“Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth… While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free…”

With Debs on my mind, it seemed like a good time to share this post from 2020.

Labor organizer Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855. He left home when he was fourteen to work for the railroad—not unusual for the time. In 1875, he helped organize a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, a fraternal benefit society which gradually took on the role of a trade union. He rose rapidly in the organization, becoming its national secretary and treasurer in 1880.

In 1893, Debs took labor organization one step further, when he successfully united railway workers from different crafts into the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union. As the union’s first president, he successfully led its members in a strike for higher wages from the Great Northern Railway in April 1894. The national press gave him the nickname “King” Debs.

In June, “King” Debs and the union were in the news again in the great Pullman Strike. As a result of financial reverses in the panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut its wages by 25 percent, but did not cut rents for company-owned workers’ housing in Pullman, Illinois, the company town near (now in) Chicago. Many workers and their families faced starvation. Local members of the union sent a delegation to Pullman’s president, George M. Pullman, to present their grievances about low wages, poor working conditions and sixteen-hour work days. Pullman refused to meet with them.

The Pullman workers voted to strike and walked off the job on May 11, 1894. At its June meeting, the American Railway Union’s national council called for a nationwide boycott of trains carrying Pullman cars until the company submitted the dispute to arbitration by June 26. The company was unwilling to play.

Within four days, union locals in twenty-seven states went out on sympathy strikes, affecting twenty-nine railroads. Illinois governor John P. Altgeld sympathized with the strikers and initially refused call out the militia, so the railroads’ management called on the deferral government for help. On July 2, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney got an injunction against the strike from local judges on the grounds that the union was impeding mail service and interstate commerce. (1) Union leaders ignored the injunction. On July 4, President Grover Cleveland ordered 2,500 federal troops to Chicago. The strike ended within a week and troops were recalled on July 20.(2)

The Pullman Strike was a critical event in American labor history. It was also a turning point for Debs. He was arrested at the height of the violence and ultimately sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court and conspiring to interfere with the U.S. mail. During his prison terms at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs read broadly. Introduced for the first time to the works of Karl Marx,(4) he came to see the labor movement as a struggle between classes.

After announcing his conversion to socialism in 1897, Debs helped found the Social Democratic party, which was renamed the Socialist Party in 1901. Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for President five times between 1900 and 1920.His highest populist vote came in 1920, when he received about 915,000 popular votes. (But no votes in the electoral college.) (5) He was in prison at the time, serving a sentence for criticizing the federal government’s use of the 1917 Sabotage and Espionage Act against labor activists.

He was released from prison in 1921 by presidential order. His citizenship, which he lost in 1918 when he was convicted of sedition (for labor activism) , was posthumously restored in 1976.

(1) Unfortunately for the strikers, they derailed a locomotive attached to a U.S. mail train. And as you know, neither snow, nor sleet nor striking railway workers can stop the U.S. Postal service from its appointed rounds.
(2) A lot happened in between the arrival of the troops and the end of the strike. Altgeld and Cleveland sent piss-y telegrams back and forth. Strikers rioted and destroyed lots of property. More federal troops arrived. State militia arrived. National guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing several strikers.(3) It was a busy week.
(3)When will people learn that is a bad idea? It never turns out well.
(4) Obviously a well-stocked prison library.
(5) Just to put this in context: the winner, Warren G. Harding, received 16,513,200 popular votes.

Uncle Sam (to the Wolf at the Door) One of you pesky critters comes around here about every twenty years; but this is the gun that gits you! (Illus. from Puck, April 11, 1894.

As I’ve mentioned before, occasionally an event, or person, or book, or idea begins tracking me down.[1] It shows up in footnotes or casual asides in books I’m reading. Eventually, I give in and go down the rabbit hole. Then, if it’s interesting or important enough, I share it with you. That is, after all, the social contract on which History in the Margins is based.

Lately, the Great Panic of 1893 has become insistent.

