At times American history—and especially American Indian history—takes a dive down the rabbit hole with its twists and contradictions. The 1842 Cherokee Slave Revolt is one of those rabbit holes. The idea the Cherokee, or any tribe, owned slaves is not that alien a concept. For centuries before the arrival of Europeans on the continent American Indians had been enslaving captive enemies, and many tribes continued this practice well into the 1800s, much to the dismay of a paternal U.S. federal government. Each tribe had differing ideas on how to treat captives. Some regarded them, particularly young ones, as extended family members; others considered them disposable property. On an 1880 trip to Alaska with naturalist John Muir, Protestant Missionary S. Hall Young met one Huna Tlingit subchief who confessed to having ritually sacrificed two of his slaves, a husband and wife, in a bid to halt an advancing glacier.

But the slaves at the center of the 1842 revolt were black men, women and children working Cherokee plantations and farms in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The breakout came less than four years after the last group of Cherokees had walked the Trail of Tears from their traditional homeland in Georgia to hinterlands of the southern Great Plains. President Andrew Jackson had ordered the forced march of some 16,500 Cherokees, a quarter or more of whom died en route (estimates range upward from 4,000 to as many as 8,000 fatalities). To transport such a vast number of people federal troops used 645 wagons, 5,000 horses and oxen, and a steamboat. The cost of the Cherokee removal came to $1,263,338 and 38 cents, which the government unabashedly deducted from the $4.5 million in federal funds promised to the tribe as reimbursement for its seized homelands.

Yet, in the midst of this human tragedy, another human tragedy was taking place. The Cherokees, for all their personal suffering, dragged along with them nearly 1,600 black slaves—the mobile human property that had been working their plantations and farms. En route to Indian Territory these slaves hunted game, gathered firewood and performed other chores, in many ways softening the blow of the trek for their Indian masters. Yet neither the Cherokee Nation nor the U.S. government recorded how many of the slaves perished en route.

Cherokee Plantations

The seeds by which the Cherokees would imitate their white neighbors had been laid years earlier in the wake of continuous warfare between them and first the British and then American forces. The wars left Cherokee towns in ruin and disarray, while a primary source of meat for the tribe, the whitetail deer population, crashed due to overhunting. 

George Washington had evinced sympathy for American Indians since his youth as a surveyor on the Virginia frontier. As newly elected president of a nascent nation, he sought to work the concepts of tribal sovereignty and Indian assimilation into his economic plans. As tribal chiefs noted, Washington was a hard bargainer who seemed to covet their land, but not all of it. He also had a reputation among the chiefs as a fair man, and a generation of tribal males grew up with a “George” or “George Washington” in their names in honor of the man.

Washington took direct action to aid the Cherokees. His administration assisted in the rebuilding of their towns and sent agricultural agents to show the Cherokees how to successfully manage domestic animals and a variety of cash crops. 

What changed the dynamics of the Southern economy was Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop to process. But Whitney’s invention eased the labor costs of cotton production. American growers duly increased their crop yield to satisfy European demands for cotton, and the resulting industry boom in the South lasted well beyond the Civil War.

Like fellow Southerners, Cherokee growers went for the money crop in a big way. They increased their tillage, then bought additional black slaves to satisfy the corresponding demand for labor. Soaring profits in turn led more than 200 Cherokees to start their own plantations. 

With the influx of black slaves into their culture, the Cherokees in 1819 passed strict codes to forbid intermarriage with slaves, regulate the buying and selling of slaves, set punishments for runaways and prohibit slaves from owning property. Another period Cherokee law called for a fine of $15 against any master who allowed a slave to buy or sell alcohol.

There were differences between the Cherokee plantations and those of Southern whites. Cherokee plantations had fewer slaves for their size, and the Cherokees themselves worked alongside their slaves in the fields. Their slaves were also permitted to grow food for their own consumption.

Cotton and tobacco were less than ideal crops, as they drained farmland of nutrients. That sparked an increasing demand for virgin land, in turn leading to the rapid settlement of what became Alabama and Mississippi. Before long Southern whites were eyeing the large tracts of uncultivated Cherokee lands immediately to their west. That the Cherokees also had black slaves infuriated whites trying to start their own plantations and farms. After all, slaves were a status symbol denoting economic success.

Starting with Thomas Jefferson, presidents looked for ways to reinterpret Washington’s concept of tribal sovereignty. In 1802 President Jefferson signed a compact with Georgia, paying the state $1.25 million for its western two-thirds (present-day Alabama and Mississippi) and committing the U.S. government to obtain title through purchase to all Indian lands within Georgia itself. No longer would federal power be the shield for tribes it had been. Jefferson then created government trading posts on Indian lands, extending unlimited credit to tribal leaders. Eventually the federal government demanded repayment of such debts in the form of more tribal land. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson viewed the newly acquired region as a place Eastern tribes might be relocated. James Madison continued that policy. James Monroe initially sought to revert to Washington’s vision of relations between whites and Indian societies, though by his last year in office even he was calling for “Indian removal.” John Quincy Adams was likewise torn between the policies of assimilation and outright removal.

Then came the 1828 election of slave-owning Southern plantation owner and land speculator Andrew Jackson. In the colonial era Jackson had fought the Cherokee and every other major tribe in the Southeast and had personally profited from the sale of seized Cherokee lands. In 1830, at President Jackson’s urging, the Indian Removal Act passed the Senate 28–19 and the House of Representatives 101–97. In vain Cherokee leaders repeatedly visited the White House to ask Jackson to safeguard their property rights, including those governing their black slaves. Though the respective parties still needed to negotiate an actual removal treaty, most Cherokees saw the handwriting on the wall. Some 600 moved west to future Indian Territory on their own. Other Cherokees sought refuge in east Texas, in February 1836 signing a treaty with President Sam Houston, president of the newly independent republic. By the time the U.S. Congress ratified the Treaty of New Echota with the Cherokee Nation that spring, the tribe had split into four component bands.

Tensions Rise

Despite tensions between the Cherokees who had preceded most others to Indian Territory and those who later arrived on the Trail of Tears, the tribe as a whole rebounded surprisingly fast. The Cherokee Nation set up schools, a court system and law enforcement as individuals set to work establishing farms.

While most Cherokees lived on farmsteads in simple log cabins, more than 300 families started Southern-style plantations, living in two-story mansions and growing cotton using black slaves. The plantations ranged in size from 600 to 1,000 acres and put to work some 25 to 50 slaves. The Cherokees cultivated wheat, corn, hemp and tobacco and raised cattle and horses. Cotton remained king, however, and by 1840 the nation, thanks to its plantations, boasted a higher standard of living than that of neighboring Arkansas, Kansas or Missouri.

But tensions in the nation were on the rise. For one, it had become common knowledge among the Cherokee slaves that Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. A decade later incoming Texas President Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar drove the Cherokees from his republic. While most fled north into the Cherokee Nation as refugees, others crossed into Mexico. The number of blacks in the nation was also on the rise, not only through the purchase of additional slaves, but also with the arrival of runaway black slaves seeking refuge. Like their Southern white counterparts, however, the Cherokees only responded with a stricter slave code.

Adding to tensions was the manifest disparity between the lot of Cherokee slaves and those held by the Seminole. Seminoles passing through the Cherokee Nation in those years were technically captives from the ongoing Seminole wars in Florida en route to federally allotted lands farther west. Shipped up the Arkansas River from New Orleans, many disembarked at the Cherokee trading post of Webbers Falls to await transportation west. Striding down the riverboat gangplanks alongside their masters were flamboyantly dressed black Seminole slaves, many of whom bore arms. For Cherokee slaves witnessing their arrival, the blurred line between master and slave among the Seminoles must have been galling.

In the summer of 1842, given the rising prosperity the Cherokee Nation was enjoying, Sequoyah—the creator of the Cherokee alphabet, then in his 70s—led a small party into Mexico to find and return home with those Cherokees who had fled from Texas across the Rio Grande. He hoped for the unification of his people. (As it turned out, Sequoyah wouldn’t return home; he died in Mexico of a respiratory infection the next year.)

Whether inspired by the sight of the black Seminole slaves or the reawakened siren song of freedom in Mexico, slaves on the Cherokee plantations around Webbers Falls reached their threshold that fall. In years past black slaves had fled from their Cherokee masters back East and in Indian Territory, but only singly or in pairs. Dozens now waited for a signal.

Daring Escape

In the predawn darkness of November 15 the slaves on neighboring plantations rose quietly, made their way to their respective masters’ houses and overseers’ quarters, and barred the doors from the outside to ensure their occupants did not have an easy time getting out. Then they gathered at a predetermined rallying point for the planned breakout for Mexico.

Most escapees hailed from the plantation of mixed-race Cherokee Joseph Vann. In 1834, after being evicted from his family estate in Georgia, Vann had established a large plantation in southeast Tennessee. Then, in 1837, a year before the main Cherokee removal, he preemptively moved to the newly relocated Cherokee Nation, settling on promising ground around Webbers Falls. On the backs of labor provided by 200 slaves, the Vann family prospered, ultimately holding title to thousands of acres ranging from the Kansas border to the southern boundary of the Cherokee Nation. The rich soil yielded consistently profitable crops of cotton and corn, which Vann plowed back into his ever-expanding holdings of land and slaves. By 1842 he had 300 slaves and even owned a steamboat, named Lucy Walker after a favorite thoroughbred.

On leaving their rallying point, the escapees made their way to Webbers Falls, where they broke into a store for supplies, weapons and ammunition. With the coming dawn many lost their nerve and scattered into the surrounding woodlands. The remaining 20 men, women and children headed southwest into the neighboring Creek Nation on stolen horses and mules. A few were riding Vann’s blooded racehorses.

Meanwhile, back on their plantations, the bewildered Cherokees finally broke out of their lodgings. There was no sign of their slaves. Mounted owners and overseers were soon scouring the countryside. As the patrols drove their wayward property from the woods individually and in small groups, it became apparent many were missing. On questioning the slaves, the Cherokees discovered the fugitives had struck out for Mexico.

Miles to the southwest, soon after the runaway Cherokee slaves crossed into the Creek Nation, 15 slaves from the Bruner and Marshall plantations joined them in the bid for freedom, swelling the party’s number to 35. On their heels galloped some 40 armed Cherokees with dogs, soon joined by a smaller party of Creeks equally determined to retrieve their property.

The combined Cherokee-Creek posse caught up with the fugitives in the Choctaw Nation, 10 miles south of the Canadian River. Spotting their approaching pursuers across the prairie, the runaways sheltered in a buffalo wallow big enough to hold them and their horses. Though few of the slaves had ever fired a gun, they decided to fight it out. In the ensuing skirmish the posse managed to kill two fugitives and recapture a dozen others. Fortunately for the remaining 21 escaped slaves, however, the firefight convinced the Cherokees and Creeks to turn back for reinforcements.

With no time to savor their victory, the fugitives continued their race south for Mexico. 

Pursuit and Capture

The next day, 15 miles from the battle site, the fugitives happened across a pair of slave hunters wholly unaware of the breakout from the Cherokee Nation. James Edwards, who was white, and Billy Wilson, a Delaware, were transporting eight black captives—one man, two women and five children—belonging to a white man named Thompson who had married into the Choctaw Nation. In their own bid for freedom the Choctaw slaves had bolted west, hoping to link up with a Plains tribe, when another white in the nation spotted them and told Edwards and Wilson.

In a reversal of roles, however, the Cherokee and Creek runaways demanded Edwards and Wilson turn over their Choctaw captives. When the pair refused, the fugitives shot them. Though the five additional children would slow their progress, the party welcomed the Choctaws to join them on the road to Mexico. They would need to hurry, as their pursuers were regrouping.

On November 17 the Cherokee National Council authorized a company of tribal militiamen under the command of Captain John Drew to pursue, arrest and deliver the fugitive slaves to Fort Gibson, a U.S. Army post 20 miles north of Webbers Falls. The council also passed a resolution absolving the nation of any liability to the plantation owners if their runaway slaves were killed while resisting arrest. The Cherokee treasury would recompense Drew’s men for supplies and ammunition, while the commander at Fort Gibson loaned the captain 25 pounds of gunpowder. 

Captain Drew left Webbers Falls on November 21 with 87 well-armed militiamen. Arriving at the skirmish site in the Choctaw Nation on November 26, they picked up the fugitives’ trail and soon found the bodies of slave hunters Edwards and Wilson.

Two days later the Cherokee militia finally caught up with the runaways some 7 miles north of the Red River—the border between the United States and the Republic of Texas. Had they managed to cross it, the fugitives still would have had to traverse the expanse of slave-holding Texas to reach Mexico. But they had already run out of supplies and were starving.

The exhausted, dispirited fugitives offered no resistance. They must have picked up additional runaways, as Drew tallied 31 men, women and children, and two men off hunting remained at large. The militia and their captives reached Webbers Falls on December 7. The Cherokee National Council ordered five of the slaves held at Fort Gibson pending investigation into the killings of Edwards and Wilson, and two were tried for murder, though their cases appear to have been dismissed on technicalities. The Choctaw slaves were held until Cherokee authorities had determined Thompson’s claim to them.

The remaining Cherokee slaves were turned over to Vann, who put the runaways to work shoveling coal on his growing fleet of steamboats plying the Arkansas, Mississippi and Ohio rivers. In an instance of poetic justice, two years later a boiler explosion on one of his steamboats killed Vann.

Not the Last Struggle for Freedom

The 1842 revolt inspired other slaves to seek their freedom. Four years later Cherokee plantation owner Lewis Ross, a brother of Principal Chief John Ross, discovered his slaves had been collecting and hiding guns and ammunition. By 1851 nearly 300 blacks had attempted escape from plantations owned by members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole). Most fugitives tried for Mexico, taking their chances with the slave hunters of Texas, while others headed north for the unorganized territory that in 1854 would become Kansas Territory, where slavery was prohibited.

True to form, the Cherokees reacted with stricter slave codes, expelled freedman from the nation and established a slave-catching or “rescue” company to prevent additional losses. Prior to the revolt such units comprised non-Cherokee slave hunters, like the pair killed by the fugitives in 1842. That changed in the wake of the revolt, as economically struggling Cherokees realized the money to be made catching and returning runaway slaves. The nation authorized them to charge any ammunition and supplies used in their hunts to the tribal treasury.

By the 1861 onset of the Civil War the Five Civilized Tribes held more than 8,000 black slaves, representing 14 percent of the population of Indian Territory. Members of the Cherokee Nation alone held 4,600 slaves.

An oddity in the Cherokee slave code held that blacks with even a trace of tribal ancestry were considered quasi members of the nation and thus granted certain rights, such as marriage into the tribe and the possibility of eventual citizenship. In 1847, when slavers kidnapped two such mixed-blood girls—whose father was Cherokee and mother was black—and took them across the border into Missouri, newspaper editorials within the nation demanded their return. Cherokee Sheriff Charles Landrum of the Delaware District took it on himself to enter Missouri with two deputies and rescue the girls before they could be sold. The Cherokee National Council financially reimbursed Landrum and his men for their daring “invasion” of Missouri. 

Other blacks enslaved by the Cherokees weren’t as fortunate, at least until another president emancipated them on paper and hundreds of thousands of Americans spilled one another’s blood to affirm that proclamation. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on the topic author Mike Coppock recommends The Cherokee Nation: A History, by Robert J. Conley, and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Miles Tiya.

Among the bitter lessons learned during the costly American seizure of Japanese-occupied Tarawa in November 1943 was the need for ship-based close support in the interval between bombardment and a landing. Using the hull of the LCI (landing craft infantry) as a basis, the Navy devised the Landing Craft Support (Large) (Mark 3), or simply LCS. Entering service in 1944 and combat at Iwo Jima in February 1945, it packed the heaviest armament per ton of any warship, earning the sobriquet “Mighty Midget”. British Commonwealth forces also used it in Borneo, at Tarakan and Balikpapan.  

Of the 130 built, only five were lost—three sunk by Japanese Shinyo suicide motorboats in the Philippines and two falling victim to kamikaze aircraft off Okinawa. After supporting the Okinawa landings, the LCSs were fitted with radar and joined destroyers on picket duty against kamikaze attacks. It was while so engaged that Lieutenant Richard Miles McCool Jr., commander of LCS-122, saw the destroyer William D. Porter mortally stricken on June 10, 1945, by an Aichi D3A2, yet managed to rescue its crew without loss. The next evening two D3As hit LCS-122, but the seriously wounded McCool rallied his men to save their vessel and was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.   In 1949 the LCS was reclassified the LSSL (landing ship support large), and it continued to serve in Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts in foreign hands until 2007. One of two survivors discovered in Thailand is undergoing restoration to its World War II configuration at the Landing Craft Support Museum [usslcs102.org] in Vallejo, Calif.  

This story appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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The American arsenal of democracy delivered a huge number and variety of bombers during World War II. Among them were Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress; Consolidated’s B-24 Liberator series; North American’s B-25 Mitchell; and Martin’s B-26 Marauder. Excepting the B-29, all flew against every Axis power, from the Pacific and Aleutians to North Africa and Europe. But one latecomer barely got off the bench to play just before the final whistle: Consolidated’s little-known B-32 Dominator. If it’s remembered much at all it might be because of an unfortunate fact: a crewmember aboard a B-32 became the last United States combat fatality of the war.

Consolidated already had become a prominent factor in World War II aviation, producing not only the Army B-24 and Navy PB4Y series, but also the classic PBY Catalina and PB2Y Coronado flying boats. So when the Army Air Forces (AAF) sought another heavy bomber to fight alongside the B-29, it gave the San Diego firm the nod over four other contenders, giving the company the XB-32 order in September 1940. The planned aircraft would use the same 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines developed for the B-29 and share the concepts of a pressurized fuselage and remote-controlled gun turrets. The Army inspected the mockups and gave the go-ahead for prototypes in January 1941.

