Well, gentle readers, if u r like me, u r probably annoyed @ the terrible vocab skills of the txt generation.
But W8 just a second. Txtspk isn’t new. It got 2 to the Hoosier St8 B4 U.
In one of the last issues of Indiana’s oldest newspaper, the Vincennes Western Sun, editor John Rice Jones excerpted a clever love poem addressed “To Miss Catherine Jay of Utica.”
Written by an unknown author around 1832 and previously printed in literary magazines back East, “KTJ of UTK” (for short) is probably the earliest example in a Hoosier newspaper of what we now call “text speak.”
Most of the poetry and fiction printed in antebellum Indiana papers was copied out of Eastern journals carried west by riverboat or stagecoach. Samuel Morse invented his own “abbreviated” form of communication around 1844, but the telegraph didn’t come into common use until the 1850s. Early trains often traveled at a speed that we would find maddeningly slow today — sometimes running at less than 20 mph, hardly faster than a horse at a gallop or a steamboat going downriver. (In fact, due to safety concerns over wandering children and livestock, trains were nearly even banned in Indiana before the Civil War.)
John Jones probably saw “Katie Jay of Uticay” in a copy of Dwight’s American Magazine,published in New York in February 1847. An even earlier “cousin” of this amazing poem was printed in the Utica Organ in upstate New York, the Columbia (Penn.) Spy, and Atkinson’s Casket, a popular Philadelphia literary journal,as far back as 1832.
The original “KTJ,” in turn, might have been inspired by two incredible British “text-speak” dirges published in The New Monthly Magazine in London in 1828. Katie Jay’s trans-Atlantic cousins were no less than the unfortunate “Miss LNG of Q” (Ellen Gee of Kew, blinded by a “B” sting in the “I”) and “MLE K of UL” (Emily Kay of Ewell, burned to death while putting “:” [coal on] a kitchen fire grate.) Sad nymphs and “SX” (Essex) maids, these. Hark, friends, gather round and listen 2 their f8, and please 4C: 1 day U 2 shall cease 2B an N.TT!
A 2010 article in the New Yorker mistakenly identifies the anonymous poet who wrote “Katie Jay” as Charles Carroll Bombaugh. In fact, Bombaugh, a medical examiner who died in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1906, only anthologized this clever piece, which came out in his 1867 book Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature. (The popular anthology of literary witticism was republished in 1890.)
On September 22, 1849, “KTJ” appeared on the front page of the Vincennes Western Sun. Like this poem, most of what was printed in the Vincennes paper over the years wasn’t local news or literature, and rarely featured much writing by Hoosier wags. In fact, most of the paper in the late 1840s was taken up with news from Europe, the East Coast, Texas and Mexico.
KTJ shows up next to the latest news from the packet “Europa,” just docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia: Louis Kossuth’s Hungarian Revolution is still being fought. Kossuth’s revolution against the Austrians eventually failed. A few years later, in the winter of 1852 (“cold as cold can B?”), the defeated Hungarian patriot sailed over “the Atlantic C” and toured Indiana, coming on the steamboat Wisconsin from Cincinnati. Kossuth was hailed as a hero of democracy in the Indiana State Sentinel and the Terre-Haute Journal, among other papers. A small town in Washington County in southern Indiana was named after him. Alas, “Kossuth, Indiana” has now almost vanished. We mourn its DK.
With news sometimes traveling west at a great time-lag, people were always eager for entertainment in the meantime. Sometimes printers like Elihu Stout and John Jones had no news to print, so they regaled readers with whatever they could find. And unlike the news, poetry — even when written in “text speak” — can occasionally be timeless.
Hoosier State Chronicles is currently collating issues of the Western Sun from 1837 to 1849 for possible inclusion online later this year. Here’s some other entertaining excerpts from the Vincennes paper in those days. (And if you’re in Vincennes, you can visit a reconstructed version of Elihu Stout’s print shop, originally built in 1808, at Vincennes State Historic Site, the location of the old territorial capitol.)
Hoosier State Chronicles is bringing about 50,000 pages of the South Bend News-Times online. Here’s a short history of one of northern Indiana’s greatest papers.
The News-Times was formed on June 2, 1913, from a merger between the South Bend Times and the short-lived South Bend News. The Times had been in operation under several names since it was founded in 1881 by editor Henry A. Peed (1846-1905). Peed had his start in southern Indiana. A graduate of Franklin College and a major in the Civil War, around 1870 he was editing the Martin County Herald in the small town of Dover Hill near Loogootee. After coming to South Bend to found the pro-Democrat Times, Peed quickly sold out to John B. Stoll and moved to Saline County, Missouri, where he became editor of the Sweet Springs Herald.
John Stoll (1843-1926) was a true “rags to riches” American success story. Born in Württemberg, Germany, Stoll came from a well-off landowning family. His luck changed, however. His father drowned in the Nurg River when Stoll was a child and his mother lost most of their property after her remarriage.
By 1853, Stoll’s mother decided to go to America with her 10-year-old son. The two emigrated to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where they lived in poverty. She died two years later. Stoll barely spoke any English at all. Orphaned in a foreign country at age 12, he struggled to survive by working as a pin boy in a bowling alley and peddling peppermints, pins, and needles on the streets of Harrisburg.
Fortunately, the teenage peddler quickly found a wealthy benefactor who encouraged him to go into the printer’s trade. Stoll’s benefactor was no less than Margaret Brua Cameron, wife of General Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. Like John Stoll, Simon Cameron had been orphaned at age nine. He apprenticed to a printer at the Northumberland Gazette in about 1808 and went on to become the State Printer of Pennsylvania in the 1820s. Cameron succeeded in politics, though he was famous mostly for his corruption. After serving as U.S. Senator, he became Lincoln’s first Secretary of War and briefly U.S. Minister to Russia.
Helped by the Camerons, John Stoll managed to buy his first newspaper – the Johnstown Independent Observer – at age 17. That paper failed due to rising prices during the Civil War. Stoll married Mary Snyder and in 1865 moved with her parents to Noble County, Indiana, where he helped establish the Ligonier National Banner, a major Democratic journal in the Midwest.
Newspaperman, Indiana politician, and German-American John B. Stoll.
Stoll went on to found the Press Association of Northern Indiana in 1881 and the Times Printing Company of South Bend in 1882, which took over daily printing of the South Bend Daily Times in 1883. The Times took on Stoll’s character as editor. A historian of the Indiana Democratic Party and of St. Joseph County, and one of Indiana’s most prominent Germans, Stoll eventually sold the Times to the News-Times Printing Company in August 1911.
Summers was born in 1857 in New Carlisle, Indiana, and graduated from the University of Notre Dame at age 16. The son of an Irish farmer, he went into farming and sold agricultural implements in South Bend and Walkerton. In the 1890s, Summers entered the pharmaceutical business, eventually heading the Vanderhoof Medicine Company. He served as Indiana state senator and was a prominent South Bend businessman. Reportedly a millionaire from his pharmaceutical investments, he died in August 1920. His son-in-law, 23-year-old Joseph M. Stephenson, took over as owner of the paper.
Editors of the News-Times included John H. Zuver (1913-21), Boyd Gurley (1921-1926), Joseph M. Stephenson (1926-27 and 1933-38), Sidney B. Whipple, McCready Huston, and Fred Mills. Boyd Gurley moved on to The Indianapolis Times. He was that paper’s editor when it received a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for helping to undermine the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan under its Grand Dragon, D.C. Stephenson. A Progressive, Gurley attended the funeral of labor leader Mother Jones in 1930.
