon his death, and what of other grants got mixed in there, has been middied by history. And then the article references a period of time when the whole thing was tied up in endless lawsuits. Some history books have said that the property deed for Thomas' land somehow fell into the hands of the Gardner family in the late 1600s without ever a document showing that. But I also know that Leveretts came and went from the land, or at least appeared to, all throughout the 1700s, and often were referred to as living in Roxbury, but at other times Brighton. The land is lowland, swampy, heavily wooded, and could in fact straddle both what was Old Roxbury at the time and what was Brighton. It is very possible that there were houses on either end of it, or, that it could have been used by several people at once.

The whole thing leaves me with a number of questions, which I have no idea how I could possibly answer. Thee is probably some record somewhere of the boundaries of this land, but in the position I'm in, I'd have a hard time understanding it. I'm not about to go wading through legal documents to find out what happened or how it happened to fall into the hands it did. It seems to have become a park around then, in the 1890s, and was called Leverett Park for a while, apparently, but only the pond has kept its name. And what about Cotton's land? Who knows - the Cotton family didn't fare that much better than we did at the time, in terms of keeping its family estate safe from the marauding marches of time. It was the first area to get swallowed up by Goston's westward exxpansion and it was only because it was hostile lowland swampy bush that it apparently got left alone for years, regardless of who actually owned it or who was suing whom.

Someday I'll find the banks of Leverett Pond.

Angel of Hadley

An interesting thing was uncovered while I was doing other research. As yuo may know, I use "Leverett" in searches regularly and in this case I was in Newspapers 1890-1899.

The Angel of Hadley story was originally attributed by Hutchinson, a Puritan historian, to the Leverett family.

The story is of an isolated village in western Massachusetts which was unprepared for an attack by tribes in King Philip's War. In the early parts of the war, the tribes had the advantage because they knew a lot about the villges, how to get in, when to attack, etc., and they would attack by surprise.

In the village of Hadley an older, white-bearded man appeared and took charge. In a military way he commanded the men and led them to victory. His appearance was considered remarkable and he was considered to have saved the village.

But the story got wilder, as he was claimed later to be one of the regicides (people involved in the killing of the English King) who had been hiding in the colonies for over ten years. In other words he had been in hiding, in Hadley, when it happened, but he had military skills from previous experiences in England.

This story was disputed strongly by someone, whose name I've now lost but will recover, who appears to have had the last word on it. This guy said, 1) it's not even clear there was a battle of Hadley, 2) if there was, there was no way this guy could have been there, etc. etc.

Well yes it was a legend. It grew over the generations and may have embellished some facts, and the connection between the guy and the regicide might be a little iffy. Who am I to know the truth? In any case, if it was told around the Leverett dinner table, that makes it something to track down just on prinicple. So I lay this out as a goal. Hutchinson, when was the last time you came over for dinner?

Trans-Mississippi Exposition

Will Leverett, by starting his magazine The Trans-Mississippian, latched his wagon onto the Trans-Mississppi Exhibition at Omaha in 1989. His magazine would run through the exhibition and talk about all its features. Through this he became the organ or showcase for a lot of converging stars in the American West at that time.

The Indian Congress was held at the same time and featured people from many of the various tribes. The purpose was to have a cultural exchange and to show the people the lifestyles of the Native Americans, who were popularly called Indians or sometimes Aborigines. The people in general were more interested in being entertained. Ghost Dances were the most popular, even though Wounded Knee, a massacre at a ghost dance, had just happened a few years earlier.

Geronimo, who was a prisoner, was brought in along with the guards who were assigned to watch him. He was a spectacle because he was really the fiercest, most violent, and last symbol of the resistance against US Government takeover of native lands. Now, in 1898, he was beaten, a shadow of his former self, and if you asked him, he'd tell you that he never intended to surrender unconditionally, and if he did, he never should have done it. But it was too late; he was a prisoner, and would never be unwatched from then on.

Another character who came to the Exhibition was Wild Bill Cody, who traveled with a show of his own, that brought the West to people who were unfamiliar with it. He had been very successful in Europe toward the end of the Indian Wars, and, during the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, had held his own independent exhibition near it, when its organizers declined to invite him. Now, in 1898, with his career as an entertainer almost over, he was invited to Omaha in hopes that he would revive it.