Showing some Liberator influence, the first XB-32 sported the same high-aspect-ratio Davis wing and twin tails. The inboard engines had reversible propellers to shorten the landing distance. However, the B-32’s rounded fuselage was aerodynamically sleeker than the B-24’s slab-sided airframe. Despite its similarity to the “very heavy” B-29, the Consolidated was designated a heavy bomber with an ultimate gross weight of 100,800 pounds versus 133,500 for the Boeing.

Dubbed the Dominator, the prototype XB-32 made its first flight on September 7, 1942, two years after Consolidated signed the contract. It crashed in May 1943, but the second prototype flew in July and the third in November. By then the configuration had seen some changes. It now had more of a “stepped” canopy, and the B-24-type twin tail had transformed into a high single tail similar to that of the Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer.

The program saw more changes as it progressed. Consolidated eliminated the pressurization and replaced the unreliable remote-controlled gun turrets with five manual twin mounts and the original three-blade props gave way to the B-29’s four. During flight tests in October 1944, Colonels Mark E. Bradley and Osmond J. Ritland reported a mixed impression of the aircraft, but noted, “Although the B-32 is a comparatively easy airplane to fly, it is not considered a pleasant airplane because of poor ‘feel,’ noise and vibration, excessive trim change with use of flaps, high landing and takeoff speeds.” They said that the Dominator “will not be a popular airplane with the services.”

Meanwhile, the B-32’s development had overlapped the 1943 merger between Consolidated and Vultee that led to the emergence of a new company, Convair. However, the corporate amalgam exerted little if any influence upon the Dominator program as the bombers began to roll off the production line at the company’s new plant in Fort Worth, Texas. 

In all, the AAF ordered 1,500 Dominators. Convair delivered the first production model in September 1944, but it soon suffered a nose wheel collapse on landing. Other bombers were delivered in November with unit-size introduction in late January 1945. By then it had become clear that the B-29 did not require a backup, so the Army directed that 40 B-32s be delivered as unarmed transition trainers. One detachment received orders to the Philippines for operational evaluation, though it was clear that the Dominator would see little combat. In the U.S. that summer, B-32s averaged a mere three hours flying time per month.

The Pacific-bound Dominators set out on an 8,300-mile global trek in May 1944, leaving Fort Worth for Mather Field, California, then flying on to Hickam Field, Hawaii, and from there to Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Guam in the Marianas, and on to Clark Field, Luzon. There the B-32 crews joined the 386th Bombardment Squadron of 312th Bombardment Group. The group was a Pacific old-timer under Lt. Col. Selmon Wells that had been flying Douglas A-20 Havocs. Just 25, Wells had flown with the group since late 1942 and had a wealth of combat experience.

The Dominator became the designated hitter for the 312th and took on a heavy bombardment role that was quite different from the light attack duties the squadron had been flying with its A-20s. One of the crewmembers making the transition to the Dominator was Staff Sgt. Julius Kossor, who noted in his diary that he was glad to leave the Havocs behind: “really had some close calls these last few missions,” he wrote.

In May the squadron’s commanding officer, Major “Pinky” Wilson, received his orders to return to the States. An original member from the squadron’s inception in October 1942, Wilson had flown 109 missions and amassed 320 hours, one of the group’s most notable records. Captain Ferdinand L. Svore replaced Wilson as new CO. He had arrived in July 1944 and served as squadron and group operations officer before taking command. On May 30, shortly after Svore’s promotion, the squadron ceased Havoc operations to begin B-32 missions. To prepare, ground staff visited the B-24-equipped 43rd Bomb Group to learn heavy bombardment organization and procedures. New personnel “began to trickle in” from the first of June, Kossor noted.

In that period Kossor wrote, “Our A-20s, with their pilots and gunners, were transferred out and assigned to the other three squadrons in the group. New crews, factory representatives and specialists joined the squadron, and preparations were under way to convert the 386th Bomb Squadron (Light) into a very heavy bomb squadron.”

The day before it ended all Havoc missions, the squadron flew the first B-32 raid of the war, an attack north of the Philippine capital of Manila. In a display of unit pride, the squadron report noted, “The outstanding raid of the month, and probably the most notable in this theatre, was the B-32 strike on May 29th. Two of three B-32s assigned to the 386th were sent on a mission to Antatet in the Cagayan Valley. If the Japs below took time to peek out of their foxholes, they must have been amazed to see eighteen 1,000 pounders dropped from only two planes. Bombing from 10,000 feet was excellent. All bombs were 100 percent on the target, scoring direct hits on a house and damaging a large tin-roofed warehouse.

“This, the first B-32 raid in the world, was the forerunner of future operations in the Pacific,” the report concluded, not quite accurately.

After addressing engine problems and deferred maintenance, in June the squadron’s three Dominators flew ten two-plane missions to drop 135 tons of bombs, mostly on Formosa (today Taiwan). Kossor flew his first heavy bomber mission on June 13 in one of two Dominators that struck a Formosa airfield. From the ball turret Kossor had “a perfect view of the target. Three bombs made direct hits on the runway. Others all around the field—no fighter interception and no damage to our two planes.” He judged the Dominator to be “a good fast ship.” 

By the end of June, the squadron, now equipped with three B-32s and a C-47B for miscellaneous duties, had logged ten missions (20 sorties) for 105 combat hours. The combat tests ended in July and other crews began making the transition to the new bomber. Then on July 30 the advance echelon began moving to Okinawa while the rest waited for a fourth B-32 to arrive. The unit diary noted, “All we had was the promise that more were on the way.” And there were: five B-32s headed overseas in July, and nine more in August. Still, that meant there were only 10 to 16 Dominator crews overseas between June and August, versus 1,200 or so B-29 crews.

The squadron properly noted that August 1945 was “an eventful month in world history resulting in a month of impatient waiting” for the 55 officers, 370 enlisted men and nine civilian technicians on the roster. On August 8 the bombers and supporting transports left Clark Field in the Philippines for Okinawa and landed with bombs aboard at Yontan. Shortly afterward the unit moved to nearby Kadena Airfield, already home to three bomb groups and a fighter group. The support staff’s “water echelon” sailed by ship and learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan along the way. A squadron officer wrote, “Despite the fact that the war was unofficially over, the 386th carried on a private war with the Empire of Japan.” On August 15 anti-shipping strikes were recalled upon Tokyo’s surrender announcement.

However, the new arrivals still had work to do. On the 16th, reconnaissance missions scouted possible landing fields in Japan for the airborne troops who were due to arrive shortly. One Dominator turned back with engine problems but the other, Hobo Queen II, completed the flight.

On August 17 the 386th launched four photo sorties around Tokyo under the youthful Colonel Wells. During the two hours over Japan the individual bombers were harassed and attacked by flak and Japanese Navy pilots who ignored the surrender announcement that had gone out two days before. Sergeant Kossor said it was the “roughest mission I ever had.” He was flying with Wells, who had told him to leave his ball turret up because it created too much drag when lowered. Then Japanese fighters attacked and Kossor had to scramble to get the turret down. “They attacked us from each wing, and then flew under my ball as they passed,” he noted. “A perfect target, but because I obeyed orders we may have crashed in Tokio. Then we got hit with flak. It was heavy and damn accurate.” Anti-aircraft fire put shrapnel into a wing, but Wells proceeded to Yokosuka where he found the flak was even thicker but experienced little threat from fighters.

That wasn’t the case with two other Dominators. In the Yokosuka area they aborted their photo runs due to cloud cover but conducted shootouts at 20,000 feet. The gunners claimed one fighter destroyed and another damaged before heading seaward with gunfire damage to a wing.

The fourth bomber had an even rougher time. In a 15-minute set-to, several Japanese ganged up on the Dominator from six o’clock. An upper turret gunner set his sights on the closest and watched his tracers sparkle on the green airframe. Obviously stricken and streaming smoke, the assailant dropped into the undercast. But the tail turret failed and the Japanese noticed the weakness. They renewed their attacks from astern although the bomber escaped without serious damage and landed with the others about four hours later. The unit diarist recorded, “Approximately ten fighter planes attacked the formation, resulting in two probables for our side.”

Of greater concern to Far East air forces was what Japanese fighter opposition meant. Presumably the interim agreement made before the formal surrender allowed Allied aircraft full access to Japanese airspace. Did the violent responses indicate a change in Tokyo policy or were the intercepts flown by dissidents who refused to surrender?

The latter proved the case. Years later a prominent Japanese Navy ace, Lieutenant (j.g.) Saburo Sakai, explained his rationale for opposing the B-32 flights. His commanding officer had stated that if any pilots wanted to intercept the Americans, he would look the other way. When the B-32s came into sight that day, Sakai and his fellow pilots decided to attack them. “While Japan did agree to the surrender, we were still a sovereign nation, and every nation has the right to protect itself,” Sakai asserted. He claimed that the Japanese did not know the B-32s’ intentions and that the Americans should have waited before sending more airplanes over Japan. “They should have waited and let things cool down.”

The next day, the squadron flew two more photo sorties over Tokyo. The Dominators flew with extra observers and photographers to verify the situations at major airfields. The planes had completed their routes when crewmen noticed fighters airborne from the Atsugi airfield. “Fourteen Jap fighters engaged our bombers in twenty minutes of aerial combat,” the unit diary noted. “Two enemy planes were shot down and two probably destroyed. Gunners Houston and Smart were the sharpshooters.”

Lieutenant James Klein’s Hobo Queen II held an altitude advantage over Lieutenant John Anderson’s unnamed bomber, which was some 10,000 feet below. Anderson’s tail and top forward gunners put dozens of .50-caliber rounds on target, seeing two dark green fighters gush flames or explode. The nose gunner swapped gunfire with Lieutenant Sadamu Komachi, survivor of the Darwinian winnowing Japanese pilots had experienced since Pearl Harbor. The veteran shot out the Dominator’s port inboard engine, blew the plexiglass off the top rear turret, and damaged the rudder.

During the shootout one of the photographers, Staff Sgt. Joseph Lacharite, received wounds in both legs, so Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione, a young Pennsylvanian on his first B-32 mission, laid him on a cot and took over the first-aid effort. Moments later a 20mm shell exploded in the fuselage, inflicting a massive chest wound on Marchione. Five of his fellow crewmen tried to keep him alive, applying pressure while administering plasma and oxygen.

Attended by his friends, Tony Marchione died at age 19, high over Japan and far from his home in Pennsylvania. The two bombers landed at Kadena that evening, Anderson’s making it on three engines.

Anthony Marchione almost certainly was the last American killed in combat during the Second World War. Historian Stephen Harding wrote a bittersweet account of the young sergeant’s life, death and family in his book, Last to Die. It remains the definitive account of Marchione’s death. “

The War was supposed to be over Aug. 15, but our men are still gettin’ killed,” Kossor griped in his diary. “To us it isn’t over for some time yet. Nobody’s celebratin’ ‘The End’ over here. Because the war is supposed to be over, we do not get combat time for these missions. We got the rotten deal of flyin’ ’em ‘on the house!’” 

Ten days later the unit diary noted, “August 28 was probably the saddest day in the history of the 312th Group.” In two disastrous crashes, 15 officers and men were killed. One plane was taking off when it crashed at the end of the runway. There were no survivors. The other B-32, after completing a recon mission, developed engine trouble and flew to within 175 miles of Okinawa on two engines. Two crewmembers died in the bailout but the rest survived and “spent a pleasant cruise on two destroyers and returned a week later.”

After the signing of the peace treaty on September 2, a bomber from the 386th Squadron departed for the States, representing the first airplane from Fifth Air Force to return from Japan. The unit diarist closed, “So ended the glorious history of the 386th Bomb Squadron; activated three years ago in Savannah as a dive bomb outfit; flew fighter patrols over New Guinea in P-40s; bombed and strafed New Guinea and the Philippines in A-20s; received a Presidential Citation for operations against Formosa; flew the first B-32s in combat and participated in the last aerial combat of World War II.”

The war’s finish also spelled the end to the B-32. The Army Air Forces no longer needed the Dominator. Only 114 had rolled out of the Fort Worth Consolidated-Vultee plant by the time production ceased—a far cry from the 1,500 originally planned. Today not a single B-32 remains. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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My great-uncle, Captain Everal Anthony Guimond, was a bombardier in the 566th Bombardment Squadron, 389th Bombardment Group, Heavy, of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He was killed on D-Day and his military records were destroyed in the 1973 St. Louis Archives fire. What can you tell me about my great-uncle’s service and his unit’s history?

—Laura Guimond, Henderson, Nevada  

The 566th was one of the four original squadrons of the 389th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force, whose B-17 and B-24 bombers famously took the air war to Germany.

Constituted on December 19, 1942, the 389th was activated a week later at Davis-Monthan Air Field in Arizona before moving to Biggs Field, Texas, and Lowry Field, Colorado. Between mid-April and June 1, 1943, the 389th received final flight training at Lowry on the Consolidated B-24 Liberators they would fly throughout the war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally reviewed the unit at Lowry during a late-April visit, an event the Rocky Mountain News wrote was “believed to be the sole occasion when a USAAF bomb group was so honored.”

The 389th’s ground echelon left Colorado on June 5 for the Camp Kilmer staging base in New Jersey. Three weeks later the unit joined 17,000 other troops on the Cunard ship RMS Queen Elizabeth to sail to England. Along with the thousands of other Americans servicemen, on board was the famed CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, who gave airmen an idea of what sort of life awaited them at a USAAF air base in England. The unit arrived at their new home base at RAF Hethel, in Norfolk, England, in mid-June. The air echelon left Lowry on June 21, hopscotching across the U.S. before making transatlantic flights to Prestwick, Scotland. The B-24s then convoyed south to join the rest of the 389th at Hethel.

Under the command of Colonel Jack W. Wood, the 389th settled into its new digs. The group’s airmen were soon perplexed when, after having trained in the U.S. for standard high-altitude bombing missions, their training in England suddenly turned exclusively to low-altitude runs. As Lieutenant Andrew Opsata of the 93rd Bomb Group said regarding the Americans’ buzzing of the English countryside, “We terrorized the livestock, and I’m certain that egg and milk production must have taken a precipitous drop.” What the American airmen didn’t know was that they were preparing for the top-secret Operation Tidal Wave, the planned attack on Nazi Germany’s oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania. Since the B-24s couldn’t reach Ploesti from England, on July 1, 1943, the 389th departed to join the 44th and 93rd Bomb Groups of the Ninth Air Force in Benghazi, Libya. Low-level flight training continued there amid the stifling desert heat and a plague of locusts and flies numbering in the millions. Another local troublemaker inspired the 389th to adopt the nickname that would serve them until the end of the war: the Sky Scorpions. From Benghazi, the 389th flew their first missions from July 9-19, attacking Axis airfields on Crete and as well as targets in support of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. The group flew additional missions from Libya against ports and rail yards in Italy and Austria, but the big event was August 1, 1943—the attack on Ploesti.

The mission launched at 4:00 a.m., when 179 B-24s headed north from Benghazi over Corfu and northeast to Romania. The 566th Squadron’s target was Campina, the most distant of the refineries, as their B-24s were the latest models and had the longest range of the air groups. While the refineries took their hits, so too did the attackers. Of the 179 airplanes that took off, 43 planes were shot down, 532 men died, and 110 men survived bail outs to become POWs. Despite these sobering figures, the Ploesti raid succeeded in damaging the refineries and disrupting—temporarily, at least—the German war machine. The Sky Scorpions received a Distinguished Unit Citation for their efforts that day.

The 389th returned to England on August 25 and soon began a 21-month slog to bomb the Germans into submission. Meanwhile, the crews settled into everyday life at Hethel. A joint 389th/RAF rugby team played a full season of matches, and the airmen joined the war-long chorus railing against the Spam, powdered eggs, and chipped beef that seemed omnipresent in the chow lines. On Christmas of 1943, the 389th received a visit from an old friend: Edward R. Murrow dropped by to conduct interviews for his radio report home to the U.S. and ended up having his Christmas meal with Hethel’s enlisted men.

From August 1943 until the end of the war, the group flew hundreds of missions against airfields, marshaling yards, V-1 rocket sites, and numerous other targets in occupied Europe and Germany. In February 1944, the 389th was at the forefront of Big Week, the Allies’ intense bombing campaign against the ball-bearing, engine, and aircraft factories of the German aviation industry. The overall effort was not as successful as at first thought or hoped, but it was another strike in the war of attrition against Germany. But it was a war of attrition for both sides—Allied losses from German fighters and 88mm flak batteries were painfully significant.

Your great-uncle, Captain Everal Guimond, enlisted in the U.S. Army on April 4, 1942, and traveled to England with the rest of the 389th in June1943. A bombardier on Lieutenant Gregory Perron’s crew for 10 missions starting in November 1943, Captain Guimond transferred to a B-24 commanded by Lieutenant William Wambold in February 1944. His first run with the new crew was a bombing mission over Braunschweig, Germany, on February 20, the first day of Big Week. 

On April 1, 1944, USAAF brass raised from 25 to 30 the number of missions required for airmen to complete their tour. A sliding scale was put in place, so your great-uncle’s tour was scheduled to end after 29 missions. As D-Day approached, Captain Guimond’s tally stood at 28. Tragically, his final mission, on D-Day, would have been the last of his tour.

On June 6, the Liberators of the 389th flew numerous bombing missions in support of the Normandy landings. Captain Guimond was assigned to replace the regular bombardier on a B-24J-4 called Shoot Fritz, You’ve Had It under the command of Lieutenant Marcus Courtney. Taking off from Hethel at 2:00 a.m., the airplane, for reasons that were never determined, crashed and exploded 20 minutes later near the village of Trimingham on the Norfolk coast. All ten crewmembers perished.

