As the United States stood on the brink of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the urgent need for innovative military strategies to effectively confront the impending global conflict. Observing the unfolding events in Europe, he realized that defeating the Axis powers would require pioneering approaches to warfare. Roosevelt turned to William J. Donovan, a trusted advisor and former informal emissary, to develop a visionary plan for a global intelligence collection agency.

Donovan, a WWI veteran, drafted the “Establishment of Service of Strategic Information,” a detailed document outlining a groundbreaking framework for a centralized intelligence organization to coordinate the entire government and gather essential data for strategic planning. In his plan, Donovan emphasized that “strategy, without reliable information, is helpless. Likewise, information is useless unless intelligently directed toward strategic purposes.”

Impressed by Donovan’s insight, President Roosevelt established the Coordinator of Information (COI)—the nation’s first national intelligence agency. This marked a pivotal moment in US history, as Roosevelt’s foresight and Donovan’s strategic acumen laid the groundwork for creating an entity that would revolutionize how the United States managed conflict during peacetime and war. Operating under the President’s Executive Office, the COI collected and analyzed information crucial to national security.

Breaking Boundaries: The Transition from COI to OSS

A year later, Donovan presented a transformative proposal to restructure the COI into an organization that included covert and clandestine operations in addition to intelligence gathering. He envisioned a new hybrid organization that would shift warfighting from traditional military tactics to unconventional approaches using sabotage, espionage, guerrilla warfare, and psychological operations. Believing in Donovan’s strategic expertise, President Roosevelt approved the proposal, thus creating the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on June 13^th, 1942. The OSS would operate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a committee of senior military leaders formed during World War II to advise the President and coordinate military efforts.

Under Donovan’s leadership, the OSS bridged the realms of diplomacy, intelligence, and the military. He recruited technology, economics, psychology, and finance experts to provide specialized knowledge to military operations. Donovan firmly believed in a two-pronged strategy: physically attacking the enemy’s military forces and targeting their morale and spirit. The OSS quickly became a hotbed of innovation, employing diverse specialists, including intelligence analysts, linguists, and field operatives.

Inspired by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Donovan developed a unique training methodology. He prioritized specialized training for recruits to operate behind enemy lines and carry out sabotage missions. They underwent rigorous training in organizing and supporting guerrilla and partisan resistance forces. At the core of the OSS were the Strategic Services Operations (SSO), consisting of six units, each with its specialized areas of expertise and responsibilities. Notably, units like the Special Operations (SO) and the Operational Group (OG) eventually led to the formation of the twelve-person Operational Detachment-Alpha, commonly known today as the Green Berets.

From the Shadows to the Waterfront

During Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, the OSS demonstrated its strategic prowess. OSS members infiltrated Vichy French Northwest African territory, gathering vital information about enemy forces and defenses, directly influencing the invasion’s planning. The OSS also established and maintained robust contacts with local resistance groups and the Free French forces, significantly undermining the Axis stronghold in the region. Further, through unconventional warfare, the OSS successfully disrupted enemy activities and diverted resources, hindering Axis forces from mounting an effective defense against the main invasion.

However, Operation Torch also exposed some of the OSS’s shortcomings. They underestimated the resistance from the Vichy French forces, resulting in two days of intense, unexpected fighting. Additionally, they overestimated the disruptive potential of the French resistance against the Axis forces, leading to strategic missteps. Some intelligence provided by the OSS also proved to be incorrect or unreliable, causing further complications in the operation’s planning and execution. Despite these setbacks, the experiences from Operation Torch provided invaluable lessons for future operations, including Operation Jedburgh.

During Operation Jedburgh, a covert operation involving clandestine activities, the OSS provided personnel, equipment, and training to three-man teams. These teams were airdropped into occupied Europe, primarily focusing on France, to disrupt German military operations, gather intelligence, and support the larger Allied campaign. Consisting of a commander, an executive officer, and a radio operator, they played a pivotal role in leading local resistance movements against the Germans and carrying out acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare. Notably, one team member always possessed fluency in the local language, ensuring effective communication and coordination with regional allies.

In addition to providing personnel and training, the OSS handled logistics, the deployment of the teams, and the ongoing supply drops. Much like in Operation Torch, the effectiveness of the teams in Operation Jedburgh varied. They successfully disrupted German communications and logistics in some regions, significantly undermining the German response to the Allied invasion. However, German countermeasures, geography, and local conditions made their efforts less effective in other areas. Nevertheless, Operation Jedburgh showcased the potential of unconventional warfare and marked a successful collaboration between the OSS, the SOE, and the Free French.

The adaptability of OSS allowed them to operate in vastly different terrains. During Operation Greenup, OSS agents undertook a perilous mission to infiltrate enemy lines in the dangerous terrain of the Austrian Alps. Operatives navigated treacherous mountain passes and evaded enemy detection to gather intelligence on a secret Nazi Alpine fortress. This daring operation showcased the OSS agents’ courage and resilience as they operated deep within enemy territory, collecting critical information to support the Allies. Similarly, in the dense jungles of Burma, OSS’s Detachment 101 waged a relentless guerrilla war against the Japanese occupation. Working closely with local resistance groups, they disrupted enemy supply lines and executed devastating hit-and-run attacks. Simultaneously, they gathered vital intelligence that furthered the Allied cause.

Inspiring Psyops and FSSF in World War II

Beyond the operational successes, the OSS was an inspiration and model for various special units during World War II. In March 1942, General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, approved Project Plough, an operation to drop commandos by parachute into Nazi-occupied Norway to carry out covert operations. Subsequently, on July 9th, 1942, the First Special Serves Forces (FSSF) was officially established, bringing together units from the US and Canada. Their training and operations were similar to those of the OSS, employing similar skills and tactics. After careful evaluation, military leaders determined that the anticipated benefits of the mission were outweighed by the potential dangers, leading to its cancellation. Instead, the FSSF deployed to the Aleutian Islands campaign, fighting against the Japanese forces occupying the islands.

Following their involvement in the Aleutian Islands campaign, the FSSF deployed to Italy, actively participating in several military campaigns crucial to the Allies’ efforts. Their courage and combat effectiveness earned them the nickname ‘The Devil’s Brigade.’ The FSSF made significant contributions to the liberation of Southern France, showcasing their ability to undertake complex operations and support the overall Allied efforts.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized the pivotal role of psychological warfare in the European campaign and appointed Brigadier General Robert Alexis McClure to lead the Information and Censorship Section (INC) within the Allied Forces headquarters as the war reached a critical phase. The INC’s role aligned more with the analytical and strategic planning branches of the OSS, which compiled and processed intelligence to support strategic decision-making. McClure used military personnel and civilians from the OSS and the British Political Warfare Executive to employ propaganda, misinformation, and other psychological techniques to manipulate enemy combatants’ and civilian populations’ perceptions and attitudes. In 1944, Eisenhower tasked McClure with establishing the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (PWD/SHAEF), to meet the evolving needs of theater commands in the dynamic and volatile landscape of the war.

The Disbandment of the OSS and FSSF in Post-War Reorganization

In January 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge and as Allied forces gained ground on the Eastern flank, Senior officials decided to disband the FSSF in Southern France. The FSSF played a commendable role across various theaters, but leaders no longer deemed their specialized services necessary as the war neared its final stages. The surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7th, 1945, marked the end of World War II in the European theater. Throughout the conflict, the OSS adapted remarkably to meet the evolving demands of theater commands. After the war, the OSS disbanded to streamline and optimize intelligence operations in the post-war era, splitting to form the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

In the subsequent years, McClure advocated for creating the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW) to continue unconventional warfare as a potential European invasion by the Soviets loomed. He appointed Colonel Aaron Bank, a former OSS member, as the Operations Branch Chief of the Pentagon’s OCPW. Bank, following in the footsteps of Donovan, went on to create Special Forces. He recruited veterans from the Philippine guerrillas, the FSSF, and the OGs of the OSS. Individuals such as former Philippine guerrilla commanders Colonel Wendell Fertig and Lieutenant Colonel Russell W. Volkmann played pivotal roles in developing the doctrine of unconventional warfare, which became the cornerstone of US Special Forces.

Donovan’s OSS has left a lasting legacy in the special operations and intelligence communities. Today, entities such as Psyops, the Green Berets, and CIA operatives can all trace their roots back to the OSS. The OSS’s innovative approaches to psychological warfare, intelligence gathering, and unorthodox tactics during WWII laid the foundational framework of modern US Special Operations.  

Major Nicholas Dockery is an active-duty Special Forces officer, a researcher fellow for the Modern War Institute at West Point, and a Downing scholar. He holds an MPP from the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs graduate and is an alumnus of the United States Military Academy.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

The word “Seminole” is derived from the Muscogean word simanó-li, or “runaway,” reflecting a common heritage, as Upper Creeks from Alabama, Lower Creeks from Georgia, other affiliated tribes and escaped African slaves all sought sanctuary in Spanish Florida. There they mixed with one another, adapted to their surroundings, traded with Britain, Spain and the United States and came to be collectively recognized as one of the Five Civilized Tribes (along with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek/Muscogee) of the American Southeast. Not civilized enough for some, apparently, for when the United States acquired Florida in 1821, it began herding the Seminoles, through a succession of treaties, to progressively smaller and less desirable parts of the state. Ultimately, in 1834 federal officials set Jan. 1, 1836, as a deadline for removal of the Seminoles from Florida to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). When a 110-man detachment of the 4th U.S. Infantry under Brevet Maj. Francis L. Dade set out for Fort King to oversee that final removal, however, it was ambushed by 180 Seminoles led by Halpatter Tustenuggee (Alligator) on Dec. 28, 1835. The ensuing slaughter of all but two of Dade’s men marked the beginning of the longest campaign fought between the U.S. Army and American Indians, a mix of pitched battles and guerrilla warfare.

In Seminole Warrior versus U.S. Soldier: Second Seminole War, 1835–42 (No. 61 in Osprey’s Combat series) military historian Ron Field compares the tactics, arms, equipment and fighting techniques used by both sides. In addition to what whites termed the “Dade massacre,” re-examined here through a more impartial lens, Field relates two other major engagements—at Lake Okeechobee, on Christmas Day 1837, and the second of back-to-back clashes at the Loxahatchee River, on Jan. 24, 1838. 

Set in what might be more appropriately called the “Wild South,” the Second Seminole War was something of a learning process for both sides. Several notable future U.S. Army figures had their first taste of Indian warfare and, for that matter, their first combat experience during the conflict, lessons they would apply during the Mexican War. The Seminoles likewise developed guerrilla tactics they would employ as scouts during the Army’s later run-ins with other tribes on the Great Plains. Backed by Osprey’s usual fine array of illustrations and maps, Seminole Warrior versus U.S. Soldier offers Wild West readers a peek at the dress rehearsal for Indian campaigns to come. 

Seminole Warrior vs. U.S. Soldier

Second Seminole War, 1835–42

By Ron Field, Osprey Publishing, 2022

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When the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Co. launched the Pony Express on April 3, 1860, fanfare for the new express mail service made newspaper headlines from New York to San Francisco. The cheers came loudest from California where proponents hailed its commencement as a vital step forward in linking the Far West with the rest of the country. The advertised delivery time between St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento, Calif. was 10 days, accomplished by a fast-horse relay. Way stations spaced 10 to 20 miles apart provided couriers with fresh horses, enabling them to carry the mail across the West at the speed of a galloping horse. And that’s nearly the way it shook out. 

The Pony Express was the greatest display of American horsemanship ever to color the pages of a history book, but it was short-lived. Each of the nearly 190 stations had to be stocked with horses, provisions and stock tenders. Fifteen of the stations had no viable water source; water for the horses and the men looking after them had to be hauled in by mule-drawn wagons. The mail ran twice weekly, both eastbound and westbound, and after a year in operation it was eating up $5 for every $1 that it earned. It was prohibitively expensive, and on Oct. 26, 1861, the Pony Express hung up its spurs. But it cast a long shadow. As author William Banning wrote about that era in his 1928 book Six Horses, “A more glamorous contribution to our historic West than that of this ephemeral Pony would be difficult to name.” 

In 1860 and ’61, the Pony Express provided a connection between the East and the West. In 2019 the route afforded a way for me to connect the modern West and its recent history, presenting a roughly 2,000-mile avenue between past and present. I’ve been a horseman since I was old enough to know the term, and I decided the only way for me to see the country was from the back of a horse. On a personal level, I wanted to meet the people who lived along the trail, to fill in the map, and to do it slowly. Whereas the riders of the Pony Express compassed the same distance in 10 days, I’d spend all summer in the saddle. Doing so, I reckoned, would give me an end-to-end perspective of the West, a thorough look at all the country between Missouri and California. And so, on May 5, with two good horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, I pulled out of St. Joseph, bound for Sacramento.

What ensued was an intimate grittiness. I camped at old Pony Express stations, in farmers’ yards and ranchers’ pastures, and in desert valleys so dry and quiet that dawn broke like a pistol shot over the salt pans. I wore out my boots and my shirt and half a dozen pairs of wool socks, but I did not wear out my horses. On September 22, when I arrived at the base of the bronze statue of a Pony Express rider on the Old Sacramento waterfront, their eyes were bright and their coats shiny, and though both were trail-weary, neither horse was diminished for the journey. The Last Ride of the Pony Express is the story of who I met, what I saw and what I learned by crossing the West by horseback.

1. Cody Family Moves to Kansas

Will was born in Iowa Territory in 1846. In 1854 father Isaac moved the family to Kansas Territory in search of a better life. There young Will watched a wagon train embarking on the Oregon Trail and declared that was what he wanted to do. Three years later, at age 11, he did just that with a freighting operation. It was the first of many such trips.

2. Will Meets the Kickapoos

Young Cody’s earliest encounters with American Indians were with Kickapoos who did business at his father’s trading post. Will also befriended Kickapoo classmates. Such positive encounters informed the way he approached Indians the rest of his life.

3. Family Opposition to Slavery

Isaac Cody opposed allowing slavery in Kansas Territory and was stabbed in 1854 while speaking against it. Pro-slavers continued to persecute the family until Isaac’s death three years later. Will regarded his father as a martyr and idolized his mother for having persevered. Following their examples, he later championed equal rights for women and Indians.

4. Riding With the Pony Express

Just what role Cody played in the Pony Express is open for debate, but it was important enough to him to emphasize in his 1879 autobiography, by which time the mail service was but a memory. It might have remained a footnote in American history had Cody not promoted it in every performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West over a 30-year span.

5. Becoming ‘Buffalo Bill’

In 1867, during a hiatus as a scout for the U.S. Army, Cody landed a contract to supply bison meat for work crews on the Kansas Pacific Railway. He proved such an adept hunter that the workers bestowed on him the nickname “Buffalo Bill.”

6. A Taste of the Good Life

After fulfilling his contract with the railroad, Buffalo Bill returned to scouting for the Army. In January 1872 he led a hunt for Lt. Gen. Phil Sheridan in honor of Russian Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich. Among the guests were wealthy New Yorkers who introduced Cody to gourmet dining, something he’d enjoy the rest of his life. Within weeks he traveled to Manhattan, where he dined at Delmonico’s, stayed in fine hotels, partied with millionaires and took in several plays.

7. Taking the Stage

One of the plays Cody went to see while in New York was Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men, at the Bowery Theater. He attended with Ned Buntline, who wrote the dime novel series on which the play was based. At Buntline’s urging, Cody embarked on an acting career that December.

8. Birth of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

After a decade onstage Cody reflected, “Immense success and comparative wealth, attained in the profession of showman, stimulated me to greater exertion and largely increased my ambition for public favor.” That ambition led to his most successful enterprise. Beginning in 1883, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West introduced the region’s people, animals and stories first to all Americans and then to the world. The show transformed Cody into history’s first international celebrity.

9. Buffalo Bill Conquers Europe

In 1887 Cody was invited to bring his Wild West to London and perform as part of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrating her half century as Britain’s queen. Afterward, Buffalo Bill toured the Continent with his troupe, introducing Europeans to the American West. In each nation tens of thousands of curious spectators flocked to the celebrated showman’s arena performances.

10. World’s Columbian Exposition

Cody’s success in Europe only boosted his status at home. Back Stateside he planned a grand homecoming at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, but its aloof organizers denied the showman a place on their grounds. For nearly a year the Wild West performed just outside the main gate, drawing far larger crowds—18,000 people to each of its two daily shows. Buffalo Bill left the “Windy City” a millionaire with a legacy extending beyond his own lifetime.

“The First World War saw the first widespread use of propaganda to stir patriotic fervour,” note Gill Saunders and Margaret Timmers in The Poster: A Visual History. “The need to raise vast sums of money from the public purse to fund the war spawned numerous posters advertising war bonds and loans; countries on both sides of the conflict employed some of their best poster artists for this purpose.”

If it had worked in one world war, why not try it in another? In his two-volume Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion: World War II, Anthony Rhodes notes the “barrage of posters” produced by government agencies like the United States Office of War Information as well as private companies during the war. And, observe Saunders and Timmers, “Both the British and the American governments strove to cement the idea of their national characteristics as unwaveringly plucky, with humour more likely to be employed than fearmongering.”

If you had any doubt about what you should be doing—or not doing—as an American to help the war effort, there was probably a poster that could point you in the right direction. Should you buy war bonds? (The answer was emphatically yes.) How about driving to work by yourself? (No! “When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler!”) If you were a farmer, what should you produce? (Corn! Sugar beets! Milk!) Was it okay to chat about your work with that affable stranger at the bar? (Absolutely not! “Loose talk can cost lives.”) Colorfully eye-catching, the posters exhorted Americans to work harder, produce more war materiel, save gasoline and scrap metal, support their soldiers and sailors, and stop complaining about shortages. In one poster titled “Of course I can,” a young woman clutches her home-jarred food and says, “I’m patriotic as can be—And ration points won’t worry me!” (One thing that did not appear to be in short supply during the war was exclamation points.)

Perhaps the poster that best distilled all the exhortations into one single message showed a bloodied soldier pointing at a battle going on behind him and exclaiming, “More! More of everything—quick!” 

The horse was once as essential to Western life as the six-gun, and breaking horses was once a necessary skill, even a business for a few tough, enterprising souls. Eventually it became a competitive rodeo event in which working cowboys pitted their skills against wild horses—and each other. The king of the Texas broncobusters was a diminutive fellow named Samuel Privett Jr., known to history as “Booger Red.” While certain details and dates of his life differ due to faulty memories and inconsistent records, the central narrative of his life is consistent—and, oh, what a life he led!

Samuel Thomas Privett Jr. was born on the TP Ranch in Williamson County, Texas, on Dec. 29, 1858—or maybe it was 1862, or 1864. Again, the records vary. He grew up on ranches, riding and roping. As a boy of barely 12 Sam was already breaking horses, his conspicuous shock of red hair landing him notice as “that redheaded bronc-riding kid.” He was 13, or perhaps 15, when a tragic event led to his lifelong nickname, “Booger Red.” He and a pal were fooling around with a homemade firework, having packed a stump with gunpowder, when it blew up prematurely, killing the friend and disfiguring Sam’s face. On catching sight of “Red” after the accident, one boy commented how “boogered up” his face was.

Amusing moniker aside, Red’s injuries were anything but humorous. The blast had scorched off his eyebrows and part of his nose. His eyelids were reduced to slits, and he lost most of the sight in one eye. It took six months and multiple skin grafts to salvage what remained of his face. Anyone else would have retreated into seclusion, but Red was made of sterner stuff. For the rest of his life, while he was understandably camera shy and wore a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face, he embraced the nickname and even joked about it. His boogered-up face was just one of the curves life threw at him. The next curve was harder. By his mid-teens both of his parents had died, forcing the orphan to strike out on his own.

On his bowed legs Red stood about 5 feet 5 inches, and he weighed little more than 150 pounds soaking wet. He was also soft-spoken, leading many to underestimate him. Those who had seen him in the saddle knew better, and Red found steady work breaking horses for ranchers. With his earnings he bought a wagon yard and stable in San Angelo, though he “officed” out of a pool room in a saloon. He also broke horses for the U.S. Army, which for decades to come would mount its cavalry on animals rather than motor vehicles. As for pay, the Army offered Red a choice: $50 a month, or $1 a horse. He took the second offer, and by the end of his first day was reportedly owed $75. The Army quickly rescinded its offer. Anyway, Red could make more freelancing for ranchers.

He soon found an even more lucrative and entertaining way of making a living—riding competitively in small-town fairs and stock shows. Ranchers and cattlemen brought their wildest horses to such events and offered prize money to anyone who could gentle them. There were no arenas in those early days, just a patch of open prairie with poles stuck in the ground and rope strung between them. Spectators stood or sat in buggies or on camp stools. The only “box seats” were the saddles of those watching from horseback. Bets laid on both horse and rider were collected only when a rider went sailing or a horse quit bucking. The odds either way were about even, unless Booger Red was aboard. He took on any animals, even those with reputations as man-killers. Mounting was a challenge in itself. As there were no chutes—the side-opening chute came along years later—a rider had to get on while fellow cowboys held the animal by its ears and covered its eyes. As soon as the rider was in the saddle, the others let go and scattered. Red rode one notorious bronc that pitched and bucked across several acres before finally coming to a halt, its sides heaving, its head low and mouth flecked with foam. Rider and horse were equally exhausted, but Red walked away with a nice purse.

These impromptu, open-air gatherings eventually morphed into organized rodeos that charged admission and programmed the various events—bronc riding (saddle and bareback), steer wrestling (aka bulldogging), roping and trick riding. As the frontier faded into history, rodeos and Wild West shows sprang up to keep the memory of the old days alive. Such shows were a combination of nostalgia and genuine cowboy skills.

Starting a Family and a Business

In 1895 Booger Red found love. He was 37 (more or less), while Mary Frances “Mollie” Webb was, by one account, just 15 years old. Sources vary on how old each was and when exactly they married, but by any reckoning it was a May-December romance. Red met “Mollie” at a church singalong, for which he provided musical accompaniment on the harmonica. At the time she hailed from the little town of Bronte, in Coke County, and was the prettiest thing he had ever seen. To his surprise she also was taken with him, and to his further delight he learned she was an accomplished rider. Apparently, her parents had no problem with their teen daughter dating a man more than twice her age, and the couple tied the knot before the year was out.

They settled down in San Angelo, where Red continued to operate his wagon yard and stable and break horses on the side. They ultimately had seven children, starting with Roy in 1896, followed by Ella, the twins, Tommy, Bill and, finally, Alta in 1909. Only one of the twins, Luther, survived. The other was buried as “infant daughter.” None of the children made it past the 11th grade in school. Despite their ever-expanding parental responsibilities, Red and Mollie resolved to start a new business. (The settled life had never been for him, and Mollie was game for anything.) Selling the wagon yard and stable, Red used the money to start Booger Red’s Wild West & Vaudeville Show. By 1907 he had the operation off the ground.