I dug up his autobiography and found to my surprise that his account of his life as a performer was only the last chapter of a very long book. He had moved to Kansas as a child and actually spent part of his youth learning the Kickapoo language and talking about what was happening out on the plains. Much later, after having been drawn into a few battles between soldiers and various tribes, it occurred to him to go into entertaining, and give the impressions of the wild west to people who really didn't understand it. He was most successful in Europe; in places like Chicago people already had well-worn impressions of the cowboys and Indians, though they too appreciated a little dramatic gunfight here and there. It was easy enough for him to procure the proper outfits for the people who played the various roles. Some of the Native Americans who went with him on tours to Europe died of pneumonia or some other thing, while they were over there, showing that the touring life was not for everyone. Or maybe it showed that people on tours, in various hotels in random cities, tend to drink too much.

Another major visitor was William McKinley, who had his own agenda; he was pushing internationalism, American involvemnt overseas and what would become the Spanish-American War. I have yet to read up on this. But apparently the West, namely Council Bluffs / Omaha / the Dakotas / Nebraska, was generally hostile to both European involvement and overseas activism; they had to be won over. This would carry into the Great War when they were also generally opposed to US entry into the war. He may have had a tough crowd to persuade, but maybe some of the audience were from the Indian Congress.

Will and his historical bent

I've been researching Will Leverett, my great grandfather, who was in Council Bluffs/Omaha at a very crucial time in its history, and was interested in that history.

He arrived in Council Bluffs in 1893 and began working in his brother-in-law's bank. In his free time he started a magazine, the Trans-Mississippian, which highlighted the exposition that would be held in Omaha in 1989. That name, of both the exposition and of his magazine, reflected a feeling at the time that the new country would spread out to the coast and that Omaha would be the new Chicago: in the center of a bustling commercial empire. Well, a depression happened and it never quite worked out that way, but that was the spirit behind the Trans-Mississippian Exposition of 1893.

As a historian he included history in his magazine, as if showcasing the region included teaching people about its history. Unfortunately its history was grisly and relatively recent. Council Bluffs' counnty, Pottawattamie, was named for a tribe that had been marched out west in the "Trail of Death" as the governnment had removed all native tribes from Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. Many of these tribes were now in "Indian Territory" or what would become Oklahoma. Some lingered in the area but not many. Will did not sugarcoat it but told the history the best he could, as far as I can tell. Soon when Europeans heard about the forced removals they wrote to Will asking how they could contact some of the remaining chiefs. People were around and willing to talk about it. The chiefs for the most part were bitter. The Trail of Tears and the Trail of Death were not pleasant experiences.

The pattern that had been set back in Indiana and Illinois would have continued, but there were no more places to go, and the remaining tribes were now confined in some of the West's less arable lands, a reminder that "Manifest Destiny" and the "Trans-Mississippi" empire had come at a cost. In his lifetime auto cars came around and people were able to drive out there, to placds they'd only seen by train before.

A look at newspapers in the late 1890s is instructive. It could be that he found out more than he was prepared for. The Trans-Mississippian didn't last long, didn't continue past the Exposition, and the idea of Omaha as the center of the new empire kind of died a natural death.

Swaine and Mauer

My genealogical research has hit a snag - the computer I usually use to do it, has lost its ability to type a, i, s, 1, q, and a few other letters. This one types all of those, but doesn't have the password to get in to ancestry or newspapers.com. When I got the password, they didn't accept it. Perhaps because it's open on another computer?

Anyway my interest has moved along to Swaine and Mauer, a hardware shop in Council Bluffs around the turnn of the century (1898-1905?) They sold all kinds of things, like stoves, foot balls, etc.\

Charles Mauer was my great grandfather; his daughter Verna Mauer Leverett my grandmother whom I nevdr met.

His partner seems to be the mover and shaker, who went and joined the retail merchants' association, and who wrote ads trying to draw customers in, which can be seen in Non-Pareils of the era. I don't have any actualy proof of that; perhaps C.F. (Charles Mauer) had more creativity than I give him credit for. But judging from what I've seen, Swaine was the ringleader.

later, around 1915 (?) Charles Mauer would start a cashier-less store, and it would bomb. The questions I'm trying to annswer are: What happened to Swaine & Mauer? Was it a success as a store? Did C.F. have a lucrative career in the hardware business?

SWaine, his partner, had a fairly typical life. From Buffalo, he married a woman named Alice and had one son. Alice was to outlive him by about thirty years (as would Lizzy, C.F.'s wife). Maybe menn just didn't last as long in those days, due to the stress of bringing home money during the depressions.

The store moved at one point, from 340 Broadway to 332 and 336 Broadway. In other words, by moving next door they got two addresses, perhaps more space. Could this have been due to general success? THey were selling these fancy, outsized cook stoves, supposedly capable of cooking "quick meals." For a busy world, you had to have the right stove, I guess. Lots of interesting things in there; I'll keep digging.