Here is what I knew pre-rabbit hole: The Great Panic of 1893 plunged the United States into a four-year depression. It was the worst economic panic in United States history prior to the Great Depression.[2]

Quite frankly, until recently, that was all I needed to know. But for the last year or so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Great Panic of 1893 keeps coming up in terms of how it affected individual families. (For instance, the panic was the proximate cause of Sigrid Schultz’s  father moving the family back to Europe for what he thought would be a short time.) Finally I decided the time had come for me to get a firmer grasp on the panic’s causes, scope, and legacy.

Turns out there is a lot more to the story than I realized. Buckle up!

First we need to consider the term: a panic is not just a jazzier name for a recession or a depression, though they can, and often do, occur together.[3] A panic is a crisis in which people lose confidence in banks and large numbers of people withdraw their money in a short period of time[4], making banks unstable. A recession is a period of reduced economic activity: businesses can’t sell goods or services, so they lay people off, which means people can’t buy goods and services. A depression is a recession on a larger scale.

To my surprise, bank panics were pretty common in the last half of the nineteenth century: eighteen panics rocked the United States’ economy between 1863 and 1913. Most of them were centered in New York City, which was the heart of the nation’s financial system. In addition, regional panics hit the midwestern states of Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 1896, the mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania and Maryland in 1903, and Chicago in 1905.[5] I am neither an economist nor an economic historian, but it seems to me that the country was in a financial panic almost as often as it was in a state of non-panic between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the Great War.

Unlike most earlier nationwide financial panics, the Great Panic of 1893 began with banks in the Midwest and West instead of in New York. There were two causes of bank instability leading up to the panic. The U. S. Treasury’s gold reserves fell from roughly $190 million in 1890 to about $100 million in early 1893. The country was on the gold standard, which meant that Treasury notes could be redeemed for a fixed amount of gold.[6]Falling gold reserves led to fears, at home and abroad, that the government would be forced to suspend convertibility of notes. Some depositors began to convert their bank notes to gold while the converting was good. At the same time, roughly six months prior to the panic, the country entered an economic recession[7]. As the economy contracted, defaults on loans began to rise, which weakened banks’ balance sheets. Fearing for the security of their deposits, people began to withdraw their funds, creating a spiral of fear and further withdrawals.

In June, bank runs began in midwestern and western cities; more than one hundred banks failed. Between mid-July and mid-August, as the panic grew worse, another 340 banks failed. Banks in the Midwest and West began to withdraw funds they had on deposit with New York banks, creating strain on those banks in turn. In order to meet withdrawal requests, banks in New York began to sell assets. Asset prices fell. The downward spiral continued. More banks failed. Farm prices dropped. New construction largely stopped . Business and industry slowed down; more than 15,000 businesses had failed by the end of the year. People lost their jobs. Things were so bad that firms issued scrip and financial institutions used quasi-currencies like clearing house certificates[8] to make payments because the standard banking system was not functioning.

The banking panic ended in the fall of 1893. The economic depression it triggered lasted until mid-1897. The period was marked by violent strikes, the apogee and effective end of the Populist and free silver political movements, levels of unemployment that were only matched by those in the Great Depression[9], and a shift in public opinion in favor of currency and bank reform, regulation of business in the public interest, and labor relations. Even the wealthy were affected to some extent.

Not the Gilded Age portrayed in popular culture.

[1] You’re all familiar with this general phenomenon I’m sure. You become aware of something and then start seeing references to it everywhere. This is variously known as the Baader-Menhoff Phenomenon, frequency illusion, or, my favorite,  the Blue Ford Syndrome.

[2] Looking back, I am surprised I knew that much. American history is not my academic field.

[3] The United States has not suffered a large scale bank panic since the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933, proving that bank panics aren’t the only cause of recessions.

[4] The phrase “bank run” is much older than I expected. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it appears in its modern meaning as early as the end of the seventeenth century.  I suspect I am not the only one who assumed it was a literal description of events like this:

Depositors clamor to withdraw their savings from a bank in Berlin, 13 July 1931 . (Photographer Georg Pahl. Bundesarchive. Bild 102-12023)

[5] I must admit, I wonder how Chicago could have an economic panic all by itself. However, I refuse to go down that rabbit hole until I’ve dealt with the Panic of 1893 to my satisfaction. Any one else interested?