By the turn of the century Wild West shows were all the rage, Buffalo Bill’s representing the gold standard. But there was always room for another. People couldn’t get enough of seeing the Old West recreated in arenas. Mollie sewed costumes for the show, and she and the kids were part of the act. Mollie performed as a trick rider. Ella, the oldest, did a riding and roping act. Tommy was a “fancy roper,” good enough to eventually land a steady gig with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Bill was a born jockey in the saddle. But the main attraction was Booger Red, bronc rider of all bronc riders, who rode any horse brought to him, as well as a few steers and a bull he named “Andy.” Red bragged he could ride anything on four legs and made a standing offer of $100 to anyone who could bring him a horse able to throw him. Though many took him up on that offer, Red reportedly never had to pay off.

The co-star of the show was Red’s horse, Montana Gyp, who had once belonged to a Montana showman who brought Gyp to San Angelo and offered to pay $1,500 to anyone who could stay on his “outlaw horse.” Red accepted the bet, rode Gyp to a standstill, then used the prize money to buy him. Rider and horse were inseparable for the next 23 years, as much a team as Roy Rogers and Trigger or Gene Autry and Champion.

Montana Gyp was more than a mere show pony, as Booger Red’s Wild West traveled between towns not by special train but by horseback and wagon. When not on tour, the Privetts wintered on a ranch north of San Angelo. By 1915 they were making regular appearances in Oklahoma, so Red sold their San Angelo spread and bought a ranch near Miami, Okla., at which the family could winter and recoup. Around 1920, when the show got to be too much of a business, Red sold out to the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West. For the next several seasons he and the kids performed at others’ shows—including the Ringling Bros., Al G. Barnes and Hagenbeck-Wallace Bros. circuses—while Mollie remained on the ranch. The middle-aged Red remained on the circus and rodeo circuit a few more years, faithfully sending his winnings home to Mollie, who had taken to calling him “Old Man.”

Eventually, even those events became a chore. The time spent away from home, the endless succession of performances, the gypsylike life—all became too much, and Red decided to retire. He had no regrets. He remained at the top of his game, and it gave him pleasure and paid the bills. But he was pushing 60, which made him practically prehistoric among rodeo performers. He had experienced the bright lights and big times, performing at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in Chicago, as well as the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, in San Francisco, at which he was named the “World Champion Bronc Rider.” There were no more worlds to conquer.

A forgotten figure from Red’s life story is the young protégé he mentored, known professionally as Booger Red Jr. Junior was no relation; it was Privett who gave him that handle. “That’s the only kid I’ve ever seen that has the makin’s of as ugly a man as I,” Red declared the first time he laid eyes on the young man. Junior, whose real name has been lost to time, was described as an “all-round product of the Texas range,” just like his mentor. A top rider in his own right, junior appeared on numerous programs with the original Booger.

One of Red’s favorite stops in later years was Fort Worth, where he regularly appeared at the annual Fat Stock Show. In March 1916 he came to town by train for the show and left his grip in the baggage room at the Santa Fe depot. When the attendant offered him a check, he said he didn’t need one. “This grip belongs to the ugliest man in Texas—in the world,” Red replied. “If anybody uglier than ‘Booger Red,’ of Tom Green County, shows up, give him the grip. He’s welcome to it.”

In 1918, when the show promoters added a rodeo to the Fat Stock Show, Red signed on as a competitor. Held in the Grand Coliseum (later renamed the Cowtown Coliseum), it was the world’s first indoor rodeo. A lot had changed in the intervening years. Red recalled having ridden broncs on a nearby patch of prairie cordoned off by rope. While spectators then weren’t expected to pay a dime to watch cowboys compete, thousands now crowded into the coliseum, paying 25 cents a head. Though by far the oldest entrant competing for the $3,000 in prize money, Red could still outride all challengers. For the next few years he returned to compete. While he loved the attention, however, he retained his aversion to being photographed or filmed. It was the dawn of Hollywood, and motion picture companies regularly came calling, hoping to make a star of Booger Red. For the most part he managed to dodge their cameras.

“Give us Booger Red!”

Red was remarkable for more than just his advanced years and scarred visage. For one, he never touched liquor, reportedly to keep a promise made to his mother on her deathbed. A rodeo performer who didn’t drink was akin to a dog that doesn’t bark. Keeping his promise wasn’t a simple matter of abstinence. There was little else besides liquor to drink on the ranching frontier, while rodeo performers used liquor to both pass the time and ease aches and pains. (No record remains of whether Red’s vow covered beer.) The bronc rider was not completely tamed and curried, however. Red smoked a corncob pipe, chewed tobacco and boasted an ability to spit a stream of tobacco juice with accuracy and distance.

No matter how good one is in the saddle, riding half-wild horses (and steers) is dangerous work. Red suffered his share of broken bones over the years. At one Wild West performance a bronc struck a corral post and fell on Red, breaking his leg. But the showman refused to crawl off. He remained in the saddle when the horse regained its feet. No injury ever kept him from riding. That toughness helps explain why he was so admired by fellow cowboys. He was the real McCoy, not some fancy-pants trick rider.

Though Red officially retired in 1924, he couldn’t stay away from the arena. Like an actor returning to the footlights or a jock drawn to the gym, he came back to Fort Worth that year for the annual Fat Stock Show & Rodeo, but as a spectator. His performing days were behind him, or so he thought as he sat in the stands watching the Monday matinee rodeo that March 10. He had a nondescript cap pulled low over his face and hoped no one would recognize him. All was working to plan until a “hell pitchin’ hoss” named Romeo broke away from handlers, electrifying the sparse crowd. “Give us Booger Red!” the spectators began chanting. A woman in the stands beside Red suddenly stood, pointed at him and shouted, “Here he is!” The crowd went wild. Moments later, his blood racing, the nearly bald old man made his way down the coliseum steps to the arena floor, swapping his cap for a Stetson before climbing aboard the outlaw horse. Romeo promptly broke across the arena, Red hanging on with one hand and waving the hat with the other. Soaking in the smell of the horse and roar of the adoring crowd, he tipped and pivoted with each buck and twist. The ride ended with him firmly in the saddle, keeping alive the legend of never having been thrown.

Not Forgotten

Just two weeks later, back home in his own bed, Samuel “Booger Red” Privett died of Bright’s disease, the same ailment that had taken his father. He was 66 years old—or maybe 62, or even 60. His last word to family members gathered bedside began with, “Boys, I’m leaving it with you,” and ended with, “Have all the fun you can while you live, for when you are dead, you are a long time dead.” Red was buried in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Miami, Okla. (According to family lore, Mollie couldn’t afford a headstone, so his grave remained unmarked until Ella had a slab installed in 1980.) Mollie lived another 45 years, dying on Sept. 26, 1969.

Gone but not forgotten, Booger Red lived on in Western lore. For decades afterward old-timers related stories of his exploits. It seems everyone in Fort Worth was in the stands for his last ride in 1924. Renowned Texas poet Whitney Montgomery wrote verses about the celebrated bronc rider, and Red was written up in a 1944 issue of the Southwest Review literary journal, a story picked up by Reader’s Digest. Famed folklorist J. Frank Dobie kept his story alive, and 70 years after Red’s death Fort Worth journalists were relating the story of “Booger Red’s Last Ride” to new audiences. The legendary bronc rider was inducted into Oklahoma City’s National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1975, and in 1991 the cumulative years of interest finally prompted a biography. Red and Mollie’s last surviving child, Alta, was still living when her father’s biographer came calling. But Charlsie Poe ran into familiar obstacles faced by all biographers—namely, fallible memories, inflated legends and contradictory sources.

Visitors to the historic Fort Worth Stockyards may recognize the name Booger Red, for when proprietors of the 1907 Stockyards Hotel remodeled the place in 1984, they named its restaurant-bar Booger Red’s Saloon. (Never mind the irony of naming a saloon after a man who never drank.) Patrons don’t belly up to the bar for their “tanglefoot”; they climb up on saddle-topped stools, often asking, “Who or what the heck is ‘Booger Red’? Is he a real person?” The answer, of course, is yes, he was a real person, a genuine cowboy and rodeo performer who made his last ride only steps down the road in Fort Worth. Half a block away, at 121 E. Exchange Ave., is the Cowtown Coliseum, looking much as it did a century ago when Booger Red performed for thousands of cheering rodeo fans.

As one fan summed it up years before, “There will only be one Booger Red.”

Richard Selcer is a frequent contributor to Wild West who has written 11 books about his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. His primary sources for the article were the privately printed 1991 book Booger Red: World Champion Cowboy, by Charlsie Poe, and articles from early Texas newspapers.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

Books

Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary (2010, by Steve Friesen)
This is my biography of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, written when I was the director of the Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave. What sets it apart is a wealth of original photographs and images of artifacts and documents associated with the showman’s life, making it equally at home on a reference bookshelf or coffee table.

Wild Bill Hickok & Buffalo Bill Cody: Plainsmen of the Legendary West (2022, by Bill Markley)
Buffalo Bill Cody and friend James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok were, and still are, often confused with one another. Author Bill Markley does an excellent job of distinguishing their life paths and exploring the relationship between them. Two biographies in one, the book is a well-researched and highly readable analysis of two legendary Westerners.

Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody & the Wild West Show (2005, by Louis S. Warren)
The thickest tome among these picks, Louis Warren’s book is chock-full of information about the famed showman, all carefully documented with extensive footnotes. My only problem with the book is the author’s emphasis on Cody’s “imposture.” Merriam-Webster defines that word as “the act or practice of deceiving by means of an assumed character or name.” While Buffalo Bill may have been Cody’s show business persona, it was not a deception and indeed based on real-life exploits.

The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide: An Autobiography (1879)
Cody’s autobiography has been reprinted many times since 1879. Some historians regard it as largely a work of fiction. I am not one of them. Written in an era dominated by dime novels, it has its exaggerations. But it is useful as a primary source, since it is his autobiography. All in all, it is an educational and entertaining read.

Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2004, by Erik Larson)
This is the only book in this list that does not devote itself primarily to Buffalo Bill. But author Erik Larson has carefully woven Cody into the central narrative of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the deadly deeds of one of the nation’s first mass murderers. It is a nonfiction book that reads as entertainingly as a novel.

Movies

The Life of Buffalo Bill (1912, on YouTube)
Produced on three reels by the Buffalo Bill & Pawnee Bill Film Co., this silent film was the first feature about Cody and included both real and fictional scenes from his life. Though an actor portrays Buffalo Bill through most of the film, it opens and closes with appearances by the aging showman himself and is worth watching for that alone.

Young Buffalo Bill (1940, on DVD and YouTube) 
Directed by Joseph Kane and starring Roy Rogers and George “Gabby” Hayes, this oater bears absolutely no resemblance to Buffalo Bill’s actual life, nor does it intend to. Running just under an hour, it is a film version of the many 19th century dime novels about Cody, offering the thinnest of plots and plenty of action.

Buffalo Bill (1944, on DVD and YouTube)
Directed by William Wellman and starring Joel McCrae in the title role and Maureen O’Hara as wife Louisa, this Western is as accurate as one can expect from a Hollywood effort. It is loosely based on an article written by Frank Winch, who knew Cody and created an early chronology of his life. Though it strays from that chronology, expect to be entertained.

Annie Get Your Gun (1950, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
This MGM musical comedy, directed by George Sidney with music by Irving Berlin, stars Betty Hutton as Annie Oakley and Howard Keel as Frank Butler. Though primarily a love story about the two performers, who did marry in real life, it is set within the context of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and presided over by Cody (played by Louis Calhern). Among the popular songs on the soundtrack is “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” indeed a theme for Buffalo Bill’s life.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976, on DVD) and Hidalgo
(2004, on DVD and Blu-ray) According to Sandra K. Sagala’s book Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen, as of 2013 more than 80 film and television productions have included Cody in some form. Most don’t even feign accuracy, which is fine, as long as they are presented as entertainment. These two films profess to include truth, but they are so full of falsehoods, I cannot recommend them.

Norman Crockatt is not a well-known name, but the British intelligence officer was responsible for one of the most controversial decisions of World War II.

When the War Office in London created Military Intelligence Section 9 (MI9) on December 23, 1939, it chose the 45-year-old Crockatt to head the new organization. The former head of the London Stock Exchange, he was seen as “the right sort of chap” for the post despite his scant experience in military intelligence.

MI9’s mission was to help British military personnel escape and evade the enemy. That might mean smuggling maps and miniature compasses to prisoners of war held in Nazi camps or assisting shot-down airmen in enemy territory to evade capture and get back to Britain or Allied-controlled territory. MI9 was a small branch of British intelligence, but in June 1943 Crockatt had the responsibility of making a momentous decision about the fate of 80,000 Allied POWs incarcerated in Italian prison camps. The Allies were gearing up to invade Italy and Crockatt had to decide whether the POWs there should stay put and wait for the arrival of Allied troops or break out and try to make their own way to freedom.

Crockatt chose the former option, stating in an order issued on June 7, 1943, that “officers commanding prison camps will ensure that prisoners of war remain within camp. Authority is granted to all officers commanding to take necessary disciplinary action to prevent individual prisoners of war attempting to rejoin their own units.” Several factors influenced Crockatt’s final decision. First was the physical state of the prisoners, many of whom were believed to be malnourished after years in captivity. Then there was the prospect of tens of thousands of prisoners on the loose, providing easy targets for vengeful Nazis and fascist Italians loyal to Mussolini. Above all, Crockatt believed that the Allies’ advance north through Italy would be swift and British and American troops would quickly liberate the camps. Why risk a mass breakout and jeopardize the lives of so many men?

To get word to the POWs of what they should do, Crockatt used a secret code contained within the script of a popular BBC program, The Radio Padre, a favorite among the prisoners. But what MI9 didn’t do, remarkably, was inform British prime minister Winston Churchill or his War Cabinet of his decision. From the outset of negotiations with Italy Churchill had made plain his wish to see POWs returned to the Allies once the Armistice came into force. Article 3 of the Italian surrender agreement stipulated that prisoners were to be “immediately turned over to the Allied commander-in-chief and none of these may now or at any time be evacuated to Germany.” When the Armistice was made public on September 8 the Italian War Ministry kept faith with its obligations and told 80,000 Allied prisoners that they were free to leave. But the majority remained in their camps, where they risked falling under the control of the Germans.

Churchill was aghast when he learned of Crockatt’s order for POWs to stay put, but by then it was too late for many prisoners. Contrary to what Crockatt had anticipated, the Germans had wasted little time in taking over most of the camps and were soon hunting the estimated 30,000 who had defied the stay-put command and taken flight.

Nothing could be done now to liberate the prisoners in the camps, but Churchill demanded a plan to rescue the fugitives. The man chosen to lead the operation was Lieutenant Colonel Charles “Tony” Simonds, who had joined MI9 in 1941 after fighting alongside General Orde Wingate in what is now Ethiopia. Based in Cairo, Simonds was in charge of A Force, which had responsibility to set up escape lines for Allied prisoners across occupied Europe. Summoned to Allied Forces HQ in Algiers on September 23, Simonds received orders to devise a plan to rescue the thousands of escaped Allied prisoners roaming Italy. He had at his disposal personnel from Britain’s 1st Airborne Division, Second Special Air Service Regiment (2SAS), and Special Operations Executive (SOE), as well as the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The mission received the codename Jonquil.

Simonds established his headquarters at Brindisi, a port on the eastern heel of the Italian boot, and arranged a meeting with officers from 2SAS, billeted 75 miles northwest in the coastal city of Bari. This elite British special forces unit had been formed in North Africa in 1941 by brothers David and Bill Stirling, and while stationed in Cairo Simonds had heard tales of their effectiveness in raiding Axis targets deep inside their territory. David Stirling had been captured in January 1943 but Bill, in command of 2SAS, sent two of his officers, Major Felix Symes and Captain Peter Power, to Brindisi to discuss the rescue operation.

They arrived on the evening of September 26 and for the next three hours Simonds briefed the SAS officers on the nature of the mission. Standing in front of a large map of the east coast of Italy, Simonds explained that he had divided the region into four areas, from Ancona in the north to Ortona in the south, a range of approximately 100 miles. Simonds defined the role of 2SAS in the operation thus: “In each area two parties will go in, one to be dropped by parachute inland, with the object of sending all P.W.s down to the coast, and one party to land by sea to form a beach party to guide, shepherd, and protect the prisoners, and also to supervise their embarkation after having signaled the boats.” There were seven soldiers in each party, and the boats were vessels that would rendezvous off the beaches to take on the escapees.

Furthermore, Simonds planned to have two other parties landed in the most southerly of the four areas to collect a large number of prisoners known to have gathered close to the town of Chieti. Attached to each A Force team would be an Italian speaker to question villagers about the prisoners’ whereabouts.     

Simonds recruited a handful of interpreters locally, but he also could exploit the linguistic skills of the American OSS, which had a sub-unit called the Operational Group (OG) with the role of organizing, equipping, and training indigenous populations to fight common enemies. Unlike Britain in the first half of the 20th century, America had a “melting pot” society that enabled the OSS to recruit operatives from Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Norwegian, Italian, and other communities. The standard OG comprised four officers and 30 enlisted men, and the Italian unit was commanded by 1st Lieutenant Peter Sauro. Born in Yonkers, New York, to Italian parents, the 31-year-old Sauro had been a tree surgeon before the war; he was small and past his physical prime, but he had a good grasp of his ancestral language.

Sauro and his section reached OSS headquarters in Algiers on September 8, the day that Italy officially surrendered. Designated Unit A, First Contingent, Operational Groups, 2677th Headquarters Company Experimental (Provisional) AFHQ, Sauro’s OG was the first of its kind to be activated and spent the next two weeks in parachute training.

On September 25 OSS HQ informed Sauro of the A Force mission to round up escaped Allied prisoners in Italy. He had 24 hours to select 18 men for the operation and equip them as necessary. They received the codename Simcol. Once they had reached Italy, Sauro’s team of Italian speakers traveled by vehicle to Bari, where A Force had established its new base and where Simonds introduced Sauro to the SAS officers. Simonds asked him to provide one of his men to each of the four SAS parachute parties and another to each of the five teams who would land by fishing boat. Sauro and his remaining nine members of the OG would take part in a parachute operation independent of the British. 

Sauro’s team left Bari airfield in the late afternoon of October 2 for the short flight north to Catignano, a village 20 miles inland from Pescara. They parachuted onto the drop zone without incident. 

A few hours after Sauro’s party had flown from Bari, a fleet of eight schooners sailed out of the city’s port under the command of SAS Captain Peter Power, a 32-year-old Irishman. Their voyage up the eastern coast took them longer than expected because of fierce fighting at Termoli, 125 miles north of Bari, where for three days a battle raged between the British 78th Infantry Division and the German 1st Parachute Division. At Termoli, Power and his 12 men exchanged the schooners for LSI’s (Landing Ship, Infantry) and continued on their mission, finally going ashore at 2:00 a.m. on October 7 at Grottammare, 100 miles north of Termoli and 50 miles north of Sauro and his men. They had landed several miles south of their intended disembarkation point so they marched north overnight through torrential rain to reach the correct stretch of coast.

On the night of October 9-10 Power signaled ashore a naval dinghy stocked with supplies. It also brought the message that it would not be back again “until the nights of October 24/25 and 25/26 owing to the moon, and that all prisoners must be embarked on these nights.” Power’s party had a formidable task ahead of them. Deep inside enemy territory, without any wireless sets—none had been provided despite repeated requests—they had no means of extraction for a fortnight. 

Power divided his force into four groups, three of which would search the surrounding countryside to the north, west and south. The fourth party, under the command of Sergeant Major Bill Marshall, would remain by the coast to receive prisoners as they were brought in, and conduct a sweep of the coastal area for any other escapees.

When he set off north on October 10 Power had two men with him: Bob Tong, a 20-year-old private from Shropshire, and sergeant Joe Marino, one of Sauro’s OG interpreters. Power kept a daily tally of their accomplishments in his log. On the evening of October 11, he noted that they contacted 14 prisoners, including two South African officers. They next day, “British officers arrived at 11.00 hrs and told us there were a number of prisoners near Corridonia.” On October 13 they contacted another six prisoners, and when they reached the Corridonia area the next day they found a prisoner who said he knew of 30 more. They found nine more on October 15, and on the 16th made contact with a communist who was hiding about 30 escapees. 

On the return march to the beach, Power collected more prisoners, all of whom he corralled into a farmhouse about two miles from the coast under the supervision of Tong and Marino. When he reached Marshall’s base camp on October 20 Power found 34 more POWs that Marshall and his men had collected over the week. “All going well,” wrote Power in his journal. Now they just had to sit tight and wait for the naval vessels to arrive in four days. 

Their fortunes turned the next morning. A routine German patrol spotted Marshall’s base camp and in the ensuing firefight two SAS were captured and a number of Germans killed and wounded. On hearing the firing, Power shepherded the POWs from the farmhouse into a ravine where they remained for the day. To make matters worse, Sergeant Marino was unwell, a condition Power described in his journal as “delayed V.D.” 

Fortunately, the Germans did not launch a follow-up operation. Power posted lookouts on the coastal road but they spotted nothing untoward. On October 23 SAS parties from the other three operational areas began arriving with their haul of wandering POWs. In total, noted Power, by the morning of the 24th they had “about three or four hundred prisoners.” Many were excited at the prospect of their impending salvation, while others were tired, hungry, and irritable. Months and years as prisoners and weeks as fugitives had eroded much of their military discipline. Eventually, however, the SAS led them to within a few hundred yards of the beach. 

The boat was scheduled to arrive at half past midnight on October 25, and Power’s instructions to the prisoners were to “come in parties not larger than three.” Marino, though still debilitated by illness, was to act as their dispatcher. Power and Tong started out for the beach at 11:40 p.m. They had hardly arrived before they heard “bursts of automatic fire” and then the unmistakeable sound of trucks arriving. Panicking, the gathered POWs “stampeded back into the hills.” Power and Tong ran north along the beach away from the sound of gunfire. They didn’t know if the two captured SAS men had revealed the evacuation plan under questioning by their captors, or if the Germans had discovered the large number of prisoners on their own. 

At daylight Power and Tong continued their trek north, believing the operation had been fatally compromised. But that evening a Royal Naval launch arrived and picked up the SAS party, now under the command of Sergeant Major Bill Marshall and including Joe Marino. After the previous night’s panic only 23 prisoners remained of the 400 brought to the beach. Power and Tong didn’t return to Allied lines for a month, when they sailed into Termoli in a fishing boat piloted by an Italian aviation officer. They brought five POWs with them. 

Pete Sauro found himself in a predicament similar to Power’s. Having parachuted into Catignano, Sauro and his men had collected 250 fugitives within 24 hours. The Americans instructed the POWs to muster on the coast at Francavilla, some 20 miles due east from Sauro’s operational base. A naval vessel was supposed to arrive on the nights of October 4, 6, 8, and 10 between midnight and 1:00 a.m. and flash a light every 15 minutes. The password was “Jack London.”

The three other SAS parties scouring the countryside west and south of Pescara were also directing POWs toward Francavilla. In total 600 had reached the coast: 350 British, 200 Yugoslav, and 50 American. But, as the SAS report stated: “They had signalled for four nights (October 4, 6, 8, and 10), without success, though on the fourth night what was believed to have been a German MTB [Motor Torpedo Boat] switched its searchlight on them, and there was an exchange of fire. At the same time a truckload of German troops arrived on the coast road above them.” 