A 1921 advertisement in Printer’s Ink states that the News-Times publishes “morning, evening, and Sunday editions” and “blankets the territory with 17,000 daily and 18,000 Sunday circulation.” (South Bend in 1921 had a population of about 70,000 people.) To increase profit, the paper tried to appeal to merchants, since the city was “the shopping center for Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan.” A 1921 ad in Editor & Publisher announces that the paper carried 8.6 million lines of advertising in 1920.
News-Times editor Joseph M. Stephenson was featured in a mock version of the paper, published in a 1922 booklet promoting the city’s commerce and industry, South Bend, World Famed.
The News-Times began as a twice-daily publication but became a daily in 1927. Although it reached the peak of its circulation in 1937 during the closing years of the Great Depression, the paper was haunted by financial difficulties and went out of business on December 27, 1938. Its last issue includes a note from Stephenson stating that it had been published at a loss since 1931.
American comedic actor Charles Butterworth (1896-1946) worked as a News-Times reporter after graduating from Notre Dame. Butterworth was allegedly fired for reporting the fictitious death of a prominent South Bend citizen. He went on to work as a journalist in Chicago and New York before heading to Hollywood. (Butterworth’s high-school graduation photo appeared in the News-Times on June 17, 1917.)
Actor and erstwhile News-Times reporter Charles Butterworth (pictured at left with Una Merkel in The Night is Young, 1935) was a graduate of South Bend High School and the University of Notre Dame.
The paper and its immediate predecessors also helped launch the career of the great American sports columnist and short-story writer Ring Lardner and author and cartoonist J.P. McEvoy, best known as the creator of the Dixie Dugan comic strip, popular in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Raised in nearby Niles, Michigan, Lardner had one of his first newspaper jobs reporting for the Times. Though he moved on to the Chicago Tribune, in 1921 he reminisced humorously:
When I was one of the best reporters on the Times (the other one was Harvey Peters), my last daily assignment, between baseball seasons, was to call up every doctor in South Bend, find out who was sick and why, and write long or short pieces about same, depending on the prominence of the invalids and the nature of their ailments. If nobody was sick, I was through for the day. So when and if the News-Times runs my obituary and can think of no other laudatory comment on my all too brief South Bend career, it can at least say with truth, ‘He always wished everybody well.’
Ring Lardner, comic sports writer, had one of his first jobs writing for the News-Times.
The News-Times enjoyed a “high-spirited competition” with its rival, the South Bend Tribune, as the two papers tried to outdo each other in local news coverage. The News-Times was popular with South Bend’s large Eastern European community, remarkable considering that the city had numerous papers in Hungarian and Polish for many years. As early as 1914, the News-Times carried a special column, “News of Interest to Polish Citizens.”
Many of South Bend’s Hungarians and Poles had come here to work in the burgeoning auto industry, as the city was home to the Studebaker and Oliver factories. (It was also home to Notre Dame, the greatest Catholic university in America.) Hungarians, like Germans, were under suspicion during World War I, when their homeland still formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the closing year of the war, the News-Timesreported on a possible American Hungarian Loyalty League opening up in South Bend.
“Menyhart Nagy drives the carriage in front of 317 Chapin St., South Bend, carrying Ernest ‘Hank’ Kovach, the first Hungarian born in Indiana. The photo was taken in 1909. Nagy and his wife owned Nagy’s Place, a bar and restaurant on Kendall Street in South Bend. They opened every morning at 6 to serve Studebaker and Oliver employees.” (South Bend Tribune file photo)Studebaker Vehicle Works, South Bend, Indiana. News-Times, July 18, 1913.
Just like any quick exploration of Hoosier State Chronicles turns up exciting history hidden in dusty newspapers, Hoosier farmers were unearthing plenty of odd finds in their fields in days gone by.
Often, they had recourse to the expertise of John Collett, Indiana’s venerable and fascinating State Geologist. A writer for the Indianapolis Journal in March 1890 remarks (in an article on celery farms) that the Santa-like John Collett “probably knows more about Indiana than anybody within her borders.”
Collett’s own story is as interesting as any of the geological and paleontological finds he studied. He was born in 1828 on the 5,000-acre farm of his father, Stephen Stevenson Collett, near Eugene in Vermillion County. The Colletts had founded that small western Indiana town and also helped lay out Newport on the Wabash River, still the county seat.
Collett’s father and grandfather were major government surveyors in the Maumee and Wabash valleys, going back to the time when Indiana Territory stretched as far north as Lake Superior. During the waning days of the fur trade in the Midwest, Stephen S. Collett even conducted business with the famous John Jacob Astor when Astor was still based at Mackinac Island, Michigan. Later a Terre Haute merchant, John Collett’s father also served as an early state legislator for Parke and Vermillion counties.
One explanation of how the future State Geologist grew to be 6′ 2″ (a huge stature for the time) comes from the 1888 History of Vermillion County. Of his grandfather, Revolutionary War veteran John Collett, Sr., the history says: “One good characteristic he exhibited in the training of his children, was that he never allowed them to sleep in bed with their limbs ‘cuddled up;’ and the result was a peculiarly soldier-like erectness of stature enjoyed by his descendants.”
“Straight as a plumb line,” young John Collett had an early aptitude for mapmaking and geology, and grew up surrounded by the raw beauty of pioneer Indiana, a place that would be hardly recognizable to Hoosiers today.
Collett was educated at Wabash College (Class of 1847), where he once listened to a fiery eulogy on Edgar Allan Poe, but returned into farming. One of the oldest stands of bluegrass in Indiana was said to grow on his large farm at Eugene.
Though he was a widely-renowned expert on rocks, fossils, and Hoosier landforms, Collett wasn’t appointed State Geologist until 1879. (That position was first held by David Dale Owen, son of the famous New Harmony utopian socialist, Robert Owen, and then by David’s brother Richard, professor of geology at Indiana University. Richard Owen was eventually replaced by Collett’s friend E.T. Cox. Cox was educated in the communal school at New Harmony, a place that is not only the birthplace of American socialism, but in some ways the cradle of American geology.)
Though Collett helped Cox on several geological ventures (they mapped the recently-discovered Wyandotte Cave together in 1878), he also farmed, not dedicating himself entirely to geology until the 1880s. While serving as Assistant State Geologist, he also represented Parke and Vermillion counties in the State Senate. Senator Collett spearheaded a bill to make public drunkenness a crime, supported holding livestock owners responsible for their cattle and pigs running loose, and promoted gravel roads when many of Indiana’s roadways were still morasses of mud in the winter and spring.
Collett also strove to make children’s education mandatory, build a state mental hospital, and provide homes for orphans. In fact, the 6′ 2″, 200-pound Senator-Geologist, who had “piercing grey eyes” and a “snow white beard of patriarchal length,” was once hailed as “Patron Saint of the Children of Vermillion County.” At Christmastime, back home on his 75-acre farm, “Uncle John” always sent a wagon-load of candy to kids in Eugene and another wagon-load to a Sunday school in Newport. “You may well believe that he stands in higher estimation with the youngsters of Vermillion County than any other man on earth.” Did he send them a wagon full of “rock candy”?
The Collett Orphanage in Cayuga was named for the family. The State Geologist left it a $200,000 endowment in his will.
Taking over from E.T. Cox as Indiana State Geologist in 1879, Collett ended up writing some of the standard books of the day on Midwestern geology and paleontology. He produced the first geological map of Indiana ever published, in 1883. He often spent money from his own pocket to keep geologists out in the field. Collett’s scientific investigations helped Indiana become the greatest limestone-producing state in the U.S. and were also useful to coal miners and engineers.
