Misguided: The Meek Cutoff

“I hope that no other emigrants will ever be gulled as we have been,” wrote John Herren in his journal on Monday, September 1, 1845.

He and the other members of his wagon train were headed deep into the hot, waterless expanse of what is now Harney County in eastern Oregon. Guided by a well-known mountain man named Stephen Meek, they had left the established Oregon Trail on an attempted shortcut. It's become infamous as the Meek Cutoff.

As his diary shows, Herren and the others already regretted their decision to follow Meek into the high desert. Their guide proved to be considerably less familiar with the territory than he let on, and the party’s ordeal had just begun.

In The Meek Cutoff: Tracing the Oregon Trail’s Lost Wagon Train of 1845, author Brooks Geer Ragen assembles all the diary entries composed by members of the Meek party. Then, aided by GPS, metal detectors, and other modern technology, he attempts to trace the party’s exact route across Oregon.

Each section of the book is one day of the Meek party’s ordeal, with the diary entries, maps, and large color photographs of modern-day location. The result is a book that is both fascinating and poignant, a detailed day-by-day portrait of the party’s agonizing journey, and of the modern-day researchers’ attempt to follow in their footsteps.

The fate of the Meek party is not as well-known (or as horrific) as the Donner party, but it was bad enough: approximately 25 people died on the trek, many of them women and children, who succumbed to thirst and fever in the desert.

If you’re interested in this chapter of Oregon history, you’ll find Ragen’s The Meek Cutoff to be a well-researched, beautifully-illustrated resource. Check out Terrible Trail: The Meek Cutoff, by Keith Clark and Lowell Tiller, too.

Love and terror in the sky

 Cathy Kerkow was a pretty hippie from Coos Bay. In 1972 she was living and partying in San Diego. There she met and was instantly attracted to Roger Holder, a troubled African-American Vietnam veteran who coped with his racing thoughts and violent memories by smoking copious amounts of dope. The two began a passionate romance.

Holder hatched a plan that embodies the principle of “So crazy it just might work” - he and Kerkow would hijack an airplane, rescue Angela Davis (the political activist then on trial for murder in San Francisco), drop her off in Hanoi, and then he and Kerkow would become homesteaders in Australia. When he asked Kerkow what she thought of the idea, she was thrilled. She asked what she should wear.

The story of Holder and Kerkow’s insane and daring adventure is told in The Skies Belong To Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking, by Brendan I. Koerner.

To say that events did not go according to plan is an understatement; but the Holder/Kerkow hijacking of Western Airlines Flight 701 was far more successful than anyone could possibly have predicted.

Koerner’s book doesn’t just concern itself with the mad exploits of Holder and Kerkow. He also tells of the epidemic of hijacking that took place on American aircraft from 1968 to 1973, when desperate people with guns and bombs hijacked commercial flights nearly once a week. I knew little of this period - my flying years began after improved airport security made hijacking a considerably more difficult business - and I find it extraordinary that hijacking was ever so common and was permitted to persist for so long.

For a breathlessly exciting and scary true read, check out The Skies Belong To Us by Brendan Koerner.

When truth is as exciting as fiction

I love a good narrative nonfiction book - the kind that tells a fascinating historical story, one with all sorts of implications for our lives now.

One such book is Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, by Steve Sheinkin. It tells the genuinely exciting story of the race to build atomic weapons during World War II.

While Robert Oppenheimer and his team were in Los Alamos developing uranium and plutonium bombs, daring commandos were intent on sabotaging the Nazi efforts to do the same. And Soviet spies were trying to steal the secrets from both. They would succeed, leading to the nuclear escalation of the Cold War.

What was Oppenheimer like?  Who were the saboteurs?  Who were the spies, and why did they do it?  This book delves into their lives, motivations, and the way they felt once the Bomb was a reality.

Harry Gold, soviet spy.

Bomb is marketed for children, and is written at the level an intelligent and well-read eleven-year-old can understand. It’s a great introductory read for adults who are interested in this period, too, and it comes with suggestions for further reading, if you’d like to go more in-depth. (It is also illustrated with excellent photographs of the people, places, and devices described in the book, which I loved. More books should have pictures!)

If it sounds like a great story to you, don’t let the fact that this is a kids’ book bother you. Put it on hold today!

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, by Charles Mann

Until the Spanish (or perhaps the Vikings?) brought infectious diseases that decimated the native population, America was home to sophisticated urban centers that stretched from the Mississippi south to the Amazon River. At their peak, the population of some of the larger cities, such as Cahokia, located near present day St. Louis, may have reached upwards of 40,000 people. It wasn't until after the near total depopulation of the Americas that the land became the "uninhabited wilderness" that European colonists found when they landed centuries later. 

With 1491, historian Charles Mann reveals a dynamic culture stopped dead in its tracks. Gone were the irrigation systems and grain storage facilities that fed multitudes. Gone was the complex web of trade routes that supplied Gulf of Mexico salt to northern plains tribes and volcanic glass to the Iroquois. And gone, too, was a people’s ability to fend off the relentless physical and cultural assault that eventually robbed them of all they possessed.

1491 is a fascinating and controversial look at the land and cultures of the New World on the eve of Columbus' "discovery" of the New World.  This book opened my eyes to a millennia of history I never knew, and was never taught, about my own country. And you can reserve it here.

Ozarks mystery

In 1929, a sixteen-year-old girl from the high country of northern Arkansas accused five men of murdering her boyfriend. Her melodic name was Tiller Ruminer, and she’d known the five men all her life: she was related to most of them by blood or marriage. 