The SAS officer overseeing the evacuation was Captain Raymond Lee. A colorful character who craved excitement, Lee was really a Frenchmen named Raymond Couraud who had won the Croix de Guerre for his actions with the French Foreign Legion in Norway, but later deserted. Arrested, he spent some time in prison, then operated in France as a gangster before joining the SOE and then the SAS under his assumed name.

Lee told the prisoners “to split up and make their way through the lines.” He added that Termoli, 75 miles away, was now in British hands after a three-day battle, and it was safer to travel overland than by sea, where they risked attack from enemy vessels or aircraft.

Sauro issued similar instructions to half of his OSS team, but he and four men continued to scour the area for escaped prisoners, briefing those they found on how to reach Allied lines. Sauro sent three more operatives south on November 3, while he and one other remained searching. Eventually the pair were captured by the Germans.

Captain Lee returned safely to Termoli and volunteered on the night of November 2 to accompany a search and rescue party aboard an Italian MTB. With him was Captain Richard Lewis, a 26-year-old Illinoian and Harvard graduate (who would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his biography of Edith Wharton), and Augusto Ruffo, an 18-year-old Italian recruited to A Force, whose father was the 6th Duke of Guardia Lombarda. “We were part of an Anglo-American intelligence outfit known in Washington as MIS-X [Military Intelligence Service X] and in London as MI-9,” wrote Lewis in his memoir. “In Italy, we had various cover titles.” One of these was A Force.

The Italian MTB left Termoli and arrived at the rendezvous point off Silvi, seven miles north of Pescara. The vessel’s skipper flashed the recognition signal to shore, where the A Force team, including a British Lieutenant Lyte, spotted it. With them were 12 POWs. Before they could respond to the signal, said Lyte, “machine gun fire and 20mm Breda fire [were] directed at a boat about 1½ miles off shore.”

Lewis and Ruffo were below deck talking on their bunks when the firing started. “I could see tracer bullets flying and could hear shouts of consternation and rapid orders from above,” recalled Lewis. “My young Italian friend, in the midst of a sentence, fell forward from the bunk to lie dead on the floor; a bullet had penetrated the side of the boat and entered his back.”

Lewis flattened himself on the floor as rounds tore through the MTB. When he eventually emerged on deck, he counted the corpses of half a dozen Italian soldiers. “Flames were licking along the railing,” remembered Lewis. “From out in the blackness I could hear the desperate appeal of the Italian sailors who had jumped overboard with their life belts and were floating about crying for help.”

Also in the water was Captain Raymond Lee. Despite being shot in the shoulder, he managed to swim the mile ashore where he was subsequently found by Lyte. Lewis also swam ashore, staggering up the beach and into a dune. “As I watched, exhaustedly, the fire on board reached the torpedo and the boat blew up.”

Lewis was now in the same predicament as the men he had set out to rescue. He struck out south and initially made good progress, relying on the generosity of “kind and unquestioning Italian peasants.” One provided him with an old suit. Although ditching his uniform removed his status as a soldier and raised the possibility that he could be executed as a spy if captured, Lewis believed the tattered suit gave him a better chance of reaching the Allied lines than his combat fatigues. “I was almost within sight of the British lookout posts when I got stuck,” said Lewis. “The long, drawn-out battle of the Sangro River had begun, and the front lines were far too lively for me to attempt to cross.”

Though the British Eighth Army had secured Termoli on October 6, the advance up the east coast of Italy turned into a bloody slog. They finally crossed the Sangro (32 miles northwest of Termoli) on November 23, but it required another five weeks of hard fighting before the 1st Canadian Infantry Division captured the deep-water port of Ortona.

As the fighting raged, Lewis hunkered down in a stone cottage near the village of Crecchio, about 12 miles north of the Sangro. “While both armies surged forward and fell back in what, from my fretful vantage point, seemed sheer tactical messiness, I made useless little forays toward making my way to safety, only to retreat each time,” recalled Lewis.

The American finally made it through the lines on December 17, “having swallowed enough raw red wine to give me the requisite courage.” Captain Lee, who had reached Termoli after a 10-day trek, had informed A Force that Lewis had been killed on the MTB, so his arrival was greeted with delight.  

Simonds estimated that about 900 former prisoners made the same journey as Lewis and Lee in the autumn of 1943, either by boat or on foot. Some received A Force’s  assistance but others relied on their own initiative. It was a disappointing tally considering that an estimated 30,000 prisoners had walked out of their camps in September; in total it is estimated that between 11,000 to 14,000 POWs reached freedom, either in southern Italy or by crossing into neutral Switzerland.

Those involved in the A Force operation quickly pinpointed the major flaw in the operation: the lack of radio communication. Colonel Russell B. Livermore of OSS’s 2677th Headquarters Company had been unable to contact any of the men on Simcol and wrote in his report, “My reaction…is that hereafter we carry out all our own operations and discontinue these ‘joint’ ones with the British.”

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Stirling, commanding officer 2SAS, cited several other reasons for the operation’s ineffectiveness, including the “extremely erratic” timekeeping of the navy that made coordination with the men ashore difficult. But his major complaint echoed Livermore’s: “Signalling arrangements were not satisfactory,” he wrote. “Walkie-Talkies between shore and ship might have been useful. Wireless communications with the base would have prevented the ignorance of the parties of the amended orders issued.”

What frustrated Stirling most was the missed opportunity. “[G]iven a simple plan with a reliable means of communication, and R.Vs [rendezvous], which could be depended on, it might have produced more satisfactory results.” In the end, it remained a lost opportunity.

The California Gold Rush. The very words evoked the strong reaction of an American populace driven by adventure and a lust for easy riches. Drawn inexorably west in the wake of the Jan. 24, 1848, strike at Sutter’s Mill were argonauts from every walk of life—shopkeepers, former soldiers, fallen women and those willing to parade their talents onstage for bemused hardscrabble miners. Among the latter was the Robinson Family, a husband-and-wife acting duo with four kids in tow. The youngest of the brood would become one of the most celebrated performers in the annals of Victorian theater in the American West. With her onstage portrayals Sue Robinson brought to a viewing public the humor, angst and subtle realities of everyday life in that time and place.

The “Fairy Star”

Born in suburban Chicago on Jan. 14, 1845, Robinson moved west at age 6 with her parents and siblings, who were soon performing for Gold Rush audiences composed primarily of young men starved of family life. The Robinson Family trouped the length and breadth of the mother lode settlements, from northernmost Georgetown south through Coloma, Angels Camp, Murphys and countless other hamlets since lost to history, their names—Bottle Hill, Poverty Bar, Limerick, etc.—reflecting both the struggles and humor of the era.

The touring life held little of the perceived glamour of the entertainment world. On July 4, 1855, the Robinsons found themselves performing atop a giant sequoia stump for a raucous crowd in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Three years later the family drew such a throng to Poverty Bar’s Treadway Hall that its main stringer and floor joists gave way. Even when performances fell short of expectations, Sue in particular garnered flattering notices from the various camp presses, which regularly lauded her as the “jewel” of the family troupe. One reporter ascribed her popularity to a combination of factors:

“She is only 8 years old, yet she appeared to understand all the fascinating qualities of her sex of a more experienced age. This in connection with her sprightly and graceful dancing, as well as her natural beauty and sweet disposition, is sufficient not only to make her a favorite among us, but also to endear her to the hearts of all with whom she is acquainted.”

Recognizing the appealing innocence of their star attraction, Sue’s parents billed her alternately as the “Fairy Star” or “La Petite Susan.” Yet, the endless trouping in the rough-hewn mining camps scarred the young girl’s psyche. At age 8 she was severely injured while exiting a stage in Grass Valley when she brushed past the open flame of a footlight and caught her clothes on fire. Rushing to her rescue, her parents themselves were scorched in the effort. Fortunate to have survived, the Fairy Star was soon back onstage, though from then on she was prone to fleeing the stage at the mere hint of trouble.

From an early age the youngest Robinson recognized the importance even a few coins could mean to the survival of her struggling theatrical family. One evening, as she completed the Scotch lilt for an appreciative audience of Placerville miners, the men showered the stage with coins. Ignoring a bouquet of flowers thrown to her, Sue didn’t exit till she had retrieved every last coin, even filling her shoes with them.

The multitalented young girl’s singing embraced everything from sentimental ballads to grand opera, while her dance specialties included jigs, flings, clogs, the cancan, “La Cachucha” (performed with castanets), “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and a double “Sailor’s Hornpipe” performed with older brother Billy. Among her most popular numbers was a burlesque of Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez, who had reportedly taught both Sue and contemporary child star Lotta Crabtree the infamous Spider Dance, during which Montez would writhe and cavort to rid her flimsy costume of spiders, to the delight of appreciative male audiences.

Tragedy and a Rivalry

Sue was only 10 when her mother fell ill and died on Aug. 22, 1855, while on tour in Diamond Springs, sending the family fortunes into a tailspin. Economic uncertainty was and remains a stressor in the acting profession, but his wife’s death pressured Joseph Robinson to take dire measures to provide for his children. In addition to trying his hand at theater management, Sue’s father opened a dance school in Sacramento, advertising his daughters, “La Petite Susan” and Josephine, as potential dancing partners for gentlemen customers. As survival took precedence over propriety, father Robinson—characterized by one period newspaper as a peripatetic “bilk,” a Victorian-era term for an untrustworthy individual—appears to have abandoned any feelings of paternal responsibility for his daughters’ welfare.

Another formative factor in Sue’s childhood was an ongoing, unspoken competition with Crabtree, who rose to become a nationally known actress and variety star. Both girls experienced insecure childhoods spent relentlessly touring the mining settlements to perform before mostly male audiences. They occasionally crossed paths. Sue played the hand organ in a troupe that supported Lotta’s first professional performance, and in the mid-1850s Robinson performed in a saloon opposite Crabtree in a neighboring saloon. In a painful memory for Sue, the miners abandoned her performance, crossing the street en masse to watch the charismatic, slightly younger Lotta. Dressed in green and wielding a miniature shillelagh onstage, Lotta became the darling of the newly immigrant Irish then fueling the labor force in the camps.

While both girls learned the basics of stage presence, Robinson struggled with less emotional and financial support than that afforded the more celebrated Crabtree. The disparity prompted one contemporary actor to remark that had Sue been given proper theatrical training, she would have equaled any other actress of the time. Yet, the multitalented Robinson persisted in the face of adversity. Celebrated as a “child of extraordinary promise,” she sang, danced, played the banjo and, as she matured, excelled in the genteel comedy pieces and farces that followed the featured melodramas. By age 14 Sue was receiving top billing in show posters promoting the Robinson Family.

Growing Celebrity

In 1859, after remarrying a captivating performer scarcely 10 years older than his oldest child, Joseph Robinson moved his family to the Pacific Northwest, where recent gold discoveries augured a new gold rush. Playing their way through Oregon and Washington by 1860, the family spent a year in Victoria, British Columbia, headquartered in a building Joseph leased and converted into a theater. Trouping back to Portland, Sue appeared onstage with the handsome Frank Mayo, a regional actor and comedian who went on to national fame. Like Sue, he had come West as a young hopeful during the gold rush.

In some ways Sue’s life was typical for a member of an acting family prone to chasing the next theatrical opportunity and dollar. Generally ostracized from polite society, actors were clannishly protective of their own. On May 4, 1862, 17-year-old Robinson married fellow thespian Charles Getzler in Walla Walla, Wash., where she soon gave birth to Edward, the first of their two sons. Though Getzler was 12 years Sue’s senior and not her first love, he professed his adoration for her. Seeking stability and a parental figure to help assuage both the loss of her mother and her father’s veiled exploitation, Robinson almost certainly hoped for a stable married life. Sadly, it was not to be. Much as the Fairy Star had been the breadwinner for her vagabond gold camp family, so Sue shouldered the support of her husband and boys as a young adult.

Complicating matters was her growing status as a celebrity, which carried its own perils. A few months into the couple’s marriage a smitten theater patron approached their home, threatening to kidnap Sue. As Charles wrestled the deranged fan to the ground, a concealed gun in the man’s clothing discharged, killing the would-be kidnapper. On another occasion, when fistfights and gunshots erupted in a theater audience composed of enamored Union soldiers and citizens desiring decorum, a panicked Sue ran offstage. “Susie never seemed quite the same afterward,” recalled one eyewitness to the fray. “A slight commotion in the audience would attract her attention in the midst of her best song, and in her best play she always looked as though she was just a little afraid someone was going to shoot.” That nervous strain hovered just beneath the surface. When an earthquake struck during a performance of The Soldier’s Bride at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nev., Sue bolted from the stage, only returning when the aftershocks had subsided. The tremulous quality of her closing song betrayed her lingering fear.

In her best moments, absent such disruptions, Robinson exuded a calm, professional demeanor—quiet by theatrical standards. Feeling more comfortable onstage than off, her pursuit of acting as an adult after a childhood spent before the footlights was her most logical, if not only, career choice. Empowered by her celebrity status and the ability to earn a living, Sue continued performing even after marriage and the birth of sons Edward and Frederick. As a dramatic actress she often executed men’s “breeches” roles, perceived in that time and place as both sensational and erotic. Clearly, Robinson didn’t feel hemmed in by conventional gender boundaries.

For Victorian-era actresses the theater was a paradox. By entering what was traditionally a male space, they breached societal norms, a transgression that discredited their work. Yet, the theater was a place where women could earn an income equal to that of a man and maintain a degree of autonomy over their lives. The theater also had the power to overturn prevailing gender stereotypes that bound women to domesticity, keeping them indoors, protected, frail and helpless.

Stardom in San Francisco

Sincerity was a hallmark of Victorian ideology, and Robinson’s realistic acting—deemed “finished, truthful and good” by one critic—continued to reap positive reviews. Another critic found the “young but promising actress possessed of far more real talent than many who are lauded before the public as stars of the first magnitude.” Though the charismatic Crabtree had outshone Robinson in childhood, Lotta never grew beyond the song and dance routines that were her bread and butter. Sue attained a higher level of recognition as a legitimate actress in classic dramatic roles opposite the leading male actors of the day.

During her tireless theatrical career Robinson is thought to have played more than 300 different roles and performed before tens of thousands of people. Her first stage appearance in the growing entertainment mecca of San Francisco was at the Union Theater in 1855. Sue was praised for her Ophelia, played opposite the Hamlets of Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough and Edwin Adams, three of the era’s best tragedians. She appeared for almost two seasons as Sacramento’s leading lady, executing Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Portia in other Shakespearean plays, as well as comedies, melodramas and farce. In December 1868 Sue accepted a one-year contract with Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco, and by the early 1870s she was regarded as one of the best, if not the best, comedic actresses in the West.

Still, mainstream Victorian mores inevitably seeped into the life of the successful, assertive actress, who was often billed under her husband’s last name. Getzler accompanied his career wife to San Francisco, where in 1869 a domestic dispute led to violence. A year later she filed for divorce. Sue’s accolades may have threatened the insecure, underperforming Charles, whose job as saloonman also may have contributed to alcohol abuse. The divorce papers charged that “without cause or prevarication…he committed a violent assault and battery…by beating and bruising her severely, telling her at the same time that she was only a thing to use for his own convenience.” In colorful testimony Getzler accused Sue of being unchaste, called her a “bitch and strumpet” and insisted “all actresses are whores.” In an era when courts weighed a woman’s chastity, the judge accepted his assertion the couple’s younger son, Frederick, was not his and split custody. Sue kept Frederick, Charles kept Edward.

On the Move

After the divorce, though the loss of the companionship of son Edward grieved her, Sue continued to tour with her own theatrical company. Three women and five men constituted the Sue Robinson Company, which closed its run in Virginia City, packed up a mud wagon and pushed on to Reno. Actors were challenged to find paying customers, and the quest kept them constantly on the move. A ticket speculator in Reno charged theatergoers 75 cents to take in Robinson’s performances and pocketed a tidy profit, while the troupe lost money on the deal, having covered the hall rental. After performances in Truckee and Dutch Flat, Calif., the troupe performed on dusty stages in gold rush towns long past their heyday, out of necessity skipping town with unpaid hotel bills.

The company’s luck changed in North San Juan, a Sierra Nevada hydraulic mining camp where Sue had performed as a child 12 years before. On July 4, 1870, the day of the troupe’s arrival, the settlement suffered a devastating fire. Without hesitation, two of Robinson’s leading men manned a fire hose from the vantage of the hotel roof. Thanks in part to their efforts, the blaze was confined to a small section of town, and that night the company’s performance of Camille set a new theater attendance record in North San Juan. Grateful townsfolk rewarded the troupe with several ovations and curtain calls.

Though Robinson reportedly earned more than $80,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars) in the 1860s—largely while touring through Washington, Oregon and Idaho—and though she had announced her retirement on several occasions, each time she was compelled to return to the stage in support of her family. One biographer blamed her “worthless” husband for having forfeited her earnings on faro tables across the West. When not touring, Sue performed menial labor to supplement the family income.

According to friends, such persistent financial concerns, coupled with overwork and continued threats by Getzler that she’d never again see son Edward, contributed to her decline in the summer of 1871. Uncharacteristically, Sue canceled several performances, calling in sick. In early June her vindictive ex-husband sent her sheet music to a song entitled “You’ll Never See Your Boy Again.” Whether the sentiments of the lyrics pushed her over the edge is uncertain. Regardless, on June 17 Robinson succumbed to an unspecified illness while on tour in Sacramento. The epitaph on her tombstone in that town’s New Helvetia Cemetery reads, A fallen rose, the fairest, sweetest but most transient of all the lovely sisterhood, suggesting the fleeting nature of the acting profession and the ephemeral status of the characters she’d portrayed onstage.

Sue’s career had been in ascendance, as she had recently agreed to appear as leading lady at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, one of the nation’s leading playhouses. Though just 26 at the time of her death, she had already spent 20 years in show business, her career having paralleled the glory years of economic prosperity with professional highs before appreciative audiences.

“Not All Sunshine”

Much of Sue Robinson’s life has been lost to the greater drama of the California Gold Rush and its substantial effect on the settlement of the American West. Forced into a performing life by her parents, she made the best of her significant talents, as both a child entertainer and as a stellar adult comedic and dramatic talent. Her early theatricalities before rough, mostly male audiences provided them welcome respite amid dangerous, demanding lives. She was rewarded with a successful career. Fittingly, her last role was in a play called Ambition, an emotion that had driven her to persist through many trials and setbacks.

Ironically, in their time the Old West figures that today capture the lion’s share of popular interest seldom captured headlines beyond their immediate locales, while the popular actors of the Victorian era were familiar to untold thousands nationwide. The male and female celebrities of their day, such performers informed behavior, fashion, society and politics. Robinson herself often starred in melodramas steeped in morality and devoted to the Irish experience, thus helping homesick immigrants deal with the realities of a new world. Her dramatic choices underscored her fame, earning her the adoration of audience members, though on occasion the latter’s emotions got the better of them. For example, years after Robinson’s death a deranged fan, still distraught over the loss of the cultural icon, tried to dig up her grave in the New Helvetia Cemetery.

Among Robinson’s many mourners was Gold Hill News editor Alf Doten, an ardent fan and returning audience member for many of Sue’s Virginia City performances, who in his notice of her death correctly surmised, “Her path through life was not all sunshine.” On learning of her death, Doten rushed to a local photographer’s studio to purchase three pictures he’d taken of Sue, taking comfort in the images of the actress he’d admired from the flip side of the footlights. His gesture was a fitting tribute to a woman who had been thrust into the challenging life of a performer in the American West and risen to the top of her profession.

California-based writer Carolyn Grattan Eichin adapted this article from her 2020 book From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West. For further reading Eichin also recommends Troupers of the Gold Coast: The Rise of Lotta Crabtree, by Constance Rourke.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Fresh from robbing the Deadwood Stagecoach, the Sioux performers of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West changed into loose-fitting Chinese garb and attached long single braids to the backs of their heads, mimicking the clothing and hairstyle of the Boxers then rebelling halfway around the world. Thus was the stage set for the “Western Easterners” to man a wall and defend their position against U.S. Army re-enactors in a scene played out in Cody’s “Rescue at Pekin.”

Pittsburgh was the host city this day in late May 1901, and the big-city crowd did not disappoint. As the action unfolded, spectators stomped their feet so hard as to send vibrations through the grandstand. During the climactic scene, as the Army re-enactors scaled the artificial wall, the jingoistic roar from audience members swelled to ear-throbbing intensity, and they surged over the railings to join performers on the arena floor.

The drama depicted actual events of the ongoing 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion. Emerging as a violent response to increasing foreign incursion into China, the Boxers (nicknamed for their martial arts skills, though officially known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists) sought to eradicate all signs of modern progress (railroads, telegraph lines, etc.) and called for the liquidaton of foreigners, particularly Christian missionaries (and their Chinese converts).

On June 20, 1900, the Boxers besieged foreign embassies in the Legation Quarter of Peking (present-day Beijing), trapping within its walls nearly 500 foreign civilians, 400 military personnel and 3,000 Chinese Christians. Fifty-five days into the siege eight nations, including the United States, sent some 20,000 soldiers to relieve the siege. In battle that August 14 and 15 they defeated the Boxers and then divided the capital city into occupation zones, sending occasional punitive forays into the countryside. Not until Sept. 7, 1901, did representatives of the allied nations and China’s Qing empire sign the Boxer Protocol, officially ending the rebellion.

Ever the savvy showman, Cody was quick to draw a correlation between the Boxers and American Indians. As the rebels had resisted foreign incursion, he reasoned, so Plains Indians had resisted the westward tide of Anglo settlement, cutting telegraph lines, attacking railroad crews and battling U.S. soldiers. Fueled by superstitious ideology, the Boxers believed they could induce spirits to enter their bodies and render them invulnerable to bullets, much like Plains Indian adherents of the “Ghost Dance” movement believed their ceremonial shirts would protect them. The latter movement ended in tragedy on Dec. 29, 1890, with the battle turned massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., all but ending the American Indian wars.

Buffalo Bill was a stickler for the authentic, wherever possible employing real soldiers, cowboys and Indians performing with real weapons. But as he had no access to real Boxers, the duty fell to those Sioux already in Cody’s employ. They were perfect for the role, one New York Sun reporter quipped, as they were “used to dying” in each show. “They die in the cowboy battles about the emigrant wagon, and they die again in the chase of the Deadwood coach,” he wrote. “They made no objection to…dying the death of Boxers this year.” A New York Evening Sun reporter noted, tongue in cheek, “Some of them seemed a little ill at ease in their Chinese makeup, but they kept themselves entirely in the landscape, positively refused to scalp a single member of the allied forces and never even indulged in so much as the ghost of a war whoop.”

American Indians had long featured in promotions for the Wild West, which urged potential ticket buyers to come see the “horde of warpainted Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux Indians” (though after convincing the infamous Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull to tour with him in 1885, Cody had hired only Sioux from the Pine Ridge Agency). Why did Plains Indians who had violently resisted “foreign incursion” agree to perform in the Wild West shows? For starters, those working for Buffalo Bill earned a decent wage, while employment prospects on and around the reservations were limited. In addition, room, board and travel were free. Finally, performers’ immediate families were welcome to join them on tour.

In the fall of 1900, drawn like so many Americans by the dramatic events in China, Cody proposed to his theatrical manager, Nate Salsbury, that they incorporate a reenactment of the allied victory over the Boxers in the forthcoming season of the Wild West. The pair put their heads together and came up with “The Rescue at Pekin.”