Prehistoric animal bones were especially prone to turning up in the 1800s, as settlers literally cut their way into landscapes that had been left intact since the last Ice Age. The draining of wetlands for agriculture — one of the biggest engineering projects of the 19th century — turned up remains of long-dead creatures, including ancient horses and giant beavers. Railroad construction and mining also unearthed old relics.
Geologist John Collett gave a talk in 1890 about “Remains of Big Animals” that were showing up in Indiana. The talk was reported in the Indianapolis Journal on September 14.
One of the most interesting parts of that talk was when Collett remembered a man named Perrin Kent. Like’s Collett’s own father and grandfather, Kent was an early surveyor and settler. Kent lived in Warren County, just north of where the geologist himself grew up. He laid out Williamsport and Attica and lived near the boom town of State Line City.
The Warren County surveyor was also an ardent campaigner for Abraham Lincoln and a good friend of the “Prairie Lawyer.” There is an interesting story here. In February 1861, his 8-year-old grandson, William H. Kent, who later became a reporter for the Omaha World News, took a train ride with President-Elect Lincoln as he crossed over into the Hoosier State at State Line City, en route to Washington. Years later, in a news article published in Omaha in 1911, Kent remembered a melancholy Lincoln looking back down the tracks in a “long and silent reverie” as they left for Williamsport, the next stop on the line. This was the last time Lincoln ever saw Illinois — a surveyor’s line, a war, and eventually an assassin’s bullet all came between him and his home.
Collett, too, recalled a “strong story,” told to him by Perrin Kent. In 1842, Kent was working as a surveyor on part of the Wabash & Erie Canal near Covington, Indiana. Most of the actual digging of the canal was done by Irish laborers (who were typically paid in whiskey and added many of their own bones to Indiana soil.)
This stretch of the canal was cut through a virtual swamp. Grubbing around in “miry peat,” the Irish must have felt like they were back home in Ireland. Collett had to preface the anecdote he was about to tell by stating that Perrin Kent was always known as “a man of unimpeachable veracity, and the story [was] vouched for by others who saw the same thing.” As the geologist told his audience:
The route of the old canal there was a swamp, the old riverbed of the Wabash, twenty-five or thirty feet above the present bed of the river, and the old bed was filled with miry peat. Here were found the huge bones of the lower jaw and the teeth [of a mastodon]. . .
Mr. Kent told me that the Irishmen working in the swamp split open the leg bones of the monster animal and extracted the marrow, which had changed to adipocere [“grave wax” formed from fatty tissues], and they used it as an excellent grease for their boots. Think of it: those fellows greasing their boots with the marrow of animals that were perhaps contemporaries of Noah. Using ex-mummies as fuel on an Egyptian railroad is not near as shocking to the mind of the archaeologist.
Mastodon bones found in the Kankakee River near Walkerton, Indiana, courtesy of the Walkerton Area Historical Society.
With his store of fascinating anecdotes from a lifetime in the field, it’s not hard to imagine how Indiana’s great geologist became one of the most popular men in Indianapolis. (He lived at 116 N. Illinois St., a block west of Monument Circle, at the site of today’s downtown Hilton Hotel.) When he died of pneumonia in Indianapolis on March 15, 1899, at the age of 71, it was reported that he had lived modestly but “leaves a fortune” ($75,000).
Collett never married and was buried in Terre Haute, where his family had gone into business. (His brother Josephus served as President of the Board of Directors at Rose Polytechnic, later Rose-Hulman.) Terre Haute’s Collett Park bears the family name.
This clip from the Indianapolis Journal on December 14, 1884, offers one explanation for how Collett’s hair turned white:
Almost exactly 111 years ago, in January and February 1904, readers of the Indianapolis Journal and Sullivan’s Union and Democrat encountered this news.
An “eccentric” Sullivan County resident — the Hermit of the Wabash, journalists were calling him — had just survived a winter flood on the river. A late-January thaw sent at least two feet of ice water into the hut he called home. Unable to get to higher ground, the 74-year-old recluse passed two frigid days and nights without heat or food, cooped up under his roof, waiting for the flood to recede. The man was “greatly prostrated by this terrible experience.” Doctors were treating him for exposure.
Many readers around Sullivan and Merom knew this “hermit,” or at least of him. He read and wrote poetry, looked like Tolstoy or John Muir, and lived in a remote rustic shack, like his near-contemporary Henry David Thoreau.
Ruth Eno Durham, a Graysville historian of half a century ago, who probably met the hermit when she was a girl, wrote in 1959: “He was a naturalist, a philosopher, a man of culture and refinement living the life of a mussel man, fisherman and outdoorsman.”
Sullivan County historian Tom Frew even believes the “Hermit of the Wabash” is at the center of one of the great photographic mysteries of the Civil War era. Frew may be right. While identifying the “quiet philosopher” as the mystery man of 1859 is uncertain, he was undoubtedly nearby when that iconic image was made, during one of the meteoric events that led up to the war.
How did this ex-Confederate, nature lover, and happy recluse get to a remote corner of the Hoosier State?
Back in 1885, as Ruth Durham recalled, a “small boat with a lone occupant” came up the Wabash and landed at Merom, next to some men out fishing the river for mussels. Midwestern rivers then were full of these creatures. The meat provided food, while their glistening shells were shipped to thriving button factories in Cincinnati. Several small Indiana river towns prospered in the button industry in those days. Mussel harvesting was not banned until 1991.
The lone stranger announced himself. He was “Captain Roland Smythe,” a pseudonym. “He went up the ferry road,” Durham writes, “got some supplies and rowed on up the river.” Easing into the mouth of Turman’s Creek where it flows into the Wabash, the strange boatman met Ruth’s father-in-law, Dr. John L. Durham, “who was standing there and owned the land.”
Smythe and the doctor became friends right away. Durham let him build a two-room hut, christened “Solitude,” on the property he owned with his wife, Mary Mann Durham. The mysterious newcomer lived there for more than twenty years. “Solitude” sat on a high bank of the Wabash, a spot less prone to flooding — though in 1904, his luck ran out.
George Bicknell, a minor Hoosier poet from Sullivan, went out to meet the hermit at Turman’s Creek one summer. His article in Craftsman magazine (September 1909) describes the visit.
Bicknell and others reported that the fascinating hermit was intensely religious, though (like John Muir) unconventionally so. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Smythe was “able to express his thought brilliantly [and] has often been urged to write for publication, but he always refuses . . . [He] says always he prefers to live his song rather than sing it.”
Like Thoreau, who “traveled a great deal in Concord,” discovering the multitude of life in a small place, Captain Smythe was not always solitary. “Hundreds of people visit him every year,” Bicknell wrote. “Many unusual and curious questions are asked him . . . His understanding and knowledge of the classics is unusual. He probably has not seen a set of Shakespeare in forty years, yet there are whole passages from any of the plays which he can give you word for word . . . “
Hundreds of visitors came to “Solitude” to see how he lived the so-called “simple” life. Eventually, the hermit’s own children came. Around 1900, a daughter who lived back East “followed his trail” out to Indiana. Two years after the flood, a 1906 article in the Hutsonville Herald claims:
this daughter, a member of the wealthy inner social circles of New York, found him cooking a meal on his broken-down stove. There was a pathetic scene. She sat on the river banks pleading his return to ‘civilization’ . . . It was then he declared that the ‘wilderness of houses’ and the cramped life held nothing out to him. ‘I will stay near to nature and live with her,’ he declared.
The true identity of “Captain Roland Smythe” was probably not known to anyone in Sullivan County then. He was born Robert Alexander Caskie in Richmond, Virginia, in 1830. The Hutsonville Herald writer mistakenly thought he came from an aristocratic Old Virginia family, “blue bloods . . . whose forefathers dwelt in mansions on the James.” Caskie’s father, in fact, was an immigrant from Ayrshire, Scotland.