[6] Several years ago I tried to write a “word with a past” post about the term “gold standard.” I just went back to look at it again. The draft is a mess, but there are still some interesting bits there. Anyone interested in my giving it another try?

[7] In this case, the recession seems to have caused the panic rather than the other way around. Without going into details, factors leading the recession included a panic and depression in Europe that affected American markets, several years of agricultural problems as a result of storms, drought, and overproduction, and slowing investment in railroads, which had been an economic driver for two decades.

[8] I understood scrip, but I had to look up clearing house certificates. Turns out, the New York Clearing House was founded in 1853 to bring order to the complicated web of currency exchanges that had developed over the prior decade as a result of westward expansion. A Clearing House loan certificate, with the words, “payable through the Clearing House,” was the joint liability for all member banks. As such, they were a remarkably secure form of payment and were used as a substitute currency during financial panics between 1853 and 1913. It was probably illegal, but it was so successful that no one wanted to raise a fuss.

[9] More than ten percent for between five and six consecutive years.

For example, the creation of the New York Central Railroad’s Exposition Flyer,[1] which I stumbled across while researching what the woman I’m thinking about would have experienced traveling from Chicago to New York City in 1893.

This image of the Exposition Flyer is from 20th Century by Lucius Beebe.

The Columbian Exposition was expected to bring millions of people to Chicago in the summer of 1893—an expectation that was fulfilled. An estimated 27 million people visited the attraction during its six-month run. Railroads from east and west alike were eager to capture their share of those travelers.

The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad were already competing over passenger traffic between Chicago and New York in the years before the Chicago exposition. Between 1881 and 1891, the two companies had managed to reduce the time their fastest trains took to make the trip from more than 30 hours to roughly 24, mostly by reducing the number of stops and limiting or eliminating cargo cars.[2] The fare was slightly higher to reflect the time saved.

On the eve of the exposition, the New York Central’s general passenger agent, George H. Daniels,[3] envisioned a train that would take only 20 hours to make the trip between New York and Chicago, building on the techniques of the various “limited” and express trains currently traveling the route. The Exposition Flyer, billed as the “fastest train on earth,” was a small train, usually limited to a “buffet smoking and library car,” which was a haven for male passengers, a dining car, and two or three sleeping cars. It was also a “solid train”: all of its cars went the entire distance so no time was lost adding cars or leaving cars behind. And it made only seven maintenance stops on the route—no passenger stops.

None of this will appear in the proposal I am (still) struggling with. It probably won’t even turn up in the final book, if I am lucky enough to get to write it. My subject would have taken the cheapest train possible, not the Exposition Flyer nor one of the various limited or express trains that traveled from Chicago to New York . But knowing that she had to make a choice, and what those choices were, adds to my understanding. of her experience.

This is the way you write a book, one detail at a time.

[1] Not to be confused with a train of the same name that carried travelers west from Chicago to San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939

[2] Both railroads continued to run slower trains, which took more than 36 hours but made all the stops on a route that traveled through Michigan and New York State. For which people who wanted to travel to Kalamazoo. Battle Creek, Buffalo, or Albany were doubtless grateful.

[3] Remembered by railroad buffs and advertising history nerds for his innovative promotion of the railroad, including the use of travel brochures to encourage people to take the train on their vacations. Much of his work rested on the tagline “Send a stamp to George H Daniels.” Anyone who wrote to Daniels for information and enclosed a 2¢ stamp would get travel information tailored to their interests in return, whether it related to the railroad or not. He and his team created a wide range of brochures, dubbed the Four-Track series. The most popular was a reprint of Elbert Hubbard’s inspirational essay “A Message to Garcia” (1899)–the story had nothing to do with the railroad, but the pamphlet included a map of the New York Central’s routes. The railroad published hundreds of thousands of copies of the essay, keeping an essay that originally appeared in an obscure magazine that reached a small audience in the public eye.