The 389th continued to punish the German rail system, submarine pens, and shipping yards as the Allied invasion pushed on. The Sky Scorpions flew numerous missions during Operation Market Garden in September 1944—though the weather was so bad during the Battle of the Bulge that the group was unable to provide much material help. In February and March 1945, bombers switched from dropping explosives to airdropping food and other needed supplies to the advancing Allied armies. Their final mission, the last of 321 before the war in Europe ended in May, came over Germany on April 25. The 389th returned to the United States in late May and the unit was deactivated on September 13, 1945.

Everal Anthony Guimond was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Purple Heart, and he is buried in Plot E, Row 5, Grave 16 in England’s Cambridge American Cemetery. Your great-uncle’s service and sacrifice are also remembered at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, where his name is enshrined on the Wall of Remembrance. Captain Guimond’s plaque, number W-99, resides next to those of 4,414 other servicemen who gave their lives on June 6, 1944, day one of the liberation of Europe.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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It may seem strange that the outbreak of hostilities between warring factions in the Middle East would bring to mind the peaceful, idyllic fields of south-central Pennsylvania, but it is difficult to watch the news coming out of Israel and Palestine these days without recalling the important role that Gettysburg played in 1978 to bring an unlikely peace to that region.

Seldom is there something happening in the world that does not in some way connect to or a least remind one of Gettysburg. I don’t just mean the battle by that name, but the famous address that Lincoln gave there, the decades of struggle over the memory of the place, the evolution of the park into a national park, and much more that falls under the general subject heading of Gettysburg.

In the last century and a half, numerous U.S. presidents have made use of Gettysburg symbolism to further some larger political goal with varying degrees of success. Woodrow Wilson used a speech at the 50th anniversary of the battle to promote his hope for peace. Months later, the world erupted into the War to End All Wars. At the 75th anniversary, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to an estimated 200,000 people at the dedication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, while another 100,000 clogged the roads unable to reach the field. Months later, the world exploded into World War II.

In 1979, however, quite unexpectedly, Gettysburg and a president played a key role in bringing about the end of millennia of hostilities between two long-warring peoples.

carter’s peaceful plan

Jimmy Carter had long been a Civil War buff, and its greatest battle was seldom far from his thoughts. One of his ancestors had fought at Gettysburg, and in 1976, while he watched the results of the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania come in, candidate Carter noticed that he had won the vote in the electoral district that included the battlefield. To his delight, he remarked, “We ought to tell the Georgians that we finally won in Gettysburg.”

Two years later, while sitting at the presidential retreat at Camp David just a few miles southwest of the famous battlefield, his thoughts drifted there again. He was in the fourth day of intense negotiations designed to bring peace between Egypt and Israel — a conflict that predated Moses.

The leaders of both nations were there with him (Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel), but their views could scarcely have been farther apart. On one key negotiating point, Begin had declared, “My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off before I ever agree.”

In Carter’s view the two leaders were thinking in the wrong direction. “I tried for three days to get them to talk about the future,” Carter said. “But all they would talk about was the past.” Faced with the standoff and searching for some way to bring the parties to a different level of thought, Carter first kept them apart for a while, then proposed an excursion. “We went to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg one day,” he later recalled, “and I made them both agree not to talk about the Middle East or about anything that happened since 1865.”

Thanks to the meaning and mythology attached to the Gettysburg story since 1863 (much of it carved in stone in more than a thousand monuments and markers), Carter’s choice of destination was a fertile place for symbolic demonstration and persuasion. Two powers of the same region, grown from the same land but with differing cultural histories, once differed so greatly from each other that they engaged in the bloodiest war the continent had ever known. The worst of the fighting happened on the ground they were touring.

When the war was over, the two powers became one again, healed their wounds, set aside many of their differences, and went on to form the most powerful nation on earth. If North and South could accomplish this, then Egypt and Israel had a chance as well. As he admitted later in his memoirs, Carter wanted to demonstrate the high cost of war and persuade the two leaders to sign the first-ever peace agreement between Israel and an Arab nation.

The Egyptian took to the field right away. As a military student, Egypt’s Sadat had studied Gettysburg in detail and recognized it as the turning point in the Civil War. Israel’s Begin, however, was slower to the mark as he knew nothing about the battle. When the group passed the monument commemorating Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, however, Begin recited it from memory in a thick Yiddish accent, probably adding an Israeli emphasis to the line “that this nation…shall not perish from the earth.”

It took many more hours of negotiating, but less than a week later the three leaders took part in a historic signing ceremony for an agreement that brought peace between the two long-warring nations. Menachem Begin even gave in on his sticking point without losing an eye or his right hand.

lessons from gettysburg

To be sure, many factors helped bring about the Egyptian–Israeli peace in 1978, most of them having nothing to do with Gettysburg. But years after they signed the accords, the participants expressed a belief that the trip to America’s hallowed ground had meant a great deal. Carter said as much in a speech long afterward.

Sadat made one interesting observation. Since our visit to Gettysburg, he had been thinking that Carter, as a Southerner, could understand what it meant to be involved in a terrible war, and also knew how difficult it was to rebuild both the material things and the spirit of the people after a recognized defeat.

For Carter, Gettysburg was a reminder of the high cost of war and an example of reconciliation among adversaries. Sadat, lured by the military aspect of the field, felt the hope and healing in the post–Vietnam era ideas it elicited. Begin was taken with the ideas embodied in Lincoln’s immortal address.

Though perhaps not in the way he intended, Carter’s idea had worked. Both negotiating parties found meaning in the Gettysburg story that, though different from the other, helped inspire their thoughts and actions toward peace.

With war in the Middle East again the lead news story, one wonders if there might not be some magic left in the meaning of Gettysburg and whether a trip to the battlefield might someday encourage opposing leaders to find common ground, even if that ground lies in south-central Pennsylvania.

This essay was adapted from Thomas A. Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (DaCapo, 2003).

“Texas Charlie” Bigelow, a U.S. Army scout, was patrolling Indian Territory when he contracted a fever that left him so weak he could barely open his eyelids. An Indian chief took pity on Bigelow and nursed him back to health using a mysterious medicine he called sagwa. When Bigelow begged for the recipe of this wonder drug, the chief sent five tribal medicine men to accompany the scout to the East Coast, where they created “Kickapoo Sagwa,” the magic elixir sold in medicine shows that traveled America from 1881 to 1912.  

Or so the story goes, as recounted in countless Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company advertisements. But the story—like the medicine itself—was totally bogus.  

Bigelow was never an Army scout and never healed by an Indian chief. He grew up on a Texas farm in the 1850s, then fled the rigors of the plow for a life peddling patent medicines across the West and on the streets of Baltimore. In 1881, Bigelow teamed up with John “Doc” Healy, a former Union Army drummer boy, shoe salesman, proprietor of a traveling theatrical troupe called “Healy’s Hibernian Minstrels,” and the inventor and chief pitchman of a bogus liver medicine and a dubious liniment he dubbed “King of Pain.” When he joined forces with Bigelow, Healy concocted a new product, a fake “Indian” medicine he called “Kickapoo Sagwa.” And he proposed a brilliant idea for promoting it.  

“His plan was to hire a few Indians, rent a storeroom, and have the medicine simmering like a witch’s brew in a great iron pot inside a tepee,” recalled “Nevada Ned” Oliver, a veteran pitchman hired by Healy and Bigelow.  

Healy set up his first Kickapoo showroom in Providence, R.I., then moved to Manhattan before settling in New Haven in 1887. In a huge warehouse decorated with tepees, shields, spears, and other Native American curios, Healy hired Indians—none of them from the Kickapoo tribe—to entertain audiences with songs and dances while stirring huge pots of fake medicine. He advertised his Sagwa as a secret Indian recipe consisting of “Roots, Herbs, Barks, Gums and Leaves,” but it was actually a completely Caucasian concoction containing sugar, a mild laxative, and a dollop of alcohol.  

From their headquarters, Healy and Bigelow dispatched teams of real and ersatz Indians, plus vaudeville performers, and pitchmen posing as doctors to stage shows across America. The shows proved popular and the “doctors” sold oceans of Kickapoo Sagwa, as well as spinoff products—Kickapoo Buffalo Salve, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer. Healy and Bigelow became, as historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in his classic 1959 book, The Golden Age of Quackery, “the Barnum and Bailey of the medicine show business.”  

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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The two partners didn’t invent the traveling medicine show: For decades, patent medicine pitchmen roamed rural America, attracting crowds with musicians and other entertainers. Nor did Healy and Bigelow invent the notion that Native Americans were “children of nature” who possessed a mystical knowledge of healing plants. Throughout the 19th century, Americans bought books purporting to reveal the secrets of Indian medicine—The Indian Guide to Health and The Indian Doctor’s Dispensary, among others. What made Healy and Bigelow rich was their ingenious combination of the age-old appeal of miracle cures with the whiz-bang theatricality of Barnum’s circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.    

Early in the 1880s, Kickapoo shows were modest affairs—a few Indians performing dubious native dances, a few White singers and acrobats and a fake doctor, who sold Sagwa and served as master of ceremonies. One of those “doctors” was Nevada Ned Oliver, who described the shows decades later in a magazine article.  

“The show customarily began with the introduction of each of the Indians by name, together with some personal history,” Oliver recalled. “Five of the six would grunt acknowlegements; the sixth would make an impassioned speech in Kickapoo, interpreted by me….It was a most edifying oration as I translated it. What the brave actually said, I never knew, but I had reason to fear that it was not the noble discourse of my translation, for even the poker faces of his fellow savages sometimes were convulsed.”  

By the 1890s, Healy and Bigelow were dispatching more than a dozen Kickapoo shows across America every summer. The larger troupes played for weeks in big cities, staging elaborate spectacles in tents that held 3,000 seats. Admission cost a dime and shows included a dozen performances, interrupted by three or four pitches for Kickapoo cure-alls. The shows were wildly eclectic. The Indians performed war dances and an “Indian Marriage Ceremony,” and sometimes staged brutal attacks on wagon trains. The White performers included singers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, and fire-eaters. Occasionally, Texas Charlie Bigelow himself appeared, a cowboy hat perched theatrically atop his shoulder-length hair. Billed as the world champion rifle shooter, Texas Charlie demonstrated feats of marksmanship and told dubious tales of his adventures.  

“Later, there were aerial acts, a great deal of Irish and blackface comedy, and such exotic novelties as a midget Dutch comic, the ‘Skatorial Songsters,’ who performed while gliding around the stage on roller skates, and Jackley, ‘the only table performer on earth’ who turned somersaults on a pile of tables that extended 25 feet in the air,” Brooks McNamara wrote in Step Right Up, his 1975 history of medicine shows.  

“If the combination of burning wagon trains and blackface minstrel routines was somewhat eccentric, “ McNamara continued, “no one seems to have cared or even noticed—especially not Healy and Bigelow, who refused to trouble themselves about complex artistic questions so long as the Kickapoo shows continued to attract crowds and sell medicine.”  

The crowds kept coming, and kept buying Kickapoo potions, into the 20th century, enabling Healy and Bigelow to purchase expansive mansions near Kickapoo’s Connecticut headquarters.  

In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the contents and the advertising of medicines—which put a damper on the more…um…poetic claims of Kickapoo’s pitchmen.  

By then, Healy had sold his half of the operation to Bigelow and moved to Australia. In 1912, Bigelow sold the company for $250,000 to a corporation that continued selling Kickapoo Sagwa in drugstores but ended the traveling medicine shows.  

Texas Charlie moved to England, where he manufactured a potion much like Sagwa. He called it “Kimco,” a tip of his cowboy hat to the scheme that made him rich—the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.  

Decades later, the hillbilly characters in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip drank a potent moonshine called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” In 1965, the Monarch Beverage Company introduced a citrus-flavored soft drink called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” It’s still around, and quite popular in Southeast Asia. The company never claimed the soda cures ailments, but it does brag that it contains enough caffeine “to give you the kick you crave.”  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Thanks to a resounding wave of recent public support, the Texas Civil War Museum’s board of directors has decided to keep the museum in Fort Worth, Texas, open, reversing a decision made earlier this year to permanently close the facility to the public on December 30, 2023. Museum artifacts currently in possession of The Horse Soldier Antiques in Gettysburg, Pa., and Heritage Auctions in Dallas, will continue to be sold and auctioned off to endow the museum.

The museum’s current hours of operation will remain the same: Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Marcus Richey, son of retired museum president Ray Richey, will continue in his present role as museum director. 

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It was a fear Milton Smith Littlefield Jr. simply couldn’t shake whenever speaking before an audience. Though well-respected, the Presbyterian minister and editor of hymn books agonized about being recognized as the son of Civil War General Milton Smith Littlefield. The younger Littlefield did what he could to squash this controversial legacy, even tearing out, upon his father’s death, the pages of the general’s scrapbook to conceal his crimes from curious readers.

Was General Littlefield really worthy of such shame, however? He had been a rising star in the U.S. Army—a friend of Abraham Lincoln and, during the war, a distinguished commander of African American troops.

The elder Littlefield befriended Lincoln while working as a lawyer and newspaper reporter, and enthusiastically lent his support during the 1860 presidential election. His brother, John H. Littlefield, worked as a clerk in Lincoln’s Springfield, Ill., law office and was later appointed a U.S. Treasury Department clerk.

Elected a captain in the 14th Illinois Infantry, Milton Littlefield Sr. led a company at Shiloh, drawing praise from one of his sergeants for standing “erect in front of his men, during the whole engagement” and escaping “injury, except having about three inches torn from the left shoulder of his coat, by an [enemy] ball.”

In November 1862, Littlefield was aboard the steamer Eugene when it struck a sunken ship and sank in the Mississippi River, about 12 miles above Fort Pillow. While trying to keep passengers calm, the future general was knocked overboard and drifted downriver until rescued by Union soldiers at the fort.

Four months later, Littlefield was sent to South Carolina to organize and lead African American troops. As colonel of the 21st U.S. Colored Infantry, he was attached to Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore’s staff and, during the famed assault on Fort Wagner in July, was among those noted for “doing all in their power to sustain the courage of the troops and urge on reinforcements” while under “constant” fire. Littlefield assumed command of the 54th Massachusetts, replacing slain Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and in November 1864 was brevetted a brigadier general.

Erasmus W. Jones, 21st USCI chaplain, would write that Littlefield’s “unflinching perseverance, united with that perfect moral integrity that have so far elevated him, will soon raise him to higher dignities and honors.” The general’s postwar endeavors erased any chance of that, however.

In 1867, he and George W. Swepson, president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, were involved in a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme. Having fled to Florida, he evaded prosecution despite multiple attempts to extradite him.

After relocating to New York in his later years, he was arrested for other offenses, including grand larceny and misappropriation of a mortgage bond. He died in Vadhalla, N.Y., on March 6, 1899—his burial service lightly attended, no surprise.

Perhaps Milton Littlefield Jr. had his father in mind with this entry in his Hymns of the Christian Life: “Those who never knew Thee, Those who’ve wandered far, Guide them by the brightness Of Thy guiding star….To that heavenly home, Where no sin nor sorrow Evermore shall come.” 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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The landscape is lush with color, a riverside camp serene with its crackling fire and abundant provisions. In the foreground before his fur-laden canoe stands a trapper, rifle in hand, worry furrowing his brow as he looks downriver. The successful hunters and their resting dogs seem ready to settle into Camp on the Upper Missouri, but the scene also hints at an unknown future—and hidden violence.

The tension in artist Todd Connor’s work is indicative of the precipitous nature of the frontier West, and the depth Connor brings to the canvas reflects a lifetime spent looking below the surface.

Connor [ToddConnorStudio.com] finished his first plein air painting at age 12 while visiting an eastern Oklahoma lake named Tenkiller, a locale that fueled the Tulsa native’s enthusiasm for exploration. “Plein air helps me see value, color and atmosphere properly and adds authenticity to my studio work,” he explains. A year later Connor’s passions took him to new depths, quite literally. “I got certified as a diver at the age of 13 with my dad. We had spent most of my childhood at the lakes and around water. I think my fascination was being below the surface.” Both encounters with nature helped shape the artist’s subsequent life and career.

In 1987, at age 23, Connor signed up for a tour with the Navy that lasted four years. “After high school I got the bug to join the service, specifically the Special Forces,” he says. “A coworker of my dad’s happened to be an ex–Vietnam UDT [Underwater Demolition Team] guy, who recommended SEALs, since I loved the water so much.” After an honorable discharge from the SEALs, Connor spent time visiting historical sites and exploring natural landscapes that renewed his interest in plein air painting.

“I’ve done hundreds of outdoor landscape paintings on-site and a few in the studio,” the artist says, “but I always wanted to tell the story of the American West. That led to learning to draw figures and horses in earnest, especially after visiting the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville, Texas.”

A roster of talented artists helped him get started. “I’m grateful to have had the best of mentors in both drawing and painting,” Connor says. “My earliest was Ginzie Chancey, of Tulsa. Then, in Los Angeles, there was Steve Huston for drawing; Dan Pinkham, Dan McCaw and Donald Puttman for painting; and Gary Carter, [a member and past president of] the Cowboy Artists of America. He pointed me in the right direction for proper training by suggesting the ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena.”

Connor’s work often features strong female figures—mothers, daughters and sisters juxtaposed against stark vistas of rugged beauty. “Strong women evoke the primal,” he explains. “A mother protecting her nest applies to the survival of all life on the planet. In that period it was often a woman who came between the family and the threat of danger. Men weren’t always around. They were farming or out hunting for long periods of time.”