On April 2, 1901, opening night, they debuted the Chinese-themed spectacle at New York’s Madison Square Garden. After a fortnight’s run Cody took the show on the road, and by the time the season wrapped in late October the troupe had performed in arenas from upstate New York to the South and across much of the Midwest. In 1902, with few changes to the program, Cody and company performed for audiences in the Western half of the country.

The twice-daily shows were an enormous draw, attracting on average some 20,000 to 30,000 patrons, not counting those turned away at the gate. The audience often exceeded the population of the host cities, as people from surrounding areas packed the stands. The June 4 edition of Pennsylvania’s Reading Herald reported that crowds began to gather in the early morning, by showtime transforming into a “great huddled mass.”

As the battle between the Boxers and the soldiers marked the grand finale of each performance, Cody and Salsbury spared no expense. “It was indeed an enormous and costly undertaking,” author John R. Haddad writes, “requiring 100 horses, large amounts of gunpowder and explosives, the latest in cannons and firearms, and of course the massive wall of Peking that loomed majestically over one end of the arena.” The cast alone, including the braided Sioux “Boxers,” numbered 500.

The performance lacked for nothing. Whether it was authentically cast or accurate in every detail was beside the point. Cody and company were, above all else, entertainers, and whether clad in Western buckskins or Chinese silks, they seldom disappointed the huddled masses. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

O n the evening of June 5, 1944, Louis Leroux, his wife, and their six children scrambled atop an embankment near their farm to investigate the sounds of distant explosions. Three miles south, Allied fighter-bombers were attacking bridges over the Douve River on France’s Cotentin Peninsula. In the fading twilight the family watched silhouetted warplanes peel away from the glowing tracers of German anti-aircraft fire that stabbed skyward. When the excitement ended, the Lerouxs returned home to bed, unaware that their farm would play a vital role in the Allied liberation of France. 

Their slumber was disturbed a few hours later by the droning of low-flying aircraft. Gazing out their windows, they were startled to see descending parachutes. “They looked like big falling mushrooms,” recalled Madame Leroux. “We didn’t know what they were but could see that they were landing in the marshes.” When shrapnel from German flak shells pelted the roof, Madame Leroux and her husband gathered their children to take shelter in the stone stairwell. 

The farmstead sat on the east bank of the Merderet River, which bisected the Cotentin Peninsula north to south. The farm overlooked one of just two crossing points: the La Fière Bridge on the road to the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. While on the high ground, the family home was closer to the riverbank than originally intended thanks to the German occupiers who, recognizing the defensive potential of the landscape, had manipulated locks to flood the area with seawater. Rivers and streams had overflowed their banks to turn wide swaths of bucolic fields into swampland and a shallow lake.

At dawn on June 6, a platoon of Germans arrived at the Leroux’s farm. They searched the stables and occupied the house while the family retreated upstairs to the main bedroom. When gunfire erupted outside, the Lerouxs again scrambled for cover. Bullets cracked through windows, splintering shutters and ricocheting off interior stone walls. The staccato of German Mausers, MP40s, and MG42s echoed through the house as the occupiers fired back at the attackers.

During a pause in the shooting, the family rushed downstairs, past wounded Germans sprawled in the kitchen, and into the wine cellar. Wanting to flee, they nudged open the external cellar door. Spotting a soldier—who they thought was British—they yelled, “Français! Français!”

He replied in French: “Stay where you are and close the door!” 

Several hours later the door opened, and the same soldier commanded them, again in French, “Get out!” 

The Lerouxs now realized the soldiers were American paratroopers. They questioned the French family to learn how many Germans were inside, and then the shooting resumed as the French family sought cover. “The noise took our breath away,” admitted Madame Leroux. The Americans were peppering the house with rifles and machine guns. The skirmish ended after a bazooka round exploded into the house and paratroopers sprinted in to herd the surrendering Germans out. In the lull that followed, the Lerouxs celebrated their violent liberation by gifting a bottle of Calvados brandy to the Americans. “They asked us to drink some first,” recalled Madame Leroux, “which we did. Then they all drank some.”

The paratroopers, there to seize the bridge and expecting a German counterattack, told the Lerouxs it was too dangerous for them to stay. The family packed food and blankets before walking to a neighbor’s home. During their exodus, they passed more American troopers heading to the bridge.

The La Fière bridge was the D-Day objective of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Capturing the bridge intact was critical to the Allies’ plans: first, they needed to prevent the Germans from using it to move reinforcements against the landings at Utah Beach and second, they wanted the bridge to serve later as an artery for armor and infantry to break out from the beachhead toward the ultimate objective: the port of Cherbourg.

A member of the 505th later described the nighttime parachute drop they had made into Normandy as “a model of precision flying and perfect execution.” Pilots of the 315th Troop Carrier Group—veterans of missions in Sicily and Italy—had dropped their passengers right on target. Under the command of Lieutenant John “Red Dog” Dolan, Able Company assembled 98 percent of its troopers within an hour. The 505th’s sister regiment, the 507th, was supposed to land on the opposite side of the Merderet, but it was not as fortunate. Weather, anti-aircraft fire, and hopelessly lost pilots scattered them across 60 square miles. 

With their drop zone just a half-mile from their objective, Dolan’s lead platoon pushed through the graying light of dawn and reached the Leroux’s farm in 30 minutes. The troopers immediately searched the bridge for demolition charges and put the German occupiers under siege. By mid-morning, with the help of paratroopers from the 508th PIR, the east side of the bridge was secure, but the scattered state of the 507th left the defense of the west side in a weakened state.

Major Frederick C.A. Kellam, the 1st Battalion commander, organized his men as well as troopers from other scattered units into a perimeter. The troopers of the 505th, most of whom had seen combat in Sicily and Italy, provided the backbone of his defense. As one of the veterans recalled, “We knew exactly what to expect on the upcoming mission: incoming mortar rounds, the terrifying German 88s, machine pistols, and one-on-one attacks against machinegun nests.” 

The road past the bridge cut across the swampy marshland via an elevated, tree-lined causeway almost 700 yards long. Kellam’s men dug in on a gentle slope facing the river. The position was less than ideal as it left them in the open and in view of any Germans on the far side, but defending from the protected reverse slope wasn’t an option. One positive, though, was that any attack from the opposite side could only come across the narrow causeway. 

“Red Dog” Dolan positioned Able Company closest to the bridge: a platoon on each side, plus another in reserve 400 yards to the rear. Dolan’s heavy firepower consisted of three .30-caliber belt-fed machine gun crews and two bazooka teams dug in to the left and right of the bridge. He also positioned a 57mm anti-tank gun 500 feet back, at a bend in the road where it had a direct line of fire down the causeway. A platoon of combat engineers stood by to blow the bridge in the event of an enemy breakthrough. To prevent that, troopers blocked the far side of the bridge with Hawkins mines. “We placed our anti-tank mines right on the top of the road where the Germans could see them,” recounted Sergeant William D. Owens, “but could not miss them with their tanks.” 

The troopers created an additional roadblock by pushing a German flatbed truck—disabled during the earlier firefight for the farmhouse—into the middle of the bridge. 

A reconnaissance of the far bank revealed it was occupied by only a handful of 507th troopers rather than the expected battalion. Without radio contact and the planned-for support, the men led by Kellam and Dolan were on their own.

The first sign of trouble came at 4:00 p.m. when scout Francis C. Buck came hightailing it back across the long causeway. He’d heard spurts of gunfire followed by the unmistakable clanking of tanks. Close behind him were a few men from the west bank who were fleeing the German advance. Buck paused briefly at the two bazooka positions to give them a heads-up before sprinting to Kellam’s command post. 

The enemy heralded their attack with an artillery barrage, which lifted as four tanks rolled across the causeway. Following them were an estimated 200 infantrymen. The Americans held their fire—the fleeting glimpses of field gray uniforms darting between the trees wasn’t yet worth wasting ammunition.

The first tank—a Panzer Mk III—paused 40 yards short of the bridge. The commander, apparently spotting the mines, opened his hatch and stood up for a better look. One of Dolan’s machine gun crews squeezed off a burst at the tempting target and killed him instantly. With that, the American line erupted with rifle and machine gun fire.

The two bazooka teams went to work. Gunners Lenold Peterson and Marcus Heim abandoned their foxhole so they could aim around a concrete telephone pole. To their right, Privates John D. Bolderson and Gordon C. Pryne did the same. Just a few hours earlier, Pryne had been a rifleman, “But on the jump, one of the guys on the bazooka team broke his ankle,” he said. “They gave that job to me. I didn’t want it, really, but they said, ‘You got it.’” 

The two teams pummeled the lead tank, which in turn fired a round at Peterson and Heim. It flew high, shattering the telephone pole. Dolan later admitted, “To this day, I’ll never be able to explain why all four of them were not killed. They fired and reloaded with the precision of well-oiled machinery.” 

The lead tank was hit by several 2.36-inch high-explosive rockets, one of which disabled a track while another briefly set it alight. Peterson and Heim advanced to get a better shot at the second tank—a captured French Renault R-35 painted Wehrmacht gray—which was some 20 yards behind the first. Heim later recalled, “We moved forward toward the second tank and fired at it as fast as I could load the rockets into the bazooka. We kept firing at the second tank, and we hit it in the turret where the body joins it, also in the tracks, and with another hit it also went up in flames.”

The 57mm gun fired as well and was subjected to heavy enemy retaliation. In the melee, two tank rounds punched through the glacis shield, and seven men were killed keeping it in operation.

A third tank now lumbered toward the bridge as German mortar shells pounded the American line. Although the first tank was disabled, the main gun and machine gun were still barking out shells. Rushing out from his foxhole, Private Joseph C. Fitt scrambled atop the first tank to toss a hand grenade into the open hatch and finish off the crew.

While the tank battle raged, the German infantry struggled to advance against the weight of American firepower. One paratrooper observed that the bunched-up enemy, seeking cover along the treelined causeway, “made a real nice target.”

With the German attack stalling, the two bazooka teams yelled for more ammo. Three men, including Major Kellam, scrambled forward with satchels of rockets. The trio was 15 yards from the bridge when another mortar and artillery barrage crashed in. Kellam was killed, and the other two men badly wounded, one mortally. Kellam’s death made Dolan the senior officer. His first action after taking command was to dispatch a runner to the regiment’s command post to advise them what happened.

Artillery continued to rain in. “They really clobbered us,” admitted Owens. “I don’t know how it was possible to live through it.”

Owens’ platoon was out front. When his radioman with the walkie-talkie took a direct shell hit, they lost contact with Dolan. “So, from then on, as far as we were concerned, we were a lost platoon,” said Owens. Anticipating another attack, Owens slithered from foxhole to foxhole collecting grenades and ammunition from the dead to redistribute to his men. “I knew we would need every round we could get our hands on.”

The enemy infantry rushed forward again, passing the knocked-out tanks and getting closer to Owens’ platoon, which poured fire into their ranks. “The machine gun I had was so hot it quit firing,” said Owens. He shouldered a dead man’s BAR, firing it until he ran out of ammo, then he switched to a second machine gun of a knocked-out crew. 

Owens could hear another machine gun stitching the German flank and the plonking belch of a 60mm mortar lobbing shells along the causeway. Riflemen squeezed off shot after shot. It was getting desperate. “We stopped them,” Owens recounted, “but they had gotten within twenty-five yards of us.” 

Just as the German attack failed, Colonel Mark J. Alexander, the regimental executive officer, arrived with 40-odd paratroopers he had managed to collect along the way. His inspection of the defenses confirmed they were set as well as could be expected. Shortly thereafter, the division’s second-in-command, Brigadier General James M. Gavin, arrived with men from the 507th. Gavin concurred with Alexander’s assessment, later recounting that Dolan’s troopers holding the bridge were “well organized and had the situation in hand.”

Alexander asked Gavin, “Do you want me on this side, the other side, or both sides of the river?” 

After glancing at the far bank, Gavin replied, “You better stay on this side because it looks like the Germans are getting pretty strong over there.” The two officers agreed that attacking across the bridge would divide their manpower and might cost them the bridge in the face of a strong counterattack.

German shells continued to pummel the American positions. One shell exploded on the edge of a foxhole, burying the two occupants. Alexander helped dig them out and then sent them back to the medics.

First Sergeant Robert M. Matterson, who was directing the wounded to the aid station, said they were coming back in such numbers that he “felt like a policeman directing traffic.” Indeed, as the day ended, dozens of men flowed past while dozens more of their comrades lay dead, strewn across the battlefield. 

Sunset gave way to darkness, with a bright moon that was occasionally obscured by scudding clouds. Throughout the night, the Germans periodically lobbed artillery shells at the Americans, while Alexander dispatched supply parties to scour the division’s drop zone for more ammunition.

At dawn, the rising sun released mist from the surrounding swamps and heralded the arrival of a squad of airborne engineers along with two more machine gun crews. Colonel Alexander warmly welcomed the men and directed them to dig in. 

The additional firepower was much needed, but Alexander was still concerned about his available arsenal: “We had no long-range firepower other than machine guns. Well, we had one 57mm gun with six rounds of ammunition and a limited supply of mortar rounds, but this all had to be held in reserve for any serious effort the Germans might make to cross the bridge.” 

Alexander’s mental inventory was interrupted when a group of paratroopers on the far side of the Merderet River attempted to wade across. He watched helplessly as German fire cut into the men sloshing through the water. A handful made it to safety, but most were killed and several of the wounded drowned.

The Germans preceded their next attack with intensified shelling, including tree bursts. Two more captured French Renault tanks were in the vanguard. Dolan’s 57mm crew held their fire—with only six rounds left they wanted a clear shot. But when the lead tank boldly geared onto the bridge, the 57mm crew cracked off a round. The shell struck the tank, sending it and its partner into retreat. Nestled in front of the anti-tank gun was Corporal Felix Ferrazzi, a radioman serving as a machine gunner. With a clear view down the causeway, he added to the mayhem with repeated bursts of fire into the advancing Germans. The gunners implored him to move due to the 57mm’s muzzle blast, but despite being wounded, Ferrazzi stayed put—until a mortar shell mangled his .30-caliber. The other Americans added to the wall of lead, especially Sergeant Oscar Queen, who estimated he fired 5,000 rounds from his belt-fed machine gun. 

Thirty minutes into their attack, the Germans floundered. They began their withdrawal as the paratroopers neared their breaking point. Dolan’s 1st Platoon was down to 15 men; one squad had just three troopers still standing. Owens sent a runner to report to Dolan: they were almost out of ammo and unable to repel the next attack; could they pull back? Dolan replied, “No, stay where you are.” He then scribbled a short message for the runner to relay to Owens: “We stay. There is no better place to die.” With his orders in hand, Owens organized what was left of his platoon.

But the Germans had had enough. They waved a Red Cross flag and requested a 30-minute truce to recover their wounded. Owens and his comrades used the time to bring up more ammo and determine who was still alive. Able Company had suffered 17 killed and 49 wounded; the battalion was down to 176 men. The exhausted Owens then sought a better view of the causeway. “I estimated I could see at least 200 dead or wounded Germans scattered about. I don’t know how many were in the river,” he said, “Then I sat down and cried.”

But the battle for La Fière Bridge wasn’t over. For the Allies to break out of the beachhead, the stalemate had to be broken. Later that evening, General Gavin relieved the battered 505th paratroopers with elements of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. In a charge rivaling the Light Brigade, the glider men made a daylight assault across the causeway on June 9. Pushing through the pall of friendly artillery and withering enemy fire, they successfully occupied the far bank, while another group of 100 paratroopers swarmed in behind them to help secure the foothold. The road to Cherbourg was now open for Major General J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps, but it came at a heavy cost. The 82nd Airborne had suffered 254 men killed and more than 500 wounded to seize, hold, and secure the vital bridge at La Fière. 

The Leroux family returned to find their home in ruins and most of their livestock victims of the crossfire. They lived in the stable—as it had suffered the least damage—rebuilding their farm over the next five years. They moved back into their home in time for Christmas 1949. 

“Our family celebrated,” recalled Madame Leroux, “happy, in spite of our misery, to all be back together without having suffered any dead or wounded, thanks to the American soldiers who fought to liberate and save us.”

Of all the city slickers ever to venture into the 19th century American West, Oscar Wilde towered above the rest, preening like a peacock with his ostentatious wardrobe, his philosophy of art and his knack for spilling printer’s ink across the pages of Western newspapers. In the parlance of the cowboy, Wilde exemplified the “swivel dude,” a gaudy fellow worthy of a second look or a tip of the hat. The flamboyant poet and playwright not only turned heads with his eccentric outfits, but also left Westerners scratching their noggins over his esoteric lectures on “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful.” For the better part of two months in 1882 Wilde pranced his way across the frontier, a wholly different breed of pioneer.

Arriving in New York City on Jan. 3, 1882, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde spent 51 weeks touring the United States and Canada, traveling 50 of those days west of the Mississippi River. Twenty-seven years old when he arrived, he had accomplished little beyond graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, self-publishing a play and a thin book of poetry, and ingratiating himself into London’s high society with his quick, sardonic wit. During college and afterward Wilde evolved into both a disciple and a proponent of aestheticism, a philosophy best summarized as “art for art’s sake.” Proponents, or aesthetes as they were called, valued form over function. Aestheticism countered the function-intensive machines of the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian belief that literature and art should provide moral and ethical lessons and restraints on society.

While other aesthetes made greater contributions to the philosophical movement, none was more visible than Wilde, largely due to his extravagant dress and a peculiar fixation on sunflowers and lilies as “the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decoration—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy.” Wherever he spoke in America, runs on florist shops depleted the supply of those two flowers, as fans and skeptics alike were eager either to laud or mock Wilde with them.

Among the skeptics, dramatist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan parodied the aesthetes with a “fleshly poet” named Reginald Bunthorne, the lead character of their 1881 comic opera Patience—the follow-up to their hit comic operas H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. On the back of the duo’s latest success, their producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, decided to take Patience across the pond to North America. Doubting that Americans would understand the play’s satire, Carte sought an “advance poster” of aestheticism to promote it. Wilde was the natural choice, as Carte was already serving as the poet’s booking manager.

Likely massaging Wilde’s ego with a suggestion his poetry was also popular in the United States, Carte persuaded the Irishman to assume the mantle of the fictional Englishman Bunthorne for a lecture tour. The clincher was Carte’s offer of half the net profits.

What Wilde excelled at most in his young adulthood was self-adoration and self-promotion, often erasing the line between fame and notoriety. When he arrived in New York, the young nation’s biggest celebrity was dime novel hero Buffalo Bill. By the time the aesthete returned to Britain, Wilde—if not eclipsing the future Wild West showman as a household name—had certainly drawn more news coverage than William F. Cody. At very least Wilde was the first celebrity who became famous merely for being famous, launching the superficial celebrity culture that permeates American popular culture to this day.

“lord of the lah-de-dah”

Wilde stood 3 inches over 6 feet. Protruding from his elongated, colorless face was a prominent nose over coarse lips that sheltered greenish-hued teeth, discolored from too many Turkish cigarettes and too few toothbrushes. His thick eyebrows shaded attentive eyes, and a long mop of tawny brown hair brushed against his shoulders. “He looks better in the dark, perhaps” quipped one St. Louis journalist. A portrait of Wilde printed in the competing Leavenworth Times prompted Kansas’ Emporia Daily News to observe, “If it is anything like correct, there will be no chance for Oscar to get a wife in this neck of the woods.”

What Wilde lacked in looks, he made up for with a voguish wardrobe that ranged from dark formal suits to gaudy shirts and cravats in vibrant purples, greens and yellows. For his first appearance west of the Mississippi he chose a more subdued outfit, his trademark knee britches in black over black silk stockings and patent leather pumps with large silver buckles. Above that he wore a white shirt and white waistcoat topped with a long-tailed black coat and white kid gloves.

His presentations, though, were neither as bright nor as entertaining as his attire. Wilde read his speeches in a monotone voice with a verbal quirk accentuating every fourth syllable. In advance of his February tour date in St. Louis the Globe-Democrat reported, “Curiosity to see Oscar Wilde is greater than to hear him.” Following his lecture there to an audience of 1,500 a subhead in the paper’s coverage pronounced, A Large and Fashionable Audience Bored by His Talk on Art. The reporter, like many other Western newsmen, christened Wilde “the lord of the lah-de-dah.” Others just labeled him an “ass-thete.”

After St. Louis and side trips to Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wilde on March 20 took the transcontinental railroad for talks in Sioux City and Omaha before lecturing the philistines of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento and Stockton. Aboard the westbound train Wilde enjoyed the company of actor John Howson, then traveling to San Francisco to play Bunthorne in the West Coast production of Patience. Whenever Wilde wearied of facing the applause or jeers of spectators who thronged train stations to gawk at the aesthete, he’d send out a costumed Howson to greet the folks instead.

After nine days in California, during which he stayed in San Francisco’s luxurious Palace Hotel, Wilde headed back east, stopping first in Salt Lake City, where a Herald reporter attended his lecture and penned a scathing review:      

“What is the attraction about this strange specimen of humanity? Oscar is not handsome and is strikingly awkward; as an elocutionist he violates every rule of rhetoric and is painfully dreary in his manner of expression.…Only in the matters of exhibiting decidedly vulgar front teeth and displaying an abundance of not even wavy hair is he a success.”

Wilde then moved on to Denver, Leadville, Colorado Springs, Kansas City, St. Joseph, Topeka, Lawrence, Atchison and Lincoln before wrapping up on April 29 with a whirlwind tour of five Iowa communities. In June he returned west for appearances in Fort Worth, Galveston, Houston and San Antonio. By the time he ended his Texas swing, Wilde had cleared $5,605, or nearly $170,000 in present-day dollars. That total did not include the money he personally charged admirers to attend their local functions.

Puzzling the Press

Wherever he went, Wilde made time for newspaper reporters, receiving them in his hotel suite after they had properly provided their calling card to his manservant. Describing his audience with the apostle of aestheticism, a San Antonio Light reporter “found Mr. Wilde taking the world easy in his room at the Menger; he was dressed in drab velvet jacket, blue tie, white waistcoat, light drab trousers, scarlet stockings and slippers. A table covered with books, a lemonade—with a stick in it—and a huge bunch of mammoth cigarettes made up the array that confronted our aesthetic reporter.”

Wilde flattered reporters to their faces and then demeaned them behind their backs, prompting Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star to observe, “The average reporter may not have a very exalted idea of art, but he knows human nature too well to stick himself in knee breeches and call it brains instead of brass.” In the end, Wilde and the press used each other—the aesthete to enhance the fame he craved, the reporters to sell papers.

Audiences either revered Wilde for his intellect, even if they didn’t understand it, or ridiculed him for his eccentricities. “Oscar Wilde, the apostle of the beautiful, is here,” The Topeka Daily Capital gushed, “and there is no doubt that he will have a full house. Topeka is essentially aesthetic, and to hear the great exponent of true culture is an opportunity which may never occur again.” Nebraska’s North Bend Bulletin was considerably less flattering in its report of the lecturer’s forthcoming stop in nearby Fremont: “Oscar Wilde is coming. It’s just awful.”