You know the beginning of this story.  In the fifteenth century, Portugal under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator(opens in new tab) *  began maritime exploration along the coast of Africa.  More or less a hundred years later, a Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama reached India.  After a certain amount of bumbling around, Portugal transformed itself into a maritime empire(opens in new tab) with a lock on the spice trade.

For almost a hundred years, the Portuguese successfully protected their control over the sea routes to the Indian Ocean.  Foreign ships caught sailing to the Indies were seized and their crews sentenced to a lifetime in the galleys. Suspected spies were arrested and shipped back to Lisbon for trial; those from the Protestant countries of England and the  independent northern Netherlands were charged with heresy as well as espionage.**

Things changed in 1580, when Phillip II of Spain*** conquered Portugal and united the two countries.  The enemies of Spain became the enemies of Portugal, especially England and the Netherlands.  The two Protestant countries could no longer buy spices from Portugal.  Suddenly free trade was a religious as well as a political issue.  The English took the direct approach and attacked Portuguese ships as they returned from the Indies.  The Dutch preferred to trade rather than raid, but establishing trade with the Indies would require information they didn’t have.

Dutch merchants sent a spy overland to the Indies.  Before he returned, they received all the information they wanted from a source they didn’t expect:  a Dutch spy who worked right under the nose of the Portuguese.

Jan Huygen van Linschoten was a Dutch Catholic, born in the Netherlands in 1563.  When he was seventeen, he traveled to Lisbon, where he worked for a Portuguese merchant.  In 1583, he traveled to India as secretary to the new Archbishop of Goa, the Portuguese capital in India.

Linschoten worked in Goa from 1584 to 1589.  As secretary to the Archbishop he had access to protected information regarding trade routes and sailing conditions.  He questioned any European traveler who came through “golden Goa” about the countries further east.  When the Archbishop died in 1589, Linschoten began a four-year-long voyage home to the Netherlands, learning even more about the Portuguese trading empire on the way.

Back in the Netherlands, Linschoten wrote Voyages to the East Indies, an account of everything Dutch merchants needed to know if they wanted to trade in the Indies.  He described the sea routes to the east, including where to get fresh water and vegetables and what time of year the weather was best for safe sailing.  He explained that they would need silver to buy spices because the Asians weren’t interested in European products.  He described the countries and customs of Asia from India to Japan.  He even provided up-to-date maps.  Most important, Linschoten revealed that the once powerful Portuguese army, which had defended the trade routes with blazing guns in the past, was no longer so powerful.  The sea routes to the east were open to anyone who dared take them.

In 1595, Dutch ships sailed for Java, with a copy of Linschoten’s Voyages aboard as a guide.  Portuguese control of the spice trade was over.

*A misnomer applied to him by nineteenth century British historians for nineteenth century British reasons

**A serious matter in the days when the Spanish Inquisition was more than Monty Python routine.

***Just to remind you, he’s the guy who was married to Queen Mary Tudor from 1554 until her death in 1558, tried unsuccessfully (and illegally) to marry her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, and sent the equally unsuccessful Spanish Armada against England in 1588.  He was also one of the most powerful rulers in Europe at the time.  Sometimes its hard to tell the players without a program.

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The official trading area of the Dutch East India Company

The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned–perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into the eighteenth century.

The truth is that in the early centuries of the Asian trade most European-made merchandise was a dud in the Asian marketplace. Some products, like mechanical clocks and toys, were too expensive for any but the wealthiest to purchase. Others, like heavy woolen cloth, were simply not useful or appealing. The only thing Europeans had that Asian were interested in was precious metal from the mines in Latin America.

The Portuguese, who controlled the trade routes from Europe to Asia for almost a hundred years, were content to pay silver for the luxury goods that reached their Indian stronghold at Goa. When the Dutch entered the spice trade in 1595 , they didn’t have the luxury of paying for everything with hard currency. It was too expensive to simply trade with the Indies. Instead they learned to trade within the Indies: carrying goods from one Asian market to another as part of what they called the “inland trade”.