His painting The Gathering Storm, for example, depicts a young mother standing sentinel outside her sod house, infant child cradled in one hand, a double-barreled shotgun in the other. In Far From Anywhere a mother sits with her two daughters on the bench seat of their covered wagon. Shielding her eyes from the setting sun, the woman gazes over a vast open plain.

“The hardships and the teamwork it took to just stay alive is something our modern society seems to have lost touch with,” Connor says. “The family has been the foundation of humanity. I show it in the context of settling the frontier.”

In 2020 Connor moved to Fort Benton, Mont., one of the oldest settlements in the state, which served as inspiration for another of his favorite themes—the Lewis and Clark Expedition. “A fascinating story—an expedition going upriver with no motors through 2,000 miles of wilderness untouched by white men, not knowing what they would find or if they would return at all,” the artist says. “When I started painting for a living, it was coming up on the bicentennial of the expedition, and I did a series of paintings on the subject. In terms of complexity of story and number of figures and composition, it’s probably my most ambitious work to date.”

Connor had long been drawn to the history and beauty of the region. “I’d wanted to try living in old Montana since going there for 20 years to float the White Cliffs,” he says. “So many memories of being with my father and friends out there, and lots of plein air studies resulted from those trips over the years. We dressed up in 1800s costumes and created reference photos of trappers and traders, mountain men and their Indian counterparts with canoes, all against the stunning background of the cliffs and river. I’ve done many historical paintings from those shoots.”

From his 2,700-foot home studio Connor paints every day and often into the night, referencing a sketchbook loaded with ideas.

“I also do miniature paintings, which I sell from my website or at shows where I have a booth, like the [C.M.] Russell Museum auction. These small pieces give me perspective on deciding whether a larger version would be interesting.” When an idea makes the cut for further development, Connor employs models to bring the project to fruition.

Ironically, his success leaves him little time for his own works. “I am currently working on three commissions. I’m generally painting for show deadlines, the last one being the Briscoe Museum’s “Night of Artists” show. I like to be ahead with lots of ideas and options to choose from for any given exhibit, but the reality of the business is sometimes it’s pretty hard to keep up.”

Success also has its rewards. During a recent tenure as an artist in residence at Craig Barrett’s Triple Creek Ranch in Darby, Mont., Connor shared his love of painting with guests and squeezed in time for his own plein air work. 

“Painting on-site is a learning experience,” he says, “an essential activity for every painter to do now and again in their career, in order to stay fresh and growing in your craft.” 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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In his new book Duel in the Deep (Naval Institute Press), author David Sears tells a story that he subtitles “The Hunters, the Hunted, and a High Seas Fight to the Finish.” The central incident is the tale of an outmoded four-stack destroyer, the USS Borie, and its intense fight with the German U-405 on October 31, 1943, a “swashbuckling, no-holds-barred brawl of cannons, machine guns, small arms, and even knives and spent shell casings.” Sears builds up to that that epic struggle by outlining the ebbs and flows of the Battle of the Atlantic, when Germany’s submersible craft attempted to starve Britain into submission and keep the Allies reeling by sinking the ships carrying necessary food and supplies across the Atlantic. In a high-stakes game of technological cat and mouse, both sides attempted to gain the upper hand in the contest with advanced technology and, on the Allied side, intensive codebreaking work.

Sears, who served in the U.S. Navy aboard a destroyer himself, uses diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper interviews to bring his story to life. In this interview with World War II editor Tom Huntington, Sears talks about his book.

No, technically, it’s not over, though overt hostilities stopped 70 years ago.  

On June 25, 1950, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) invaded the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), sparking the first hot conflict of the Cold War—a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union in support of the north, and the United States and its United Nations allies in the south. Crossing the 38th parallel, the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) pushed ROK and U.S. forces south, trapping them behind the 140-mile Pusan Perimeter. In response, the U.N. sent troops, 21 nations ultimately contributing to the effort.  

Assuming command of U.N. forces, General Douglas MacArthur turned the tide with Operation Chromite, the amphibious landing of troops at Inchon, southwest of Seoul. Reinforced U.N. forces also broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, pushing the KPA back across the 38th parallel. Coalition forces then invaded North Korea, aiming to reunify the Korean Peninsula, with leading elements reaching the Yalu River border with China.  

At that imminent threat, Chinese troops poured into North Korea and launched a series of offensives against ROK and U.N. forces. The fighting was fierce as combatant forces seesawed back and forth. Notable battles included those on the Chosin Reservoir and the Chongchon River. Eventually, the front lines stabilized along the 38th parallel and a long stalemate ensued, though where fighting broke out, such as the three Battles of the Hook, it proved especially bitter.  

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Peace talks began in July 1951, but disagreement over the repatriation of POWs led to protracted negotiations. The conflict dragged on, claiming the lives of as many as 5 million civilians and military personnel, until the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953. Tensions remain.  

In the mid to late 1960s a series of incidents threatened the armistice, including armed clashes along the DMZ separating north and south, the attempted assassination of South Korean President Park Chung Hee (amid the January 1968 Blue House Raid), the capture of the U.S. spy ship Pueblo that same month and North Korea’s 1969 shootdown of a U.S. Lockheed EC-121M Warning Star spy plane over the Sea of Japan, killing 31 crewmen.  

North Korea has become increasingly isolated on the world stage, particularly in the wake of the Cold War. In 1994 President Bill Clinton, on receiving intel that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons, weighed bombing its nuclear reactor at Nyongbyon. In 2002, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush included North Korea in his “axis of evil” list of states sponsoring terrorism. In June 2019 Donald Trump tried a different tack, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea when he stepped into the DMZ to shake hands with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Despite such overtures, Kim has recently stepped up the rhetoric and since resumed the missile tests.    

Lessons

Beware short-term commitments: The United States occupied South Korea at war’s end in 1945 and withdrew three years later, leaving South Korea weak and ill prepared to resist a North Korean invasion, once again necessitating military intervention.

Ignore intelligence at your own peril: In October 1950 MacArthur dismissed information regarding Chinese troop movements and assured Washington that Beijing would not intervene.
Chinese troops crossed the Yalu on the 19th and attacked on the 25th.

Sometimes divorce is inevitable: Today South Korea is a thriving, modern republic, while North Korea remains a communist backwater. Reconciliation seems unlikely.

This story appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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Those of us who still build the occasional model airplane on a rainy weekend have noticed that the small hobby shops that filled their shelves with colorful boxes of airplanes, tanks and the occasional 1967 Chevy Camaro have been disappearing from the American landscape. The classic model companies of our youth—Comet, Hawk and Lindberg—have also gone away. Even 1970s and ’80s stalwarts like Revell and Monogram combined forces at one point but have since been bought by a German business group.

Over time tastes also changed and the older, less-detailed kits became a bit passé. Modelers wanted more accurate scale models that they could build into “museum quality” reproductions. We wanted to build the P-51D, not the B version, and have a better choice of bombs or rockets and at least three different choices of markings. The heavy steel molds that produced those earlier kits wound up on warehouse shelves, waiting to be melted down.

Or maybe not.

In 2009 Atlantis Hobbies, based on Long Island just outside of New York City, began looking for some of those older out-of-production molds. Their mission was to produce nostalgia by bringing back the classic kits that got us all started. They quickly amassed a veritable museum of plastic model history, nostalgic items that can fill important spots in any collection. They range from rare aircraft like the P6M Seamaster and Convair 990 airliner to the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the “Rat Fink” hot rods of the 1960s. For me, Atlantis brought back memories of building kits while trying desperately to keep glue from getting on the kitchen table. I’m looking forward to the next addition to their collection and a few more memories on some rainy weekend.

One of Atlantis’s classic kits is the 1/48th-scale Curtiss JN-4D Jenny, originally produced by Lindberg in 1955. Lindberg was an early plastic scale-model company in the United States, producing a wide range of imitation boats and automobiles in the 1940s. Their line of airplane kits ranged from early Cold War fighters to the classic biplanes of World War I. Light on detail, which is typical of the time, the Lindberg Jenny is simple to put together and reasonably accurate. Perhaps skills learned over the years will help you make a more detailed version this time around.

The model is molded in a deep green color. After cleaning up the parts in a solution of water and dish soap, adding a coat of a light-colored primer is good idea. Now it’s time to get down to business.

Like the real thing, the cockpit is a simple affair—two seats, control sticks, rudder bars and a pair of shapes that double as control panels. Paint the cockpit floor and the control panels a light tan, then lightly streak with a darker color to imitate wood grain. Paint the inside of the cockpit area a slightly darker tan. A pair of after-market resin seats with a period wicker look will take the place of the kit parts. Add a pair of simple seat belts to give cockpit some extra interest. The kit provides a couple of decals that represent the few cockpit instruments.  

It’s time to finish the fuselage. The two halves fit well, but here’s here where the kit shows a little of its age. Minor flash and sink marks from the original molds are unavoidable and need a little care. Filling and sanding these flaws will require a bit of putty and a fair amount of patience. They are most noticeable across the lower wing. Once everything is smooth, you’re ready to get painting. For this military version of the airplane, the fabric part of the fuselage (to the rear of the cockpit) should be a pale tan color. The forward section was made of metal and should be masked off and painted olive green. The edge of each cockpit was lined with leather, so paint that area a reddish-brown color and set aside the finished fuselage to dry.

Next, paint the wings, rudder and horizontal stabilizer the same light tan color as the fuselage. The struts should be a darker wood brown. Landing gear struts and the tail skid should also have that wooden look.

Cement the lower wings, horizontal stabilizer and rudder to the fuselage. Give the assembly a coat of clear gloss and you can begin to add the airplane’s markings. Decals are a simple affair, and the kit has a nice set replicating the original version that came with the old Lindberg kit. Markings for a post-war Barnstormer and a color guide that shows a more historically accurate U.S. Army Air Service color scheme are provided with the instructions.

It’s time to attach the upper wing, always a part of the build I found tricky when I was younger. Take your time as you place the struts into their positions. Carefully add the landing gear and tail skid and the Jenny starts to look like the classic trainer it is. Give the airplane another coat of clear varnish to seal the decals.

The JN-4D is a web of rigging, wires and cables that control ailerons and stabilizers and supporting struts that hold the whole thing together. It has a spindly, fragile look that belies the stable airplane that it was. Pay close attention to your research in order to accurately rig the airplane. Open up that big box of patience; you’ll need it and probably spend more time here than you did actually building the airplane. The results will be well worth the effort.

Start rigging from the center and work out toward the wingtips. A number of companies produce a thin thread that is easy to use with a bit of superglue. “Old School” modelers might opt for thinly stretched sprue, a time-consuming technique to master. Tackle the back half of the airplane with the cables connecting the horizontal stabilizer and rudder. Remember to step back from time to time in order to let the cement cure and not get too far ahead of yourself. Patience.

With the complex rigging complete, it’s time to add the engine, radiator and propeller. Paint the engine aluminum with a dark wash to pick out details. Paint the radiator a metallic color and the area around the outside copper. The propeller should be painted a brown “oak” and you can drybrush a darker color to simulate streaks of wood grain. The hub is steel. Many props were fitted with metal tips and a leading edge. A touch of brass colored paint does the trick.

The kit comes with two tiny clear windscreen parts. While you might want to use them, cutting two pieces from a sheet of clear plastic looks a bit more to scale.

With the windscreens attached and the Jenny fully rigged, it’s time to find it a prime spot among your collection of early biplanes.

Atlantis gave me a couple of nostalgic weekends, and I appreciate the reminiscing and the chance to add a classic airplane to my display shelf. I look forward to getting another taste of nostalgia soon.

Bullets zipped by him like a thunderstorm gone frenetic, whistling past his ears and slamming into the crumbling walls overhead. Minutes earlier the young Hispanic had bolted across the plaza to hole up in the tiny wood-and-adobe jacal—meager refuge from the coming hail of lead. Over the next 36 hours more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition would riddle the structure, tearing away parts of the house. Eight slugs were later pried from a broom handle.

Yet through it all the teen survived unscathed.

In late October 1884, in a dramatic display of skill, spunk and luck, unimposing 5-foot-7 19-year-old Elfego Baca instigated and prevailed in what was likely the most unequal civilian gunfight in the history of the American West. Certainly, it was the most unusual ever recorded.

Elfego’s Early Life

Many legends surround Elfego Baca, but a few facts are certain. On Feb. 27, 1865, he was born in Socorro, New Mexico Territory, to Francisco and Juana María Baca. The first legend has it his mother was playing las Iglesias, the Mexican version of softball, when her son emerged into the world right there on the field. Another legend claims Elfego was kidnapped in early childhood by Indians who immediately returned the toddler to his family after his screaming disturbed the serenity of the abductors’ camp.

A year after Baca’s birth his parents relocated the family to Topeka, Kan. There, surrounded by Anglos, Elfego grew up learning English and how to defend himself—using his wits before resorting to fists or gunplay, but never backing down. 

Then, in early 1872 an unrecorded illness struck the family, claiming the lives of Baca’s mother, two sisters and a brother. Deciding to return to New Mexico Territory, Elfego’s father, Francisco, brought along eldest son Abdenago but left Elfego in the care of an orphanage. Settling in the small town of Belen, in Valencia County some 40 miles north of Socorro, the senior Baca was soon appointed marshal.

In 1880 15-year-old Elfego left the orphanage and made his way to Socorro, some 75 miles south of Albuquerque. There he reunited with brother Abdenago and other members of the Baca clan, later reconnecting with father Francisco. But it was to be a brief reunion for Elfego and his father. That December in the line of duty Marshal Baca shot into the midst of a drunken brawl in Belen, killing a man. Tried for murder the following spring, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Francisco was being held in the Valencia County Jail, in Los Lunas, awaiting transfer to the Kansas State Penitentiary, in Lansing, when he and three other prisoners were “liberated” by Elfego and 15-year-old accomplice identified only as Chavez.

Newspapers reported details of the jailbreak, but only a few people knew of Elfego’s involvement. After escorting his father to El Paso, Texas, where Francisco could slip across the international border should need arise, Elfego returned to New Mexico Territory. Young Baca worked on his uncle’s isolated Socorro cattle ranch and then for a time in the Albuquerque area, where he transported meat by wagon to Santa Fe Railroad workers. But he always returned home to Socorro.

“Not Afraid”

From the 1880s into the ’90s Socorro was besieged by more than 3,000 miners without benefit of much law enforcement. Sheriffs were stretched thin, thus the town ran wide open 24 hours a day. One day in January 1883 liquored-up Texas cowboys staggered out of a Socorro saloon and rode through the Hispanic neighborhoods in a cloud of dust and bullets. County Sheriff Pete Simpson was in pursuit when he happened across Baca. Mounted and armed, Elfego, weeks shy of his 18th birthday, joined the chase at Simpson’s request. In an interview years later Baca claimed to have shot one of the fleeing horsemen from the saddle at better than 300 yards. Newspapers at the time reported that Simpson had made the shot, but Elfego remained cocky about the encounter. When asked if he knew the name of the dead cowboy, he replied flippantly, “He wasn’t able to tell me by the time I caught up with him.”

Though still wild and reckless in many respects, Elfego took a desk job at age 19 as a mercantile clerk for onetime Socorro judge and mayor Juan José Baca (not a relative), where the teen’s ability to speak both Spanish and English served him well. Though hardly as exciting as being a posse member, it beat being punching cows. Still, Elfego harbored ambitions of being a lawman.

In October 1884 Pedro Sarracino, a county sheriff and saloon owner from San Francisco Plaza, aka Frisco (present-day Reserve, N.M.), rode to Socorro to visit storeowner Baca, his brother-in-law. While there Sarracino mentioned to Elfego that several cattle ranches had sprung up in the Frisco area, and that their hands, mostly rowdy Texans, were running roughshod over local Hispanics. The chaos had recently come to a head when cowboys tortured and maimed a local man in Sarracino’s cantina. Outraged and full of teenage braggadocio, an outraged Elfego declared, “I will show the Texans there is at least one Mexican in the county who is not afraid of an American cowboy.” According to a 1924 autobiographical pamphlet, Baca volunteered on the spot to be Sarracino’s deputy. “I told him that if he would take me back to Frisco with him, that I would make myself a self-made deputy.” Elfego later claimed to have made his own badge. With that, the pair headed to Frisco, 110 miles west as the crow flies in far west-central New Mexico Territory. 

The Legendary Fight

For two centuries before Anglo miners and trappers explored the region that today comprises western New Mexico and eastern Arizona the land supported several hundred Hispanic families. Farming, fishing and hunting kept the people well fed. Long before that, of course, the region had supported various sedentary Indian tribes.

In the 1880s cattlemen arrived from Texas and Oklahoma, daily swelling the population of sprawling San Francisco Plaza, a string of three settlements along the namesake river, which by 1884 had become a staging ground for cross-cultural sparring. Anglos sparred with Hispanics who sparred with Indians, and around it went. Adding fuel to the flames were heated arguments between the various cattle outfits—men who “rode for the brand” and took offense when someone from a competing ranch made an offhand comment. On the heels of the influx of rash young men more than a dozen saloons and bordellos sprang up in Middle and Lower Frisco. The valley was rife with tension.

Soon after Sarracino and young Baca arrived in town, Elfego stepped forward to make his first official arrest. On Oct. 29, 1884, inside the popular Milligan’s Whiskey Bar, drunken cowboy Charlie McCarty brandished his pistol at Hispanic patrons, ordering them to dance, then shot off Baca’s hat. Standing his ground, Baca flashed his badge at McCarty, who hailed from the John Bunyan Slaughter ranch, a notoriously rough Socorro County outfit. Somehow Elfego managed to take the man’s gun. 

Cowboys gathered outside were unhappy to hear that this swaggering, self-deputized Hispanic hero had snagged their partner. Liquored up and ready to fight, the Slaughter cowboys leveled their Winchesters at the saloon, cocked at the ready. As angry shouts, curses and threats from the street resounded off the interior walls, Baca barricaded the saloon doors and windows.