The future hermit was educated at the University of Virginia, one of the greatest southern universities during the period. On December 20, 1859, he married Amanda Gregory, daughter of a former Virginia governor, John Munford Gregory. When the Civil War broke out, Caskie went on to serve as captain of Caskie’s Rangers, a mounted company in the 10th Virginia Cavalry. He fought in many of the major battles of the war, including the last one, at Appomattox, where he was mustered out, having been promoted to colonel in February 1865.
A broken man at war’s end, Robert Caskie went back to his family’s tobacco business. But with the South in ruins, he eventually took his family west, becoming one of the biggest tobacco merchants in Missouri. In the late 1870s, the Caskie family was living at Rocheport, on the Missouri River, just west of Columbia.
Bankrupted by a lawsuit back in Virginia, around 1884 the desperate tobacco dealer abandoned his family. On the verge of being driven into poverty, he seems to have chosen it on his own terms. It was then that he rowed up the Wabash, seeking (it seems) a remote place to hide from creditors and his family alike. Durham thought he was too proud to live on his wife’s money.
Robert Caskie had become “Captain Roland Smythe.”
Whatever else his visitors knew about his life, it was an event he had witnessed back in 1859, just a few weeks before he married the daughter of the ex-governor of Virginia, that really stuck in their minds.
In October of that year, the radical abolitionist John Brown tried to spark and arm a massive slave revolt by raiding the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry on the Potomac. Brown’s raid failed catastrophically, inducing anxiety among Virginians. Considered the greatest “terrorist” of his time, the much-hated Brown was scheduled to be hanged on December 2.
To increase security while Brown languished in a Charlestown prison a few miles from Harpers Ferry, Virginia governor Henry Wise had organized several militia companies. One formed in Richmond was known as the “Richmond Greys.” Robert Alexander Caskie appears in their roll book and, as he told the poet George Bicknell, he went to Charlestown that November.
Stopping at the jail where John Brown was being held, Caskie managed to strike up a conversation and friendship with the condemned abolitionist. The 29-year-old Caskie even got permission from Brown’s guard to bring him the newspapers. He also claims that it was he who finally convinced Brown to send a telegram to Philadelphia for his wife.
On December 2, 1859, Caskie watched as Brown stepped up to the gallows, his body on the way to “mouldering in the grave,” as the famous enemy of slavery was memorialized in a Civil War song. Many years later, Caskie described what he saw to George Bicknell:
The wagon was driven through the line and up close to the gallows. John Brown jumped to the ground and skipped up the steps to the platform as though he were a mere boy.
The gallows was unusually high, giving a view of a landscape unsurpassed for its beauty and grandeur. The sun shone with all its brightness, the grass was still green.
It is possible, even likely, that Robert A. Caskie appears in two of the most famous images taken at the time of that event. These are two ambrotypes — a “relative” of the daguerreotype — that languished in obscurity until 1911. Historians generally agree they depict the Richmond Greys and were made in Charlestown just before Brown’s execution. The first one, known as “RG #1,” has become one of the iconic images of the Civil War era. (It was featured in Ken Burns’ famous documentary and book.)
Robert A. Caskie, the “Hermit of the Wabash,” might be the man with the mustache and goatee standing in the middle of “RG#1.” Comparing this to the few other images we have of him, including in old age, the faces are similar.
“RG #1” is a famously contentious image. At least three of the men depicted here — including the one now thought to be Caskie — have been “forensically” examined and identified as John Wilkes Booth. The other two men stand in the left corner.
Lincoln’s assassin, in fact, saw John Brown’s hanging. It is thought that Booth was leaving a theater in Richmond when the Richmond Greys marched by, and the 21-year-old Shakespearean actor bought a uniform from them. Booth definitely witnessed Brown’s last moments.
Booth, too, has a surprising connection to Indiana. His father, the English actor Junius Brutus Booth, fell ill and died on a riverboat on the Ohio River across from southern Indiana in 1852, while en route from New Orleans to Cincinnati, probably after drinking river water.
Under pressure from his children, and “after he became too old to stand the rigors of the river,” Robert Caskie finally left the Wabash Valley around 1910.
In June 1931, a writer for the Sullivan Union remembered that after he left “Solitude,” “Captain Smythe” lived with Ed Salee’s family in Sullivan, then moved off to Indianapolis with the Salee family. One of Caskie’s sons eventually came out to Indianapolis from New York or Philadelphia. “This was the last that was ever heard of the old hermit of the Wabash by the Salees or anybody in this community.”
But the hermit’s adventure was not done. In 1922, aged 90, he applied for a passport and traveled to France and Switzerland, where he lived with a daughter.
Aged 98, Col. Robert Caskie died of heatstroke in Philadelphia in August 1928 and was buried there. In later years, “The Hermit” was reburied at Richmond’s historic Hollywood Cemetery, near many of the honored Confederate dead.
When one of western Indiana’s most beautiful natural areas was turned into a state park in 1947, conservationists who had fought to protect it were faced by a publicity problem: what to do about its name, the one it had been known by for about a century?
Located along Sugar Creek, 45 miles west of Indianapolis, Shades State Park sits in the “shadow” of its better-known neighbor, Turkey Run in Parke County. But as 19th-century tourists knew, the steep, even vertical scenery in these wild gorges — atypical of Indiana’s landscapes — is a powerful lure.
The canyons and cliffs at Shades and Turkey Run stand out in this part of the Midwest, which was scoured, bulldozed, and mostly flattened by glaciers. Ecologically, too, these unique parks are outliers, reminders of a time when Indiana looked more like Wisconsin or Canada. Pine Hills Nature Preserve, now part of Shades, contains one of the southernmost stands of white pines in America. Other geological vestiges of a “primitive,” ancient Indiana are the fern- and lichen-covered sandstone gorges, strewn with small waterfalls, along Sugar Creek.
In fact, as the founders of the Indiana state park system knew when they created the first parks to commemorate Indiana’s 1916 centennial, Turkey Run and Shades are among the few Hoosier landscapes that pioneers would recognize today.
Yet most pioneers avoided Shades. Mostly because of geology: the steep area was too difficult to farm or even log. But partly, it could be, because of folklore and a name.
From sometime in the mid-1800s until 1947, what we call Shades was almost always known by its old pioneer name, the “Shades of Death.” Although the spot was a popular tourist destination as early as the 1880s, and the name didn’t seem to scare many visitors away, an unknown writer in the July 22, 1888, Indianapolis Journal suggests changing it to something less ominous.
“The popularity of the ‘Shades of Death,'” he wrote, “one of Indiana’s most beautiful summer resorts, would undoubtedly be greatly enhanced by a change of name.”
A man naturally hesitates before saying that he has sent his family to the Shades of Death, and does not find it altogether agreeable to be congratulated on his own safe return from there. It casts a chill over otherwise fascinating society notes to read of distinguished citizens who have gone down to the Shades of Death. To be sure, they are heard of the next week as coming back, but the emotions which arise over their return are of the sympathetic sort that go out to those who have been to the gates of death. . .
The Shades of Death should become the ‘Indiana Eden,’ or ‘Montgomery County Paradise,’ or, being a Crawfordsville adjunct, the ‘Litterateur’s Retreat’ – anything to relieve the gloom.
(A stretch of Sugar Creek near the “Shades of Death” had been a favorite fishing spot of Hoosier literary giant General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur. Wallace lived in nearby Crawfordsville.)
In fact, a quick search through news articles digitized by Hoosier State Chronicles turns up plenty of strange mentions, like these: “This train also available for Shades of Death and Montezuma…” “The Odd Fellows of Indiana will hold a picnic at the Shades of Death…” “Miss Anna Moore will go to the Shades of Death this week to spend the summer…”
What was the origin of this old Indiana place name?
In his Sugar Creek Saga (1959), Montgomery County historian Theodore Gronert thought it came from the pioneers’ morbid associations with danger (Native Americans and animals) lurking in the shades. Few settlers, in fact, came to this part of the county. Yet one of those who did settle in the vicinity, an Irishman named Alexander Weir, reportedly chose the area because of its wild beauty. Weir was said to have named the spot on Sugar Creek where he lived “Balhinch” after his native village in Ireland, which this rugged place supposedly reminded him of.
Others speculate that the name “Shades of Death” actually comes from a lost Native American name for the canyons along the creek. Miami and Shawnee bands are thought to have lived in this area just before European settlement.
Though not well substantiated, there is a Potawatomi legend about a huge pitched battle against the Miami, an event that may have taken place on the steep terrain of Pine Hills and Shades in the 1770s, when these tribes fought each other for control of the Illinois prairies and part of the Wabash Valley. The legend alleges that nearly 600 warriors on both sides were slaughtered in these canyons, with only seven Potawatomi living to tell the tale as the last five Miami scattered into the woods in defeat. The truth of the story is nearly impossible to tell.
What is certain is that in 1836, a frightened woman-or perhaps teenage girl-went to trial in Montgomery County, the first woman ever tried for murder here. Surviving records at the courthouse in Crawfordsville show that she was known only as “Mrs. Rush”. She lived with her husband, a pioneer named Moses Rush, whom folklore claims was also an outlaw, along part of Sugar Creek near what became Shades. H.W. Beckwith’s 1881 history of Montgomery County says the Rush cabin was “just below where Deer and Canine’s Mill now stands.” (This is the Deer Mill covered bridge at the edge of the park near Pine Hills.) The remote spot probably suited Rush, who seems to have been a wild man, a drunk, and a brutal wife beater.
Probably nothing at all is known about Moses Rush except that one night in 1836, according to his wife’s court testimony, he came back to their cabin drunk and threatened to kill her. Fortunately, Rush decided to take a nap first. Fearing for her life, his battered wife took an axe and split his skull open — then went to a neighbor and reported her crime. The trial was short. The judge and jury were sympathetic. Moses Rush’s widow was acquitted and possibly even congratulated for ridding Montgomery County of him.
According to Virginia Banta Sharp’s History of Waveland, “The husband’s body was buried near the house where he had lived and on a tree by the grave was cut the letters, Moses Rush, 1836. For many years the words could be seen and much later, a party of picknickers unearthed the remains and found the skull with a 3-inch deep cut in it.”
Another murder took place right outside the boundaries of what became Shades State Park back in 1865, as the Parke County Republican reported on February 15. This story, too, may have reinforced the murderous association with the name “Shades of Death.”
Fearing he was going to be cheated of his inheritance, a 33-year-old farmer, Milton Wineland, brought a double-barreled shotgun to the farm of his father, Frederick. Frederick Wineland “resided in Montgomery county, about four miles northwest of Waveland, but was murdered in this county [Parke], the county line running between his house and the field in which he was at work.” Milton “inquired of his helpless mother where his father was,” then went out in the field, hid behind a fence row, and shot his father and cousin dead.
The murderer then took off as a fugitive, perhaps finding temporary refuge in the gullies and canyons of Shades and Pine Hills. Wineland’s own mother posted $1000 reward for his capture. But a week later, the Parke County Republican thought he had fled to Canada. “Wineland doubtless imagines that a murderer will be safe within the realms of the Queen’s domains,” it was written from Rockville, “inasmuch as deserters, bounty jumpers, and Copperheads fleeing the draft, there find a place of safety.”
Despite the murders, the future park was a peaceful place, considered wild and romantic. It was probably an early stomping ground of Indiana’s most famous painter. Though best known for his Impressionist paintings of Brown County in southern Indiana, T.C. Steele grew up in Waveland, the closest town to “Shades of Death”. When he was given a box of paints, Steele began his formal art training at the Waveland Collegiate Institute, later called Waveland Academy, then at Asbury College (now DePauw University) thirty miles down the road in Greencastle.
A young T.C. Steele, courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.Steele’s boyhood home in Waveland, a ca.-1850 cottage, was bought for restoration in 2014 for $12,500.
Newspapers digitized by Hoosier State Chronicles show the popularity of Shades long before it became a state park and the words “of Death” were dropped from its name. Visitors from Indianapolis and Terre Haute especially were drawn here. (Two-hundred acres of forest were owned by a Dr. Moore from Irvington, on Indianapolis’ East Side.)
Indianapolis physicians planned to build a sanitarium at the Shades of Death around 1890 and there was even a controversial push to connect it to an electric tram line serviced by the Vandalia Railroad. (Waveland in those days had passenger trains.)
These passenger pigeons or doves were carved onto a natural rock bridge called the Devil’s Backbone at Pine Hills in the late 1800s. A portrait of the Devil himself was also graffitied here. Photo by the author.(Devils Back Bone near Bluff Mills, Ind., circa 1900. Waveland Photo Album.)
Shades of Death was mostly a happy place, but one last story from the turn of the century nearly led to a student’s tragic end.
In February 1903, a gang of fifteen freshmen at Wabash College “entered the Wells Club at the supper hour” and kidnapped a member of the rival sophomore class, a student from Iowa named Andrew Thornell (some papers call him Thornley.) Thornell was the captain of the Wabash College baseball team.
Handcuffed, blindfolded, and shoved into a buggy waiting in an alleyway, Thornell ended up being taken at night to a lonely hut or solitary farmhouse near the Shades of Death, twenty miles southwest of Crawfordsville. Three freshmen fastened him to a wooden block on the floor and kept watch over him. The freshmen must have fallen asleep, since Thornell broke loose, jumped from a window, and struck out through the woods around Shades and Pine Hills. Exposed to the elements, the “kidnapped” student got lost and “walked many miles” before he found a farmhouse where someone offered him shelter and food.
Almost every landscape has a story or two that brings it to life. Many will surely remain untold forever, lurking in the “Shades of Death” where old stories go.
From the late 1800’s into the early years of the 20th century, Indiana’s capital city had a body problem. How to protect people who were already dead?
Around 1900, even supernatural visitors to the city’s cemeteries would not have been surprised to find “the quick” prowling among the dead. For decades, grave robbers and vandals regularly stalked Indianapolis’ burial grounds – until the city took bold steps to stop them.
An early description of how big the “body-snatcher” problem was comes from an article in the Indianapolis Journal, published just before Halloween on October 27, 1899. The story concerns a shocking discovery at the Greenlawn Cemetery.
You’d be hard pressed to find any trace of Greenlawn today, but for most of the nineteenth century, this was one of the major city cemeteries. Founded in 1821, while Indianapolis was first being laid out, Greenlawn was the original city burying grounds. Situated along the White River just north of what became Kentucky Ave., the cemetery is thought to have been the oldest in Indianapolis. (Tiny family cemeteries may have existed in the area before then, but no trace of them has been found.) Today, the once hallowed 25-acre spot is occupied by the Diamond Chain Company, just west of Lucas Oil Stadium and just north of where I-70 crosses the river. (The company once manufactured about 60% of the bicycle chains in America.)