The Dutch didn’t invent the inland land. Merchants from all over Asia bought and sold goods at busy seaports along the Red Sea, on the coast of India, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and in China and Japan. Islamic merchants in the Persian Gulf shipped raw cotton, coffee, dried fruits and nuts, and attar of roses across the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants sold silks, tea, porcelain and zinc. India produced printed cotton textiles that were popular throughout Asia. South East Asia was the source for pepper, sandalwood, spices, and ivory.

Asia ships seldom sailed all the way from the Persian Gulf to China. Instead, an Arab ship would sail from Mokha to Surat and back. An Indian merchant would travel between Surat and Java. Chinese junks controlled the trade between Canton and Bantam. A chest of tea or a load of pepper would be bought and sold several times , and transported from port to port in several different ships.

Instead of concentrating on trade between two ports, the way most Asian merchants did, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded throughout the entire system, trading one type of goods for another, which was then used to buy a third. From one end of the chain to the other, Dutch traders handled more than one hundred Asian products, including raw silk, sandalwood, saltpeter, tin, opium, and cowry shells. Each item was bought for a low price in the place where it was made and then sold for a higher price in another part of Asia in which it was in demand.

In order to make the most of this complicated series of trades, the VOC set up a network of permanent trading stations along the major trade routes in Asia–a process that often involved violence against local rulers and other European merchants. By 1785, the company had roughly 20,000 employees in twenty settlements spread across Asia, including company-owned spice plantations in Indonesia and walled warehouses in port cities in China, Japan, and India.

The spice trade–more than just pepper.

Thanks to  the Charleston Country Public Library

Eliza Lucas was born on Antigua, which was then part of the British Leeward Islands, where she grew up on one of three sugar cane plantations owned by her father, George Lucas, who was a lieutenant colonel in the British Army.[1] When she was ten, she was sent to school in London to learn the accomplishments believed to be necessary for a young woman in society.[2] The school seems to have been an unusual one: the curriculum included bookkeeping in addition to the usual skills of needlework, French, and music. She wrote to her father that her favorite subject was botany, perhaps a foreshadowing of her future life as farmer on a large scale.

In 1738, the Lucas family moved from Antigua to South Carolina, where Colonel Lucas had inherited a plantation from his father. He soon bought two more. The following year, as tensions between England and Spain increased , George Lucas, now a major, was called back to his post in Antigua When those tensions exploded into the War of the Austrian Succession[3] in 1740, he was named lieutenant governor.

Major Lucas left sixteen-year-old Eliza in charge of the Carolina plantations, which he had mortgaged to pay for his last military promotion[4], and of a household that included a sickly mother, a younger sister, and a number of enslaved people. Eager to make the plantations pay, and perhaps to reduce the debt, she began experimenting with new crops that could replace or complement their production of rice. She planted a large stand of oaks, in anticipation of future income. She tried ginger, cotton,[5] alfalfa, flax, and hemp. Each of them failed. Finally, in 1739, she planted indigo, which was being grown and processed in the West Indies in response to a demand in the British textile industry.

By 1744, Eliza had grown a large enough indigo crop to attempt the complex process of producing dye, working with two indigo processing experts from the West Indies, a French grower named Montserrat and an enslaved dye maker from the French West Indies named “Quash”. She sent a sample to Britain, calling it “Carolina Indigo,” which was favorably received.

Eliza married Chief Justice Charles Pinckney that same year. She raised a family, including two sons who played important roles in the new American republic. After Pinckney’s death, she managed his plantations as well as her own. Throughout her life, she continued to grow and process large amounts of indigo for the British market. Later she also experimented with producing silk.

When she died in 1793, George Washington served as a pallbearer at her funeral at his own request—perhaps a symbol of how important her work had been.

Eliza’s success (and that of her enslaved mentor) transformed agriculture in colonial South Carolina. Other planters followed her example. The crop fit into the established slave plantation economy of the region. It could be grown on land that was not suitable for growing rice, which was the primary cash crop in the southern colonies at the time. By the beginning of the American Revolution, indigo made up one-third of the colony’s export trade.

[1] I believe in sharing mother’s names where I can. Eliza’s mother was Ann (probably Meldrum) Lucas. That “probably” tells us how little we know about her.