Besides his dry, droll delivery, Wilde’s standard topics on art and beauty seldom resonated with people scratching a living from the earth. For instance, as decorative flourishes in the home the aesthete recommended tiny porcelain cups over their heavier crockery cousins—this to listeners who set tables with often little more than tinware. Further, he prescribed tiled, not carpeted, floors; porcelain, not cast-iron, stoves; and wainscoting, not papered walls. Such advice might have had greater application east of the Mississippi, but out West, to people living in adobe jacals or log cabins, it lacked pertinence.

Less forgivable was lord lah-de-dah’s condescension toward people unable to broaden his fame and wealth, conduct that grated on Western sensibilities. “Oscar Wilde was more bother than all the women who ever rode in a railroad car,” one Chicago-based train conductor recalled. “He had an idea that he was the greatest man America had ever seen.…He was the vainest, most conceited mule I ever saw. He wouldn’t drink water out of the glass at the cooler, but sipped it out of a silver and gold mug he carried with him.”

High Times in Leadville

Wilde’s impromptu April 13 visit to Leadville, Colo., endured as the most colorful of the aesthete’s stops across America. Though it was not on his original itinerary, Wilde squeezed in an appearance between lectures in Denver and Colorado Springs after no less a figure than Lt. Gov. Horace A.W. Tabor, the “Bonanza King of Leadville,” offered the poet a tour of his Matchless silver mine.

Wilde recalled the silver boomtown as “the richest city in the world…[with] the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told that if I went there, they would be sure to shoot me or my traveling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing they could do to my traveling manager would intimidate me.”

When he reached Leadville (elev. 10,158 feet) after a bumpy 150-mile, six-hour train ride, he felt understandably lightheaded, nauseous and short of breath. A doctor called to his Clarendon Hotel suite identified his malady as “a case of light air,” or altitude sickness as it is known today. The doctor prescribed medicine and rest while Leadville anticipated his appearance.

The aesthete eventually recovered enough to dress in color-coordinated knee britches, stockings, shirt, fancy cravat, dress coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Before striding across the covered bridge that connected the hotel’s third floor with the ritzy Tabor Opera House, Wilde unpacked his copy of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, reasoning that if he were too weak to deliver his lecture, he could read passages from it to attendees. What could be more appropriate? he thought, for like the hardscrabble miners in the audience, the great Renaissance artist also worked in silver.

As the minute hand slipped well past Wilde’s scheduled appearance, the Leadville Daily Herald recalled, “a whole house of curiosity seekers,” some having paid as much as a $1.25 for reserved seats, fidgeted impatiently. When the lecturer did finally show, the Herald reporter wrote, he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.” Placing his speech and the Cellini autobiography on the podium, Wilde launched into a variation on his decorative arts spiel.

As the lecture dragged on, the audience grew noticeably restless, so Wilde turned to the autobiography, drawing a reprimand from a boisterous miner questioning why Wilde hadn’t invited Cellini to speak for himself.

“He’s dead,” Wilde explained.

“Who shot him?” replied the curious miner.

Somehow the lecturer made it through his talk without taking a bullet, though the Herald reporter took a potshot at Wilde in print, writing, “The most notable feature of Mr. Wilde’s lecture was the rather boisterous good humor of the audience.”

After the lecture Wilde returned to the hotel to change into more practical clothing and grab a coat for his tour of town and the Matchless. With Mayor David H. Dougan and select Tabor employees acting as guides, the lecturer stepped into the crisp night air, which seemed to revive him. Wilde saw and heard Leadville’s nightlife, a cacophony of drunken carousers, brass bands, tinkling pianos, spinning roulette wheels, screeching women proffering nocturnal delights and boardwalk barkers for saloons bearing such colorful, albeit sometimes misleading, names as the Red Light, Silver Thread, Tudor, Little Casino, Bon Ton, Board of Trade, Chamber of Commerce and Little Church, the latter of which boasted a mock chapel as its entrance.

The tour was an eye- and earful for Wilde, who followed his guides into Pop Wyman’s rollicking saloon. Rumor had it Wyman had killed several men in his younger years and carried a change purse made from a human scrotum. Wilde complimented the saloon owner for a sign over the piano reading, Please Do Not Shoot the Pianist; He Is Doing His Best, calling it “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He later elaborated on the message, writing, “I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music,
my apostolic task would be much simplified.”

From Wyman’s the mayor had the party loaded in wagons and driven 2 miles to the Matchless, where mine superintendent Charles Pishon accompanied Wilde down shaft No. 3 in a metal ore bucket lowered 100 feet into the pitch black by a cable-and-pulley system. A dozen miners greeted their guest, showing Wilde silver in its natural state and letting him drill the start of a new shaft they dubbed “The Oscar.” Quipped Wilde, “I had hope that in their grand, simple way they would have offered me shares in ‘The Oscar,’ but in their artless, untutored fashion they did not.”

The mining soiree ended with an early morning supper, Wilde wrote tongue in cheek, “the first course whiskey, the second whiskey and the third whiskey.” By the time those gathered had emptied all the bottles, their foppish guest had impressed his hosts for his ability to hold liquor without any visible signs of inebriation. Finally re-emerging from the mine, Wilde returned to the hotel for a brief rest before boarding a train to Colorado Springs to deliver a speech just 14 hours later. He was no worse for the wear.

Heading for Home

On writing about his experiences out West, Wilde largely mocked the “barbarians” he had striven to enlighten. “Infinitesimal did I find the knowledge of art west of the Rocky Mountains,” he recalled, illustrating his criticism with the story of a miner who had struck wealth beyond his education and turned to culture to flaunt his riches. After ordering a replica of the Venus de Milo from Paris, Wilde wrote, the nouveau riche miner “actually sued the railroad company for damages because the plaster cast…had been delivered minus the arms. And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.”

Americans likewise found fault with Wilde as he prepared to leave the States that December. Wrote one acquaintance, “He is guilty of all sorts of petty meanness, such as perpetually begging cigarettes from acquaintances and never offering any himself; eating dinners with indefatigable industry at other people’s expense, sneaking out of paying cab fares; and ‘working’ his friends shamelessly for whatever he can get out of them.”

Yet, for all his snobbery, Wilde still found a noble quality among the Westerners, observing, “The West has kept itself free and independent, while the East has been caught and spoiled with many of the flirting follies of Europe.”

By the time he left New York City for home, Wilde had traveled some 15,000 miles through 30 of the 38 United States, leaving in his wake more than 500 major newspaper features and countless Westerners scratching their heads at what they had seen and/or heard. His fame briefly surpassed that of Buffalo Bill, at least until Cody started his Wild West show the next year. Nine years after returning home Wilde finally attained the literary notoriety he’d craved with publication of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Unlike other city slickers who visited the American West, Wilde conned more folks than outwitted him, and he left with more money than he had yet earned. Despite the Irish peacock’s biting condescension, his annoying arrogance and his numerous faults—or perhaps because of them—Wilde could claim the title of the Wild West’s all-time slickest dude.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine. For further reading, author Preston Lewis recommends Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, by David M. Friedman; Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1882), by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith; and Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann.

Frenchman Henri Farman was already a celebrated cycling champion, race car driver and entrepreneur when he ordered a biplane from the world’s first airplane factory, Les Frères Voisin. Five months later, in January 1908, he won Ernest Archdeacon’s prize for the first officially observed heavier-than-air flight over a one-kilometer circular course.

A week after making Europe’s first flight outside France (in Belgium), Farman lunched with Wilbur Wright in Paris in June. They got on famously; when Wilbur explained his plans to make demonstration flights in France, Farman replied that he had accepted an offer from a consortium of St. Louis businessmen. He would get $25,000 for touring the United States for 90 days, plus $200 per flight. The organizer was Tom MacMechan, editor of American Aeronaut. “These public demonstrations ought to bring about a great popular realization of the practicability of dynamic flight,” enthused Aeronautics, another aviation journal. 

After learning that aviator Glenn Curtiss had flown his June Bug on July 4 to win the $25,000 Scientific American Cup for the first public powered flight in America, Farman crated his Voisin for shipment across the Atlantic. He sailed with his assistant, Maurice Herbster, and his wife, arriving in New York on July 26 to an enthusiastic welcome. Headed by Curtiss, a welcoming committee from the Aero Club of America chartered a tug to escort the Farmans’ ship to the pier, where automobiles whisked them to the Hotel Astor on Times Square.

Farman had become front-page news, where he was hailed as “the world’s champion aeronaut” and “the man with the practical aeroplane.” The military was keen to witness his demonstrations, and with Orville Wright planning test flights for the government at Fort Myer, Virginia, an international contest seemed possible. Farman even challenged Orville to a contest for a $10,000 purse, but Wright declined. Farman was unfazed: “If they consider their machines superior, why don’t they accept my challenge? I could gain much valuable data from a contest, and surely my machine, with its long list of record flights, has at least some points of information for my brother aviators.” 

As the venue for his demonstrations, Farman chose the horseracing track in Brighton Beach, New York, which in 1907 had been converted to host 24-hour endurance motor races known as “Grinds.” Farman arranged to remove large sections of an infield fence while he had his crates hoisted onto theatrical scenery trucks and unloaded in the track’s old betting ring. When customs officers did not arrive as expected to examine the contents, Farman sent away his hired stevedores. Then the revenue men finally arrived and Herbster had to recruit a crew of unskilled locals. They dropped one of the crates, damaging the airplane’s tail cell and rudder. Despite the damage, the appraiser declared the Voisin’s new Antoinette V8 engine to be the finest piece of machinery he had ever seen, saying that “all who examined the machine were greatly impressed with its workmanship, which is exquisite.” Farman spend the next day on repairs, reassembling the airframe and installing the engine. 

At a banquet at the Astor on July 30 one news account noted that “the ballroom was full of balloonites, with here and there a submarine fiend, an auto crank or a common scientist wedged in among the number.” Charles Manly, the engineer and test pilot for aviation experimenter Samuel Langley, congratulated France on its aviation experimenters and described Farman as “a man destined to do great good for aeronautics and create enthusiasm among millions.” Farman’s riposte was equally gracious to those on this side of the Atlantic: “We foreigners owe credit to Octave Chanute for the basic principles of our apparatus, and to the Wright brothers, pioneers after Mr. Chanute.” 

After the guests had consumed a model of the Voisin confected from spun sugar, Farman made a less-than-sweet dig at the secretive and litigious Wrights. “I carry on my experiments in public because that seems advantageous,” he said. “The work is difficult enough, and it is better for others to see what you are doing and for you to see what they are doing, each improving by the mistakes of the other.”

Farman was not alone in resenting the Wrights’ secrecy, even on home turf. The American Magazine of Aeronautics opined, “Farman has perhaps done more, through publicity, to brush away the cobwebs of doubt than the Wrights. Even here, we doubt that the Wrights ever flew, while we read of the Farman’s flights with less astonishment than at the invention of a headacheless booze.” James Means, editor of Aeronautical Annuals agreed, saying, “Owing to the public exhibitions of flights with motor-aeroplanes in France, the Frenchmen are in a fair way to get years ahead of us in aviation, as they did with the automobile.”

“We are disgusted with some American inventors who have been chasing the almighty dollar instead of solving the problems of flight,” railed MacMechan in the American Aeronaut. For impeding the free exchange of ideas, he argued, the Wrights should forfeit their place in history for making the world’s first airplane flight. He added, “After Farman’s flight, there will be no difficulty raising capital to finance the cost of building aeroplanes and conducting experiments.” 

First, though, Farman had to get into the air, and that was looking problematic. At only 840 yards, the racetrack was short and it was traversed by ruts and ditches. Ominously, Farman’s promised down payment of $6,000 failed to materialize, so track owner William Engeman was induced to mollify him with cash so the show could go on. 

Apart from finances and the small track, keeping the water-cooled Antoinette from overheating was Farman’s main problem. Its “total-loss” cooling system meant the engine water evaporated as it carried heat away, and since the Voisin had a marginal power/weight ratio, the airplane could carry only so much coolant. “If we could carry sufficient water,” Farman said, “we could stay in the air 30 hours as easily as 30 minutes.” Wind was his second concern: “A steady, strong wind is what you want—but if it becomes too strong, great care is needed. Trees and other obstacles can divert the wind. I generally fly 15 feet above the ground—I can fly higher, but never as high as your skyscrapers, although I hope to some day.” 

Ever cautious, Farman confided to the Daily Tribune, “When I risk my neck, as every man who mounts an aeroplane is bound to, I am at least certain that I have left nothing undone to make my apparatus as perfect as possible. I take no unnecessary risks—I could soar into the air to any height if my motor would work long enough. But it would be folly to ascend a yard higher than necessary, for the aeroplane is at present a very delicate machine and something may snap at any moment.” He managed the public’s expectations accordingly. “I want to emphasize to the American people that an aeroplane does not fly over the rooftops like a balloon. I hope they will not be disappointed to find that they can view airships without craning their necks.” 

On July 31, before his first public show, Farman flew for Aero Club members. According to the New York Times, “Several hundred persons were near the curtained-off part of the betting ring in which the machine is kept when it was pushed out. Then those who watched got some idea of the driving power of the propeller. A mechanician turned the motor over by twisting the blades while five men held the aeroplane, Mr Farman advanced the spark and opened the throttle. The whirling blades shook the shrubbery 60′ away as in a windstorm, while dust clouds were blown up 75′ away.… [T]he airscrew of the Voisin began to revolve swiftly, and the machine moved across the turf for 200 yards. It left the ground, mounted ten or twelve feet in the air and moved along with an easy, bird-like glide. Two-thirds of the way to the eastern extremity of the oval, a group of men with a wagonload of boards were busy covering a ditch. A calf ran about and the crowd infringed. As he bore down on these obstructions, Farman stopped his propeller, while the guiding planes were inclined downward. As the aeroplane neared the turf, Mr Farman let his propeller shoot around for a moment. This made the landing as gentle as that of any creature of the air. It was a delicate piece of airmanship, and the crowd cheered.” 

The first public day, Saturday, August 1, was less propitious. Attendance was poor. At a venue regularly attracting 20,000, only 2,000 people turned up. Weather balloons zigzagging across the sky indicated wind gusts of 22 mph, which prevented any ascents. Instead, Farman had the Voisin paraded before the grandstands and explained its workings. After being warned to hold their hats, the crowd gasped as the Antoinette fired, generating “a terrific blast of air back towards the hundreds behind. Instantly a cloud of straw hats went hurtling into the air, high into the roof of the grandstand. The blast cleared a path like a cyclone. Fifty people were blown off their feet.” 

Entertaining perhaps, but not what the crowd had paid to see. They dispersed resentfully when Farman announced by megaphone in his thick French accent that flights would be postponed. Admitting “the spanking sea breezes that met the conservative foreigner,” the New York Times acidly described Farman as “walking through the clover to see if the wind was strong enough to justify his determination not to fly.”

Thereafter, things got worse. No demonstration had been planned for the next day, Sunday, August 2, so no officials were present. But despite the forecast of continuing gusts, conditions were sunny and calmer. While Farman tuned his Voisin in the makeshift hangar, 500 of Saturday’s disgruntled visitors huddled outside. MacMechan assured them that Saturday’s tickets would be valid for future flights, but the crowd responded with a chorus of threats and started forcing the gates. 

When news of the fracas reached Farman, he acted swiftly. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “They paid to see me fly—many of them working people who can’t get here any other day. Let them in. Hurry!” To objections that there was no one to police the crowd, he replied “I have seen enough of the American people to satisfy me they don’t need police if you give them a fair show.”

Minutes later, the crowd surged through the gates, raced across the infield and surrounded the hangar so closely that it became impossible to roll out the Voisin. According to The Herald, “Farman, with his new-found confidence in American fairness, ordered the canvas doors to be drawn back, climbed on the machine and shouted at the crowd to stand back as the aeroplane was rolled out.” 

An announcer asked people to be patient, and most obeyed. The wind died down to a westerly breeze. “There came a clattering sound from the aeroplane, and a cloud of dust could be seen leaping into the air,” reported the Herald. “The propeller flashed faster and faster, then the great machine darted forward, rolling rapidly over the ground. 200 feet from the start, it leaped into the air, rose 25 feet and came whirring over the field with the speed of an express train. At the end of the flight the motor was stopped, the slant downward begun, the motor started again for a few revolutions to lessen the shock of landing, the machine rolled along for about 100 feet. For a second or two the crowd was silent before the throng in the grandstand stood and cheered, but it was all over in less than a minute. Then the crowd dashed across the field to tell Farman that he was not a fake after all, but the real thing. Farman took it all coolly and begged the men not to hurt the machine: ‘Aeroplanes are babies yet—in the crawling stage—and you must be patient with them.’ Many of the men who were yelling themselves into a state of perspiration over Farman’s achievement were only five minutes before denouncing him as a fraud and exciting the more unruly elements to demand their money back or ‘have fun’ with his machine….” 

The Voisin had made a public flight, but it appeared that the tour was doomed by the combination of inadequate spectacle, misleading advertising, poor organization and increasingly critical press. Farman offered to sell his Voisin for $6,000, even suggesting that the government might buy it for the Fort Myer trials. The popular Vanderbilt Cup race driver Joe Tracy made an offer, which Farman turned down. 

Matters didn’t improve. On August 5 Curtiss wrote, “Farman’s attempts were very disappointing. The first day he flew 140 yards at an elevation of three feet in 11 seconds, at about 20 mph. He made two such flights and then wheeled the machine back to the tent. Next day there were about 3,000 attending and as it was too windy, he did not attempt to fly.” On August 6 and 7, storms precluded further flights, with only three hops over the weekend; attendance by then was down to a few hundred, who showed more interest in the amateur motorcycle races organized at the last minute as an added attraction. 

Ironically, in France Wilbur Wright was triumphantly demonstrating the superiority of his machine to incredulous audiences at another racetrack, near Le Mans. As far as transatlantic rivalry was concerned, it was game over. By contrast, Farman’s backers fled back to St. Louis and the contractor who erected the hangar attached the Voisin for a debt of $120. Farman sent him $50. Warned that other creditors would soon follow, he hired a fast car, some wagons and a local work crew. By the early hours of August 14, the Voisin had been hastily repacked and hustled off to the Manhattan Custom House and loaded aboard a Cherbourg-bound freighter. 

With his machine safe, Farman accepted Thomas Edison’s invitation for a quick visit to the “play shop” at the great man’s New Jersey laboratory. There, he saw the Voisin flicker jerkily onto a screen in a short film that was advertised for public screenings in that month’s Variety.

Stardom notwithstanding, Farman had only received a fraction of his promised fees. His wife was unimpressed by the visit to America. To the New York Sun, she compared audience expectations on both sides of the Atlantic. “The people here are not ready for such an advanced idea,” she said. “They would rather witness a race between two donkeys than see Farman fly. The machine is too technical for them to grasp and Farman flew so easily that they thought it didn’t mean much. He would have drawn more crowds if he had made several ineffectual attempts to sail and broken the machine a little—enough to give an idea that it was dangerous. In France it is different. Over there, where flights have been public and no one has to pay, I’ve seen 30,000 present at a flight.” The editor agreed: “Farman’s work seems almost too businesslike. At least he might make the machine wobble a little and dip dangerously to remind us that he really is flying and not running an automobile on some invisible aerial road.” 

For Aeronautics, the problem was the venue. “If the grounds had been large enough to allow long circular flights, people would have been anxious to see the flights, but with a straight flight of only a few hundred feet, people thought they had not seen enough for their money. Any flight is wonderful but the public wants a spectacle. Mr Farman fulfilled his side of the agreement as far as the ground permitted and must be of the opinion that interest in aeronautics on this side of the pond is really less than he anticipated.”

The New York Times riposted: “Mr. Farman is a bit ‘difficult’ and overconfident of his ability to steer his way among strangers.” The editorial concluded that it was a case of caveat aviator: “Mr. Farman did not exercise caution in the selection of his managers. Inventors are notoriously incompetent in business matters, and it is not only in the United States that their bright hopes of fortune fail to materialize.” 

Farman remained pragmatic. “I said to myself before I came to America that I was not sure that the people were ready for such an exhibition of mechanical flight in the restricted area that seems a necessary adjunct to charging admission. If for no other reason than that the newspapers here have treated me with such kindness, I am glad the trip was made.” 

Disillusioned, the Farmans headed back to France on August 15. Farman’s Brighton Beach flights were commemorated 30 years later by the painter Alois Fabry as part of a huge mural project inside Brooklyn Borough Hall done for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Entitled “Brooklyn Past and Present,” the work immediately attracted controversy—for its style and because some people thought it included a depiction of Vladimir Lenin. Dedicated in 1939, the murals were removed in 1946 and have since disappeared. 

Virtually every Old West aficionado is familiar with Buffalo Bill Cody’s popular Wild West shows, which traveled the United States and across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During Cody’s 1890 and 1906 European tours throngs of Italians in arenas from Rome to Bologna thrilled at the showmanship of Buffalo Bill and his revolving cast of characters. The 1906 tour was the last to Europe for Buffalo Bill, who a decade later teamed with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West but by then was too frail to travel overseas.

Within decades Americans huddled faithfully around TV sets in living rooms nationwide to indulge a seemingly insatiable fascination with Western lore and dramatized portrayals of real-life cowboys, Indians, cavalrymen and gunmen. Though few channels were on the air by the mid-1950s, dozens of Western series aired weekly, at least one or more nightly. Western junkies could also take in Saturday afternoon B reruns of black-and-white “oaters” on the small screen at home or the latest Technicolor weekend matinees on the big screens at local movie theaters.

Meanwhile, another American harboring a fascination with the Old West embarked on a tour of Europe, searching for a gunmaker who could replicate the Colt 1851 Navy per-cussion revolver, the weapon of choice of Wild Bill Hickok, among other Western gunfighters. Val J. Forgett Jr.—gun collector, Civil War re-enactor and owner of the New Jersey–based Service Armament Co.—ultimately found what he was looking for in Italy. In 1957 Forgett founded Navy Arms, a subsidiary cap-and-ball revolver line within Service Armament, and a year later rolled out his first Colt Navy replicas in unison with gunmakers Vittorio Gregorelli and a young, astute Aldo Uberti from the northern Italian firearms manufacturing center of Gardone Val Trompia. Forgett’s first imports didn’t bear the later obligatory Italian proof marks but were merely stamped GU, or G&U, for Gregorelli and Uberti. In 1959 Uberti began producing replica firearms under his own trade name. He and Forgett were the driving forces behind the enduring popularity of Italian-made replica Old West firearms. It took the American entrepreneur and the skilled Italian gunsmith to make many a would-be gunhand’s dream an affordable reality.

Around the same time, with the centennial of the American Civil War fast approaching, the North-South Skirmish Association (N-SSA) found its ranks expanding. N-SSA’s competitive shooters (Forgett among them) were in dire need of usable guns, as the supply of wartime arms had begun to dry up. Blame the collector market, which had snapped up most original firearms of the era, in turn driving up prices on those remaining in circulation. Particularly scarce and expensive were Confederate firearms, which had been produced in far fewer numbers. Thus, in 1960 Navy Arms introduced a pair of percussion revolvers based on the Colt Navy and dubbed the “Yank” and the “Reb.” The steel-framed Yank adhered to the styling of the Colt Model 1851, while the brass-framed Reb faithfully recreated the Griswold & Gunnison, a Southern copy of the Colt Model 1860. Fine examples of either can reap well into the five figures today.

