Post by cefil on Dec 28, 2008 10:55:34 GMT -6
Nineteenth century America was a small world, and I am always intrigued to learn how closely connected seemingly disparate events actually were...the connections coming through the people who were directly or indirectly involved.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was reading Paul Beck's excellent new biography of Inkpaduta, and learned that Lewis Armistead, of Gettyburg/Pickett's Charge fame, once arrested Inkpaduta in the wake of the kidnappings of some white settlers when Armistead was a young Lieutenant at Fort Dodge. I never would have put those two together in the same story.
Yesterday I had another such "Aha!" moment. I was reading the story of Thomas Egan, the first man to be convicted (wrongly, as it happens) of the 1880 murder of his wife and executed by the Territorial government of Dakota. Egan's execution was particularly memorable. The first time he was dropped, the rope broke and he fell, strangling and gurgling, to the ground. He was hauled back onto the gallows and while being fitted with a new rope, the trapdoor was inadvertently released and once again he fell seven feet to the ground. For a third time he was hauled up onto the platform, and this time they were successful in getting the new rope around his neck before they dropped him to his death. (Forty five years later, on her deathbed, his stepdaughter -- the victim's daughter -- confessed.)
Here's where I encountered one of those unexpected connections...including a connection to Custerland. The judge who presided at Egan's trial was Jefferson P. Kidder, no stranger himself to frontier tragedy. Thirteen years earlier, he had led the frantic efforts to retrieve the body of his son, Lyman, the Lieutenant who died, along with his whole squad of men, while delivering a dispatch to Custer.
And here's a bonus connection: the man who led Judge Kidder to the site of his son's death on the Kansas plains was Lieut. Frederick Beecher, whose own father would face a similar task one short year later.
Nineteenth century America...and the frontier, in particular...really was a small world.
cefil
A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was reading Paul Beck's excellent new biography of Inkpaduta, and learned that Lewis Armistead, of Gettyburg/Pickett's Charge fame, once arrested Inkpaduta in the wake of the kidnappings of some white settlers when Armistead was a young Lieutenant at Fort Dodge. I never would have put those two together in the same story.
Yesterday I had another such "Aha!" moment. I was reading the story of Thomas Egan, the first man to be convicted (wrongly, as it happens) of the 1880 murder of his wife and executed by the Territorial government of Dakota. Egan's execution was particularly memorable. The first time he was dropped, the rope broke and he fell, strangling and gurgling, to the ground. He was hauled back onto the gallows and while being fitted with a new rope, the trapdoor was inadvertently released and once again he fell seven feet to the ground. For a third time he was hauled up onto the platform, and this time they were successful in getting the new rope around his neck before they dropped him to his death. (Forty five years later, on her deathbed, his stepdaughter -- the victim's daughter -- confessed.)
Here's where I encountered one of those unexpected connections...including a connection to Custerland. The judge who presided at Egan's trial was Jefferson P. Kidder, no stranger himself to frontier tragedy. Thirteen years earlier, he had led the frantic efforts to retrieve the body of his son, Lyman, the Lieutenant who died, along with his whole squad of men, while delivering a dispatch to Custer.
And here's a bonus connection: the man who led Judge Kidder to the site of his son's death on the Kansas plains was Lieut. Frederick Beecher, whose own father would face a similar task one short year later.
Nineteenth century America...and the frontier, in particular...really was a small world.
cefil