Over 1100 Hoosier pioneers were interred at Greenlawn. Vermont-born Indiana governor James Whitcomb (1795-1852) lay there until his daughter ordered his body moved to massive, prestigious Crown Hill Cemetery in 1898. Among those who also found their first, but not final, resting place by the White River were 1200 Union soldiers and over 1600 Confederate POW’s who died of illnesses and battle wounds at the U.S. Army’s Camp Morton or in city hospitals nearby.
Greenlawn, however, shared the fate of all those who came to call it home in the nineteenth century. The cemetery, too, died. Indianapolis’ downtown burying grounds faced all the normal cemetery problems, such as vandalism of tombstones by youth and overcrowding, especially after the numerous Civil War interments. Spring and winter floods on the White River were also a major factor behind its closure to new burials in 1890.
But another cause also drove the city to declare Greenlawn itself “defunct”, and was far more disturbing in nature. As Indianapolis newspapers reminded their readers in 1899, the problem had been around for decades.
While performing some of the earliest removals out to Crown Hill, families and city officials unearthed the grisly fact that “in reality, few if any bodies” buried at Greenlawn prior to the 1890’s were still in their graves.
Robbing a grave for jewels and other valuables is a tale as old as time. Preventative measures against the desecration of graves and theft of items meant to stay with the dead had actually led to the creation of some of the greatest mortuary art, including Egypt’s pyramids. Even daring archaeologists were technically glorified grave robbers. The plot of William Faulkner’s great novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) centers around a spinster and a teenager trying to clandestinely remove a body from a fictional cemetery in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, to prove a man innocent.
Outright theft of bodies themselves, however, was something that really only emerged after the 1500’s, when the more accurate study of human anatomy initiated the emergence of modern medical science. In the early days of modern medicine, however, the primary provider of bodies for anatomical study was the public hangman, not the grave robber. Rembrandt’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp shows doctors-in-training gathered around the body of a Dutch thief, Aris Kindt, who had been strung up on a rope just a few hours before he went to the dissecting table.
Before many centuries were out, though, doctors began to find that live thieves were also useful. In the 1800’s, medical faculties often had trouble finding enough bodies for their students to dissect in classrooms. Families were reluctant to donate their loved ones to science. Tragically, the bodies that medical instructors typically got hold of came from the most victimized and outcast members of society. When available, corpses for the dissecting room were found at poorhouses, jails, and mental asylums, for the simple reason that those who died there had often been abandoned by their families.
While many vocal opponents tried to stop the dissection of the poor, if none came to claim a body as a “friend,” medical faculties were legally allowed to use such corpses for the education of future doctors. Most states passed so-called “Anatomy Acts,” modeled on Britain’s of 1832.
It should come as no surprise that the largest number of bodies dissected by medical students from the 1800’s into the 1930’s were those of African Americans. A high number of those paid or encouraged to do the grave-robbing were also black. African Americans often served as medical assistants to white students, as many turn-of-the-century photographs of dissections show, but rarely became doctors then.
Medical students and an African American assistant, University of North Carolina Medical Department, Raleigh, circa 1890. “The seated man is the janitor; the overturned bucket he’s sitting on was usually kept at the foot of the dissection table, and was used to collect waste.”
The clandestine pilfering of Indianapolis’ unguarded cemeteries stemmed from a constant need for fresh “instructional material” at central Indiana medical schools, including Indiana Medical College, the Physiomedrical College of Indiana, and Greencastle’s Asbury College (now DePauw). Indiana University in Bloomington did not offer courses in anatomy or physiology until September 1903.
The Central College of Physicians and Surgeons, at 212 North Senate Avenue, was built in 1902 and immediately showed up in lurid news stories about illegal body snatching. (The college was an early forerunner of IU Medical School.) Readers of stories in the Indianapolis Journal could easily have formed an image of the college’s medical faculty scouring obituary notices and hiring thieves to steal fresh bodies as soon as the last family member left the cemetery after a funeral. One such story was reported on September 22, 1902. Mrs. Rosa Neidlinger, recently buried at Pleasant Hill Cemetery between Traders Point and New Augusta, was recovered at Central College a few days later. Investigators returned her to her husband, a miller, for a second burial.
(The “self-locking” Boyd Grave Vault “keeps out Vermin as well as Burglars.” Indianapolis Journal, June 28, 1884. The Flanner in this ad is Frank W. Flanner, whose mortuary firm Flanner & Buchanan went on to become early promoters of cremation.)The Central College of Physicians and Surgeons was built in 1902 and sat at 212 North Senate Avenue in Indianapolis. It became affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1906.
The preferred word in newspapers for grave robbers was “ghouls” (a word that comes from Middle Eastern folklore.) At least one story shows that ghouls and their employers were sometimes caught red-handed.
On February 26, 1890, the Journal reported that three prominent Louisville physicians had been apprehended and indicted for body-thievery at a New Albany, Indiana cemetery. Four “ghouls”, all African American, employed by the Kentucky doctors were involved. One ghoul, George Brown, was shot through the heart by policemen in the cemetery.
The Journal article from October 1899 describes the bizarre dimensions of the problem at Greenlawn in Indianapolis. Families who ordered exhumations of their relatives at Greenlawn were discovering an astonishingly high rate of empty coffins — or to put it more accurately, coffins with only empty clothes left in them. No bones, no hair. Only shrouds and clothing. Were robbers stripping the bodies at graveside?
A man presumably on trial in Marion County for grave-robbing explained this odd fact to the writer for the Journal, who reported:
At first it was customary to open a grave and take the body out, clothes and all, and either strip it naked on the ground or double it up in a sack and remove the clothes after taking it to a safe place.
This practice was discontinued when one day the city was thrown into an uproar over the finding of a girl’s slipper in the snow beside her newly made grave. She had been buried one afternoon in winter when snow was falling and her relatives came back the following day to look at the grave. Between visits the grave robbers got in their work, and, following the usual custom, did not remove the clothing from the body, but doubled it up and put it in a sack. In doing so one of the dainty slippers fell from one of the feet, and, being white, was not noticed in the snow. During the following morning the snow melted and the relatives, returning to the grave, saw the slipper, and, recognizing it, raised a hue and cry. This made the grave robbers change their methods, and thereafter opening the boxes they stripped all bodies of their clothes and put the garments back in the caskets.
This when related to the authorities explained why in opening the graves within the last few months nothing was to be seen in the caskets but piles of discolored clothes thrown in heaps, with slippers where the head ought to have rested. . .
It has come to be generally understood by the city officials that while Greenlawn has all the outward signs of being a cemetery, there are in reality few, if any, bodies there, and that in view of this fact there should be no opposition to its being transformed into a park.
The Journal writer may not have been exaggerating. Grave robbers and doctors were possibly reluctant to disturb the honored Union dead, who were removed to Crown Hill National Cemetery as early as 1866. Can the same be said of the Confederate dead? Greenlawn’s 1600 Confederate soldiers were the last bodies removed once the city decided to exhume every remaining coffin in Greenlawn for reburial at Crown Hill. This process began in 1912, and was sped up by the fact that the area around Greenlawn had become an unattractive industrial area, which it still is today. The Confederate soldiers were left here until 1931. Buried in a damp area by the river, few of their remains likely would have survived 70 years after the Civil War. Could some of them have been sent to medical schools just after burial?
One of the most fascinating criminal cases in Indianapolis history is the story of Rufus Cantrell. An African American who had moved north from Gallatin, Tennessee with his family and settled in Indianapolis, he was prosecuted for extensive grave-robbing in 1903. When pressed, and perhaps enjoying the media attention, Cantrell came clean, taking investigators around cemeteries all over the city where he and his “gang” had removed corpses. Lawyers tried to prove their client insane, even getting his mother to testify that he had preached and talked to God when he was a teenager.
Cantrell was found guilty and sent to the Indiana State Penitentiary in Michigan City, where he “lay dying of typhoid fever” in June 1904. He survived and later was transferred to the Jeffersonville Reformatory near Louisville. Though few if any white doctors who paid ghouls for their services ever got such sentences, Dr. Joseph C. Alexander, who allegedly worked with Cantrell, went on trial in Marion County in February 1903. When the court failed to convict him, angry farmers in Hamilton County hanged and burned effigies of Dr. Alexander and the judge in the middle of a street in Fishers, shouting “Death to the grave robbers!” When they inspected the graves in a rural cemetery on what became Indianapolis’ North Side, half of the coffins there were found empty.
Indianapolis News, April 23, 1903
Rufus Cantrell was even accused of plotting to steal the body of ex-President Benjamin Harrison, who died in 1901. The ghouls might not have been bluffing here. The fear that struck Hoosiers in those years, and especially the Harrison family, was great and well-founded.
In 1878, there had occurred the well-publicized heist of Benjamin Harrison’s own father from the family cemetery in North Bend, Ohio. Former Congressman John Scott Harrison, son of Indiana territorial governor and U.S. President William Henry Harrison, was found hanging naked from a rope in an air shaft at Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati, shortly after his son Benjamin came from Indianapolis to oversee his secure burial in a secret grave. Amazingly, John Harrison, Jr., armed with a search warrant, had discovered his father’s body while investigating the disappearance of yet another corpse, that of Augustus Devin, a young tuberculosis victim who had been buried next to the Harrison plot just days earlier. Devin’s body turned up in a vat of brine at the University of Michigan.
John Scott Harrison, son and father of U.S. presidents, was snatched in 1878.
All this considered, a major factor driving the surge in burials at Crown Hill at the turn of the century was the increased security taken there to ward off robbers. Modeled on Louisville’s famous (and equally massive) Cave Hill Cemetery, Crown Hill was the resting place of most of Indianapolis’ elite. It eventually became the third largest private burial ground in the country.
As a lengthy article in the the Journal reported on October 5, 1902, surveillance at Crown Hill was extensive. Security involved call boxes for quick communication. It also featured a curious system of “time stamps”. Revolver-toting guards were forced to clock in at different corners of the cemetery every 20 minutes, thus ensuring they didn’t fall asleep or shirk their duties as they monitored every part of the park-like necropolis, which in 1902 housed over 32,000 graves. If they encountered prowlers, the guards were ordered to shoot to kill, and they patrolled the cemetery in all weather. The northwest section, near the future site of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, was considered Crown Hill’s “most dangerous district.”
Body-thieving never totally disappeared. (The actor Charlie Chaplin was stolen from his grave in Switzerland in 1978.) The public also feared other reasons for desecration. When Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was buried with his family at Terre Haute’s Highland Lawn Cemetery in 1926, no individual headstone was placed there. Though Debs’ body had been cremated, the Debs family and his supporters feared that unfriendly vandals or “souvenir”-snatchers, perhaps funded by his political enemies, would try to steal the urn.
Such stories are troubling to read, but a vital part of the city’s history, involving race, science, and medicine. Ultimately, it is a strange fact, surely part of the terror and beauty of the human predicament, that many a grave robber, who almost certainly came from the margins of Indianapolis society, ultimately did help advance medicine and the public welfare.
In December 1904, two curious articles appeared in Indianapolis’ German-language daily, Indiana Tribüne (one of the many historic Hoosier newspapers digitized by NDNP).
Headlined “Peter Nissen und sein Ballonschiff”, the first small clip announces the disappearance of a remarkable Great Lakes daredevil and accountant, Chicago’s Peter “Bowser” Nissen, who had been in and out of American and international newspapers since 1900.
Nissen’s waterborne adventures by boat, “balloon ship”, and possibly even submarine are a strange tale, a confusing mix of fact and mixed-up news reportage. Eleven years after his tragic death in 1904, and in the wake of another Great Lakes maritime tragedy, the little-known daredevil steps into mystery and even folklore.
Chicago, Nov. 30 – It is feared that Peter Nissen has either drowned or frozen in his rolling balloon, which he dubbed “Foolkiller” – a name that now seems to have been well chosen.
Nissen began his dangerous journey over the lake yesterday afternoon. No news has been had of him in 24 hours.
Nissen is the same daredevil who several years ago shot the rapids of Niagara Falls in a boat.
The assumption that Nissen has drowned grows more likely, since the only air supply at his disposal in the “Foolkiller” had already been depleted before he left the shore. Nissen encountered a gale which pummeled the lake with winds of 48 miles an hour.
In the same news clip, the Tribüne includes a report from South Haven, Michigan, on the lake’s eastern shore, that a search along “various points of the coast from Michigan City to Muskegon has returned no word of Nissen, who dared the open lake in his Foolkiller, a canvas boat with air-cushions. It is believed that Nissen has become a victim of his valor.”
The following day, December 2, the Tribüne brought a further report from Berrien County, Michigan:
[Stevensville, Mich., 1 December. Peter Nissen, who sought to traverse Lake Michigan in his balloon-boat, was found dead on the beach 2 ½ miles west of here today. It is thought that his body was washed up on the local beach during the night. The balloon was found about 20 rods away from him, in a very sorry state. The body was brought here, where it is being kept in the town hall. The hands and face were frozen and the lineaments of his face bore signs of infinite distress. The clothing was rather torn. The body was found by Mrs. Collier, who lives on a farm near the lakeshore.]
Who was this Peter Nissen, then, whose fantastic story the Tribüne barely digs into?
Born to Danish parents in Germany in 1862, Nissen was an immigrant himself. One report said that he lived in poverty in Chicago, where he worked as a bookkeeper. His death certificate issued in Michigan says that he was single and had worked as foreman in a furniture factory.
Nissen apparently first made national news headlines as early as 1900, when, at age 38, he successfully shot the Whirpool Rapids of the Niagara River in New York, just downstream from Niagara Falls. Many previous Niagara daredevils shot or swam the Rapids, often in wooden barrels, and almost always at the cost of their lives. Nissen’s was by far not the first attempt, but his was unique because of the strange boat he used to accomplish it.
Like the bizarre “balloon boat” he piloted to his death on Lake Michigan in 1904, this boat, too, was dubbed Foolkiller, and was actually one of at least three vessels Nissen called by that name. The feat was celebrated in papers as far away as his ancestral Denmark, where Skandinaven picked up the story on July 11, 1900. Probably translated from an American paper, this description of Nissen’s boat must have given Danish readers a picture of American bravado and the power of the American landscape. It also gives us some details about the mysterious vessel itself:
The boat used by Mr. Nissen for his dangerous feat is twenty feet long and four feet deep, built of pine with frame and keel of elm. In addition to the ordinary keel, the boat has an iron keel weighing 1,250 pounds, and the total weight of the boat is over two tons. There is a screw driven by foot power, and the boat has six airtight compartments, two in the bow, two in the stern, and one on each side.
Peter Nissen of Chicago, who prefers to be known as “Bowser”, made a successful journey through the Niagara rapids and whirlpool Monday afternoon in his boat, the Foolkiller. The boat struck the first foam-topped wave and turned over as easily as if it had been a stick and not a 1,250-pound keel. Man and boat disappeared. The watchers thought it was all over, when suddenly farther down stream “Bowser” reappeared, clutching the boat with one hand and waving his jersey cap with the other. The boat had righted itself. This occurred three times in the rapid journey, for it took only two and a half minutes for the whole trip through the rapids. Then “Bowser” and his boat were flung straight into the whirlpool. He was carried straight to the vortex which sucked in the boat, casting it up a minute later, with the drenched but plucky fellow clinging to its seat. Here it remained for forty minutes while the whirlpool played with it, spinning it like a top, then rolling it around the outer rims of the whirlpool. The man was finally rescued by three men who ventured into the water as far as they dared and caught a rope which he threw to them as his boat swung round on the outside of the pool. “Bowser” said the trip was more terrible than he feared, although he came out unharmed.