The leader of the mob, Slaughter ranch foreman Young Parham, demanded McCarty’s release even while testing the doors and windows with his shoulders. Parham vowed he and his men would take their friend by force if necessary. Elfego hollered back from inside, threatening to shoot if the cowboys weren’t “out of there by the count of three.” The story goes that the ranch hands had begun to crack jokes about Elfego’s race being unable to count, when they heard him call out in a single quick breath, “One-two-three!” Baca and his “deputies”—friends who’d joined him inside—then fired several warning shots through the door.

In the resulting fusillade Parham had his horse shot out from under him, and as it collapsed, the horse crushed and killed him. Another cowboy caught a bullet through his knee. Out of ammunition and focused on caring for Parham, his horse and the wounded man, the ranch hands retreated, swearing vengeance against Baca and his deputies, who remained holed up at Milligan’s. Early the next morning Slaughter’s hands offered a compromise, vowing to leave be those inside the saloon if Baca would allow McCarty to be tried at a neighboring house. Elfego warily agreed and strolled next door with his ward.

At the speedy trial the justice of the peace fined the sobered-up McCarty $5 and ordered his release. By then, however, rumors had spread among the hands on surrounding ranches that Hispanics in Frisco had gone on a murderous rampage, killing and dismembering Anglo citizens. Seeking to mollify the gathering mob, the justice moved to detain Baca for questioning in Parham’s death.

Unwilling to be arrested, mobbed and undoubtedly lynched, Baca slipped out the “courtroom’s” side door and dashed across the plaza to a crude little jacal whose walls of mesquite sticks and dried mud would almost certainly not stop bullets. Evicting owner Geronimo Armijo and family, Elfego settled in for a siege. While much of the populace fled into the overlooking hills to watch the unfolding drama, some 80 vengeance-seeking ranch hands, using the adobe buttresses of a local church as cover, emptied their weapons into the jacal, reloaded and kept firing until its walls were full of holes. 

Incredibly, none of the bullets struck Baca. All attempts to dislodge the teen were unsuccessful. He refused to come out. In frustration Burt Hearne, of the Spur outfit, rode up to the jacal, leapt from his horse and tried to force the door. Immediately, shots from inside struck Hearne in the stomach. He died within moments. The cowboy soon had company. In the long gunplay four of the vigilantes were killed, eight wounded. Late that evening someone lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it at the jacal. The resulting explosion collapsed the roof and one wall. To spectators and Baca’s attackers alike it seemed no one could have survived the blast. But none of the cowboys was willing to investigate in the darkness. They wisely decided to wait and sift the ruins soberly in the light of day. 

As the morning sun peaked over the Mogollon Rim, the hands who’d spent the night sleeping on the cold ground around Baca’s hideout awoke to the aroma of steeping coffee and fresh tortillas—from inside the jacal. After a hearty breakfast the very much alive Baca resumed his watch. One hungry and enraged cowboy charged forward using a cast-iron shield pirated from a cookstove, only to flee and drop the armor after a slug creased his hairline.

At 6 that evening, a day and a half after the first shots were fired, the battle ended when a bona fide Socorro County deputy sheriff, Frank Rose, persuaded Baca to surrender. Before doing so, Elfego insisted on two conditions: to stand trial in Socorro, and to retain his two pistols (one was McCarty’s). The next morning he rode in the back of a buckboard on the return trip to his hometown. Trailing cowboys were warned not to approach.

Back in Frisco curious onlookers pored over the jacal. Inside, they were astonished to find an intact plaster statue of Nuestra Señora Doña Ana. That Baca had survived was also considered a miracle—until his secret was revealed. The jacal’s floor was recessed 18 inches belowground, enough to have screened Elfego from the incoming barrage. 

Yet Baca did seem to lead a charmed life, for an ambush planned for him on the road to Socorro also failed. Two separate groups of would-be assassins each mistakenly thought the other had carried out the attack. Meanwhile, the lawman arrived safely in custody in Socorro.

Charged with murder in the shooting of Hearne, Baca remained in jail until his trial in Albuquerque in May 1885. Among the items entered into evidence was the door of the jacal, bearing nearly 400 bullet holes. That and Sarracino’s testimony convinced the jury Elfego had indeed killed in self-defense. Subsequently tried and acquitted of murder in the death of Parham, Baca was immediately thrust into the status of folk hero to the local Hispanics.

A Colorful Career

Exploiting his notoriety from the Frisco shootout, Baca officially resumed his career as a deputy sheriff in Socorro. He was later elected county sheriff, with the power to secure indictments for the arrest of local lawbreakers. Instead of having his deputies risk life and limb in pursuit of the wanted men, he sent each of the accused a letter: 

“I have a warrant here for your arrest. Please come in by [fill in date] and give yourself up. If you don’t, I’ll know you intend to resist arrest, and I will feel justified in shooting you on sight when I come after you.”

Most fugitives turned themselves in.

Shortly after his acquittal in 1885 Baca married 16-year-old Francisquita Pohmer. Despite alleged dalliances by Elfego, the couple remained together 60 years and raised two sons and four daughters. 

In 1888 Baca was appointed a U.S. marshal and served two years. He then studied law and in 1894 was admitted to the bar. After working for respected jurist Alfred Alexander Freeman’s law firm in Socorro in 1895, Elfego operated his own practice on San Antonio Street in El Paso from 1902 to ’04.

Around 1910 he moved to Albuquerque, where he worked as both a lawyer and private detective. “Dressed in a flowing cape and trailed by a bodyguard, he stalked the downtown streets handing out business cards,” historian Marc Simmons writes. On the front of the card was printed Elfego Baca, Attorney-at-Law, Fees Moderate, on the reverse Private Detective, Divorce Investigations Our Specialty, Discreet Shadowing Done. As if being a private detective wasn’t exciting enough, Baca also worked a stint as a bouncer in a gambling house south of the border in Juárez, Chihuahua.

That period of his life spawned another legend. One day Baca received a telegram from a client in El Paso. “Need you at once,” it read. “Have just been charged with murder.” Attorney Baca supposedly responded with a tongue-in-cheek telegram reading, “Leaving at once with three eyewitnesses.”

When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, Baca ran for Congress as a Republican. Though unsuccessful, he remained a valued political figure for his ability to turn out the Hispanic vote. He held several other public offices in succession, including Socorro County clerk, Socorro County school superintendent, mayor of Socorro, and district attorney for Socorro and Sierra counties. “Most reports say he was the best peace officer Socorro ever had,” Leon Metz writes of Baca in his 1996 book The Shooters.

Still more adventures, with revolutionary overtones, awaited Elfego.

Another Escape

In February 1913, after a period of unremitting turmoil amid the Mexican Revolution, President Victoriano Huerta wrested control of the republic, though he continued to face challenges from guerrilla leaders in the northern provinces. Chief among them was Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who controlled much of the state of Chihuahua, bordering New Mexico.

In early January 1914, hotly pursued by Villa’s army, Huerta-allied General José Inés Salazar crossed into Presidio, Texas. Almost at once he was arrested and charged with having violated American neutrality laws. Placed in military custody at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, the general was later moved to Fort Wingate, near Gallup, New Mexico Territory.

President Huerta in particular wanted Salazar out of jail, and agents of the Mexican government sought the legal services of Baca, whose reputation had spread across the border. Baca traveled to Washington but failed to gain the general’s release. He then engaged in a series of legal shenanigans that garnered his client an additional perjury charge. On November 16 Salazar was transferred to the Bernalillo County Jail, in Baca’s hometown of Albuquerque, to face the charge. Four days later two masked men entered the jail, overpowered and bound the sheriff and sped off in a car with Salazar. He was last spotted in El Paso, headed south.

Word about town had it Huerta’s accomplices had arrived in Albuquerque beforehand and quietly contacted certain influential residents, providing them with substantial funds to arrange Salazar’s freedom. Some suspected Baca had been the ringleader. Yet Elfego had an ironclad alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the escape; he’d been drinking at the crowded Graham Bar in downtown Albuquerque and had even overtly asked a friend for the exact time so he could set his watch.

Regardless, in April 1915 a federal grand jury handed down indictments charging Baca and three other officials with conspiracy in Salazar’s escape. At their December trial all four were acquitted. Elfego’s reputation only soared among Hispanic admirers.

On Feb. 26, 1940, the day before Baca’s 75th birthday, he boasted to The Albuquerque Tribune that of the 30 people he had defended on charges of murder, only one was sent to the penitentiary. In later years Baca worked closely with longtime New Mexico Senator Bronson M. Cutting as a political investigator and wrote a weekly newspaper column in Spanish praising the senator’s work on behalf of local Hispanics. He even switched parties with Cutting in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944, despite poor health, 79-year-old Baca considered running for governor, but that year he failed even to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for district attorney. 

“I Made ’em Believe it”

For more than six decades Baca remained a lively part of New Mexico’s cultural landscape, relating spirited memories of comely señoritas and political intrigues past. His miraculous deliverance from the 1884 Frisco shootout had earned this man of many facets a reputation as one tough hombre. That reputation followed him throughout his years as a lawman, criminal lawyer, district attorney, private detective, chief bouncer of a Prohibition gambling house and American agent for President Huerta.

On July 13, 1936, Janet Smith of the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, conducted an interview with Baca, the notes from which are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. “I never wanted to kill anybody,” Baca told Smith, “but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.” Full of self-confidence throughout his life, Baca added, “In those days I was a self-made deputy. I had a badge I made for myself, and if they didn’t believe I was a deputy, they’d better believe it, because I made ’em believe it.” 

As befitting a legend, New Mexico lawman Elfego Baca, who’d been born near the close of the Civil War in 1865, died at age 80 on Aug. 27, 1945, near the close of World War II. He is buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Albuquerque. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on this topic author Melody Groves recommends Memoirs: Episodes in New Mexico History, 1892–1969, by William A. Keleher; Incredible Elfego Baca: Good Man, Bad Man of the Old West, by Howard Bryan; and The Lost Frontier, by Rod Miller.

No larger collection of artillery had ever been brought to a war’s battlefields in the Western Hemisphere before the Civil War. More than 200,000 men, trained and educated like no other subset of soldiers in this war of amateurs, handled and operated these big guns.

The story continues that the Civil War changed the standards, rules, and results of artillery use, advancing technological, tactical, and other norms forward from the Napoleonic wars, with their smoothbore guns and inaccurate round shot, toward a present and future determined by rifled guns that could be expected to hit their targets with regularity. Artillery would dominate from here on, and the side that figured out how to use it best would surely be victorious.

Not so fast, says Earl J. Hess. The professor emeritus of history at Lincoln Memorial University and author of 30 books on the Civil War argues in his 2022 study Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield that these advances were overrated in determining the war’s outcome as well as the proper place of its artillery on the timeline of military history.

Let’s get right to the heart of it: The Civil War is often considered the “first modern war.” You argue that it was mostly a traditional one. Please explain. 

Anyone who views the Civil War as the first modern war has a very hard case to prove. In my view it overwhelmingly was closer to warfare during the Napoleonic era 50 years before than to World War I 50 years later. A Napoleonic soldier would have been quite comfortable on a Civil War battlefield, while a Civil War soldier would have been stunned by the battlefield created by the Great War of 1914–18. 

In light of that, what were the differences between the artillery forces of previous wars and those of the Civil War? 

Civil War artillery saw only relatively slight improvement over that used in the Napoleonic era. The biggest difference was rifling, which applied to only about half the pieces used during the Civil War. Yet, because mostly of problems with igniting long-range ordnance and problems with seeing targets at great distances, there is no proof that rifled artillery produced any noticeable results on Civil War battlefields other than the odd long-range shot that hit its target because the gun crew happened to be particularly good. 

What were the main improvements over the past? 

Another difference between Civil War artillery and that of previous decades was adding heavier ordnance to the mix. Six-pounders were phased out during the first half of the Civil War in favor of 10-pounders and 12-pounders. Also, the trend was toward eliminating all decorations and handles on the artillery tube because they caused weak points that could not resist the stress of firing as well. Sleek-looking designs, heavier ordnance, and lighter pieces for easier moving around were the trends evident by the 1850s and 1860s. All this amounts to an improvement on the age-old system of artillery, but not a revolutionary break from it. 

What were the greatest disappointments of Civil War artillery? 

Probably the greatest disappointment was the failure of rifled pieces to prove their worth on the battlefield. Their limitations became apparent to many. That is why about half the pieces used by both sides during the war still were smoothbore. Many gunners were convinced they were at least as good as the new rifles, or better. 

How much did the improvements and disappointments have to do with winning and losing the war? 

Civil War artillery failed to achieve more than a supporting role to infantry. It did not come to dominate the battlefield as would happen along the Western Front during World War I. Even in static campaigns like that at Petersburg, and despite the heavy concentration of artillery pieces along the 35-mile-long trench system at Petersburg and Richmond, the guns failed to provide a campaign-winning edge for either side. That does not mean they were unimportant, by any means. They could and did on occasion elevate their role on the battlefield to something like a decisive edge under the right circumstances. One could argue that Union guns did so on January 2, 1863, at Stones River, and Confederate guns did so at the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh, for example. But far more common was their accomplishment in helping infantry hold a position, a much less prominent, though important, role. 

One of the issues you cover in your book is the conflict over control of the artillery between the artillery itself and the infantry. How important was that, and how did it resolve? 

Artillery was a supporting arm of the infantry, and to a lesser extent of the cavalry. It did not have the ability to operate independently, always needing support from foot or mounted troops. That is one of the reasons army culture considered it best to vest infantry commanders with the authority to command artillery. Batteries were assigned to infantry brigades and were under the infantry brigade commander’s orders and relied on his infantry brigade staff for their supplies as well. 

Some artillery officers complained of this arrangement for several reasons. The most prominent one was that it inhibited the concentration of artillery on the battlefield and thus robbed it of its potential to play a decisive role in combat. But more importantly, they complained that infantry brigade staff simply did not know how to supply batteries very well. Another important reason for their complaint was that dispersing the batteries to infantry units greatly limited advancement for artillery officers, most of whom could look forward to holding nothing higher than a captaincy of a battery. 

While historians have widely accepted the opinion of artillery officers without question, I argue that their complaint has only limited validity. The complaint about the inability to concentrate the guns to play a prominent role on the battlefield does not hold water. The most visible concentrations of guns, at Shiloh and Stones River, took place in armies that practiced dispersion of batteries to infantry brigades. The system was flexible. If infantry officers wanted to, they had no difficulty concentrating batteries for a specific job on the battlefield.

There must have been something to their complaints…

Their complaints were quite valid when it came to administrative control, rather than battlefield control. They needed their own staff to supply the batteries and to constantly train the men. 

By the midpoint of the Civil War, the major field armies of both sides began to group field artillery into units of their own, called artillery brigades in some armies and artillery battalions in others. Between battles, these units were under the control of an artillery officer appointed to his position, and he was responsible for supply and training. But during a battle, control of those units reverted to infantry commanders at the division or corps levels. This was not everything the artillery officers wanted, but it was more than they ever had before in American military history. Moreover, it essentially was the system used during the 20th century wars as well.

In the Civil War this arrangement improved the administration and upkeep of the artillery force, but it did not noticeably improve its battlefield performance, which was as good early in the war as it was later in the conflict. Even though some infantry officers foolishly ordered the guns about even though they knew nothing about how to use them, an equal number were keen students of artillery practice and could use the guns well on the battlefield.

There was a third group of infantry officers who knew little if anything about how to use artillery but were wise enough to allow their battery commanders a completely free hand in operating under fire. In other words, there is not such a clear-cut difference between the dispersion policy of 1861–62 and the concentration policy of 1863–65.

How should we think of the Civil War as it occupies the space between Napoleonic warfare and World War I? 

I do not see the Civil War as a transitional conflict between the Napoleonic wars and World War I so much as a minor variation on the Napoleonic model. The things that made the Great War the first truly modern conflict were largely or wholly absent in the Civil War. If that is transition, then one could say there was a huge leap across a big chasm between 1865 and 1914, but an easy step back from 1861 to 1815.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Land mines were used by all sides during the Vietnam War and caused significant casualties. In 1965 alone, more than one-third of U.S. Marine Corps casualties were caused by mines and explosive booby traps. A modern land mine is a concealed explosive device emplaced under, on, or even above the ground to kill or wound enemy troops, or destroy or disable vehicles.

The land mines of the Vietnam era were triggered by direct contact or command-detonated by wire. The most common contact triggers were pressure or pull (tripwire). Anti-personnel mines used a combination of blast and fragmentation effects. Most anti-vehicular mines used blast effect. Land mines are most effectively used in fixed defenses or for “area denial.” Rather than serving as a barrier to enemy movement, the purpose of a defensive minefield is to disrupt and slow an enemy’s advance and channelize him into pre-planned fields of fire and kill-zones.  

Why Land Mines?

Land mines were used by both sides in contested and remote areas. The U.S. deployed millions of air-dropped small anti-personnel “button mines” as part of the McNamara Line strategy to deter NVA infiltration into South Vietnam from North Vietnam and Laos. The explosive charge in the button mines decomposed quickly. Only slightly more effective were the BLU-43/B and BLU-44/B “Dragontooth” mines. The VC made extensive use of anti-personnel mines and booby traps in likely American/ARVN assembly areas, high ground, hedgerows, tree lines, shady areas, trail junctions, and fence lines and gates.

The VC normally did not have enough material to mine an entire fence line. U.S. troops quickly learned to bypass the gates and batter down the fence at some distance from the gate. Yet all too often a later patrol would assume that an already battered-down section of the fence was clear.