[2] In other words, the accomplishments that would lead to a good marriage.

[3] One of several European wars that spilled over into Europe’s colonial colonies in the eighteenth century.

[4] While an occasional field promotion occurred promotion by purchase, rather than by merit, was standard operating procedure in the British army at the time.

[5] Cotton was grown in the United States as early as the mid-16th century, primarily for domestic use. It did not become a cash crop in the American south until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, at much the same time as cotton was overtaking wool in Britain’s textile mills.

Fanny Palmer, ca 1876.

Fanny Palmer was born in Leicester, England, where she received her first training in art, specifically drawing, perspective and watercolor, at Mary Linwood’s academy for girls[1]. She ran a drawing school in Leicester for several years in the 1830s. Later, Fanny and her husband, Edmund Seymour Palmer, decided to get into the lithography business as well. Fanny trained as a lithographer with Louis Haghe, one of the founders of what was considered the best British lithographic firm of the time; meanwhile, her husband became as a professional printer.

The Palmers opened a lithography business in Leicester in 1842. In 1844, they immigrated to New York, where they opened a shop under the name F & S Palmer, Lithographers.[2] During this time, she produced a large and diverse body of work—including sheet music, cartoons and war illustrations as well as the better known prints for home decoration—and demonstrated a sophisticated use of the medium. When the business failed several years later, the Palmers sold it to the owner of another printmaking business, one Nathaniel Currier, the founder of what became the famous Currier and Ives firm, the most successful and prolific printmaking company in the United States.[3] (You see where this is going, right?)

Closing the business opened new opportunities for Fanny, who soon had a full-time position as an artist with Currier and Ives.[4] She was the only woman illustrator on the staff and one of the most skilled and prolific artist in the Currier and Ives stable: one of the small number of their artists whose works they issued with a signature. In print after print she gave form to the romanticized vision of American life that was part of the Currier and Ives brand.

She created some two hundred [signed] lithographs for the firm, including two prints that became iconic representations of the United States’ westward expansion:Across the Continent. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way “(1868) and The Rocky Mountains. Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1866).[5]  She is also known to have worked on many more that were released without a signature, including a large number of the firm’s still life prints.

In addition to holding a full time staff position with Currier and Ives,  it appears that Palmer also ran a lithographic workshop in her home, where she trained several apprentices, several of whom went on to become innovative lithographic artists and found important lithographic studios of their own. In other words, she created a legacy in addition to producing a substantial body of work.

Palmer was not the only woman involved in the business of lithographic prints. Some were hired to transfer drawings to polished lithographic stones. Others were employed to hand-color printed lithographs. By mid-century, a few who had been trained at the Philadelphia School for Women[6], even found work as lithographers. But Palmer was the most successful and well-known. Her works were enormously popular. In fact, Currier and Ives expert. Ewell L. Newman claims “It is likely that during the later half of the nineteenth century more pictures by Mrs. Fanny Palmer decorated the homes of ordinary Americans than those of any other artist, dead or alive.” Wow!

[1] Mary Linwood (1755-1845) was a celebrated artist in the early 1800s, known for her full-scale embroidered versions of famous paintings. It appears that her work was in high demand in the royal courts of Europe (!) and she maintained a permanent exhibition of her work in London. Rabbit hole, here I come.

[2] I am intrigued by the fact that Fanny (F) got first billing.

[3] Currier and Ives billed itself as a “Publisher of Cheap and Popular Prints.” Truth in advertising.

[4] Her husband became a tavern keeper.

[5] It is interesting that Fanny, who grew up in England and was probably exposed to the rhetoric of British imperialism, uses the word “empire” to describe the push west.

Together, the two works can be seen as visual representations of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Across the Continent is an allegorical depiction of expansion, organized along a dramatic diagonal created by a train track. On one side of the tracks is a bustling American frontier town, with a small train of covered wagons departing into the background. On the other side is an image of a remarkably tame wilderness, occupied by a few Native Americans, two on horseback and two in canoes in the distance.  The Rocky Mountains shows the next step in expansion: a wagon train winding its way toward the viewer with the mountains looming in the distance. Native Americans, again on horseback, watch the wagon train from a low ridge in the foreground, not quite as distant as before.