The dead man was Connie Franklin, a drifter who’d come passing through six weeks earlier, and who had promised to marry Tiller. Now Connie was gone, five men were in jail, and a flock of newspaper reporters was about to descend upon the Ozark Mountains to cover a crime that turned out to be even more sensational than they realized. 

The story of Connie Franklin and Tiller Ruminer is told in Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South by Brooks Blevins. The most interesting aspect of Ghost of the Ozarks is its portrayal of the region’s culture, like this fascinating passage about the name of an Arkansas town, which was originally named Buckhorn. In 1883, the town changed its name to St. James: 

 ...as a memorial to Jesse James, the patron saint of disgruntled ex-Confederates and the powerless poor whose life of banditry had been cut short less than a year earlier in St. Joseph, Missouri. Local legend has it that James and his gang spent the night at the home of A.W. Canard in Dugan on their journey back to Missouri after holding up a stagecoach in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1874. There is no hard evidence that the James gang ever came through Buckhorn, and Arkansas, like other states in James’s orbit, abounds with “Jesse slept here” lore... Buckhorn residents’ memorializing and simultaneous beatifying of Jesse James reflected not only the community’s overwhelming Confederate sympathies a generation after the war but also the probability that St. Jamesians viewed vigilante terrorism as an acceptable expression of communal will. 

As for the murder of Connie Franklin - well, it’s a problematic story. In the years since 1929, the Ozarks have been transformed by Depression, war, and the march of modernization. The descendents of the people involved were far from willing to talk about the past, even to an Arkansas native like Blevins. 

And many of the documents relating to the case have disappeared, including trial records. Blevins had to rely on newspaper reports for much of his story, and these, he shows, were far from reliable. Newspapers were determined to portray the story as one of violent feuding moonshiners.  Their articles were full of preconceived notions of what mountain folk were like. 

Only one thing emerges clearly: no one in the case seems to have been deeply committed to telling the truth for long. Unusually for a true-crime book, by the end Blevins can’t even say for certain that there was a murder at all.  

Though there might have been. Depending on who you ask.

A true, terrible story

In 1821, off the west coast of Chile, a ship's lookout spotted a drifting whaleboat, rigged with mast and sail - obviously the relic of a shipwreck. The boat was full of human bones, along with two living men, emaciated, incapable of speech, and apparently mad. To their horror, rescuers saw the men greedily clutch at the remains of their mates - the food that had sustained them upon their voyage.

The whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819 and came to grief about as far from land as it is possible to be, in the middle of the Pacific. The ship was destroyed by a large and apparently vengeful sperm whale. Of the twenty men who escaped the wreck of the Essex, only eight survived, scattered across the Pacific - three in one boat, two in another, and three on a deserted island. The survivors suffered extremes of hunger, thirst, exposure, and loneliness; some of them resorted to cannibalism to survive.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick uses this true incident to tell the fascinating story of Nantucket whaling - how the ships plied their trade, seeking sperm whales thousands of miles from home, killing and butchering them at sea. To a modern reader, the details of 19th century whaling are appalling. Just as bad is the arrogant, destructive behavior of the whale crews when they reach such (to us) precious natural wonders as the Galapagos Islands.

But these particular whalers certainly paid for it. Philbrick describes the inconceivable ordeal the men endured after the destruction of their ship. It is not a story of adventure and heroism, like (for instance) Shackleton's voyage in the Endurance. The consequences of the mistakes, ignorance, and weakness of the officers of the Essex are all too plain. Philbrick examines these, and shines light on some of the troubling aspects of the story.

For instance, is it significant that the first four men to be devoured by their crewmates were all African Americans? Why were the three men stranded on the deserted island African Americans? (Were they wiser than their fellows?) The answers are not straightforward; the decisions facing these men were surely among the most agonizing imaginable.

The tale of the Essex was renowned throughout the world and inspired the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In the Heart of the Sea is not a happy tale; but it's a well-paced, intense, and satisfying one.

Planning and banning in the U.S.A.

In 1935, Oregon became the first state to regulate the safety of condoms. Soon other states passed similar laws, and by 1937 the FDA set up federal inspections of prophylactics. Before that, as the CEO of the company that makes Trojans explained, defective condoms were simply marketed under other brand names. "If there is a flagrant hole or a flagrant defect," he admitted, "naturally they are sold too."

I learned that from a fascinating book called Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America by Andrea Tone. The book begins in 1873, when passage of the Comstock Act outlawed a variety of "obscenities," which included vulgar books and pictures, and also contraceptives. The author shows that this and other laws interrupted a voracious American demand for birth control products.

Since for many decades contraceptives were illegal, a thriving black market supplied consumers with remedies that were unregulated, inconsistent, and by our standards highly sketchy. The number one contraceptive of the 1930s and 40s gave, at best, only the illusion of control. At worst, it delivered painful and dangerous chemical burns. And female readers of this book are likely to reflexively clutch their abdomens when they see the photograph of 19th-century IUDs.

Not surprisingly, laws and customs dealing with contraception are very revealing when it comes to attitudes towards sex and gender throughout history. Contraception also opens a window on opinions towards apparently-unrelated matters, like race and class. For instance, companies did not market diaphragms in places like Harlem, on the theory that the method was too complicated for African-Americans to learn.

Though all readers may not share the author's socially progressive outlook, Tone's analysis of these demanded but morally-debated products throughout America's history is interesting, important, and quite timely. Whether you're interested in today's politics of personhood, or just enjoy social history, Devices and Desires by Andrea Tone is a great read.