Uberti’s and Forgett’s respective lines continued to expand, leading to a second generation of replicas of the “smoke wagons” of old. In 1973 Navy Arms introduced copies of the Winchester Models 1866 and 1873, the first of the company’s replica lever-action rifles. Over the decades at least a dozen different Italian gunmakers have entered the replica arms market, including Davide Pedersoli and Giuseppe Pietta, introducing everything from Colt Single Action Army “Peacemakers” to Spencer carbines. Uberti’s present-day line includes dozens of models.

Another Italian export that drove the popularity of Old West replica arms was the “spaghetti Western” film subgenre, a darker take on the traditional Western, whose productions were directed and scored by Italians, co-starred Italians and were filmed in both Italy and Spain. The heyday of these popular big-screen adventures (roughly 1964–78) brought to superstardom such American actors as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef and featured full-screen closeups of the co-starring firearms.

Any sharp-eyed, gun-savvy viewer can quickly discern an Italian replica from an original. For example, many replica Colt Single Action Army revolvers are fitted with brass trigger guards—an option unavailable on original Peacemakers, though most percussion-era revolvers did have brass trigger guards. Colt 1851 Navy revolvers could be special-ordered with silver-plated guards, while the fluted 1861 Navy—another hard-to-find original Colt on the collector market—had blued-steel trigger guards. To their credit, Uberti and other Italian makers equipped later iterations of their replica Peacemakers with the correct steel trigger guards.

One thing is as sure as shooting, the Italian connection reverberates to this day in the ranks of such competitive shooting organizations as the N-SSA and the Single Action Shooting Society, not to mention on the big and small screen. Despite reports to the contrary, the decades-old transatlantic fascination with the Old West is alive and well. 

The motor launch tied up at the small-boat pier in Seeadler Harbor in New Guinea to disembark a dozen men from the ammunition carrier USS Mount Hood. The date was November 10, 1944. Led by the ship’s communications officer, Lieutenant Lester Hull Wallace, the group had several errands to run on shore before returning to the ship. Wallace planned to take a couple of men with him to the fleet post office to pick up mail. Others were headed to headquarters to obtain charts and manuals. Two had dental appointments and two were on their way to the brig. The sailors were just splitting up when a tremendous blast knocked them off their feet. When they looked out into the harbor, they were stunned to realize that their ship was being wracked by explosion after explosion.

Seeadler Harbor was off the northeast coast of Manus Island, 250 miles north of mainland New Guinea. It was one of the finest anchorages in the Southwest Pacific Theater, measuring 15 miles long and four wide, with ample depth for capital ships. The army had taken the island from the Japanese in early March 1944 and within days U.S. Navy Seabees had begun to build a major advanced operating base capable of supplying and repairing the ships of Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet as it supported General Douglas MacArthur’s leap-frogging drive along New Guinea’s north coast to retake the Philippines. That same month a survey ship marked out more than 600 moorage sites throughout the vast harbor. The Manus base grew over the summer and became dotted with hundreds of buildings—mostly Quonset huts used as barracks for thousands of sailors and as warehouses for the vast amounts of materiel necessary to carry on the war.

On the morning of Friday, November 10, Mount Hood was one of some 200-odd ships in the harbor. The vessels ran the gamut from patrol boats to escort carriers and also included landing ships, tanks (LSTs), destroyers, and civilian-crewed freighters. Mount Hood was anchored at berth 380, near the harbor’s center, four miles from the entrance and 2½ miles from land. It was the first of eight AE class ammunition ships that had been converted for the U.S. Navy, with a length of 460 feet, a displacement of 14,000 tons, and a cargo capacity of 7,800 tons. Mount Hood’s keel was laid down in September 1943 and it began service as a cargo vessel named the SS Marco Polo. Once the navy took over, it converted the ship into an ammunition carrier. Commissioned in July 1944, the vessel was renamed after the dormant volcano that provides Oregon with its highest point. Its captain was Commander Harold A. Turner. 

Turner struggled to find qualified seamen for his crew and many of those he received were raw recruits with no experience at sea. After an unusually short fitting out and a shakedown cruise in the Chesapeake Bay, Mount Hood stopped at Norfolk, Virginia, to load 5,000 tons of explosives and ammunition. On August 5, 1944, with its hold filled, Mount Hood departed Norfolk bound for the Admiralty Islands via the Panama Canal. The ship reached its final destination, Seeadler Harbor, on September 22. Its mission was two-fold: to dispense its cargo to other warships, and to take on any unused munitions from homeward-bound vessels.

On November 10 Mount Hood was ringed by nine landing ship, mechanized (LCM) boats and was the center of a humming hive of loading and unloading activity. The small-engine repair ship USS Mindanao was anchored off the ship’s port side just 350 yards away. USS Argonne, another repair ship that also served as the task force commander’s flagship, was 1,100 yards off.

Wallace and his going-ashore party piled aboard the captain’s 40-foot gig and at 8:25 a.m. they shoved off toward the beach. As he headed toward shore Wallace noted that aerial depth charges were being loaded aboard the Mount Hood from the landing craft moored alongside.

A lanky, bespectacled 29-year-old native of Georgia, Wallace had graduated from Atlanta Tech High School and earned his law degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1941. Afterward he married Mildred Virginia French and went straight into the service of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, working in the estate and gift tax branch—but not before registering as an officer in the Naval Reserve. In 1942 the navy called him up and assigned him a place in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. After a year there the navy sent Wallace to its communications school at Harvard University, and then to the Sub Chaser Training Center at Miami, Florida. In the summer of 1944 the lieutenant was transferred to USS Mount Hood—his first at-sea deployment. He put his Ivy League training to good use when setting up the ship’s communications department.

Wallace and his crew landed at the pier and disembarked to carry out their various chores. Just as they were separating, one of the sailors loudly exclaimed, “Look!” The boat crew turned to see an eruption of smoke and fire rising above Mount Hood. In seconds a powerful explosive concussion threw them to the ground. It took a full 12 seconds for the horrible sound of the exploding ship to reach them. Even from two miles away they could see dark shapes being ejected from the explosion and curving high into the sky. The lieutenant reacted immediately. “Back to the boat!” he yelled. He told the coxswain to make all speed to return to the scene. It took more than a quarter of an hour for the motor launch to reach berth 380. They found no ship, no bodies. “There was nothing but debris all around,” Wallace later wrote. Mount Hood and her crew of 350 had simply vanished.

Wallace directed the boat to the nearest vessel, the Mindanao. He was shocked by what he saw—the port side had been pummeled by flying steel that punched 33 irregularly shaped holes into the hull, some as large as three by four feet. He later learned that everyone on the port deck—26 sailors—had been killed instantly by the blast. In all, 82 men died on Mindanao. There seemed nothing more Wallace and his men could do, so the lieutenant had the launch head back to the pier to await further orders. There he was told to stick around and that he’d be required as a witness for an about-to-be-convened official board of inquiry. He did not know then that he was the only surviving officer from Mount Hood. 

Out in the harbor ships were assessing the damage from the explosion. After the sky ceased raining metal fragments, the crew of the Argonne counted 221 pieces of the Mount Hood strewn across the deck. Said the ship’s captain, Commander T.H. Escott, “By the time we had recovered from the force of the explosion, Mount Hood was completely shrouded in a pall of dense black smoke. It was not possible to see anything worth reporting.”

Ships as far as 2,200 yards distant sustained various degrees of damage, among them the escort carriers USS Petrof Bay and Saginaw Bay, the destroyer USS Young, four destroyer escorts, and several cargo and repair vessels. Small boats like landing craft took the brunt of the blast. Many were sunk and more were damaged beyond repair. Many crewmen died. Fortunately, there were no major combat ships in the harbor that morning. 

When divers entered the harbor waters to inspect Mount Hood’s wreckage, they found none to speak of—only a few stray pieces of the hull, nothing bigger than 16 by 10 feet. They were astonished to see a trench in the sand 50 feet wide and 300 feet long that the explosion had excavated to a depth of 40 feet. USS Mount Hood had literally ceased to exist.

Within days the navy organized a board of investigation to discover the cause of a catastrophe that killed 432 men and wounded an additional 371 from surrounding ships. The members, headed by a captain and two commanders, were to review all the facts, study images taken at the scene, and interview personnel who, in some way, witnessed the events of November 10, 1944. The hearings took place aboard the destroyer tender USS Sierra. 

The first order of business was to define the scene at Seeadler Harbor and the role Mount Hood had played in activities there. It was noted that the ship was “the primary source for the issue of all types of ammunition,” and was taking on munitions from homebound vessels. The board noted that the harbor had four delineated anchorages for ammunition ships in the harbor’s western portion. But they were not used. After shifting the ship’s allocated place twice, the harbormaster settled it into berth 380, in the generally placid waters at the harbor’s center. That central location was more convenient for the landing craft and lighters that had to carry the ammunition back and forth. The ship was anchored in about 120 feet. At the time of the explosion Mount Hood was carrying about 3,800 tons of high explosives, including “quite a bit of damaged ammunition,” Lieutenant Wallace told the board. “Some of it was corroded and I myself remember seeing some pyrotechnics with dates as far back as 1915.”

Seaman First Class Lawrence Gaschler told the board that he should have been aboard Mount Hood that morning unloading side-by-side with his fellow crewmates from the amphibious boat pool. But he had been chosen to pilot a boat that carried an officer from the escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay to another ship in the harbor. “In my mind, we’d just passed the Hood when it blew up,” he testified. “There was this bright flash and I could feel the heat, then just a second later the concussion hit us. It knocked the officer down and knocked me out. When I came to, debris was falling in the water around.”

Motor Machinist’s Mate Lew Cowden was aboard the destroyer escort USS Whitehurst. He recalled that “we were headed toward the open sea when it exploded. They tell me we were much closer when taking on supplies and went right past [Mount Hood] on our way out. I had just started up the ladder to the fantail when the blast pushed me back. I ran forward and came up on deck amidships. The air was full of smoke and fine dust. I was told that we were far enough away to avoid damage from the blast and yet near enough that major debris blew over us.” 

Not all eyewitness testimony was credible. Aviation ordnanceman Edward L. Ponichtera, who was working on the beach near the Mount Hood, asserted that he saw a twin-engine Japanese bomber drop two bombs—“each a direct hit”—on the ship. “I clearly observed the Rising Sun painted on the plane,” he said. Carl Hughes, a sailor on the Liberty ship SS William H. McGuffey, averred that he saw an enemy midget submarine broach the water near Mount Hood and fire two torpedoes.

With help from the Mount Hood survivors on Wallace’s boat, the board’s investigators pieced together an accounting of the types of cargo aboard at the time of the explosion. Munitions included .30-caliber machine gun rounds, 14-inch shells for battleships, and everything in-between. There were dozens of 100-pound bombs stored away in the holds, or in the case of the 1,000-pound blockbusters, kept in a small shack on the main deck. Hold #5 contained rocket bodies and rocket motors, most of them damaged. The total was nearly 4,000 tons of munitions. 

The investigators then moved over to assess Mount Hood’s crew and their role in the inferno. They felt the sailors had an overall “lack of experience” and, perhaps even more crucial, a “lack of leadership among the twenty-two officers,” which led to poor discipline onboard. “This was reflected in the rough and careless handling of ammunition,” the board noted. 

In all, 133 witnesses gave testimony, supported by dozens of exhibits. Wallace was twice called to give evidence. It took the board a month to gather all of its evidence. 

On December 14, 1944, the board issued its findings. “The following unsafe conditions and practices were revealed in the investigation: ammunition was being roughly handled in all parts of the ship; boosters, fuzes and detonators were stowed together in one hold in a manner contrary to regulations governing transportation of military explosives; safety regulations for handling ammunition were not posted in conspicuous places and there was a general lack of instruction to the crew in safety measures; there was a lack of enforcing the prohibitions of smoking; there was evidence that ammunition was accepted on board which was definitely defective and should have been destroyed by dumping in deep water.”

The board’s final conclusion was that “The explosion was caused by a force or agency within the USS Mount Hood itself.” Had Captain Turner survived he and his senior officers would have been held responsible. The board had to admit that they had no clear idea of the exact cause of the disaster—they could only guess—which was frustrating for the three members.

Regarding the statements about a Japanese bomber or midget submarine, the board firmly stated there was no evidence that either of these attacks took place, and so discounted the accounts. 

In his endorsement of the report, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander of Pacific Ocean Areas and Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, wrote, “The question of negligence is not involved but rather that the technical mistakes made by the above named officers [Turner and others] were errors in judgement resulting from a keen desire to meet necessary military commitments and move on with the progress of the war.” The admiral noted, “The exigencies of war will always require the acceptance of certain operational hazards.”

While working on its conclusions the board took note of two other incidents involving explosions on ammunition-carrying vessels, one in May 1944 and the other in July. 

On May 21 an LST tied up at Pearl Harbor’s West Loch was loading mortar rounds for the upcoming invasion of the Mariana Islands when it was blown up after an errant shell fell into a stack of munitions in the hold. The resulting conflagration quickly spread to other nearby LSTs. Six of the craft were sunk and 160 men killed.

And on July 17 a blast at the naval magazine ammunition loading facility in Port Chicago, California, flipped and sank the freighter SS Quinault Victory and vaporized the Liberty ship SS E.A. Bryan. Three-hundred-twenty men died, two-thirds of them African American stevedores. Both ships were tied up at a finger pier loading ammunition from a string of railway boxcars. The official finding of facts produced by the board of inquiry noted that “no intent, fault, negligence, or inefficiency of any person in the naval service caused the explosions.” Among shortcomings that led to the disaster, the board wrote, “The officers had little stevedoring experience, none with handling enlisted personnel, and none with explosives.” They went on to describe the situation with the enlisted men, and the racism in the conclusions was only thinly veiled: “They were unreliable, and lacked capacity to understand instructions.” (When loading was ordered to resume weeks later, many of the sailors involved refused, leading to a mass court-martial. Those convicted of mutiny and sentenced to hard labor became known as the Port Chicago 50 and gained their release after the war and only following a public outcry.) 

So, in the space of seven months three eerily similar accidents wreaked havoc on the navy’s explosives supply lines. Nine ships were lost and more than 900 men died.

In March 1945 the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance issued a “circular” letter to relevant commands that emphasized how easy it was to explode “bomb type” ammunition accidentally “by impacts not severe enough to cause even slight rupture to container walls. Any idea that hazards due to ‘mere denting’ of containers must be thoroughly dispelled.” The letter went on to outline a series of revised loading practices intended to cut down on the risks of explosions, in particular how dangerous materials should be handled. After tightening up the rules the navy suffered no further cataclysms. 

Following his testimony to the board of investigation, Lieutenant Wallace returned to Arlington, Virginia, to reunite with his wife and son. For his next tour the navy sent him for duty in the communications unit of a carrier—exactly what he had sought all along. He spent the next ten months on station in the Pacific Theater, where he was promoted to commander. Wallace was discharged in late 1945 and when he returned home, he reclaimed his old post at the Bureau of Revenue (later renamed the Internal Revenue Service). He retired in 1974 and died in 2012 at the age of 97.

Mount Hood was not forgotten. In July 1968 a second ship named for the Oregon volcano was launched at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Designated AE-29, it was the fourth Kilauea-class ammunition ship to enter navy service. The second Mount Hood served in Vietnam in 1972, earning a campaign star, and served in the Gulf War in 1991. The ship was decommissioned in August 1999 and was sold for scrap in September 2013.

The Rev. Dr. Taylor Filmore Ealy faced many struggles, most not of his own making, while a Presbyterian medical missionary between 1874 and 1881—first at Fort Arbuckle, on the Chickasaw Reservation in Oklahoma Territory; then in volatile Lincoln, New Mexico Territory; and finally at Zuni Pueblo, also in New Mexico Territory. Some of that time he kept a journal. Daughter Ruth drew on his journal entries, as well as the recollections and correspondence of her father and mother, Mary, to write Water in a Thirsty Land—first privately issued in 1955 in a limited edition of 40 copies.

Editor David Thomas resurrects the Ealy chronicle as Vol. 10 of Doc45’s Mesilla Valley History series. In his excellent introduction Thomas provides not only overviews of the three Western locales where the Ealys lived, but also brief biographies of the major figures in Ruth’s narrative. Perhaps of greatest interest is the time the Ealys spent in Lincoln, as the family arrived on the day murdered English rancher John Tunstall’s body was brought into town. It was the latter’s murder that triggered the 1878 Lincoln County War, and it was the Rev. Dr. Ealy who delivered Tunstall’s funeral oration at the home of Alexander McSween. Forty-one days later the doctor and family witnessed the killing of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman, and the Ealys were also present for the five-day shootout in Lincoln that culminated with the burning of the McSween house and Alexander’s murder. In his journal Ealy noted that Colonel Nathan Dudley, the commander at Fort Stanton, “refused to protect McSween and ordered his men not to fire over Dudley’s camp, or he would turn the cannon on them. My wife read his note to reply to McSween’s request for protection. McSween’s house, where his party had taken refuge, was deliberately set on fire.”

Such violence is what ultimately drove the family out of Lincoln. The Rev. Dr. Ealy then spent nearly three years as a missionary teacher at Zuni Pueblo, 150 miles west of Albuquerque. There was no gunplay there, but Ealy experienced plenty of cultural shock. “He had gained the respect of many of the Indians who more and more were beginning to realize the value of an education,” wrote Ruth (who was born in East Waterford, Pa., in 1877 and died in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1959). “The religious dances still interfered with the school attendance, it is true, but the children seemed to be enjoying their schoolwork. He had learned to like his Indian friends.” It was—and remains—mighty dry country, and Ealy often noted in his journal how the Zunis danced day and night for rain. 

Water in a Thirsty Land

By Ruth R. Ealy, edited by David Thomas, Doc45 Publishing, 2022

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Odds are there isn’t a Civil War buff living who hasn’t seen a copy of this remarkable pencil sketch (above) by special artist Edwin Forbes, which Forbes labeled as “William J. Jackson, Sergt. Maj. 12th N.Y. Vol.—Sketched at Stoneman’s Switch, near Fredricksburg [sic], Va. Jan. 27th, 1863.” The young noncom has gazed back at us across the years from countless publications and exhibits. Rendered with camera-like honesty, it is arguably among the best drawings of a common soldier done during the Civil War. Writing about his work in general, Forbes assured viewers, “fidelity to fact is… the first thing to be aimed at.”

In fact, once Forbes completed his drawing of Jackson, the sketch went virtually unseen for more than 80 years. The drawing was among several hundred illustrations Forbes made while covering the Army of the Potomac for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper from the spring of 1862 to the fall of 1864. Approximately 150 of Forbes’ wartime sketches were engraved and printed in the illustrated newspaper during that period, although his drawing of Jackson was not among them.

After the war, Forbes retained most of his original illustrations. Many he reworked into more polished drawings; some into oil paintings. He fashioned scores of them into award-winning etchings. Many appeared in his books, Life Studies of the Great Army (1876) and Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Story of the Great War (1890). Again, the poignant sketch of the beardless sergeant major from the 12th New York Infantry was not included.

Following Forbes’ death in March 1895, his wife, Ida, maintained his portfolio of original artwork, where the Jackson sketch was catalogued, “Study of an Infantry Soldier — The Sergeant Major.” She eventually sold the entire collection for $25,000 to financier J.P. Morgan in January 1901. Eighteen years later, on the heels of World War I, Morgan’s estate donated the collection to the Library of Congress, its current home. The sketch of William Jackson remained out of the public eye for another quarter-century until it resurfaced during World War II, thanks to the efforts of a U.S. Army private.

Private Lincoln Kirstein, however, was not your ordinary ground-pounder. Born into wealth, the Harvard educated Kirstein was well-connected socially, channeling his “energy, intellect, and organizational skills to serve the art world.” By age 36, when he was inducted into the Army in early 1943, Kirstein had already published several books, co-founded The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, and later, The School of American Ballet in New York City with renown Russian choreographer George Balanchine.

Following his basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., Kirstein was posted at Fort Belvoir, Va., charged with writing training manuals. “I am an old man,” he confided to a friend, “and find the going very hard.” To fill his idle hours, he conceived an idea to collect and document American solider-art. “[M]uch of their work is interesting,” Kirstein wrote, “and some of it is beautiful.” He soon expanded his survey to include “U.S. battle art through time.” His plans included a “large-scale exhibit and a book.”

Aided by some influential friends, including Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and then Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, Kirstein gathered material from various sources, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and, of course, the Library of Congress. Thanks to his efforts, Forbes’ sketch of “Sergt. Maj. William J. Jackson” emerged from obscurity.

The efforts culminated in the exhibition of American Battle Art at the Library of Congress staged from July 4 through November 1, 1944. Three years later, the Library of Congress issued the book that Kirstein had envisioned. Titled An Album of American Battle Art, 1755-1918, the heavily illustrated volume “took its origin” largely from the wartime exhibit. Forbes’ portrait of William J. Jackson appeared in print for the first time, captioned “a solemn lad with his arm resting on his rifle…toughened by campaigning.”​

A Perilous Start

Jackson may have been “toughened” early in life. The son of Irish immigrants, he was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 8, 1841, the first of four boys. His father, also named William, worked as a mason. The family grew in time, and moved from tenement to tenement, though always remained in proximity to Washington Square. The surrounding web of narrow streets flanked by a tumble of brick and framed dwellings and small businesses was an Irish enclave in the city’s 9th Ward facing the Hudson River.

It was a tough neighborhood. “Boys were primitive in those days,” wrote one of Jackson’s contemporaries. “They were like the old time warring clans. Every avenue was arrayed against the other.” Tensions bubbled within the city’s growing Irish immigrant population where clashes were common.

One notorious encounter erupted within a stone’s throw of Jackson’s home when he was 12. On July 4, 1853, streets echoed “the popping, fizzing, whirring and banging sounds” of fireworks as crowds of green-clad Irish revelers celebrated Independence Day. They ended up battling one another. “At one time several hundred men were…hurling stones and other missiles…” trumpeted The New York Herald next day. Platoons of policemen from nearby precincts aided by two fire companies “succeeded in subduing the riot…” Nearly 40 Irishmen were arrested, reported the Herald, “all of whom bore the strong evidences of an impression made on their heads by a contact against the policemen’s clubs.”

Battles of another kind rocked William’s world when civil war erupted on April 12, 1861. The 19-year-old left his parents and his job as a clerk a week later, on April 19, to enlist in the 12th Regiment New York State Militia, Company F. A recruiting office was just blocks from his home.

Tendered for immediate service by its commander, Colonel Daniel Butterfield, the regiment also included in its ranks the future Maj. Gen. Francis C. Barlow when it sailed from New York on April 21, bound for Washington, D.C. Though fully armed, the unit lacked enough uniforms to go around. Raw recruits like Jackson wore “their ordinary clothing with military belts and equipment,” giving them, by one account, a “guerrilla like,” appearance. Appearances changed when a new Chasseur uniform was issued to the regiment at Camp Anderson in Washington early in May 1861. The militiamen were also mustered into Federal service for three months while there, and received a “severe course of drilling.” Barlow was mustered in as a first lieutenant in Company F.