[6] Which we have seen several times before. The school is unavoidable if you are thinking about women artists in nineteenth century America.

Two years and two months ago,*[1] My Own True Love and I finished an epic road trip down the Great River Road. It took us ten years and it was absolutely wonderful.*[2] We’ve been considering what our next big multi-part road trip should be ever since.*[3]

For a while we thought about driving Route 66, which turns 100 this year. But we’ve finally decided on following the Lewis and Clark “trail.”

Like the Great River Road, which wasn’t actually a road, the Lewis and Clark trail isn’t exactly a trail. The expedition travelled by water whenever possible, so the modern “trail” often runs as close to the applicable river as it is possible to get. The two guidebooks we have warn us that even where they traveled by land, it is difficult, if not impossible to follow the trail as they took it in 1804.

The starting place is obvious. According to Meriwether Lewis, “The mouth of the River Dubois is to be considered as the point of departure.” Our first stop on the road will be the Lewis and Clark State Historic Site in Hartford, Illinois, on the site of Camp Dubois. How far we get after that on the first leg of the trip is unknown.

Part of the fun of a road trip is discovering the unexpected, but we would also love to hear any suggestions you might have. What are your must-see sites along the trail—famous and obscure alike? Which widely heralded sites are duds, or closed for renovation? What little town has a great restaurant, bakery, farmer’s market or place to two-step to a honky-tonk band? Traveling history nerds want to know.

In return, you’ll get lots of stories from the road.[4]

[1] Not that I’m counting

[2] You can read my summary of the trip here and detailed stories of our adventures here.

[3] For those of you who wonder why it has taken us two years and a bit, all I can say is a LOT has happened since then.

[4] If you don’t follow me on Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, now would be the time. I like to post things seen along the way that are too small for a blog post and too fun not to share.

These days I’m hanging out a lot with Bohemians (or possibly that should be bohemians) in New York at the turn of the century: radicals, reformers, artists, and a handful of people who are just plain weird. In the process, I am coming across interesting people doing fascinating things. Case in point: photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)

After a brief stint as a student at Ohio State University, Abbott started her artistic career studying sculpture—first in New York, then in Berlin, and finally in Paris, where she worked as Man Ray’s[1] studio assistant. The experience changed her artistic focus[2] to photography

In 1926, after two years of working for Ray, who allowed her to use his darkroom for her own photographs, Abbott set up a photographic studio of her own, where she became a serious rival to her mentor, known for her portraits of the artistic and intellectual circles.(Think “Lost Generation.”) One newspaper review went so far as to call her “the best portrait photographer in Paris, which, is to say, in the world.”

Portrait of Janet Flanner by Berenice Abbot. ca. 1925

In January 1929, Abbott returned to New York, for what she intended to be a short visit. Instead it proved to be another major turning point in her career. As she later described it, “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,”

Using a handheld camera, she began to walk through the city, taking what she called “tiny photographic notes” of its infrastructure and its street life[3]. Her project may have been inspired in part by the work of French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who documented the transformation of Paris from the 1880s through the 1920s.[4] But where Atget’s work was known for its wide views, Abbott developed what she described as “bird’s-eye” and “worm’s-eye” points of view for her work, often capturing the contrast between the old and new in the rapidly transforming city

At first the work was a passion project: 266 small black and white photos pasted in a standard photo album, arrange by subject and location. In 1935 she received funding from the Federal Art Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration. The photographs were displayed as a traveling exhibition and published as Changing New York, which enjoyed both critical and commercial success

In addition to the portraits and documentary photographs for which she is famous, Abbott wrote and illustrated guidebooks about photography and invented new photographic equipment and techniques.

She also integrated art and science in her work. One of her later projects was photographs of scientific phenomenon created in collaboration with MIT. Combining clear demonstrations of abstract scientific principles with artistic vision, her photographs were used to illustrate physics textbooks throughout the 1950s and 19960s.