The VC, however, were highly disciplined about keeping their mines under surveillance. As soon as one patrol passed through a cleared area, the VC would move in and mine the gap. The VC were methodical about marking their mines so that their troops or local villagers would not walk into them. The markers were cleverly concealed, but known to locals. American and South Vietnamese patrols generally tried to secure cooperation of one or more locals before initiating an area sweep. That was not easy. Villagers might be VC sympathizers or intimidated by other sympathizers who would hold them accountable later.  

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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Types of Land Mines

Command-detonated anti-personnel directional mines were widely used. The U.S. M-18 “Claymore” mine blasted 700 steel balls in a 60-degree arc, 6-feet high, out to a range of about 150 feet. The Claymore was triggered by an electrical blasting cap via a wire with a hand generator.

The VC used any Claymore they captured. The VC and NVA were also supplied with the Chinese-made DH-10 Directional Mine, known as the “ChiCom Claymore.” Crudely made but larger and more powerful than the U.S. M-18, it was devastatingly effective when emplaced in a tree, pointed down a jungle trail. The VC also used the DH-10 to mine anticipated helicopter landing zones.  

The standard U.S. anti-personnel mines were the M-14 and M-16. Called the “Toe Popper,” the M-14 was a pressure-triggered blast mine with a relatively small charge. The M-16 was a fragmentation mine designed after the World War II German S-mine, called a “Bouncing Betty.” When triggered, either by stepping on one of the exposed pressure prongs or pulling a tripwire, a short delay fuze detonated a secondary charge which blew the main body of the mine 5 to 6 feet into the air. A second, slightly longer-delayed fuze then detonated the main charge, spraying fragmentation out to 25 meters.  

An Enduring Menace

Anti-vehicular mines were used to destroy or disable trucks, armored personnel carriers, and sometimes tanks. They were either pressure- or command-detonated by wire. Road-clearing became an almost daily ritual, especially around major bases. Sweep teams of combat engineers with mine detectors worked the roads each morning, while flank security teams screened both sides of the roads looking for evidence of digging, detonating wires, and even ambushes. It was slow and tedious.  

Although North Vietnam manufactured mines and some were supplied by China, the majority of mines used by communist forces in Vietnam were improvised. Enemy forces in Vietnam were exceptionally innovative at turning anything into a mine—including captured or unexploded ordnance such as hand grenades and mortar and artillery shells; ammunition cans; oil drums; beer and soda cans; and even bicycle frames. Triggering devices included flashlight batteries, wristwatches, field telephone hand cranks, and mousetraps.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Fishkill, New York was arguably the fulcrum of espionage efforts by Patriots in the American Revolution. Fishkill is where Founding Father John Jay coordinated counterintelligence efforts around undercover agent Enoch Crosby. Crosby’s successful efforts to infiltrate Loyalist militia networks during the war inspired the first best-selling novel in U.S. history, The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1821. Cooper had gleaned the exploits of Crosby from his handler, Jay, over many dinners and created a composite spy character named Harvey Birch. Crosby eventually published his own memoirs several years later, The Spy Unmasked, though unfortunately the sales of his original accounts paled in comparison to Cooper’s smash novel. 

What is largely unknown even today is the existence of the site of an invisible ink laboratory located in what is now East Fishkill. Operated by John Jay’s brother, Sir James Jay, it produced the unique, magical ink that Gen. George Washington heavily relied on for use by many of his spies. This included not only both the Culper Spy Ring of Major Benjamin Tallmadge and the Dayton Spy Ring of Col. Elias Dayton of Elizabeth, New Jersey, but also some very sensitive correspondence of diplomat Silas Deane of Wethersfield, Connecticut and Elias Boudinot of Elizabeth, New Jersey. 

Washington’s Secret Lab

The first of 32 letters involving Gen. Washington, the spymaster, and James Jay (including 10 between Washington and Jay) is an introductory letter about the invisible ink between these two Founding Fathers—to Washington from John Jay:

Fish Kill 19th Novr 1778

Sir

This will be delivered by my Brother, [James] who will communicate & explain to your Excellency a mode of Correspondence, which may be of use, provided proper agents can be obtained. I have experienced its Efficacy by a three Years Trial. We shall remain absolutely silent on the Subject. I have the Honor to be with the highest Esteem & Respect Your Excellency’s most obedient Servant

John Jay

James Jay (1732-1815) was a physician and amateur chemist, who studied and practiced medicine in Great Britain from the 1750s until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. James was knighted by King George III in 1763 for his efforts in raising money for King’s (Columbia) College of New York as well as Ben Franklin’s projected college, now the University of Pennsylvania. James was described as “haughty, proud, overbearing, supercilious, pedantic, vain, and ambitious” as well as being a notorious over-charger; eventually his medical practice “became entirely confined among his own relations.” His writings included a pamphlet written in 1772, Reflections and Observations on the Gout. James developed his invisible ink in 1775 and used it throughout the war in correspondence with his brother, John. He never disclosed the chemistry of the ink.

The Problem With INk

Invisible ink letters were already being composed using any liquid that dried to a clear color. The liquid also needed to be slightly acidic such as milk, lemon, lime or grapefruit juice as well as vinegar. When it was heated by fire, it would redevelop and allow for reading of the intended content. This reaction was able to happen because the heat weakened the fibers in the paper, thereby turning the ink brown and visible. 

James’s invisible ink, however, was unique. The skilled chemist was able to create an ink that would not react to heat. This would prove to be the bane of British leadership in New York which was headed by Gen. Sir Henry Clinton and his intelligence officers, Maj. Henry Beckwith and Major John André.

By April of 1779, the Culper Ring had possession of Jay’s invisible ink and developer, as evidenced by the fact that Abraham Woodhull, aka Culper, wrote on April 12th to Tallmadge that he had received a vial of the invisible stain. 

Washington soon after informed Boudinot he could share James Jay’s secret concoction in a May 3, 1779 letter: “It is in my power, I believe, to procure a liquid which nothing but a counter liquor (rubbed over the paper afterwards) can make legible—Fire which will bring lime juice, milk & other things of this kind to light, has no effect on it.” 

The recipe for this special ink centered around gallotannic acid. This is found in the galls of many species of oak trees. As Washington indicated to Boudinot, anyone wish-ing to develop any letter written in Jay’s invisible ink had to have the counterpart liquid, or developer, also known as the reagent.

Summer 1779 proved to be an important turning point in secret correspondence in the American Revolution. Unbeknownst to Washington, his favorite battlefield commander, Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold, had just begun correspondence with Maj. Andre in May, the month after his wedding to the fetching Peggy Shippen, daughter of a prominent Tory family. Also, that summer the British intercepted a letter of June 21st from Caleb Brewster to Tallmadge, revealing that Anna “Nancy” Strong, wife of Justice Selah Strong, was part of the Culper Ring.

Improving Secrecy

Another hapless event happened on July 3. Tallmadge was embarrassed to report by letter to Washington that he had lost his horse, some guineas and some important papers in a British surprise attack on his camp during the early morning of July 2. Washington replied to his case officer of the Culper Ring: “I have just received your letter of the 3d—the loss of your papers was certainly a most unlucky accident—and shows how dangerous it is to keep papers of any consequence at an advanced post—I beg you will take care to guard against the like in future—If you will send me a trusty person I will replace the guineas.” 

As if all this was not enough, on July 5, a letter from Woodhull in Setauket, Long Island advised his childhood friend Tallmadge that he was under suspicion and therefore could no longer go into the British army camp in New York City. He further informed of his plan to move from the city back to Setauket, adding, “I shall endeavor to establish a confidential friend [Robert Townsend] to step into my place if agreeable direct in your next and forward the ink.”

Over the next several weeks, both Washington and Tallmadge scrambled to improve the tradecraft and the secrecy of the Culper Ring. Two letters on the same day, July 25, attest to these mutual efforts. Washington wrote to Tallmadge from West Point: “All the white Ink I now have (indeed all that there is any prospect of getting soon) is sent in Phial No. I. by Colo. [Samuel] Webb. the liquid in No. 2 is the Counterpart which renders the other visible by wetting the paper with a fine brush after the first has been used & is dry—You will send these to C——r Junr as soon as possible & I beg that no mention may ever be made of your having received such liquids from me or any one else—In all cases & at all times this prudence & circumspection is necessary but it is indispensably so now as I am informed that Govr Tryon has a preparation of the same kind, or something similar to it which may lead to a detection if it is ever known that a matter of this sort has passed from me.” 

Making the Laboratory

That same day, a letter from Tallmadge to Washington demonstrates Tallmadge’s rushed efforts to create his famous code book, which is actually only four pages. The letter was written from Ridgefield, Conn., and enclosed the codes of numbers and words to correspond with the Culper spy ring. The intent was to have a reference guide for key players in the Culper espionage efforts that would not identify the participants to anyone who might intercept a letter. This way, despite interception and decoding, the opposition would still not know key individuals referred to by code names.

By spring 1780, the volume of letters between Washington and James Jay increased, as Washington had suddenly run out of the invisible ink in April. Washington wrote to Jay, who was with his brother John in Fishkill, in a bit of panic on April 9: “The liquid with which you were so obliging as to furnish me for the purpose of private correspondence is exhausted; and as I have found it very useful, I take the liberty to request you will favour me with a further supply. I have still a sufficiency of the materials for the counterpart on hand. Should you not have by you the necessary ingredients, if they are to be procured at any of the Hospitals within your reach, I would wish you to apply for them in my name. I hope you will excuse the trouble I give you on this occasion….P.S. If you should not be able to prepare the liquid in time for the bearer to bring, & will be so good as to commit it to the care of Colo. Hay he will forward it to me.”

James Jay replied to Washington on April 13, “I have the honor of yours of the 9th instant and I do myself the pleasure to send you the medicine you desire, in a little box, which I hope you will receive with this letter. I wish I could furnish you with a greater quantity, because I am afraid you may be too sparing of the little you will receive…This little however is all that remains of what I brought with me from Europe—I have now the principal ingredients for the composition by me, & the rest may be procured: but the misfortune is, that I have no place where a little apparatus may be erected for preparing it…” 

The letter goes on about his need for an appropriate laboratory to reproduce the ingredients. Jay concluded: “I shall soon have the satisfaction of sending you such a supply that you may not only use it freely yourself, but even spare a little to a friend, if necessary, without the apprehension of future want.” 

Washington’s Favorite Ink

Washington was delighted to receive more of Jay’s ink by special courier. It would be interesting to know who was entrusted with such a special, sensitive duty. A likely candidate would have been one of Tallmadge’s colleagues in Col. Elisha Sheldon’s Second Continental Light Dragoons, an elite cavalry unit in which Tallmadge was an officer.

In a letter to Jay, Washington expressed his improved state of affairs—and also his support for having an invisible ink laboratory constructed for Jay. Instead of being obvious about the content in question, Washington cloaked his wording to Jay: “I have had the pleasure of receiving your favours of the 13th & 20th of April. The Box of Medicine mentioned in the former came safe to hand, and was the more acceptable, as I had entirely expended the first parcel with which you had been kind enough to furnish me. I have directed Colo. Hay to assist you in erecting a small Elaboratory from which I hope you will derive improvement and amusement, and the public some advantages.” 

Washington then wrote to Lt. Col. Udny Hay, deputy quartermaster general, who was located at Fishkill because of the town’s supply depot for the Continental Army and patriot militia. He informed Hay that Jay asked for a day or two to build a small “Elaboratory, as he purposes making some experiments which may be of public utility and has already furnished me with some Chymical preparations from which I have derived considerable advantages I think it proper to gratify him.” 

Untraceable

Following a year and a half of “on again, off again” secret correspondence, Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold and Maj. John André met on the shoreline in the woods south of West Point on Sept. 22, 1780. On that same fateful day in 1776, Capt. Nathan Hale had been hanged as a spy by the British in Manhattan. Several days earlier, on Sept. 19, James Jay wrote the last of any existing letters between himself and Washington before war’s end. He apologized for not supplying the “medicine” sooner due to financial constraints. It was evident from the letter and its warm closing that Jay held Washington in high esteem. Years later, in 1784 Jay wrote to Washington, asking him to validate his secret service, which he did. This letter was penned from London, where he lived out the rest of his life.

The invisible ink and Tallmadge’s code book proved largely effective. None of the agents or couriers, nor Tallmadge the case officer, were positively identified or captured by the British. Details of the efforts of James Jay and the Culper Ring did not come to light until the 1930s research of Long Island historian Morton Pennypacker. The team effort of Washington as spymaster, coupled with the many brave agents and couriers (as well as Tallmadge), blended with a talented chemist in James Jay to become a formidable force against the mighty British military. They used ingenuity and creativity in their quest for freedom and independence from the British global empire.

The location of Jay’s secret laboratory is adjacent to the temporary home of John Jay which was the 1740 Judge Theodorus Van Wyck House, located in the Wiccopee hamlet of what is now East Fishkill. This was for many years on the property of today’s large IBM campus. The lab was lost to history sometime after the war, while the Van Wyck House was unfortunately demolished by IBM in the 1970s.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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The Boeing Stratocruiser was the largest and most luxurious airliner of its time. Passengers loved it, but it still failed as a commercial transport. Its mainline service career lasted only a decade, thanks to the one-two punch of eye-watering operating costs and the arrival of the more efficient Boeing 707. It didn’t help that the Stratocruisers’ high-tech propellers often tore themselves loose from the engines, leaving the worldwide fleet with a stupefying accident record. Of the 56 Stratocruisers Boeing built, Pan American Airways alone lost seven—almost one a year between 1952 and 1959. United, Northwest Orient and BOAC each crashed one. Surviving Strats ended up being sold for scrapyard prices. But those junked airplanes led to the development of a remarkable new category of aircraft known as volumetric transports—or, more familiarly, Guppies.

Boeing called the Stratocruiser the Model 377, and its lineage led from…well, nits are painstakingly picked over this issue. Many say that the roots of its family tree were fertilized by the B-29 Superfortress, or at least the later B-50 version, which used the R-4360 engines that would power the Stratocruiser. Others point to Boeing’s double-deck C-97 Stratofreighter and its aerial-refueling tanker version, the KC-97. (To Boeing, these two B-50 derivatives were called Model 367s.) Conventional 1940s aeronautical engineering theory held that there was a limit to an airplane’s fuselage diameter relative to wingspan and powerplants, so most aircraft were designed with a small fuselage and large wings. The porcine Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, the first big postwar transport, pushed fuselage diameter to the max that convention would allow. The C-97, however, pushed things even further.

Some Boeing nerds nominate a single modified Model 367 as the Stratocruiser’s daddy. It was a C-97 that had been fitted out as a passenger-carrying VIP transport, with 80 seats and multiple windows on two levels, called the YC-97B and later designated the C-97B. Boeing built only one.

Its mechanical antecedents notwithstanding, the Stratocruiser came into being thanks largely to one man: Pan Am founder and CEO Juan Terry Trippe. Some assumed from Trippe’s first name that he was Latino. Others accused him of adopting the name to make himself attractive to the South American market where Pan Am originally flew. The truth is that Trippe was a whitebread Yalie who had been named after a distant Venezuelan relative, Juanita Terry. After graduating from Yale, Trippe had worked as a Wall Street financier until he decided to enter the aviation business in 1922, first with a company called Long Island Airways and later with a Florida-based company that evolved into Pan American World Airways. In the years leading up to World War II, Trippe made Pan American Airways synonymous with luxury, grace and prestige by operating a fleet of four-engine Boeing and Martin flying boats over Atlantic and Pacific routes, particularly from San Francisco to Hawaii. These airplanes were the most opulent of their time, and they flew for a coterie of wealthy travelers who had survived the Great Depression. After the war, Trippe wanted to lure this clique back to the Pan Am, but the long runways constructed during the war could now support landplanes like the Lockheed Constellation and the Douglas DC-4 and -6, effectively putting the fancy flying boats out of business.

Pan Am had been operating a small fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners—a pressurized derivative of the B-17 Flying Fortress—but the “Stratoclipper,” as Pan Am dubbed it, was not a success. It didn’t have the range to either cross the Atlantic or fly nonstop across the U.S. The Constellation blew it away, and the Constellation was being operated by Howard Hughes’ TWA. This infuriated Trippe, who hated Hughes, and it had a lot to do with Trippe’s motivation as the Model 377’s launch customer.

Trippe wanted to offer luxury travel with a new semi-double deck airliner that Boeing president William Allen proposed in 1945 and called the Model 377 Stratocruiser. It had a distinctive stepless, glazed-beachball nose and a 14-seat “downstairs” cocktail lounge, accessed via a tight spiral staircase. (Not until the 747 would there be another such extravagance, though the lounge was upstairs rather than down and was quickly turned into revenue space with rows of first-class seats.) Boeing suggested a high-density, 95-seat version of the 377 to be called the Stratocoach, but Trippe recoiled. He wanted a luxury liner, not a cattle car—an airplane to compete with sumptuous ocean liners. 

Trippe ordered 20 Stratocruisers (and later purchased the prototype) with the proviso that Boeing supply none to any airline before Pan Am had at least six. Pan Am paid $1,304,390 each, not including spares, and the airline took delivery of that batch in Oregon instead of Boeing’s home state of Washington, to avoid paying the latter state’s sales tax. At the time, Constellations sold for $1,200,000 and DC-6s went for under a million. After Pan Am, Northwest Orient became the second-biggest Stratocruiser operator by purchasing ten. American Overseas Airlines ordered eight and United bought seven. Swedish Intercontinental Airlines (SILA), soon to become the core of the Scandinavian SAS consortium, bought four, and Britain’s BOAC ordered six to use until the de Havilland Comet jet became operational.

For its Stratocruisers, Pan Am hired the modernist industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to lay out the interiors. Teague used muted colors and simple patterns—no busy floral prints, just gentle lines to match the horizon, so passengers wouldn’t be jarred by looking out a window and then back into the cabin. Everything was done to make the cabin seem wider and taller and to avoid designs that might encourage motion sickness.

At Pan Am’s request, Boeing installed air conditioning that could run independently of other aircraft systems, so that passengers who wished to stay asleep in their berths after the Stratocruiser landed could do so in comfort. Some sleeping berths were wide enough for two, encouraging membership in the four-mile-high club, and an aft compartment was even dubbed the Honeymoon Suite, since Hawaii was a popular destination for newlyweds. Unfortunately, it could turn into a rough ride, since the Stratocruiser was prone to porpoising in turbulent conditions.

The Stratocruiser was originally intended to have four 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines—the B-29’s powerplant—but it was Trippe who suggested using the R-4360s that had been developed for the B-50. They were the most advanced and powerful piston radials to go into production, but Trippe would come to regret his choice. It quickly became apparent that the bleeding-edge technology of the R-4360 and its huge four-blade propeller was not synonymous with reliability or safety. The Pratt & Whitney Corncobs (so named because their 28 cylinder heads resembled rows of kernels) were remarkable engines, putting out 3,500 water-injected horsepower on takeoff, but they pushed the materials and technology of the time beyond reasonable limits. They were a-bridge-too-far engines. Hawaii passengers on 377s would later routinely boast that they’d made it to Honolulu on three engines, occasionally two.

Boeing claimed that the 80-seat 377 would provide luxury, speed and range for just a penny per passenger mile, though this was almost certainly before the true specific fuel consumption of the R-4360 became apparent. Although R-4360s powered all of the super-large postwar airlifters—C-97, C-124 and XC-99—the engine had poor fuel specifics. It burned .43 gallons of gasoline per hour per horsepower while the ubiquitous Pratt & Whitney R-2800 used .38. DC-6s powered by R-2800s soldiered on well after the Stratocruiser was put out to pasture. 

The Strat was the first airliner with turbochargers, though they weren’t used to provide takeoff power. The advanced General Electric turbos joined the chorus during climb and cruise, to turbo-normalize the engines’ rated power. In fact, they doubled the R-4360’s output at altitude, which allowed it to cruise at over 300 mph at 25,000 feet. (Top speed was 340 mph.) The Stratocruiser was also the first American commercial aircraft to employ water injection, which boosted takeoff power from 3,000 to 3,500 horsepower. And it was the first airliner to use the more efficient underwing pressure fueling instead of above-wing gravity-fed fueling, but it still took about two and a half hours to top up the airplane’s standard 7,790-gallon nylon wing bladders. (Pan Am added capacity for an additional 360 gallons to 10 of its Strats, so they could make the New York-to-London trip nonstop. They called them Super Stratocruisers.) Northwest Orient claims to have used its Stratocruisers to become the first airline to serve liquor in U.S. airspace, in August 1959.

At one point Trippe asked Boeing to engineer a six-engine version of the Model 377. He wanted two Wright R-1820s outboard of the number-one and -four R-4360s. It’s not clear why Pan Am dreamed up this impractical mix. Perhaps because it knew how prone to failure the Pratts were? Or was Trippe simply fond of the classy six-engine airliner concept?  He was, after all, the only airline executive to express interest in a commercial version of the six-engine Convair B-36 bomber. Convair had proposed an airliner version of its XC-99, essentially a double-deck B-36, which Trippe saw as a 400-passenger leviathan that could support transcontinental ticket prices equivalent to bus fare. But feeding six ravenous R-4360s exceeded what any airline could afford. 

One of the secrets of the 377’s speed and range was the famous high-aspect-ratio “Boeing wing,” with its proprietary 117 airfoil. Originally designed for the B-29, it was particularly light yet efficient. The Model 377’s wing was 16 percent stronger, 650 pounds lighter and 26 percent more efficient than the original B-29 wing.  

Stratocruisers began coming apart within nine months of entering service. In January 1950 a Pan Am Strat dropped an engine into the Pacific en route to Tokyo. A day later, a Northwest Orient 377 had the number-one engine separate from the wing near Chicago. Pan Am suffered its first 377 passenger fatalities in April 1952, when a prop blade separated from the number-two engine over Brazil and the airplane shook itself to death, the pieces falling into the Amazon jungle. The wreckage was finally spotted three days later, but there were no survivors among the 50 passengers and crew. Nor was the number-two engine and prop ever found.

Investigators were initially baffled by the crashes, but it soon became apparent that the props were the airplane’s Achilles’ heel. Some Stratocruisers had Curtiss electric propellers, usually looked upon warily because of electric-gremlin-induced overspeeds and sudden in-flight prop reversals, but the Curtisses proved docile on the Stratocruiser. However, the typically reliable hydromatic Hamilton-Standard airscrews were not. That’s because the propeller company had lightened the big steel blades for the Stratocruiser by hollowing them and filling the voids with rubbery neoprene. The filler, glued in place, would break loose and quickly stuff itself into the outer extremity of the hollow space, flung outward by the prop’s rotation. The sudden imbalance would cause the prop tip and even the entire blade to break loose. The hollow blades were also prone to cracking or simply breaking.

The most notorious Stratocruiser accident occurred in October 1956, when a Pan Am Strat flying between Honolulu and San Francisco, on the last leg of a round-the-world trip, had a runaway number-one prop that the crew was unable to stop or feather. They oil-starved the engine, which seized, but the prop continued to windmill. The drag was massive. And then the number-four engine decided to ignore its throttle.

Barely aloft on two good engines in the middle of the night, the crew headed for the Coast Guard cutter Pontchartrain, which was on ocean-station duty just 40 miles away. The airplane orbited the cutter until daylight, and then the crew skillfully ditched alongside the ship. All 24 passengers and crew were rescued. Not until pilot Chesley Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles ditched their Airbus in the Hudson River in January 2009 was a water landing so celebrated, or so fully documented.

On November 8, 1957, another Pan Am Stratocruiser plunged into the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and San Francisco. Thirty-eight passengers and six crew were lost, and the cause of the accident remains a mystery. Both the FBI and Pan Am were convinced that foul play was involved. Conspiracy theories revolved around the fact that there were a number of important French businessmen aboard, including a vice-president of automaker Renault, as well as a U.S. Air Force major supposedly involved in a clandestine operation of some sort and a former Navy frogman and demolition expert. Nor did it help that the flight’s purser was known to be an unhappy employee who owned a handful of blasting-cap detonators. 

In late 1958, 12 years after the 377 had first flown, the Civil Aeronautics Board finally issued an airworthiness directive requiring the removal of its hollow-core props. By that time, disintegrating props had resulted in the loss of a quarter of Pan Am’s Stratocruiser fleet, but federal bureaucracy ensured that the airplane’s propeller problems were dealt with somewhere between slowly and not at all.

The 56 Stratocruisers that Boeing built, including the prototype, were just a small portion of the 888 Model 367s and 377s Boeing manufactured, the vast majority of them C-97s and KC-97s. But the Stratocruiser was the airplane that established Boeing as an airliner builder. (The Model 314 Clipper flying boat was a small-run specialty airplane—just 12 built—not a mainline airliner.) But by the late 1950s, their luxury cachet meant little when the real jet set had turned to the 707. Low-cost airlines still flying props were looking for airplanes that were cheap to fly, not Stratocruisers. Transocean, an off-brand carrier that had amassed a fleet of 14 Stratocruisers, sold them all for $7,500 apiece—well less than the cost of a new Aston Martin DB-4 sports car.

The Stratocruiser’s rebirth as a family of super-sized Guppies was initially the work of two men: Jack Conroy and Leo Mansdorf. Conroy was a former B-17 pilot who had become a POW after being shot down over Germany. After the war he was an airline captain, California Air Guard weekend warrior and coast-to-coast record setter in an F-86A Sabre. Mansdorf was an obscure aircraft broker. Yet Mansdorf had bought up almost the entire surviving Stratocruiser fleet at literally a dime on the dollar. He had no idea what to do with them, but he couldn’t resist the bargain.

Mansdorf initially had the idea of grossly inflating Stratocruiser fuselages so they could transport rocket components for NASA. The space agency had been shipping rockets by barge from Texas to Florida’s Cape Canaveral, and the voyage took 25 days, with sea-air corrosion always a problem. Transport by air would cut shipping time to 18 hours, including loading and unloading, and every hour counted during the space race. For his part, Conroy had wanted the airplanes to start a California-to-Hawaii VIP airline, but he bought into Mansdorf’s concept after a well-lubricated lunch with Mansdorf and a bunch of airplane buddies who tossed around preposterous suggestions of what they could build to snare a NASA contract. 

NASA didn’t have the budget to develop the needed heavy lifter itself, and it would have been wildly expensive for Boeing, Douglas or Lockheed to design and engineer such a limited-use craft. Conroy, however, decided to develop a volumetric transport from surplus aircraft—Mansdorf’s Stratocruisers—using private funds from speculators. Conroy himself poured almost a million dollars into the project, under the company name of Aero Spacelines, Inc.

It was an enormous leap of faith. No established aeronautical engineer would buy into the concept of trying to fly an airplane with so extreme a fuselage diameter. But Conroy took the design beyond those assumed limitations. It was hard to imagine anybody developing a successful cargo carrier from the husks of so unsuccessful an airliner. And husks they were, for intact Stratocruisers weren’t used to build Guppies; instead, mix-and-match major components—cockpit sections, empennages, fuselages, wings—were patched together. Many of them were from C-97s, not Strats.

German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who had become the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1960, had been a pilot since the mid-1930s and had flown everything from Messerschmitt Me-109s to helicopters. He involved himself substantially in the Guppy program. The initial idea had been to carry rocket loads externally, atop Douglas C-133s, but von Braun quickly nixed that scheme. He was also a big help when the Federal Aviation Administration became antsy about granting Conroy’s monsters the supplemental type certificate required for a modified aircraft. Von Braun leaned on the FAA to get with the program.

The first of the bloated Stratocruisers was called the Pregnant Guppy and in 1963 it transported components of the Titan rocket used for the Gemini program and went on to fly parts of Apollo’s Saturn. The Super Guppy, next in line, replaced the PG’s R-4350 engines with either Pratt & Whitney or Allison turboprops (five were built). The Mini Guppy reverted to R-4360s and was built to carry conventional oversize commercial cargo. It was the only version to be fully FAA-certificated.

And here the Stratocruiser line dies out, with just one Super Guppy still being operated by NASA. Not a single Stratocruiser survives, not even as a static museum exhibit. The jets arrived just in time. Had anybody tried to push the Stratocruiser’s 1930s technology just one level further, it would have been a disaster. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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On October 5, 1869, just more than four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and 34 years before the Wright Brothers took off, Watson Fell Quinby was granted this patent for a human “Flying Machine.” The contraption used two side wings and a “dorsal wing,” supported by the shoulders and waist, powered by stay-cords attached to the feet, and guided or steered by hand. To our modern eyes, the device looks comical, of course. Had it worked, the old joke, “I just flew in from Newark, and boy are my arms tired,” would have been a reality. And it must have seemed ridiculous to those who lacked Quinby’s vision or foresight in an age without air travel.  

“We hardly think he will be able to compete with the swallows in this harness,” an 1871 article in Scientific American quipped about Quinby’s invention. “We would advise him to start from some low point at first, so that, if he should fall down, it will not hurt him much.”

He did not heed this advice. Quinby, born in 1825 and a successful physician, reportedly built his machine secretly in his carriage house in Newport, Del. When it came time to test it, he donned a skin-tight suit, strapped the machine to his body, and leapt into the air from the roof of a small building. He soon discovered its failings. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and family members who had gathered to witness the flight test, rescued him from the wreckage. Quinby’s dream of flight was undeterred. He patented an improved “Flying Apparatus” in 1872 and “Aerial Ship” in 1879. Neither of those inventions ever took off, either.  

He did live long enough to see powered air flight become a reality, and even become a factor in war. When he died in 1918 at the age of 93, the Wilmington Morning News penned his obituary, and wrote: “From boyhood Dr. Quinby delighted in mechanical experiment, and during his mature life has invented several useful devices since completing his airship, a rotary digger, a method of arch construction without the use of forms and centers, a conduit for underground wires and pipes.”

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Who says living in the past doesn’t pay? Doug Hansen has turned a youthful passion for old-world craftsmanship into an internationally renowned business still rooted on family land in Letcher, S.D. Hansen Wheel & Wagon Shop has restored and built wagons and stagecoaches for museums, theme parks, film and TV productions, collectors, reenactors and people who just plain like to travel by wagon. Working in new and old buildings—the shop’s finishing area is in a former railroad depot—the Hansen team has built wagons and camp gear for such popular productions as Dances With Wolves and 1883, as well as the forthcoming Kevin Costner film Horizons. Hansen has also worked on stagecoaches and wagons for Wells Fargo, Disney, Knotts Berry Farm and Budweiser’s signature Clydesdales. Word has certainly gotten out, as the shop’s history-minded customers include clients in France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Japan and Taiwan—anywhere people celebrate the heritage of fine craftsmanship. 

What inspired you to work on wagons? 

My family gets a lot of credit, because my dad had a nice shop, my mom had a leather shop, and we had horses. My mother is a saddlemaker. My grandfather was a teamster and had worked in his uncle’s blacksmith shop. I was intrigued with old-world craftsmanship as a kid. A wheel needed restoration, so I undertook that. Pretty soon my mother was buying buggies at antique auctions, and I restored them. All of a sudden my hobby got out of control, and I made it a business. We are building those vehicles I’m passionate about. 

Would you rather restore/rebuild or start from scratch? 

When doing restoration, you’re usually just cleaning up, profiling. But in a replication, you have to build everything, and there are specific hardwoods for different components. A spoke is hickory. A felloe [rim] is white oak. The hub is elm. A reach [bearing shaft] is hickory. All your panel wood is yellow poplar. One of the challenges is finding the stock. In today’s hardwood industry most stock is used for kitchen cabinets and furniture. It’s thinner stock. The wagon industry no longer exists, so the heavy stock and specific species are harder to find. We often find we have to custom saw and custom dry, and it’s a long-drawn-out process.

Building a replica is a lot like being a sculptor. You have to rely on your eye and your hand to recreate that. You are sculpting a horse-drawn vehicle, be it a buckboard or a stagecoach. You are sculpting thousands of components. That historical accuracy of the horse-drawn era is form over function. They have to look good. They have to work. 

What type of vehicle do you most like to restore?

The stagecoach is my passion. It is the most complex. The leather thoroughbraces, the pumpkin-shaped vehicle—it is a complex vehicle of industry and artistry. My aptitude is the mechanical, the engineering, and then the artsy side of it. I can easily comprehend the engineering, and I appreciate the design. Like any historical trade, it takes a certain amount of time to understand. You have to get it right historically. It’s not your design; you are replicating a period.  

How do you define your role?

I’m the visionary. I carry chalk in my pocket, and I draw pictures on the ground or a bench, then work with the actual sculptor, the craftsman. 

How do you find or train employees?

It’s not our equipment that builds wagons—we don’t have cookie cutters. It’s our craftsmen, their dedication, skill and passion. All of them have aptitude. Nobody comes aboard as a wainwright or a wheelwright. We bring them on, train them, immerse them in our world. We work as a team—wheelwright, wainwright, blacksmith, coach maker, painter, trimmer and ornamentor. We take wood, iron, pigments, textiles and leather, and poof! you have a vehicle. One day you roll it out, critique it and say, “What can we do better next time?” We strive to be as proficient as the men back in the 1800s. They had all the knowledge. We’re still uncovering lost knowledge. We will never fully understand the process. 

What historical insights have you gleaned?

There’s a difference between a historian who lives it and one who writes it. I can read about a vehicle, I can look at it, but I don’t understand it as much as when I build it and drive it. 

How do you differ from period Old West craftsmen? 

They were forward engineering to meet a need. We are reverse engineering. What we do is a little bit like archaeology. We need to uncover tidbits of information as well as the obstacles. America was built by the teamsters who had the fortitude, ingenuity and desire to get past obstacles. 

Have any projects left you wondering, Why did I agree to do this one?

Can of worms projects we didn’t mean to put that much money into. We try to figure out in advance, Will this be too complex? Then you open the can of worms. All things are obtainable, but not always obtainable by the budget. 

Do any projects stand out?

I enjoy doing conservation and restoration. We’ve learned so much from vehicles with historical content. Now we understand the design, textiles, leathers, pigments and the engineering specifics of the wood species. There’s so much information when you get a historic vehicle like the last stagecoach we worked on, from Annisquam, Ma. It’s like opening a volume of encyclopedias.

The best museum projects would have to be the Oregon Trail replicas we’ve built. It’s an obscure wagon. There were thousands of them, but the emigrants used them up like old trucks. Those are fun. We’ve built covered wagons for trail interpretive centers across the West. Other vehicles that come to mind are the stagecoaches. We’ve restored Wells Fargo coaches that had original content in them—signatures, dates. We even found an upholsterer’s tool. They’re all fascinating. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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He was a frontier lawman above reproach and probably made a greater impact on his assigned jurisdiction than any other badge wearer west of the Mississippi. Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was part Superman, part Sherlock Holmes and part Lone Ranger. But he was real, and he was black.

The larger-than-life African-American marshal worked in the most dangerous area for federal peace officers, Oklahoma and Indian territories, for 32 years. Recent research shows that before the two territories merged into the state of Oklahoma in 1907, at least 114 deputy U.S. marshals died on duty there. It was no picnic for members of the Indian police or local law enforcement, either, but the challenges and hardships were usually greatest for the deputy marshals.

The majority of federal lawmen were killed in the Cherokee and Creek nations of Indian Territory, within a 50-mile radius of Muskogee, in the Creek Nation. When recognizing the wild towns of the Wild West, Muskogee must be mentioned along with Tombstone, Arizona Territory; Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory; Dodge City, Kan.; and El Paso, Texas.

Born a slave near Van Buren, Ark., in July 1838, young Bass moved with his owner to north Texas in the 1840s. His owner, George R. Reeves, was a farmer, tax collector and sheriff before the Civil War. During the war, Colonel Reeves organized the 11th Cavalry Regiment for Grayson County, Texas. Bass Reeves said in a 1901 interview that he had been George’s body servant but that they had parted company (not on good terms, according to family history) during the war. Supposedly, Bass and George argued during a card game, and Bass knocked his master out cold. In Texas, a slave could be killed for such an act, so Bass headed for Indian Territory and found refuge with the Creek and Seminole Indians, learning their customs and language. (After the war, George Reeves would rise to become speaker of the House of Representatives in Texas before dying from a rabid dog’s bite on September 5, 1882.)

Exactly what Bass Reeves did during the Civil War after he left his master remains uncertain. One uncorroborated claim says that Reeves served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant during the conflict. It’s possible he could have been with one of the guerrilla Union Indian bands in the territory, such as the Cherokee Pins. He might also have served with the Union’s First Indian Home Guard Regiment, composed mostly of Seminoles and Creeks, under an Indian name. The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole), who earlier had been relocated from the Southeast to Indian Territory, fought on both sides during the conflict. Afterward, the western portion of the territory was taken away from them and set aside as reservations for Plains Indian tribes (Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Apache and Kiowa) who were subdued by the U.S. military.

By the early 1870s, Bass and his family (wife, Jennie, and four children; eventually there would be 11 children) were living in Arkansas. Although other blacks lived in the countryside near Van Buren, Reeves built a substantial home for his family right in the town proper on the riverfront. Several oral stories say that Reeves served as a scout and guide for federal lawmen going into Indian Territory in search of outlaws. A better employment opportunity came in 1875. That March, Judge Isaac C. Parker took over the Fort Smith federal court in Arkansas, which had jurisdiction over all Indian Territory and western Arkansas, and he promptly ordered his marshal to hire 200 deputies. At that time, the territory consisted of all the land that would become the state of Oklahoma except for the panhandle. This was the largest federal court, in terms of area, in U.S. history, and most likely there were never more than 70 deputies covering the vast area at any one time. Bass Reeves was one of the deputies hired that year. He was skilled with weapons, could speak several Indian languages and apparently knew the lay of the land. The federal police had jurisdiction over whites or blacks that were not citizens of the respective tribes in Indian Territory. The Indians had their own police and courts for their citizens. Noncitizens who committed crimes against the Indians would have to be arrested by deputy U.S. marshals and their cases heard in federal court.

Bass Reeves has been called the first commissioned African-American deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River, but this may not be true. A story in the “Indian Pioneer Papers” at the Oklahoma State History Museum in Oklahoma City tells of a posse led by one “Negro” Smith from Fort Smith in 1867. Smith was sent to catch a gang of outlaws who had robbed a stagecoach and killed the driver near Atoka, in the Choctaw Nation. The Cherokee Advocate reported on October 14, 1871, that a Cherokee Indian named Ross had killed a black deputy U.S. marshal on the banks of the Arkansas River opposite Fort Smith. Reeves, though, was undoubtedly one of the first, and he certainly became the most famous black deputy to work the Indian nations before statehood.

In the late 1870s, despite being a commissioned deputy U.S. marshal, Reeves served as a posseman and went into Indian Territory with more experienced lawmen, including Deputy U.S. Marshals Robert J. Topping and Jacob T. Ayers. Later, Reeves and his good friend Deputy U.S. Marshal John H. Mershon teamed up on occasion. Federal law mandated that deputies take at least one posseman whenever they went into the field. On extended trips into the territory, deputy marshals often brought two or more possemen, along with a guard and a cook. One or two supply wagons (sometimes referred to as “tumbleweed wagons”) would serve as headquarters on the prairie while the lawmen rounded up desperadoes. The Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad tracks in the territory were known as the “deadline.” Deputies couldn’t arrest anyone east of the tracks until they were on their way back to Fort Smith. The lawmen typically traveled west to Fort Reno and Anadarko, south to Fort Sill and then back to Fort Smith. This trip took in about 400 miles and would take one to two months depending on high water.

Reeves made catching criminals while in disguise part of his modus operandi. He did this throughout his years while working for the federal courts at Fort Smith, Ark., and Paris, Texas. Sometimes he would appear as a drifter, other times as a cowboy, preacher or farmer. For example, he once got a tip that some dangerous outlaws were holed up in a log cabin, so he dressed in farmer overalls and intentionally got his ramshackle wagon stuck on a nearby tree stump. When the four outlaws came out to help him get unstuck, he got the drop on them and brought them to justice.

In disguise or not, it was a dangerous business. The closest he came to losing his life, he said in a 1906 newspaper interview, came sometime in 1884 while riding the Seminole whiskey trail in search of four men, two white and two black, for whom he had warrants. His pursuit was interrupted by three brothers named Brunter—who had been accused of horse stealing, robbery and several unsolved murders in Indian Territory.

The Brunters got the drop on Reeves. With their guns pointed at the lawman, they ordered him to dismount and keep his hands away from his Colt revolver. Reeves played it cool, showing the brothers warrants for their arrest and asking them what day of the month it was, so that he could make a record for the government. The outlaws thought the lawman must be out of his mind. They told Reeves, “You are just ready to turn in now,” but they were laughing too hard and relaxed their guard. Reeves whipped out his Colt and killed two of the brothers as quick as lightning. While he was in the act of shooting those two, he grabbed the gun barrel of the third outlaw, who could only manage three harmless shots. Reeves hit the third Brunter in the head with his revolver, killing him. There would be no fees to collect on the three dead men, but there were now three fewer desperadoes infesting Indian Territory. Also in 1884, a benchmark year in Reeves’ long career, Bass and the noted Choctaw lawman Charles LeFlore arrested Texas horse thief Robert Landers right in Fort Smith. Reeves’ most celebrated gunfight occurred that same year. Jim Webb, the foreman of the huge Washington-McLish Ranch in the Chickasaw Nation, was his foe. A black preacher who owned a small farm adjacent to the ranch had let a fire get out of control, and it spread onto ranch land. Webb had scolded the preacher, but that didn’t satisfy his anger. He had then shot him to death. Webb was one tough hombre who had reportedly killed 11 men while living in the Brazos River region in Texas. Reeves was able to arrest Webb without incident but was forced to go after him again when the foreman jumped his bond.

In June 1884, Reeves located Webb at Bywaters Store at the foothills of the Arbuckle Mountains. Webb refused to surrender this time, and the two men had a running gunfight. After nearly being shot himself, Reeves got down from his horse, raised his Winchester and shot Webb twice from a distance of about a quarter-mile. Several cowboys and the owner of the store witnessed this gunfight. Heroics like that had caused the Muskogee Indian Journal to refer to Reeves as one of the best deputy U.S. marshals in Indian Territory. At that time, after Reconstruction, it was rare to find black federal policemen anywhere in the country except Indian Territory. Reeves and the other black deputies there would blaze a trail of justice and equality for all citizens of that federal protectorate. During the territorial era, at least 50 black deputy U.S. marshals served in Indian Territory.

Reeves stood out in most any gathering of marshals, white or black, and not just because he stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 180 pounds. He had a reputation for being able to whip any two men with his bare hands and manipulate six-shooters and rifles equally well with either hand. His most trusted weapon was a Winchester rifle, but he was also known to carry as many as three revolvers, two butt forward at his belt for easy access. Territorial newspapers reported that during his career he killed 14 desperadoes—but it could have been twice that number. He brought in a great many men alive, too, including outlaws with bounties on their heads. As a man hunter, he had few equals. On one occasion he hauled in 17 horse thieves in “Comanche country” near Fort Sill. Texas rustlers often ventured into Indian Territory to steal ponies from the Indian residents. Not that Bass Reeves was perfect. Nobody could be a lawman that long without chalking up a blemish or two on his record. On one of his 1884 trips into the Chickasaw Nation, Reeves shot and killed his black cook, William Leech. On April 8, while Reeves and his posse were camped near the Canadian River, he uttered a few choice words about Leech’s cooking, and Leech responded in kind. The possemen assumed the banter was all in fun, since Reeves and Leech had seemingly gotten along in the past. But this time things apparently got out of hand. Leech, according to one popular account, poured some hot grease down the throat of a puppy that Reeves had in camp, and the deputy marshal proceeded to shoot down the cook. Then again it might not have happened that way at all, and the dog might have belonged to Leech. In any case, nothing came of the shooting for a while.

The next year, 1885, was considerably less eventful. But in September ’85, Bass Reeves did swear out a warrant for the arrest of the infamous female outlaw Belle Starr, as well as Fayette Barnett, for horse stealing. Reeves and Belle Starr were apparently on friendly terms. Many times in dealing with people he knew, Reeves would inform them that they were wanted in Fort Smith and it might be better if they would turn themselves in so he wouldn’t have to haul them around the countryside. Although it is not known for sure that he made this suggestion to Mrs. Starr, she did soon turn herself in at Fort Smith—the only time on record that she did so—and reportedly said that she “did not propose to be dragged around by some federal deputy.”

In January 1886, two years after shooting his cook, Reeves was indicted for first-degree murder, arrested by Deputy U.S. Marshal G.J.B. Frair and held in the Fort Smith federal jail. It took six months before Reeves could make bond. On May 21, President Grover Cleveland appointed a new U.S marshal, John Carroll—the first former Confederate veteran that Reeves would serve under at Fort Smith. Whether Carroll had anything to do with the proceedings against Reeves is not known. The trial was finally held in October 1887. Eleven witnesses were called for the prosecution, while Reeves and his excellent attorneys requested 10 witnesses for the defense. Reeves testified that he had argued with Leech while in camp but that nothing had come of it. That same evening, Reeves said, a cartridge caught in his Winchester rifle and while trying to dis lodge the bullet, the gun accidentally went off. The bullet, the defendant continued, struck Leech in the neck, and though Reeves sent for a doctor, the cook expired before medical help could arrive. Reeves was acquitted of malicious murder, but because the murder trial had depleted his substantial savings, he had to sell his home in Van Buren and move his family to a house on the outskirts of Fort Smith.

Reeves resumed his productive ways in the field after this interlude, once again bringing in desperadoes and villains by the dozen. In the spring of 1889, Jacob Yoes, a Union Army veteran, was appointed U.S. marshal at Fort Smith. Late that year, Yoes sent Reeves after a gang of killers, and on December 30, Reeves sent a note to the marshal saying, “Have got the three men who killed Deputy Marshal [Joseph] Lundy [on June 14, 1889].” His three prisoners were Seminole Indians— Nocus Harjo, One Prince and Bill Wolf. In April 1890, Reeves captured the notorious Seminole Tosa-lo-nah (alias Greenleaf), who had murdered and robbed three white men and four Indians. Greenleaf had been on the run from the law for 18 years, and this was the first time he was arrested.

In November 1890, Reeves went after an even more famous Indian Territory outlaw, the Cherokee Ned Christie, who was accused of killing Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Maples in May 1887. Christie had maintained his innocence but refused to come to the white man’s court, for he felt no justice would be served. Reeves and his posse attacked Ned’s hideout in the Cherokee hills, known locally as Ned’s Fort Mountain. Reeves was able to burn down the fortified cabin. At first, he believed Christie was trapped inside, but he later found out that the renegade had escaped. Christie swore vengeance on Reeves but failed to make good on the threat before a large federal posse killed Christie at Fort Mountain on November 2, 1892.

The first white and black settlers had been allowed onto Indian lands in 1889, when Oklahoma Territory, just west of Indian Territory, was opened. In a 1930s interview, Harve Lovelday, an early white settler in Pottawattomie County, described the scene in the territories:

In Old Oklahoma the West was West when the six-shooters worked out in the gambling halls and in the saloons of Asher, Avoca, Wanette, Earlsboro, Violet Springs, Corner, and Keokuk Falls about the time of 1889 and 1890….These small Western towns were inhabited by Negroes, whites, Indians, half-bloods, gamblers, bootleggers, killers and any kind of an outcast….

Bass Reeves, a coal-black Negro, was a U.S. Deputy Marshal during one time and he was the most feared U.S. marshal that was ever heard in that country. To any man or any criminal what was subject to arrest he did his full duty according to law. He brought men before the court to be tried fairly but many times he never brought in all the criminals but would kill some of them. He didn’t want to spend so much time in chasing down the man who resisted arrest so would shoot him down in his tracks.

The new Oklahoma Territory towns were different from the Indian Territory towns in that saloons were legal in the former. Profiteers—principally white men and women—could make a killing by buying liquor in Oklahoma Territory and bringing it into Indian Territory, as long as the deputy U.S. marshals didn’t catch them. The federal court for Oklahoma Territory was in Guthrie. Reeves, like many other deputy U.S. marshals, became cross-deputized so that he could work in both territories.

The worst saloon town in Oklahoma Territory was said to be the Corner, just across the boundary with the Seminole and Chickasaw nations. The term “bootlegging” supposedly came from the drovers, cowboys and ranchers who would put a flat bottle of whiskey in their boots and smuggle the contraband into Indian Territory for profit. The term “last chance” was coined here, because these border saloon towns offered the last chance to get legal whiskey before a traveler crossed into the dry Indian nations. On at least one occasion, Reeves reportedly killed a gunman in a Corner saloon who called him out for a gunfight.

In late June 1891, Reeves and his posse rode into Fort Smith with eight prisoners (five wanted for murder) from the Indian nations. The captured outlaws included William Wright, a black man; Wiley Bear and John Simmer, Indians; and William McDaniel and Ben Card, white men. McDaniel and Card had been arrested for allegedly killing John Irvin, a black man, but Reeves apparently didn’t have enough solid evidence to indict the pair. The Fort Smith Weekly Elevator attacked Reeves for chaining up the two men and dragging them around Creek country for nearly a month. Most likely, Reeves was reprimanded by Marshal Yoes, but there is no record of such action.

Reeves left Fort Smith around 1893 and transferred to the federal court at Paris, Texas. This court had jurisdiction over much of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations in the 1890s. Reeves was stationed at Calvin, Choctaw Nation, and would take many of his prisoners to Pauls Valley, Chickasaw Nation, where a federal commissioner was stationed and there was a jail. Hearings would be held at Pauls Valley, and if necessary, criminals were transferred to the Texas court for trial. By the late 1890s, three federal courts were located in Indian Territory to hear major and minor cases—the Southern District at Ardmore, Central District at McAlester and Northern District at Muskogee. Federal authorities transferred Reeves to the Northern District, where he was first stationed at tiny Wetumka in the Creek Nation. By 1898 he was living in Muskogee, where he would stay until statehood in 1907.

Reeves escaped many assassination attempts during his career, one of the last occurring on the evening of November 14, 1906, at Wybark, Creek Nation. While riding in his buggy looking to serve warrants, he was fired upon under a railroad trestle by unknown parties. He returned fire, but nobody was hit. By that time, Reeves was focusing on arresting black and Indian felons, though he would still arrest white outlaws if the occasion called for it.

The last major gunfight that Reeves took part in erupted in Muskogee on March 26, 1907. A large group of black anarchists calling themselves the United Socialist Club had taken over a two-story house and declared that they could claim any property in town. Two city constables, John Colfield and Guy Fisher, were sent with eviction papers, only to be met at the door of the house by gunfire. Fisher was wounded, but escaped; Colfield was severely wounded and couldn’t move from where he lay. The U.S. marshal’s office was alerted, and Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Bud Ledbetter, along with a black deputy U.S. marshal named Paul Smith and others, arrived on the scene. An intense gunfight followed. Ledbetter killed two of the offenders, and Smith saved Ledbetter’s life by killing one of the radicals who had Ledbetter pinned down. Reeves arrived late. After noting where most of the gunfire was coming from, he plugged an anarchist who was shooting down on the lawmen from an upstairs window. The lawmen killed two more of the group before the remaining seven anarchists surrendered. Constables Colfield and Fisher recovered from their wounds, and Ledbetter called Reeves “one of the bravest men this country has ever known.”

Even before that shootout, on March 8, 1907, the Oklahoma City Weekly Times-Journal ran a story headlined “He has Killed Fourteen Men: A Fearless Negro Deputy of the Indian Territory.” Two days later, on March 10, The Washington Post reprinted that lengthy article. It would be the most national exposure Bass Reeves received during his lifetime. And if accurate, it means that the black anarchist he killed later that month would have been No. 15.

When Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907, the federal office was downsized, and many of the lawmen found other jobs. Bass Reeves, now 68, took a job with the Muskogee police department, walking a downtown beat. Old-timers reported that Reeves would walk with a sidekick who carried a satchel full of pistols and that there was never a crime on his beat. Reeves would complete 32 years of service as a law officer without ever being reported wounded. He died at home of Bright’s disease on January 12, 1910, at age 71, and was buried somewhere in Muskogee. The exact location is not known today; it was probably either in the Old Agency cemetery or in a small black cemetery west of town on Fern Mountain Road. Reeves’ long service and remarkable dedication to duty could match any lawman of his time, and his six-shooter had been, as the two newspapers reported in March 1907, “a potent element in bringing two territories out of the reign of the outlaw, the horsethief and bootlegger, to a great common wealth.”

Art T. Burton, a native of Oklahoma, is a history professor at South Suburban College in South Holland, Ill. His 2006 book Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves is recommended for further reading along with his 1991 book Black, Red, and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territories. Originally published in the February 2007 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.