The first Foolkiller, then, was essentially a 1200-pound, foot-powered, deep-keeled kayak. In another section of the same issue of Marshall County’s Independent, Nissen’s craft is described as weighing
4,500 pounds, with a keel of iron which weighed 1,250 pounds. The keel acted like a pendulum and the boat was never wrong side up for more than five seconds at a time. The boat road the first wave like a duck. The second engulfed it and Nissen disappeared. He afterward stated that the wave nearly tore his head off.
To the eventual entertainment of many news readers, Nissen repeated his daring Niagara feat in 1901, in a restructured version of the boat, this time a longer, narrower craft featuring an eight-horsepower steam engine and a larger rudder.
The April 1902 Wide World Magazine includes several of the few photographs in existence of the second Foolkiller, hailing it as “The smallest decked steamer in the world,” a kind of steam-powered sea kayak. Containing himself in a small crawlspace beneath the cockpit, Nissen successfully shot Whirlpool Rapids for a second time in October 1901. An unknown cinematographer for the Thomas Edison Film Company even captured him in one of the earliest motion pictures. (The thrilling short is available on YouTube.) Unfortunately, on a third venture down the Niagara River late in 1901, Foolkiller II sank and was never seen again, probably ending up in Lake Ontario. Nissen and a colleague barely escaped drowning.
(Incidentally, Chicago’s accountant-daredevil wasn’t the only “fool” at Niagara Falls in October 1901. Just a week after his steam-powered Foolkiller II made it through the rapids intact, a Bay City, Michigan, schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls itself in a wooden barrel and live to tell the tale. Taylor did this on her 63rd birthday.)
With his second experimental vessel at the bottom of the Niagara River, Peter Nissen returned to the Midwest. By November 1904, he had pioneered his weirdest and wildest vessel, Foolkiller III.
A Popular Science Monthly article in September 1933 (“Freak Vehicles for Air, Land and Water”) regales readers with an account of Nissen’s final, fatal incarnation of the Foolkiller. The author claims that:
In the early years of the present century, Nissen was seeking a way to reach the North Pole. One of his schemes for traversing the rough Arctic ice was to use an automobile equipped with huge, low-pressure tires. Thus, thirty years before this time, Nissen dreamed of the modern balloon tire. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t stop there. The idea of the balloon tire kept growing in his mind. It got bigger and bigger and eventually the automobile disappeared from his plans and only the tire remained!
Nissen’s “fantastic scheme” was not unlike his previous experiment with turning a kayak into a steamboat. This time he would virtually turn a zeppelin into a ship. According to the Popular Science Monthly article, Nissen eventually intended to create a canvas bag 115 feet long and 75 feet in diameter. Filled with hydrogen gas, the balloon would sail north to the Arctic carrying the car underneath. After landing on the ice, Nissen would deflate the balloon and drive the car through a special door in the canvas. By means of a pump, the airtight “football” would reinflate once the car was inside. Nissen planned to string the automobile itself on cotton ropes hanging from a revolving interior wooden axle that stretched from end to end of the “football”. Air-tight glass portals allowed him to see out. Powered by winds, and with the ability to sail over both water and Arctic ice sheets, Nissen would literally roll to the North Pole.
Amazingly, in the summer and fall of 1904, Nissen actually constructed a miniature 32-foot-long version of this contraption and was performing test runs a few miles out on Lake Michigan, just off the Chicago shoreline. Photographs in the Chicago Daily News show the inventor at work next to his “pneumatic ball.” Readers of the Indiana Tribüne, the Indianapolis Journal and other papers might not have known the background to this story when they read about the “Der Foolkiller” on December 1, less than 48 hours after Nissen set out on his fateful voyage.
Reporters at the time claimed that he left from Chicago’s Navy Pier bound for Michigan City, Indiana. Caught in a gale (or did he deliberately go out in the gale to test Foolkiller’s ability to withstand bad weather?), Nissen may even have drifted within sight of Gary and the Indiana Dunes.
After his body was recovered on the beach just south of Benton Harbor, Michigan, doctors believed that Nissen had probably survived the gale itself, but either suffocated inside the balloon or drowned while trying to get out of the surf. A handwritten note found in the balloon suggests he knew he was going to suffocate. He may have died just offshore. (The South-Bend Tribune claims that the only provisions found inside the balloon were biscuits, cheese, tobacco, and water. The Indianapolis Journal claims that Nissen subsisted only on candy.)
Glass plate negative of seven people walking along Lake Michigan in Chicago near wreckage believed to have been part of Nissen’s Foolkiller. DN-0001137, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.
Readers in Indiana and elsewhere who heard of the navigator’s terrible fate might have thought it an end to Foolkiller stories. But on November 25, 1915, eleven years later, the South Bend News-Times published this surprise item:
Chicago, Nov. 24 – Efforts were being made today to raise the “fool killer” submarine that has been buried in the mud of the Chicago River for 18 years. The diving boat was found by William M. Deneau, a diver, who was laying a cable in the river bed.
The boat was owned by Peter Nissen, an old time mariner. It was a cigar shaped craft, and could be submerged until an air pipe about 10 feet high was the only part that stuck out of the water. Nissen, who never succeeded in putting the subsea craft into practical operation, lost his life trying to drift across Lake Michigan in a revolving boat, another of his spectacular inventions.
Where this submarine came from is a mystery. As long ago as the 1840’s, a Michigan City, Indiana, shoemaker, Lodner D. Phillips, was actually building and patenting several unsuccessful submarines on the Great Lakes, all of which stayed on the bottom. (A fascinating article from the Ann Arbor Chronicle tells a bit of Phillips’ story.) Was this the wreck of a much older vessel? At a time when the Chicago River was being dramatically re-engineered for human use, it is hard to imagine how a submarine could have gone unnoticed under three feet of mud right in the heart of the downtown business district, next to the Wells Street Bridge, for so many years.
Yet as photographs from the Chicago Daily News attest, something was definitely pulled out of the river in 1915. (Interestingly, these photographs may have been taken by Jun Fujita, the first Japanese American photojournalist, who was employed by the Daily News.)
“Raising Foolkiller submarine from Chicago River, December 20, 1915.” Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0065730, Chicago History Museum.
Chicagoans’ morbid interest in the discovery of the submarine (which the Daily News called “Foolkiller,” “something out of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”) was due in part to its proximity to the site where the SS Eastland capsized six months before, killing 844 passengers boarding a vessel for Michigan City, Indiana – the deadliest disaster in Chicago history. In a twist of fate, William “Frenchy” Deneau was one of the heroic divers who recovered about 250 bodies of Eastland victims from the river that summer. After the submarine turned up in December, there were tales that Deneau, its 23-year-old discoverer, had also found the bones of a man and dog inside — not the first such find on the bottom of the river.
To cap the story off, the Chicago submarine’s ultimate destination is as murky as its origin and sudden reappearance. Deneau reportedly got permission from the U.S. government to salvage the vessel. He put it on exhibition on State Street for several months, charging 10 cents admission, then sent it out on a tour of Midwestern county fairs. The bizarre vessel, it is thought, disappeared at a fair in Iowa in 1916. No trace of it turned up again.