[1] Short version for those of you who haven’t spent much time thinking about early twentieth century photography: Man Ray began his artistic career as part of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He began to experiment with camera-less photography in 1922, soon after he arrived in Paris, putting objects on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing them to sunlight. While he is best known for what he dubbed “rayographs,” he also built a career as a fashion photographer.

[2] Unintentional photography metaphor, but having seen it I chose to keep it. Sorry.

[3] Her process makes me think of the painters of the Ashcan School, who arrived in New York a generation earlier and painted scenes they saw as they walked the city’s streets.  (I’m reading a lot about the Ashcan School these days with no clear purpose other than I really like their work.  No further reason needed, right?)

[4] After Atget’s death, Abbott bought his work and negatives. She spent forty years making sure his work was remembered.

When Karin suggested Lydia Pinkham (1819-1883) as a woman entrepreneur that I should look at, I pooh-poohed the idea. I wasn’t sure that Pinkham was a real person. (She was.) And even if she was a real person, she would be too early for my purposes. (True.) But not too early for a blog post.

Lydia Estes Pinkham was a household name—and face— in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her image appeared on bottles of her famous tonic and in ads selling them. In fact, according to one of my sources, her image was so familiar that some American newspapers used her picture when they reported Queen Victoria’s death in 1901.[2]

She was born into a large Quaker family —the tenth of twelve children—on a farm in Lynn, Massachusetts., where she attended the Lynn Academy and was actively involved in movements dedicated to the ideas and causes of the time, including Swedenborgianism, abolition, temperance, and women’s issues. She spent several years working as a teacher in Lynn and worked with Frederick Douglass as the secretary of the Freedman’s Institute.

In 1843, she married Isaac Pinkham, a widower with a daughter. Together they had several more children. For the next thirty years, Lydia was primarily a homemaker, though she had a side hustle as an herbalist with a focus on perfecting an herbal treatment for “female complaints.”

For years she shared her tonic with family and friends, many of whom believed the formula helped them.[3] When the family’s finances, always shaky, reached a new low as a result of the bank failures of 1873[4], Lydia, at the urging of her son, Daniel, decided to try selling bottles of what they named Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.

Ads for the product leaned heavily on slogans such as “Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills,” and in fact Pinkham’s compound was one of the earliest products made by a woman for women. The use of Pinkham’s image in advertising, another of Daniel’s ideas, underscored the idea.

Pinkham went further and invited women to write to her for advice. The company received so many letters that Pinkham set up an all-woman Department of Advice to respond to them. She also wrote a book intended to help women understand their bodies— the nineteenth century equivalent of Our Bodies, Our Selves. The book was distributed at no charge under several different titles.

Doctors dismissed the compound as just another quack nostrum; in fact, one of its primary ingredients, black cohosh, is used today to ease menstrual difficulties.[5] Women embraced it. The business grew from a one-woman operation to a factory that brewed and shipped roughly $300,000 of the tonic and related pills and lozenges each year at the time of Lydia’s death.[6]

The company stayed in business until the mid-twentieth century. Today at least two companies offer similar products, under variants of Lydia’s name, with an ingredient list very similar to her original tonic.

[1] Many thumbs up, with the caveat that it is more violent than the first two episodes would lead you to expect.Two middle-aged women on the run from bad guys, and from themselves. Funny and smart. Excellent storytelling. Think Thelma and Louise meets James Bond.

[2] I have not been able to verify this, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.

[3] An alternate version of this story has Lydia using family and friends as lab rats as she perfected the formula. Potato,.Potahto.

[4] The first of four major economic crises that hit the country in the late 19th century, the panic of 1873 was the result of over-expansion in railroads, and triggered by a stock market crash in Vienna which led European investors to dump their American securities

[5] Despite Pinkham’s stance on temperance, the tonic also had an high alcohol content, a fact that was clearly stated on the label, with the explanation that the alcohol was used solely as a preservative. If taken as directed, the alcohol would not have been an issue, but there is no guarantee that it wasn’t misused.

[6] Roughly $10 million today