One of their Camp Anderson instructors also distinguished himself later in the war. Emory Upton, fresh from graduation at West Point, would achieve the rank of Brevet Maj. Gen., and eventually become superintendent of U.S. Military Academy. Upton found that tutoring the 12th New Yorkers was tiresome. “I do not complain,” he wrote, “when I think how much harder the poor privates have to work.”

Their crash course in soldiering quickly paid off. Before dawn May 24, the 12th New York led Union forces over Long Bridge to occupy Alexandria, Va., and fortify Arlington Heights in the wake of that state’s secession from the Union the day before. Jackson was among the first Union infantrymen to set foot on Rebel soil.

Jackson continued his trek through enemy country when the regiment joined Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson’s army at Martinsburg, Va., on July 7, 1861. The men patrolled and picketed environs of the Lower Shenandoah Valley until their expiration of service on August 2, when the unit returned to New York. Following a march down Broadway and Fifth Avenues on Monday August 5, the regiment formally mustered out at Washington Square, near Jackson’s home.

Quick Return to the Fray

Jackson’s homecoming was brief. He reenlisted October 1, 1861, and mustered into Federal service for three years, a member of Co. F, 12th New York Volunteer Infantry. Dubbed the “Onondaga” Regiment, its ranks had originally been filled with short term volunteers from near Syracuse and Elmira, N.Y., in May 1861. After the Union debacle at First Bull Run in July 1861, the regiment recruited around the state including in New York City where Jackson signed on. Perhaps showing potential from his recent militia service, William was immediately appointed sergeant.

Recruits ferried over the Hudson River from Manhattan to Jersey City, N.J., and boarded trains for the trip south to join the regiment then on duty in defenses outside Washington, D.C. Recalled another New York volunteer who made the trip about the time Jackson did, “the cars were crowded and the ride was slow, cold and tedious.”

From Washington, the novice soldiers crossed Chain Bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia. Union Army engineers had fortified the landscape to defend the Capital. “Every mile is a fort,” marveled Private Van Rensselaer Evringham, Co. I, 12th New York. “There is thousands of acres here that have been cut down & left on the ground to prevent the Rebels coming by surprise…it would take 50 years to bring everything back to its former state.”

The 12th New York, given the moniker “the durty dozen,” according to Evringham, joined scores of other raw regiments manning fortifications throughout the fall and winter 1861–62, while they trained for combat ahead. Jackson’s Co. F, with four other companies from the 12th garrisoned Fort Ramsay, located on the crest of Upton’s Hill, about a half mile east of Falls Church, Va. They also furnished a daily guard “to protect the guns in Fort Buffalo” nearby. The regiment’s remaining companies manned Fort Craig, and Fort Tillinghast. They occasionally traded shots with Rebel forces, “but to little effect,” wrote a New York diarist.

On March 21, 1862, Jackson and tent-mates were ordered off Upton’s Hill to Alexandria, Va. Next morning, boarding the transport John A. Warner to the strains of Dixie, they steamed down the Potomac River to Chesapeake Bay. In a letter to his parents, Private Homer Case, of Co. I, confided: “We did not know where we was a going.”

After two days aboard ship, Jackson and “the durty dozen” landed at Hampton, Va., embarked on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s offensive to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. Hard marching through steaming pine thickets and swampy bottom lands on narrow, crowded, often rain-mired roads marked the campaign. Private Sid Anderson, Co. H, quipped of “mud clear up to the seat of our unmentionables.” While Private Evringham claimed, “Virginnie is 2/3 woods or swamps.”

Under Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s command during the fruitless Union thrust up the Peninsula, the 12th New York saw action at the Siege of Yorktown, the battles of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and numerous skirmishes in between. Afterward, the New Yorkers languished at Harrison’s Landing until mid-August when they trudged to Newport News. From here they traveled by steamer to Aquia Creek; then by railroad to Falmouth, and on by foot to join Maj. Gen. John Pope’s ill-fated Army of Virginia near Manassas, Va. “We marched thirteen days…with little rest,” wrote Private Robert Tilney, Co. F., “part of the time on half rations…”

At the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Onondagans engaged in bloody afternoon assaults on August 30, against Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s position astride the railroad cut. “We poured volley after volley into the concealed enemy,” recalled one New Yorker. Rebel return fire shredded the Union foot soldiers, “woefully thinning” their ranks. Nearly a third of the 12th New York became casualties.

Facing Lee’s army at Sharpsburg on September 17, Sergeant Jackson likely had mixed emotions while he and his regiment stood in reserve with Porter’s 5th Corps, mere spectators to the bloody Battle of Antietam. The Sharpsburg area remained Jackson’s home through the end of October 1862, when the regiment advanced via Snicker’s Gap and Warrenton, to the Rappahannock River where the Army of the Potomac arrayed opposite Fredericksburg. The boyish-looking sergeant would earn three more stripes during the ensuing battle.

Jackson’s regiment with Brig. Gen. Charles Griffin’s division occupied Stafford Heights when the Battle of Fredericksburg opened on December 13. They crossed the lower pontoon bridge in early afternoon, struggling through debris in Fredericksburg amid what one New Yorker described as “a shower of aimless bullets.” The regiment advanced to a shallow fold in the ground about 500 yards from Rebels posted at the stone wall on Marye’s Heights. “[T]his position,” reported brigade commander Colonel T.B.D. Stockton, “was much exposed to the cross-fire of the enemy’s guns…”

Stockton’s Brigade charged the stone wall just before sundown. The 12th New York missed the bugle signal to advance in the din of battle, though soon recovered, sweeping forward. They met a maelstrom of shot and shell “on both front and side,” wrote Stockton. The New Yorkers piled into the tangled mass of bluecoats already stalled at the foot of Marye’s Heights and went no farther. Ordered to hold their exposed position under enemy fire throughout the night Stockton’s men were bait for Rebel sharpshooters and artillery until relieved about 10 p.m. December 14. It was “all a person’s life is worth to go to or come from there,” wrote a newspaperman. Young Jackson suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg below the knee that day.

When Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside ordered his battered army back to its old camps north of the Rappahannock on December 16, Jackson returned as a sergeant major. He had been promoted the day before, likely to fill a vacancy caused by the battle.

Jackson saw little combat after the Battle of Fredericksburg. The 5th Corps wintered in a small metropolis of timber and canvas huts near Stoneman’s Switch, a supply depot along the railroad several miles north of Fredericksburg, where the 12th New York engaged in an “uneventful round of camp and picket duty.” It’s uncertain whether Jackson’s injured leg kept him from chores, or prevented him from joining Burnside’s inglorious “Mud March” in pitiless wind and rain storms January 20–24.

By January 27, however, the 21-year-old Jackson, with bayonetted rifle, his greatcoat tightly gathered at the waist, was able to stand still long enough for special artist Edwin Forbes to capture him on paper. The artist clearly shows that Jackson placed his weight on his right foot. No evidence has surfaced to indicate Jackson and Forbes knew each other, or ever met again after the drawing was completed, though Forbes remained in the area depicting numerous scenes around the Stoneman’s Switch camps that winter.

In late April 1863, the 12th New York was reduced to battalion-size when five “two-year companies” were mustered out of the army. Jackson and the remaining companies with the 5th Corps followed Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker to Chancellorsville, Va., in early May. During the battle there, the New Yorkers were employed “making rifle-pits and abatis” on the fringe of the fighting. “[I]n this position,” recalled a private in Company D, “we saw the fires in the woods which the artillery had kindled, and heard the cries of the wounded.”

Expiration of service further reduced ranks of the regiment after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Jackson and other “three-year” men were then consolidated in a two-company provost guard. The contingent moved with 5th Corps headquarters when the Army of the Potomac pursued Lee’s Rebels toward Pennsylvania. “Our troops had been on the march for many days,” wrote the Company D soldier, “bivouacking at night in the open air, and were dirty and travel-stained with the heat and sun of late June.” This ordeal ended abruptly for Jackson on June 30. On the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, at a camp near Frederick, Md., Sgt. Maj. Jackson was granted an early discharge from the army “by reason of being rendered supernumerary…” (surplus due to the consolidation).

​​Battle With Postwar Bureaucracy

Jackson returned to New York City and married in 1865. Employed as a clerk/salesman, he and his wife, Maria, set up housekeeping in Brooklyn. Over time, they were blessed with three daughters. Elizabeth, their first child, born in 1866, suffered from an unspecified disability and likely remained homebound until her death in April 1891. Margaret, born in 1869, worked as a file clerk, remained single, and passed away in 1920. Ellen, or Nelly, Jackson, who was born in 1871, was also employed as a clerk, and unmarried. She lived well into the 20th Century, passing away in October 1945.

Outside his family and job, William Jackson had enrolled in the Old Guard Association of the Twelfth Regiment N.G.S.N.Y., and in “The Lafayette Fusileers,” antecedents of the units he served with during the war. The rigors of his army service eventually took a toll on Jackson’s health later in life.

At age 51, Jackson filed his first claim for an Invalid Pension in June 1892. The former sergeant major supplied a laundry list of disabilities on his application form: “[A]lmost constant superficial pain in right chest & some in legs…pain & violent beating in heart…weakness – can’t lift anything.” His “gunshot wound of left leg” was cited. In sum he was “Physically unable to earn a support by manual labor.” Military medical records also show Jackson had been treated for “Gonorrhoia” [sic] on November 13, 1861. (Perhaps the result from a visit to one of the hundreds of brothels around Washington, D.C., while his regiment was on garrisoned duty.)

Jackson’s claim was rejected, “on the ground of no pensionable disability…under Act of June 27, 1890.” It wasn’t until President Theodore Roosevelt had signed an Executive Order for Old Age Pensions declaring all veterans over the age of 62 to be eligible for a pension that Jackson was finally granted $6 per month beginning May 10, 1904.

The reward would be short-lived. On April 11, 1905, following Maria’s death that January, William J. Jackson died. He and his wife rest with their three daughters under a single headstone at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Flushing, N.Y.
​
​George Skoch, a longtime contributor, writes from Fairview Park, Ohio.

To the disbelief of gaping onlookers in the packed stands at El Toreo, Mexico City’s largest bullring, American rodeo performer Bill Pickett clung to the horns of a massive Mexican bull ironically named Frijoles Chiquitos (“Little Beans”). Watching from a safe distance in the saddle atop jittery horses were cowhand Vester Pegg and siblings Joe and Zack Miller, proprietors of the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West. Matadors, including the famed Manuel Mejíjas Luján (aka “Bienvenida”), also stood by as Bill grappled with the snorting, gyrating wild beast, which Mexican and Spanish bullfighters alike typically fought from a more dignified distance. Funny thing is, Pickett wasn’t even supposed to be there. Days earlier he’d been working one of the Miller family ranches back in Oklahoma.

It was early December 1908, and the Real Wild West had come off a grueling tour of the United States. Instead of heading home to lick their wounds, however, Joe and Zack Miller took the show south of the border. Though still two years from the onset of the Mexican Revolution, that southern neighbor was already in turmoil. The troupe endured several intrusive (and costly in bribes) searches by customs officials before arriving in Mexico City on December 11. The streets of the heavily populated capital were clogged with Roman Catholic pilgrims preparing for the next day’s Our Lady of Guadalupe observance, marking the 1531 visions of the Virgin Mary to believers in that Mexican city. The observance also marked the start of the show’s two-week run at the circus arena in Porfirio Díaz Park.

Low attendance and gouging fines for Pickett’s failure to appear, though “The Dusky Demon” was prominently featured in advertisements, led Joe to telegram brother George, back at the 101 Ranch, with instructions to have Pickett travel down by train immediately. Shortly after the bulldogger arrived and began performing, Joe and the show’s press agent, W.C. Thompson, stopped in at the Café Colón, a popular eatery among matadors and local reporters, where Joe hoped to gin up publicity for the show. When a table of matadors directed their laughter at the gringos, Joe asked what they found so humorous. They told him they had attended the show that afternoon and were unimpressed with Pickett’s antics in the ring, comparing him to a novice bullfighter. An indignant Miller challenged them on the spot to go toe to toe with Pickett in a bulldogging event. On behalf of the group, Bienvenida accepted and agreed to show up at the circus arena at 10 the next morning. But neither he nor any other matador took up the challenge, claiming the arena promoters forbade them from taking any such foolish risk.

After several days of verbal exchanges, challenges and braying newspaper ads, Miller bet the arena promoters Pickett could remain alone in the ring for 15 minutes with their fiercest fighting bull and spend at least five minutes of that time grappling barehanded with the beast, wrestling it to the ground if possible. If Pickett succeeded, the Millers would collect the gate receipts for the day. Joe also made a 5,000-peso side bet. The publicity from his wager and newspaper coverage led promoters to move the bulldogging spectacle, scheduled for December 23, to the far larger El Toreo. Within days Mexico City’s largest venue had sold out.

On the afternoon of the 23rd Pickett trotted into the arena atop his favorite horse, Spradley, to a cacophony of cheers, boos and hisses from an estimated 25,000 onlookers. As the blare of the opening trumpets faded, the gate to the corrals swung wide, and Frijoles Chiquitos stormed into the ring. When the bull saw Pickett and raced across the arena toward him, Bill saw right off that his terrified hazers would be of no use.

Steering Spradley in close to Frijoles Chiquitos, Bill sought to maneuver into position to leap on the bull’s bulging neck. Each time the rampaging beast gave them the slip. Suddenly, the bull swung around and charged rider and horse from behind. Spradley could not evade the rush, and one of Frijoles Chiquitos’ horns ripped open the horse’s rump, causing it to stumble. Taking advantage of the distraction, Pickett dove from the saddle. Locking on to the bull’s horns, he wrapped himself around its writhing neck and rode Frijoles Chiquitos as the crowd rose to its feet in anticipation. The bull tried everything it could to free itself of Pickett, to no avail. For several  agonizing minutes it wildly shook its great head, slashing with its horns, as the determined bulldogger clung tight, looking for an opportunity to take the animal to the ground.

Likely bemoaning their decision to bet against the do-or-die Yankee, the crowd turned on Bill and began pelting him with whatever was at hand. Fruit, cushions, rocks, bottles, even bricks rained down from the stands. After taking a rock to the side of his face and a beer bottle to the ribs, a bleeding and dazed Pickett released his iron grip on the raging Frijoles Chiquitos and lay on the arena floor grimacing in pain. Rushing in, his 101 Ranch hazers finally distracted the bull long enough to help Bill to his feet and out of the ring.

The crowd’s delight at Pickett’s failure turned to disappointment on learning he’d made it to the 5-minute mark, thus winning the wager. With his seven and a half minute ride the bulldogger had earned the show a whopping 48,000 pesos (north of $450,000 in today’s dollars), not to mention Joe’s side bet. The day after Christmas the show wrapped up its lucrative run in Mexico City and headed back north. Joe canceled a scheduled show in Gainesville, Texas, and as the train arrived in Bliss, Okla., weary troupe members clapped and cheered at being home. The big payday had helped buffer an otherwise tough financial year, and the show’s future seemed bright.

A Working Ranch

Most Western historians cite 1881 as the year 101 Ranch patriarch Colonel George Washington Miller first seared his brand on cattle. A notorious namesake San Antonio saloon is said to have inspired the brand. Whatever the truth, that first bitter wisp of burnt hide launched a story for the ages, as the 101 was destined to become one of the most recognizable names in both ranching and Western entertainment.

A Kentucky native, Miller fought for the Confederacy in his 20s and moved west after the Civil War, initially settling in southwest Missouri and driving cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas. Miller later moved his herds to land leased from the Quapaw tribe in Indian Territory (present-day northeast Oklahoma) while residing just across the border in Baxter Springs, Kan. He cultivated a relationship with the Ponca tribe when it was briefly displaced to the Quapaw Agency. Miller suggested the Poncas settle on land farther west in the Cherokee Outlet. After the federal government forced ranchers out of the outlet in 1893, the Poncas did just that, and Miller leased their land for his operations, setting up headquarters near the tribal hub at New Ponca (renamed Ponca City in 1913). The 101 Ranch ultimately comprised 110,000 acres.

After Miller succumbed to pneumonia in 1903, wife Molly had the ranch turned into a trust, with Joe, Zack and George as equal partners and shareholders. From then on the trio ran the whole shooting match. At the time of their father’s death Joseph Carson Miller was 35 years old, Zachary Taylor Miller 25, and the youngest, George Lee Miller, 21. Each brother developed unique interests and skills, enabling them to divide oversight of the 101 effectively and without rancor. Together they remained focused on realizing their father’s dream to build the nation’s largest and most influential ranch.

The rich soil already grew a range of crops, while livestock included cattle, bison, hogs, poultry and several breeds of horse. The brothers continued to experiment with crops and added an electric plant, a cannery, a dairy, a tannery, a store, a restaurant and several mills. Promoted as the “greatest diversified farm on earth,” the ranch prospered well into the early 20th century.

Of course, oil too played a role. Ernest W. Marland, of Marland Oil Co., spearheaded the search for crude deposits on the family spread and helped form the 101 Ranch Oil Co. That highly successful venture substantially increased the Millers’ profit margin.

All-important downtime served to seed the brothers’ entrance into show business.

What became the Real Wild West had its roots in late summer or early fall 1882 in Winfield, Kan., where Colonel Miller, Mollie and their children had recently moved. Miller and hands had just finished a cattle drive up the Chisolm Trail from Texas. Meanwhile, Winfield city leaders were planning an agricultural fair and wanted entertainment. Miller proposed his cowboys put on a roping and riding exhibition, and the event planners enthusiastically accepted his offer. Miller’s “roundup,” as he called it, proved a roaring success.

The business of running a sprawling ranch intervened, and it wasn’t until 1904, a year after Colonel Miller’s death, that the 101 hosted its next roundup. This time it was the Miller brothers’ brainchild.

That year Joe Miller visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo. While there he and leading Oklahoma newspapermen met with the board of directors of the National Editorial Association, hoping to convince the board to hold its 1905 convention in Guthrie. To sweeten the pot, Joe told the directors the 101 Ranch would host them and put on a big Wild West show in their honor. The board bit and approved the proposal.

The Millers thought it best to prepare for the 1905 event by holding a roundup in the fall of 1904. Pleased with the enthusiastic turnout, the brothers planned the 1905 roundup, which they grandly dubbed the Oklahoma Gala. Dozens of trains were needed to help transport the more than 65,000 people who attended the elaborate opening parade on June 11. It was the largest crowd yet assembled for an event in Oklahoma.

The June gala ended with a reenactment of a wagon train attack by 300 Indians. Gunfire and bloodcurdling screams rose from the arena floor as wagons caught fire and settlers closed with their assailants in mortal combat. More credulous onlookers feared they were witnessing a real massacre. Then, out of nowhere, a posse of cowboys rode to the rescue, guns blazing. As the act drew to a close, the performers gathered at the center of the arena to a standing ovation. The Miller brothers joined the troupe to bask in the crowd’s appreciation.

Over the next two decades the Millers hosted annual roundups at the 101, seating up to 10,000 spectators in an arena just across from ranch headquarters. The program always included roping, riding and bulldogging, as well as Indian dances and other Western cultural offerings. The brothers employed top cowboys from across the region, and Pickett and other well-known 101 Ranch hands went on to stardom in Hollywood Westerns.

The “Show Business Bug”

Planning for the June 1905 Oklahoma Gala had another unexpected offshoot, for Joe caught the “show business bug” in a big way. Looking ahead to the June gala, he and Zack arranged to have some of their performers join Colonel Zack Mulhall and his touring Western troupe in a series of shows that April at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Appearing before packed houses in one the biggest venues of the era gave the brothers an opportunity to learn the production aspects of a touring show. It also afforded their performers rehearsal time for the upcoming gala. Among the Miller hands appearing at the garden was Will Rogers, then a relative unknown. Indeed, Mulhall initially turned down Rogers, who had to enlist the help of the colonel’s wife, Mary, to secure a spot on the program.

It is ironic, then, that while the Madison Square Garden run proved successful for Mulhall, Rogers benefited all the more from his appearance. The turning point came amid the sixth show when a steer got loose and entered the stands. Thinking quickly, Will lassoed the wayward animal and guided it back to the arena floor, saving the day. The publicity generated by his courage, talent with a lariat and wit prompted a shrewd promoter to offer him a starring role, performing his rope acts solo on vaudeville stages in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Joe, Zack and their well-rehearsed performers returned to Oklahoma to finish preparations for the gala. Taking a page from Mulhall, the Millers generated a marketing blitz, published in newspapers and spread through contacts nationwide, describing what attendees could expect on June 11. The lineup included bulldogger Pickett, trick rider Lucille Mulhall (the colonel’s daughter), expert horseman and crack shot Tom Mix and a supporting cast of almost a thousand performers, many from the local Ponca and Otoe tribes.

The 101 Real Wild West was one step from becoming one of the most popular traveling Western entertainment troupes of its era.

Taking the Show on the Road

Encouraged by their successful 1905 gala, and at the urging of Oklahoma neighbor Gordon W. “Pawnee Bill” Lillie—who’d already made a name for himself as the founder and proprietor of Pawnee Bill’s Wild West—the Millers took their show on the road full time in 1907. Favorable publicity from an early run in Kansas City, Mo., caught the notice of Theodore Roosevelt. The “Cowboy President” was already acquainted with the Millers from prior visits to their ranch. (On his invitation Mix had ridden in the president’s 1905 inaugural parade alongside Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War “Rough Riders,” sparking a rumor the 101 Ranch hand had been a Rough Rider himself.) Roosevelt persuaded the Millers to bring their show to Norfolk, Va., as part of the Jamestown Exposition. At the close of that 100-day run the exposition promoters helped land the Real Wild West a two-week run at the Chicago Coliseum. The publicity from 1907 led to the busy but grueling 1908 tour, starting at Brighton Beach, N.Y. Through 1916 the Millers and their performers were at the top of their game as crowds grew ever bigger, drawn by a spreading fascination with cowboys, Indians and all things Western.

In 1916 the Millers merged their production with Cody’s arena show and toured as Buffalo Bill (Himself) & the 101 Ranch Wild West Combined, though the nation’s growing involvement in World War I put the tour on hold later that year. Cody died soon after, on Jan. 10, 1917. Going back on the road in 1925, the Real Wild West toured throughout the United States and abroad, traveling to Mexico, Canada, Europe and South America.

Through the 1920s, however, the 101 Ranch Real Wild West, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West and other touring shows drew ever smaller crowds, leading to severe financial losses. By then such productions faced stiff competition from the film industry, as well as proliferating circuses and rodeos. Making matters worse for the Real Wild West, Joe Miller died in 1927, followed two years later by the death of brother George. Then came the Great Depression, which drastically cut into profits from the ranch and show. Zack alone could not pull the operation out of its tailspin, and in 1931 the 101 Ranch and its associated businesses went into receivership. A year later much of the land was divided and leased, and authorities auctioned everything of value to cover debts. On Jan. 3, 1952, a nearly destitute Zack Miller died.      

Today one may visit the site of the ranch headquarters, though all that’s left are a few weathered buildings, the foundation of the Miller home (known in its prime as the “White House”) and a few historical markers describing what once was. An excellent nonprofit named the 101 Ranch Old Timers Association continues its work to keep the ranch and show legacy alive. Its members support a wonderful museum housed within oilman E.W. Marland’s Grand Home in Ponca City and host annual events and tours for the public. And so the show goes on.

New Mexico–based E. Joe Brown is an award-winning author of novels, short stories and memoirs. For further reading he recommends The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West, by Michael Wallis, and The 101 Ranch, by Ellsworth Collings and Alma Miller England.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

The Curtiss-Wright Corporation came into being in 1929 through the merger of companies started by pioneering aviators Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers. Within the new company, the Curtiss-Wright airplane division made airplanes while the Wright Aeronautical Corporation focused on engines. By the time of World War II, Curtiss-Wright held more defense contracts than any organization other than vastly larger General Motors and had become something of a bully. It used lobbyists, legislators, friends in high places and its own overzealous salesmen to get what it wanted. It made some adequate but unspectacular airplanes and some big radial engines, but why Curtiss-Wright could punch so far above its weight remains something of a mystery. 

Trouble arrived for Curtiss-Wright in 1943 when its engines became the focus of a congressional investigation led by a senator named Harry S. Truman. The inquiry, launched back in March 1941, was formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program and it helped propel the obscure politician from Missouri into the vice presidency and eventually the White House. Strangely enough, it also impacted the life of actress Marilyn Monroe—but more about that later.

At the time, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was the company’s go-to product. The design was essentially a 1933 radial-engine Curtiss P-36 Hawk fitted with an inline Allison V-12 engine. While not a bad airplane, the P-40 was obsolete by the time the United States entered World War II. Still, it was the best America had at the time. Messerschmitt Me-109s and Mitsubishi A6M Zeros ran rings around it at altitude—the P-40 had just a single-stage supercharger—but it remained an effective ground-attack machine.         

Yet the obsolete P-40 stayed in full production until the end of 1944. Why not ramp up manufacture of the North American P-51 Mustang and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt instead, Truman’s investigative committee asked? But Curtiss liked the easy profit it derived from the simple, proven, utilitarian design, and its attempts to create a successor—the XP-46, XP-60 and XP-62—were uninspired. All were canceled. Curtiss had no aeronautical geniuses like Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, North American’s Ed Schmued or Republic’s Alexander Kartveli to push it to the forefront. Its best talent was an engineer named Don Berlin, who was held in high regard but never really rose beyond his singular success with the P-40. It is notable that when the British asked North American Aviation to license-build P-40s for the Royal Air Force, the California company said, “Hell, give us three months and the back of an envelope and we’ll design a real fighter for you.” That fighter became the Mustang. 

One new airplane the company had to offer was the SB2C Curtiss Helldiver, but it was an ill-handling, poorly manufactured, aerodynamically misshapen beast loathed by pilots, back seaters and maintainers. It was not a Don Berlin design but was credited to Curtiss engineer Raymond C. Blaylock, who seemed to have stepped out of obscurity long enough to head the Helldiver program and then disappear. (In fact, he ultimately became the vice-president of engineering of Chance Vought. He specialized in missiles and was not involved in the design of the remarkable F8 Crusader.) 

To be fair, it wasn’t all Curtiss’s fault. The Navy ordered the SB2C to succeed the Douglas SBD and demanded that a pair of the Curtiss dive bombers had to fit on a fleet carrier’s elevators while at the same time requiring that the SB2C be faster and longer-ranged than the SBD and carry a heavier load of ordnance. This led to the Helldiver receiving an awkwardly short aft fuselage, a huge vertical tail that nonetheless failed to keep the short-coupled airplane longitudinally stable, and a monster wing to lift all that weight at carrier-approach speeds. When Curtiss put a prototype SB2C model into the MIT wind tunnel in 1939, aerodynamicist Otto Koppen said, “If they built more than one of these, they are crazy.” 

The Helldiver’s poor handling characteristics, structural weaknesses—it tended to shed the aft fuselage and empennage under the stress of arrested carrier landings—and lousy stall characteristics at final-approach speeds caught the Truman Committee’s attention. It didn’t help that Helldiver production had been delayed by nine months while the Navy demanded more than 800 modifications. For many months thereafter, Curtiss failed to produce a single SB2C that the Navy considered usable as a combat aircraft. What particularly griped the Truman Committee was that Curtiss had been spending tens of thousands of government dollars advertising the SB2C to the public as “the world’s deadliest dive bomber,” despite the fact that it had not produced a single usable Helldiver.

There was even a song about the SB2C. It went, “Oh mother, dear mother/Take down the blue star/Replace it with one that is gold/Your son is a Helldiver driver/He’ll never be 30 years old.” The Australians and the British were smart enough to cancel their large orders for the SB2C before more than a few were built.

Initially, Curtiss was to construct the SB2C at a huge new government-funded factory in Buffalo, New York. Then production was shifted to Columbus, Ohio. For months, nothing happened, and rumors began circulating among the sidelined workers in Columbus that their efforts were being literally sabotaged. Nobody realized that the problem was the fact that Curtiss hadn’t been able to produce a single successful airplane in Buffalo. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) ordered thousands of Helldivers as a variant called the A-25 Shrike dive bomber. Big mistake. The Germans had already learned, with the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, that terrestrial dive bombing worked only if the bombers had total air superiority and were attacking targets undefended by anti-aircraft guns. That kind of situation was rare enough that Allied air forces had abandoned the concept of dedicated dive bombers by the time the A-25 was ready for delivery.   

Things were bad enough with Curtiss airplanes. They were even worse for the engines being produced by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. Several Army inspectors stationed at Wright’s engine factory at Lockland, Ohio, told Truman that they were being encouraged to ignore proper inspection procedures and to approve faulty materials and even entire engines being delivered to the government for use in the Helldiver and various other aircraft. That engine was the 1,600-hp Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone. 

The R-2600 was the engine that goaded Pratt & Whitney into designing and producing the R-2800, the best radial of World War II, but the big Wright was an excellent engine itself—when it was built right. It powered thousands of North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, including those that flew America’s first offensive strike against Japan—the April 1942 Doolittle Raid. 

A preliminary investigation by Truman’s staff revealed that there were ample grounds for the whistleblowers’ claims, and that the inspection failings were obvious enough that company execs and Army inspectors should have been aware of the problems.

Well, let’s not be hasty here, the Army said. We’ll look into this and report back. Brig. Gen. Bennett Meyers and his staff did so, and Meyers announced that the Army could find nothing amiss. Meyers either lied or had been duped by his own inspectors, whom the Truman Committee later found to be actively obstructing the investigation. 

The engine division blamed the snitching on “petty bickering over privileges, authority and rights.” The Truman Committee, however, soon uncovered evidence of false tests of R-2600s and the materials that went into them, destruction of records, improper reporting of test results, forged inspection reports, off-the-cuff oral alteration of the tolerances allowed for parts, outright skipping of inspections and, in general, letting Wright’s engine-production needs override the recommendations of both company and Army inspectors. 

There almost certainly had been crashes and deaths caused by the failure of faulty Wright R-2600s, but nobody could identify any specific examples outside the mass of wartime catastrophes attributable to everything from thunderstorms to pilot error. Truman himself said, “The facts are that [Wright was] turning out phony engines, and I have no doubt that a lot of kids in training planes were killed as a result.” The fact that no 1,600-hp Wright Twin Cyclone had ever powered a trainer escaped his attention, but never mind.

As is often the case in such relationships, a culture had grown that encouraged Army inspectors to believe their primary duty was toward Wright rather than the AAF, and that keeping their jobs depended on keeping the company happy. If an Army inspector refused to accept material that he knew was faulty, he got a reputation as a knucklehead who failed to “get along.” Failing to get along meant you risked anything from an inconvenient job transfer to outright losing that job. When one Army inspector produced an honest report on conditions at the Lockland factory, he was immediately prohibited from entering any Wright plant. 

Testimony to the Truman Committee revealed that whenever an Army inspector tried to reject suspect engine material, a Wright exec would insist that the material was “important to the company.” If Wright appealed an inspector’s decision—to the inspector’s supervisor, to an AAF technical advisor, to the Army’s Wright Field itself—the appeal was invariably allowed. Inevitably, Army inspectors came to realize that objections were futile if Wright Aero disagreed.

Wright denied Army inspectors access to the company’s own precision instruments for their inspections, meaning they were limited to purely visual examinations. If they couldn’t see a crack, it didn’t exist. Wright’s excuse was that the Army inspectors weren’t properly trained in the use of the equipment. This was particularly true, the company said, for a device used to test the hardness of the gears in the R-2600’s drivetrain. It became an open secret that Wright was faking the hardness testing of these gears. The military inspectors were also denied the use of rejection stamps or embossing warnings to identify failed parts or engines, since Wright wanted to sell those wares to unsuspecting commercial and export operators. 

More than a quarter of the R-2600s built at Lockland failed a basic three-hour test run. Randomly selected engines were also put through a 150-hour quality test, but the Truman Committee found that since 1941 not a single engine had completed the test. One of them failed at 28 hours. 

Truman claimed to have personally rejected 400 ready-to-ship Lockland engines. “They were putting defective motors in planes, and the generals couldn’t seem to find anything wrong [with them],” he said. “So we went down, myself and a couple of senators, and we condemned 400 or 500 of those engines. And I sent a couple of generals who had been approving those engines to Leavenworth.” (Fort Leavenworth was the Army stockade in Kansas.)

Wright company inspectors often weren’t the problem. The AAF’s own people too often wanted to go along to get along. Chief Inspector Lt. Col. Frank Greulich tried to intimidate and discredit witnesses who gave negative testimony to the Truman Committee, and Greulich himself lied to the committee a number of times. As one observer put it, “The Committee witnessed the unpleasant spectacle of a lieutenant colonel, a major and several high civilian officials all telling entirely contradictory stories.”     

Once the Truman people had finished their investigation, the AAF insisted on repeating their work, inevitably making the same negative findings. But those faults led the AAF to a different conclusion: that the record of engines built at Lockland compared favorably with the record of other types of engines built elsewhere. The best they could say of Curtiss-Wright’s products was that “they were not always the best [but] have been usable.” 

One thing became readily apparent. The Lockland scandal was a prime example of what happened when a huge government-built, spare-no-expense factory tried to turn out an enormous quantity of material with inexperienced management and impossible production schedules while maintaining quality in the face of constant changes in tolerances and specifications.

Middle management was so overextended by the sudden wartime demands that a lot of the execs were simply incompetent, the workers inadequately trained and experienced engineers and supervisors too few. The more plants the government built for Curtiss-Wright, the more diluted the cadre of qualified and talented managerial personnel became. Only two percent of the first batch of applicants for jobs at Curtiss-Wright’s new plant in Columbus, Ohio, had any experience in aircraft production, yet they would soon be building Curtiss SB2C Helldivers, which had been described as the most complex single-engine design of its time. The Lockland plant was the biggest single-story industrial facility in the world, but its inept management soon turned the sleek new factory into a cluttered, crowded, ill-lit dump. One AAF report called it “a disgrace to the company and to the Air Forces.” 

It was thought at the time, at least by some, that Curtiss-Wright was untouchable because its president, Guy Vaughn, was a big-time player on Capitol Hill. Vaughn was a former automobile racer and speed-record holder who had come up through the ranks at Wright Aero. He was responsible, at least in part, for the development of one of the most important aircraft engines ever built, the Wright J-series Whirlwind. Particularly in its nine-cylinder J-5 form, the Whirlwind was the first reliable, bulletproof aircraft engine available. It was so reliable, in fact, that Charles Lindbergh chose it for his 1927 transatlantic flight, and it never missed a beat. (In truth, though, engineer Charles Lawrance did the heavy lifting and designing for the Whirlwind.)

Vaughn griped that the problems the Truman Committee claimed to be finding were simply “standard and recognized manufacturing and inspection procedures.” During his cross-examination by the committee, Vaughn demanded to know exactly what was wrong with three specific R-2600s that had been crated and ready to ship before being rejected by inspectors. It turned out that one of them lacked a lockwire on a gear, another had corroded cylinders, and the third had a driveshaft gear with a broken tooth and an inoperative magneto—defects that could have led to crashes. Vaughn huffed that he didn’t consider these engines to be defective. 

In the end, the Truman Committee toned down its report and Curtiss-Wright ended up suffering no penalty. This despite the fact that the Lockland plant had plainly turned out defective engines with the cooperation of dishonest AAF and company inspectors, and that some of those engines almost certainly went on to kill pilots and crewmen. The Justice Department did sue Wright and eight of its executives for selling the government known defective aircraft and engines, but the suit was never pursued. Three Army Air Force officers, including Greulich, did end up at Leavenworth, however, after being court-martialed for neglect of duty. (Despite Truman’s claim, none of them were generals.)         

The Truman Committee also concluded that Curtiss-Wright had received “far more contracts from the Army and Navy than warranted by the quality of its products or its ability to produce them.” The committee recommended that all Curtiss-Wright contracts be renegotiated, but this never happened either. 

However, the committee’s investigation marked the beginning of the end for Curtiss-Wright, a company that had once manufactured and sold more different aircraft, engines, propellers, accessories and parts than anybody else in the industry. Curtiss-Wright had become good at cranking out quantity, but less adept at creating quality. It continued to build second-best P-40s, concentrating on increasing the production rate, lowering costs and maximizing the profit. 

By 1947, with war profiteering a distant memory, Curtiss-Wright shut down 16 of its 19 plants. The company’s only possible moneymaking program was an attempt to turn the Curtiss C-46 Commando cargo plane into a pressurized airliner. But C-46s were so cheaply available as surplus that operators were buying and refitting the airplanes themselves. (And none saw the need for pressurization.)           

The CW-32 was to be a four-engine airliner with military airlift capability, but the project was canceled in 1948. The company was testing an all-weather jet interceptor, the XP-87, but when an expensive wing modification appeared necessary, the U.S. Air Force insisted that Curtiss pay a major part of the expense. CEO Guy Vaughn refused, and the Air Force retaliated by canceling the project. 

After 40 years, Curtiss was out of the airplane business.

Chaos took over the company’s front office as the focus shifted to profit-taking at the expense of R&D. As the excellent book Curtiss-Wright: Greatness and Decline puts it, “A vigorous and well-planned course of action was desperately needed. This, in turn, required a high degree of managerial skill and perhaps a bit of luck. Curtiss-Wright, it seemed, lacked both.” The leadership that took over Curtiss-Wright “came from the world of corporate finance and investment banking,” the book notes, “and had almost no direct connection with, or understanding of, the aviation industry.” By the mid-1950s, Curtiss-Wright “no longer had a distinct identity. The company had no viable product to develop and sell, and overdiversification was dissipating its resources.” 

Today the Curtiss-Wright Corporation has its headquarters in North Carolina and manufactures components for aircraft, but the days when the company dominated the U.S. aviation industry ended long ago. 

In 1944, Harry Truman became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate and advanced to the vice presidency after FDR’s reelection to a fourth term. Some say he was chosen to shut him up, others that it was a reward for years of chasing down fraud, waste and abuse in the defense industry. (This part of Truman’s career is detailed in Steve Drummond’s excellent new book The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two.) Truman became president only months later, when Roosevelt died  suddenly  in April 1945. 

Marilyn Monroe is perhaps the most unlikely person to have had her life changed by the Curtiss-Wright catastrophe. That’s due to a young American playwright, Arthur Miller, who would later write Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other classics. But in 1944 he had written a play that flopped after only three performances on Broadway. He decided that if that was the best he could do, he’d take up accounting, or selling insurance. Fortunately, he decided to give playwriting one more try. 

In January 1947, Miller’s play All My Sons opened on Broadway, became a huge success and launched his career. Based directly on the Curtiss-Wright scandal, the play told the story of a man who knowingly produced bogus aircraft parts. One batch of his parts—badly cast cylinder heads—resulted in the crashes of 21 P-40s, including one that killed his own son.

In an odd but fascinating mismatch, the now-celebrated Miller fell for actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself sought escape from her dumb-blonde image, and marriage to a successful playwright and intellectual like Miller, she felt, was her ticket to legitimacy. They wed in 1956 but the marriage, like Curtiss-Wright’s dominance of the U.S. aviation industry, soon came to an end.

But for Curtiss-Wright’s fall from grace, it never would have happened.

On December 18, 1860, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a compromise plan to the U.S. Senate. Just two days later, South Carolina would become the first state to secede from the Union, and within six weeks, six more Southern states would follow suit. But while Dixie fire-eaters were driving their states pell-mell toward disunion, Senator Crittenden and other moderates were working to broker a sectional adjustment — one that could, they hoped, soothe Southern fears about Abraham Lincoln’s election and stay the secession tide in the South. 

The Crittenden Compromise would be central to these efforts during the winter and spring of 1860-1861. It represented an attempt to settle the slavery question once and for all, drawing on the tradition of grand settlements like the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. Indeed, the cornerstone of Crittenden’s plan was a constitutional amendment that would divide the remaining Western territories along the old Missouri Compromise line, barring slavery above and protecting slavery below the 36º 30’ parallel.  

Moderates like Crittenden hoped that this might be enough to secure the loyalty of the remaining Southern states to the Union. This might, in turn, make Republicans more willing to let the secession crisis play out, and it might eventually make the seceded states more willing to return to the Union. Yet most Republicans, including Lincoln, refused to countenance any further extension of slavery into the territories. Attempts by moderates to push through the Crittenden Compromise repeatedly foundered against this opposition. 

Compromisers struggled, too, against the opposition of Southern secessionists, who argued that it did not do enough to protect slavery from the threat of an empowered Republican Party. Over the course of the secession crisis, it became clear that the leaders of the seceded states had no interest in negotiation or returning to the Union. Southern rights advocates in the states that had not seceded also complicated the project of compromise; their demands for more concessions meant there was no consensus around Crittenden’s or any other compromise measure even in those states.  

One such antagonist was Virginia’s John Robertson, a prominent Democrat and judge from Richmond. The state legislature sent him as a commissioner to the seceded states in early 1861, and he returned with assurances of the new Confederate States’ sympathies with Virginia. They are “bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh,” he reported. 

The outbreak of fighting at Fort Sumter on April 12 provided the push for which many Southern hardliners had been hoping. Abraham Lincoln responded by issuing a call for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion in the South, and in short order Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded and joined the new Confederacy. The start of the war seemed to signal triumph for militants like Robertson and disaster for moderates like Crittenden. Yet neither man would accept this as the outcome of his labors. 

Robertson wrote a letter to Crittenden near the end of April that highlighted just how uncertain the future appeared in that moment. Robertson refused to believe that the collision at Fort Sumter necessarily meant war —and rejected, moreover, the idea that war would accomplish the ends of either side in the conflict. He thus suddenly and unexpectedly found his own goals aligned with Crittenden’s, and Robertson begged the old Kentuckian to renew his efforts at conciliation.  

From Robertson’s point of view, civil war did not seem inevitable, even when armies were massing on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The situation represented a dramatic escalation, to be sure, but in the context of the decades-long sectional crisis over slavery (one that had at other points erupted in violence), observers like Robertson could imagine outcomes other than intestine war. 

John Robertson to John J. Crittenden, April 28, 1861

Dear Sir,
No man could have more earnestly striven than yourself to [resolve] the feuds, whose increasing fury, already advanced to the stage of murderous conflict, threatens to involve thirty millions of men in the horrors of civil war. However I may have differed with you, looking from a Southern view, as to the acceptability of the terms of adjustment you proposed, I never doubted that you regarded them as just, or, at least, as preferable to the evils otherwise to ensue, and as the best which could possibly be obtained. The event has proved that, moderate as they were, the ruling faction [the Republican Party] would be content with none but such as would degrade the South. Wellnigh desperate is the condition to which that faction has reduced this country. The fact now stares them in the face that the Union is dissolved beyond all hope of restoration, at least, in our day. Yet they are threatening to preserve the Union by force. They read the riot act to millions of men, nay, to sovereign States, who are to be coerced into friendship by their foes at the point of a bayonet. But, waving all recrimination, not insisting on the absurdity of the idea, or the impossibility of reducing the South to an ignominious submission, or the certainty that their subjugation, if possible, would defeat the very object their enemies profess to desire (namely, the preservation or restoration of the Union), by converting States into vassal provinces (in that character alone can they remain or enter into it), let us inquire if there are no means by which the anticipated consequence of our family jars (now an accomplished fact), the separation of the States, may be recognized by the ruling faction at Washington, without deliberately repeating the most atrocious crime, and steeping their hands still deeper in the blood of their brethren. A word from the long-eared god [Lincoln], who now holds in his hands (as he imagines) the destinies of the country, would be enough. He has only to say, “Let there be peace,” and there will be peace. But he and the murderous gang whom he consults already cry ‘Havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war. And yet the star of hope still twinkles in the clouded firmament. Preposterous as is the idea of peaceful union or reunion, there may still be a peaceful separation; and it is to yourself, sir, who, if allowed to do so, I will still regard, notwithstanding the marked difference of our political sentiments, as a valued friend,—it is mainly to you I look for effecting so glorious a consummation. I do not desire that my name should be connected with an effort which you may, most probably, consider utterly idle, and which, should you think worth trying, be more apt to succeed without it. Before going further at present, permit me to inquire whether it will be agreeable to you to entertain the thoughts which, after much anxious reflection, have entered into, and taken firm possession of, my mind.

It is proper to say that my appeal to you is wholly without the sanction or knowledge of any constituted authorities, State or federal. It has been suggested even but to two individuals; in the judgment of one of them you would yourself repose great confidence. I have received decided encouragement to make it.

An immediate answer, if convenient, will greatly oblige me. 

With great and respectful regard, yours,
John Robertson

For all of their disagreements, Crittenden must have found some encouragement in Robertson’s kindred desire for peace. Robertson still seemed to hope that secession could be accomplished peacefully, but Crittenden saw peace as a means to promote compromise and reunion, as well. A month after the former’s letter, Crittenden would preside over a convention in Frankfort, Kentucky, which would renew calls for Crittenden’s compromise as a basis for sectional adjustment. “Whether any such constitutional guarantees would have the effect of reconciling any of the seceded States to the government from which they have torn themselves away we cannot say,” the convention declared, “but we allow ourselves to hope that the masses in those States will in time learn that the dangers they were made to fear were greatly exaggerated, and that they will then be disposed to listen to calls of interest and patriotism, and return to the family from which they have gone out.” 

In the meantime, Crittenden would also be instrumental in the effort to keep Kentucky neutral in the Civil War. He would tour the state advocating this policy, arguing that it would leave Kentucky well-placed to act as a mediator in the conflict. Kentuckians might not be able to stop the ensuing fight, but it certainly seemed a better alternative to him than active involvement in war. 

A week before the Frankfort Conference on May 20, 1861, Kentucky’s governor would issue a proclamation declaring the state’s neutrality; in it, he claimed that this course would help promote peace. Such hopes obviously failed to stop the onrushing war that would rage for four years and kill hundreds of thousands of people. No one could foresee what would come, but Kentucky’s neutrality in 1861 — and the efforts of men like Crittenden and, to some extent, Robertson — stood as a monument to their different visions for the future in that moment. Those different visions informed their behavior during the conflict, and at least in the case of Kentucky, those ideas helped shape the broader contours of the Civil War. 

Jesse George-Nichol is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia.