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Nascar is a multibillion-dollar business whose history and rich mythology are rooted in money; Southern liquor-runners and moonshiners gave the earliest, postwar version of the sport much of its tone. But long before the advent of stock-car racing, competitive drivers cared less about prize or profit than about simply completing the course. The men who lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square on the morning of February 12, 1908, were embarking on a nearly unimaginable feat: a race from New York to Paris, westward. The contest was sponsored not by Bank of America or Coors Light, but by the French newspaper Le Matin and the New York Times. The prize: a 1,400-pound trophy and proving it could be done.

The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage. The New York-to-Paris race was suppoed to be (and is still largely considered) the greatest of them all, even surpassing the prior year’s Peking-to-Paris competition, in which the winner, Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, enlisted donkeys and mules to pull his car and sipped oily water from its radiator to relieve his thirst. His reward was a magnum of champagne.

In Times Square that morning 17 men, including drivers, mechanics and journalists, crammed into six cars from four countries: three from France, and one each from Germany, Italy and the United States. A quarter of a million people lined Broadway up to northernmost Harlem; those who couldn’t glimpse the cars had to settle for the whiff of gasoline and the strains of a brass band. The American entry, a 60-horsepower touring car called the Thomas Flyer, carried three extra gasoline tanks with a capacity of 125 gallons and primitive canvas convertible top. The race was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., when Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., son of the Union Civil War general, planned to fire the starting pistol, but he was characteristically late. At a quarter-past, railroad financier Colgate Hoyt snatched the golden gun from the table and shot it into the air.

The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race from Marseille to Algiers that resulted in every single boat sinking in the Mediterranean. His captain was Hans Hendrick Hansen, a swashbuckling Norwegian who claimed to have sailed a Viking ship, solo, to the North Pole. He declared that he and his companions would reach Paris or “our bodies will be found inside the car.” Frenchman Charles Godard, driving the Moto-Bloc, participated in the Peking-to-Paris race without having driven a car and set an endurance record by driving singlehandedly for 24 hours nonstop.

Emilio Sirtori, the driver for the Italian Zust, took with him 21-year-old journalist and poet Antonio Scarfoglio, who had threatened to pilot a motorboat across the Atlantic if his father didn’t let him enter the race. (His father, a prominent newspaper editor in Naples, relented.) The German entrant, driving the Protos, was an aristocratic army officer named Hans Koeppen who regarded the race as an opportunity to raise his rank from lieutenant to captain. Montague “Monty” Roberts, manning the Thomas Flyer, was a gregarious crowd favorite and one of few American drivers who actually trained for races. His teammate was George Schuster, a 35-year-old mechanic for the E. R. Thomas Motor Company in Buffalo, New York. One of 21 children born to Casper Schuster, a German immigrant who worked as a blacksmith, George was an expert radiator solderer, chassis inspector, motor tuner and test driver. To Roberts, he was an ideal choice—high enough in the factory hierarchy to be considered indispensable, but too low to steal attention from Roberts himself. After the starting shot, the cars moved forward, Scarfoglio wrote, “between two thick hedges of extended hands amidst a roar as of a falling torrent.” The poet blew a kiss to the crowd, and they were off.

August Pons, driver of the French Sizaire-Naudin, drpopped out after only 96 miles with a broken differential. The De Dion, the Zust and the Thomas Flyer quickly emerged as the leaders, with the Protos and the Moto-Bloc bringing up the rear. In Hudson, New York, the cars plowed through foot-deep snow in a single file. Schuster circled the Thomas Flyer—which had no heater or windshield—with a stick to check snow depth and put down planks for traction. The trail out of Auburn, which the New York Times described as the worst road in the United States, lived up to its reputation, with the three leading cars getting mired at Dismal Hollow in the Montezuma Swamp. The men prepared to camp for the night, but an American guide hired by the Italians came with six horses to pull the cars through.

They settled into a routine, rising at 5 a.m. and driving until 8 p.m., with the mechanics tinkering with the cars until midnight to repair cracks in the chassis and drain the radiators to keep them from freezing. (At the time, antifreeze was primarily used to produce explosives.) They stopped at hardware stores to fill up on gasoline, one bucketful at a time. The teams forged a tense agreement that they would alternate leadership every five hours, but this spirit of cooperation quickly dissolved. They convinced themselves that an hour or two would make a difference in a six-month race, and feared that their opponents would sneak off in the middle of the night. St. Chaffray took to giving imperious orders: “When you wish to go into a city ahead, you ask me,” he told Roberts. The American replied, “From now on you will know this is a race.”

The animosity increased as they trekked through the snow-battered Midwest, with the Italians accusing the Americans of cheating by using railroad tracks and the aid of a trolley car. A few of the foreign competitors took offense at the locals, whom they perceived as boorish. Scarfoglio sent off a snide dispatch: “I do not like the Americans as a whole, just as I do not like the cheesemonger whom a prize in a lottery or a sudden rise in the price of potatoes has made wealthy. There is still too much of the herdsman about them.” In Indiana, the Moto-Bloc and  Protos teams resented the fact that they had to pay significant sums for the aid of horses and men while the Thomas Flyer was swarmed by Hoosiers anxious to volunteer. They sent a plea to the president of the Chicago Automobile Club, which the Tribune printed under the headline, “FOREIGNERS’ PATHETIC APPEAL”: “We are discouraged,” the note began. “The peasants demand $3 per mile for helping us…they charged $5 each to permit us to sleep on the ground. Peasants along the way have filled up road dug by leading cars, so as to help the Thomas car…would it be possible to influence public opinion to aid us?”

By March 8, the Thomas Flyer was leading in Julesburg, Colorado, and traveling with a new passenger: Hans Hendrick Hansen. The Norwegian had quit St. Chaffray’s team after the De Dion got stuck in a particularly bad snowdrift; when Hansen, the Artic expert, failed to extricate it, he and the Frenchman began to argue. They agreed to settle the matter with a duel, but before they could find their pistols St. Chaffray made an executive (and cool-headed) decision to fire Hansen. “I could go afoot over the Siberian route and beat the De Dion car,” Hansen retorted, and pledged his allegiance to the American flag.

Meanwhile, the Zust was in Omaha, the De Dion in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Moto-Bloc in Maple Park, Illinois, and the Protos a bit behind in Geneva, Illinois. As the Thomas Flyer approached frenzied crowds in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Monty Roberts knew that his time in the great race was nearing its end. He wanted to sail to Paris in May and race in the Grand Prix. E. Linn Mathewson, the son of the general agent for Thomas cars in the Midwest, would drive the Flyer through Wyoming to Utah. Professional driver Harold Brinker, famous for surviving a crash the previous year that had killed another driver, would take command in Ogden. George Schuster, the indefatigable mechanic, would drive through Alaska and Siberia, and Roberts would return when the car neared Europe.

Before leaving Cheyenne, Schuster bought a .38-caliber Colt with a six-inch barrel, reasoning it might come in handy. He continued to sacrifice himself for the journey when no one else could or would, walking ten miles in the dead of night to find gasoline and navigating the car out of gullies they couldn’t avoid. His acumen had kept the car running through blizzards, freezing temperatures and sandstorms. At each overnight stop, he repaired the fresh damage and readied the Flyer for the next leg of the journey. And he was so unheralded that newspaper reports frequently misspelled his name when they bothered to mention him at all.

By the time the Americans left Wyoming, they were leading by two states. The Italians were starting across Nebraska from Omaha. St. Chaffray was in Iowa, awaiting parts for the De Dion, while Lieutenant Koeppen in the Protos and Charles Godard in the Moto-Bloc were just entering Iowa. The Moto-Bloc was having mechanical trouble, although Godard was loath to disclose specifics. Desperate, he decided—in violation of the rules—to ship his car to San Francisco by railroad, but abandoned the idea when a photographer caught him in the act. Godard received a cable from the owners of his car: “Quit race, sell car and come home.” The Moto-Bloc was finished, leaving only four cars.

Harold Brinker drove the Thomas Flyer from Utah through Nevada and around the border of Death Valley, arriving in San Francisco the third week of March, 900 miles ahead of his closest competitor, the Zust. Factory whistles sounded and automobile drivers blew their horns on Market Street. “The record of the Thomas car from New York to San Francisco was a remarkable feat,” the New York Times concluded. “Many skeptics declared when the New York to Paris racers started out from New York in the dead of winter that none of them would get across Wyoming until summer, some that they would not reach Chicago and a few that they could not cross New York State.” The Americans prepared to ship the Flyer on a freighter to Seattle. After a two-day trip there, it would be transferred to a cargo ship headed for Valdez, Alaska. Brinker begged Schuster to let him to continue with the team, even as an assistant, but the mechanic refused. It was finally his car and his turn.

On Wednesday, April 8, the Flyer touched Alaskan soil. The welcoming committee consisted of the entire population of Valdez, few of whom had ever seen a car. Schuster wasted no time investigating the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail in a single-horse sleigh, and concluded that the only way to cross Alaska in a car would be to dismantle it and ship the parts by dogsled. The Parisian race committee abandoned the idea of Alaska and the Bering Strait and directed the Americans to return to Seattle. Their new plan called for the cars to sail to Vladivostok and drive to Paris from there. While the Americans were still at sea, their competitors, including the ever-troubled Protos, arrived in Seattle and set sail for Russia. Then the Americans lost time getting their Russian visas in order. The Flyer had been the first to arrive on the Pacific coast but was now the last to leave, a few weeks behind the competition.

The Italian and French teams were forging across Japan when the race committee made another decision. In recognition of the time the Flyer lost detouring through Alaska, the American team was given an allowance of 15 days—which meant, essentially, that the Zust and the De Dion could beat the Flyer into Paris by two weeks and still lose. The Protos, meanwhile, would be penalized 15 days for resorting to the train from Ogden to Seattle; the committee didn’t disqualify Lieutenant Koeppen entirely, concluding that there had been some honest confusion (unlike in Godard’s case) about the rules.

In Russia, the racers were advised to give up and take the Trans-Siberian Railway. Scarfoglio reported that the “great men of the Russian government, all covered with gold lace,” outlined the many reasons the venture would fail: “We shall be met on the road by Chinese brigands, Manchurian tigers, fever, plague, pestilence, famine—to say nothing of the mud after three months of rain, mosquitoes as big as locusts and other similar delights.” The drivers agreed to start again evenly matched. With one day to prepare, George Schuster searched for a supply of gasoline, which was scarce in Siberia. Back at his hotel, he received a note summoning him to St. Chaffray’s room. When he arrived he saw that the Italian team was already there.

“There is no petrol,” the Frenchman announced. “There are no means of getting any. What there was is in my possession, and I offer it to the car which will agree to take me onboard.” The Italians left the room in disgust. St. Chaffray tried to reason with the Americans, stating that he could get a seat on the German car, but the Flyer was sure to beat the Protos into Paris and he wished to be on the first car to arrive. He added that “it would not look well for a Frenchman to ride on a German machine.” Schuster calmly said he’d think about it, but he was seething. Privately he told his team that he’d rather stay in Vladivostok for the rest of his life than accept St. Chaffray’s bribe. Without fanfare, St. Chaffray transferred the rights to his gasoline to the Italian team, but was not allowed to join. His sponsor, the Marquis Jules-Albert de Dion, had decided he was finished.

In Perm, Russia, Schuster received a telegram from the Thomas factory in Buffalo: “Do you want us to send Montague Roberts to help you when you get on the good roads of Europe?” Schuster was so mad he could’ve “eaten nails,” as he put it, and sent an immediate reply: “July 9: Arrived today. Expect to reach Paris on July 24. Schuster.” The suggestion that he was good enough to drive the Flyer through the bogs of Siberia but not through the capitals of Europe impelled him, despite deadened nerves and aching limbs. He was now only a day ahead of the Protos and determined to maintain his lead.

There was one problem: Schuster kept getting lost. The Russians couldn’t understand hand signals and the Americans couldn’t understand Russian. One wrong turn cost the Americans 15 hours. Worse, the Flyer sunk into a mudhole and needed a day’s worth of repairs. Schuster heard that Lieutenant Koeppen had left St. Petersburg the same day and was on his way to securing a three-day lead. The Italians remained 3,000 miles behind, in Atchunsk.

At 6:15 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, five and a half months and 21,933 miles from the start in Times Square, Lieutenant Koeppen arrived in Paris, slowly guiding the Protos down Boulevard Poissonniere. A delegation of editors from Le Matin greeted him with tepid enthusiasm and served a cold buffet at his reception. At the same time, Schuster was having breakfast at the Imperial Automobile Club of Berlin, where several people congratulated him on his good showing. He didn’t bother to explain that the Protos would ultimately be docked two weeks for using the train in the American west, and that the Flyer was allotted two extra weeks for attempting the trip to Alaska. Schuster had a month in which to get to Paris and still win the race.

Schuster and his crew arrived on July 30, the Flyer making its way through the lines of lighted cafes, the crowds shouting wildly: “Vive le car Americain!” They cruised toward the Place de l’Opéra, where, in front of the Café de la Paiz, a gendarme stopped the car.

“You are under arrest,” he declared. “You have no lights on your car.”

A crowd of Americans rushed from the café and tried to explain, but the officer waved them away. The law was the law: a car had to have a headlight to be on the streets of Paris at night, or the driver was to be placed under arrest. A quick-thinking man on a bicycle rode up to the car, jumped off and deposited his bike, which had a headlight, in the Flyer next to Schuster. Problem solved. The gendarme stepped aside.

Schuster graciously insisted that Monty Roberts be present for the Flyer’s triumphant return to Times Square on August 17, 1908. After the accolades and parties died down, he returned to his job at the Thomas factory, where he was promised employment as long as the company was in business. Five years later, the Thomas company collapsed and all its goods were auctioned off. Lot number 1829 was listed simply as the “Famous New York to Paris Racer.”

Sources:

Books: Julie M. Fenster, Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race. New York: Crown, 2005; Dermot Cole: Hard Driving: The 1908 Auto Race from New York to Paris. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Allen Andrews: The Mad Motorists: The Great Peking to Paris Race of ’07. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965.

Articles: “Macedonian Cry for Help from Foreign Autoists.” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1908; “First in Chicago Autos’ Aim.” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1908; “New York to Paris the Hard Way, 100 Years Ago.” New York Times, February 10, 2008; “Race to Paris Starts Today.” New York Times, February 12, 1908; “The Greatest Race—1908 New York to Paris,” by Art Evans. Sports Car Digest, September 28, 2011: http://www.sportscardigest.com/the-greatest-race-1908-new-york-to-paris/; “Tour of Autoists Like Polar Trip.” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1908; “Mathewson At Wheel of Racer.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 1908; “American Car Will Try to Cross Alaska.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1908; “Thomas, Winner, Reaches Paris.” New York Times, July 31, 1908.

John Doyle Lee was born in Illinois Territory in 1812. By the time he was 3, his mother was dead. Relatives took him in from his alcoholic father and put him to work on their farm at a young age. At 20, Lee began courting Agatha Ann Woolsey in Vandalia, Illinois, and in the summer of 1833, she became Lee’s wife—the first of 19 for John D. Lee, who would soon commit himself to the nascent Latter-day Saints movement. He professed his commitment till the day he was executed for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

The massacre, in 1857, was one of the most explosive episodes in the history of the American West—not only were 120 men, women and children killed, but the United States and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints almost went to war. The denouement of the so-called Utah War set Utah on the path to statehood and the Mormons on a long and fitful accommodation to secular authority, but the Mountain Meadows Massacre remained a focus of suspicion and resentment for decades. The church issued a statement on the role its members played in the killings in 2007, and opened its archives to three scholars—Richard E. Turley Jr., a Latter-day Saint historian, and Brigham Young University professors Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard—for their book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, published in 2008. But in the aftermath of the massacre, only one participant was brought to trial, and that was John D. Lee.

Lee and his wife joined the Mormon settlement in Far West, Missouri, in 1837. That was only seven years after Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but already the Mormons had been pushed out of Smith’s home state of New York and Ohio. Conflicts arose on grounds both religious and secular—Smith preached that other Christian churches had strayed; Mormons tended to vote as a bloc and to outwork others, concentrating both political and economic power—and the antagonism intensified to the point that the Mormons would be evicted from Missouri and Illinois, where Smith was lynched in 1844. To break a cycle of mutual suspicion, recrimination and violence, Brigham Young, who would succeed Smith, made plans to lead the remaining LDS members on an exodus to Utah, which was then part of Mexico—beyond the reach of U.S. law.

As a recent convert John D. Lee joined a secret church order called the Danites, which was charged with protecting and defending Mormons. When some Missourians opposed to Mormons’ voting started a riot at a Daviess County polling center in 1838, Lee and his fellow Danites stormed into the crowd with clubs flying. “I felt the power of God nerve my arm for the fray,” he later said. Buildings were burned, and Lee later admitted that he had participated in looting.

Lee was in Kentucky when Smith was killed in 1844, but when he returned to Illinois he learned of Young’s plan to head for Utah. Lee joined the migration through hostile and foreboding territory (which led to Young’s nickname of  “the Mormon Moses”), and Young appointed him a Captain of Fifty—a ranking based on number of people under one’s command. Lee served as a clerk and purchasing agent.

In July of 1847, a contingent of Mormons arrived in the Great Salt Lake valley and began a settlement that would grow to thousands in the coming years. Just six months later, Mexico ceded that land, and so much more of the West, to the United States. The old conflicts between religious and secular power arose again. President Millard Fillmore appointed Brigham Young governor of the Utah Territory and superintendent of Indian affairs, but the Mormons kept their distance from outsiders—including officials sent from Washington, D.C.

Non-Mormon locals immediately resented the appointment of Mormon surveyors and Indian agents, one of whom was John D. Lee. The agents’ relationship with the Native Americans, to whom they supplied tools, seed and proselytizing, aroused suspicion, especially among federal soldiers in the area. Mormon men, meanwhile, took offense when soldiers tried to socialize with Mormon women. Once the Army departed, “as many as one hundred Mormon women went with them,” according to Turley, Walker and Leonard. “Everybody has got one except the Colonel and Major,” one soldier said. “The Doctor has got three—mother and two daughters.  The mother cooks for him and the daughters sleep with him.” The familiar cycle of suspicion and resentment built toward violence into the mid-1850s. Rumors that the LDS church was sanctioning polygamy—which turned out to be true—only made matters worse.

In April 1857, a Mormon apostle named Parley P. Pratt was murdered in Arkansas by the legal husband of one of Pratt’s plural wives. Mormons in Utah took the news as another example of religious persecution and considered Pratt a martyr. They began stockpiling grain, anticipating a violent and apocalyptic encounter with the people they called “Americans.”  The Army, they believed, was about to invade the Utah Territory, (an invasion that did not come until the following year in the Utah War) and Young tried to enlist Paiute Indians from nearby Mountain Meadows in the fight. He also warned “mobocrats” to steer clear of Mormon territory or they’d be met by the Danites, who would form a line of defense in villages near Mountain Meadows. Then he declared martial law, making it illegal to travel through the territory without a permit.

At the same time, several groups of emigrants from northwest Arkansas, mostly families that in total numbered between 100-200 people, were making their way to California by wagon trains. Joining up in Salt Lake City, the Baker-Fancher party restocked their supplies, but for the rest of their trip, Mormons were prohibited from selling any goods to wagon trains. Lee and another Mormon man, apostle George A. Smith, met with the Paiutes, a a tribe of Native Americans in the region, and warned them that the encroaching Americans threatened both them and the Mormons; rumors circulated that members of the Baker-Fancher train might poison water and cattle along their way.

The Baker-Fincher party was most likely unaware of the new requirement for a permit to cross Utah. They grazed their cattle on Mormons’ land as they passed through, stoking anger. Lee later said that members of the train “swore and boasted openly…that Buchan[a]n’s whole army was coming right behind them, and would kill every… Mormon in Utah.” Others reported that the men of the Baker-Fancher party were respectful.

Throughout the summer of 1857, the Mormons’ sense of impending invasion only deepened. Parades through Cedar City included young men bearing banners reading, “A terror to evil doers,” according to Turley, Walker, and Leonard. Along the southern settlements, Mormons were urged to “shore up alliances with local Indians.” When Lee came into the vicinity of the Baker-Fancher train, he said, he saw a large group of Paiutes “in their war paint, and fully equipped for battle.” Lee claimed that he had orders from Isaac C. Haight, a leader of several Mormon congregations that formed the Iron County Militia, “to send other Indians on the war-path to help them kill the emigrants.” Haight and Lee gave weapons to the Paiutes.

The Baker-Fancher party was camped at Mountain Meadows on September 7 when Paiutes (and some Mormons dressed as Paiutes to conceal their Mormon affiliation) attacked. The emigrants circled the wagons, dug trenches and fought back—but as the siege continued for five days, they began to run out of ammunition, water and provisions. The Mormon attackers concluded that the emigrants had figured out their ruse—and feared that word of their participation would hasten an assault by the Army. It was then that militia commander William H. Dame ordered his men to leave no witnesses. The emigrants were to be “decoyed out and destroyed with the exception of the small children,” who were “too young to tell tales,” according to another militia commander, Major John H. Higbee, who relayed the orders to Lee.

On September 11, John D. Lee and a group of militiamen approached the camp under a white flag and offered a truce, with assurances that Lee and his men would escort the emigrants to safety in Cedar City. All they’d have to do is leave their livestock and possessions to the Paiutes. Having no good options, the emigrants, about 120 men, women and children, laid down their weapons and followed Lee and the militia away from the camp in three groups—the last comprising adult males. It was over quickly. The Arkansas men were shot at point-blank range; the women and children ahead were slaughtered by bullets and arrows in an ambush party. No one over the age of seven survived. The victims were hastily buried. Locals auctioned off or distributed their possessions and took in the surviving 17 young children.

The Army did arrive in Utah, in 1858, but no war ensued—Young and the Buchanan administration negotiated an agreement in which Young would give way to a new governor. The following year, troops led by Major James H. Carleton went to Mountain Meadows to investigate the killings and found the bones of “very small children.” The soldiers gathered skulls and bones and erected a cairn with the words, “Here 120 men, women, and children were massacred in cold blood early in September, 1857. They were from Arkansas.” They marked the site with a cross inscribed, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord.”

Lee and the other leaders swore that they would never reveal their parts in the massacre, and Lee himself told Brigham Young that the Paiutes had been responsible for it—an explanation that became the official position of the LDS church for generations. In a report to Congress, Major Carleton blamed Mormon militiamen and church leaders for the massacre. Young excommunicated both Lee and Haight  for their roles, but only Lee faced charges. After a first trial ended in a mistrial, Lee was convicted in 1877 and sentenced to death by firing squad.

Lee claimed that he was a scapegoat, and that other Mormons were more directly involved in the planning and in the killing. And although he maintained at first that Young was unaware of the massacre until after it took place, Lee would later state, in his Life and Confessions of John D. Lee, that the massacre occurred “by the direct command of Brigham Young.” And on the morning of his execution, Lee would write that Young was “leading the people astray” and that he was being sacrificed “in a cowardly, dastardly manner.”

“I did everything in my power to save that people, but I am the one that must suffer,” Lee wrote. He closed by asking the Lord to receive his spirit, and then he was taken to the massacre site. As many as 300 onlookers had gathered. On March 28, 1877, John Doyle Lee, wearing a coat and scarf, took a seat atop the coffin where his body would lie. A photographer was nearby. Lee asked that whatever photograph was made be copied for his last three wives. The photographer agreed. Lee posed. And then an hour before noon, he shook hands with the men around him, removed his coat and hat and faced the five men of the firing party.

“Let them shoot the balls through my heart!” Lee shouted. “Don’t let them mangle my body!”

On U.S. Marshal William Nelson’s command, shots rang out in the ravine where so many shots had rung out twenty years before, and Lee fell back onto his coffin, dead.

On April 20, 1961, a joint council was held with the First Presidency and the Council of Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “After considering all the facts available,” the Church authorized “reinstatement to membership and former blessings [temple marriages] to John D. Lee.” The reinstatement puzzled many. But four decades later, the church claimed full responsibility for the incident that led to Lee’s execution. At a memorial ceremony on September 11, 2007, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, LDS Apostle Henry B. Eyring read the church’s official statement to gatherers:

“We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today, and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time. A separate expression of regret is owed the Paiute people who have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre. Although the extent of their involvement is disputed, it is believed they would not have participated without the direction and stimulus provided by local church leaders and members.”

Sources

Books: Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Oxford University Press, 2008.  Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.  Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Doubleday, 2003. Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, Alfred A. Knopf., 2003.

Articles: “The Brink of War,” by David Roberts, Smithsonian magazine, June, 2008. “Books: A Blot on the Mormon Faith, Church’s History Fraught with Violence, Bloodshed,” by John Freeman, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 13, 2003. “New Perspectives on The West: John Doyle Lee, (1812-1877) PBS—The West—John Doyle Lee, http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/i_r/lee.htm.  “John D. Lee,” Utah History Encyclopedia, http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/l/LEE,JOHN.html.  “Shining New Light on the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” Transcription of 2003 FAIR Conference presentation by Gene Sessions, FAIR: Defending Mormonism, http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2003-fair-conference/2003-shining-new-light-on-the-mountain-meadows-massacre.  “Last Words and the Execution of John D. Lee, March 28, 1877,” As reported by his attorney, William W. Bishop in Mormonism Unveiled; Or the Life and Confession of John D. Lee (1877).  Mountain Meadows Massacre Trial Homepage: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/leeexecution.html

The 84th Congress (1955-1957) included 16 women—the most ever to serve at one time in Congress. Some were incumbents—well-to-do women like Katherine St. George, a Republican from New York, who was born in England, married a Wall Street broker and ran on a platform of small government and fiscal conservatism to differentiate herself from her cousin, former president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Others rode into Congress on their husbands’ coattails or were widow successors who would serve out their deceased husband’s terms. But then there was Coya Knutson, freshman Democrat from Minnesota. The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, she came out of nowhere to win election by promising to help the struggling farmers of her district. But Knutson had a secret, which she kept even as she was undone by her vindictive husband and the political operatives who used him.

She was born Cornelia Genevive Gjesdal in Edmore, North Dakota, and raised on a small farm. Her father was an active member of the Nonpartisan League, a socialist organization aimed at farmers who sought state control of agriculture to reduce the power and influence of corporate farming. Coya graduated from Concordia College in Minnesota in 1934, then moved to New York City and studied at the Juilliard School, hoping to pursue a career in opera. But after a year, she realized she wasn’t going to succeed in music and returned to Minnesota. In 1940, she married Andy Knutson, who ran a small inn and café in Oklee. The birth of a son, Terry, soon followed. She taught school just across the state line in North Dakota, but in June 1942, she heard a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt. “It was as if the sun burned into me that day,” Knutson recalled, and she became more and more active in civic affairs—particularly on behalf of small farmers.

Years passed, however, as her husband, an alcoholic, turned abusive. Coya Knutson quietly plotted an escape through politics. The Democratic Farmer Labor Party recruited her to run for a seat in the state House of Representatives, and in 1950 she won. But Knutson, seeking a way out of Minnesota, defied the DFL party’s endorsement of a more experienced politician for Congress and launched a run for that seat in 1954. (More…)

On the evening of July 18, 1935, in an America still crushed in the coils of the Great Depression, an old man with a long white beard appeared on the front lawn of a farm off Route 1 in Metamora, Indiana.

It was late, nearly dusk, and when the farmer’s wife came out to ask what the man wanted, he begged her for a piece of bread. “He had a very kind face,” she wrote some days later,

and it has always been my custom to give to tramps if I have anything I can handy [sic] give. He was carrying a pack on his back so I told him to set it down on the lawn. I had a nice warm supper cooked so I served him on the lawn. He seemed to be very hungry. I gave him a second serving. When he finished he took from his pack two checks copied from brown paper, looked like they were cut from paper bags. He came forward and handed these to me with his plate.

According to this woman, “his face was so kind it is hard to believe he meant anything false.” But when she looked down at the paper checks, she saw that one had been written for $25,000, and the other for $1,000.

More than a year later, on October 23, 1936, the same old man wandered into a lunchroom on a highway outside Columbus, Texas. He told the waitress he had no money but asked her for a cup of coffee. Feeling sorry for him, she took him into the kitchen and fed him a bowl of stew and a jelly roll with his coffee. The old man ate his fill and, while the waitress was serving other customers, took another piece of paper from his pack, scribbled on it in indelible pencil, and slipped it beneath his coffee cup before taking up his pack and hurrying off into the night. The waitress returned to find that the slip of paper was a blank check for $27,000, written on the Irving National Bank of New York and signed “John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe.” On the back he had scribbled the words: “Fill your name in, send to bank.”

Four days after that, John S. Smith was in Yuma, Arizona, where he left a check for $2,000 in exchange for a cup of coffee. Early in November, in Indianola, Mississippi, he handed another farmer’s wife two checks totaling $26,000. And in December, in Fort Worth, a young woman sitting in a parked car was approached by an elderly, bearded man who begged her for a nickel. She gave him a dime, prompting him to use her fender as a desk and write a check for $950. When the girl laughed and thanked him, he took the check back, tore it up, and wrote out another one for $26,000.”That’s for your sweet smile,” he said.

In all, between 1934 and 1940, the mysterious John S. Smith traveled as far north as Clinton, Connecticut, and as far west as Los Angeles, scattering pencil-and-paper checks written on the Irving National for sums totaling several million dollars. He paid as little as $90 for what a minister’s wife in Terre Haute, Indiana, insisted was “a good, hot lunch,” and as much as $600,000 for a hamburger cooked for him by a waitress in New Iberia, Louisiana. He paid more for food than he did for the rides he sometimes hitched, and more to women than to men. He also showed an affinity for cats, leaving checks totaling $5,000 to a woman in South Dakota to pay for “upkeep [on] the black and white cat name Smiles.” All his checks were written on brown paper, often spotted with grease, and they shared several other distinctive characteristics: handwriting in a vaguely gothic style, the misspelling of “thousand” as “tousand” and the crude symbol of a smiley face, with pencil dots for eyes and nose.

Eccentric though he clearly was, John S. Smith was only one of the hundreds of thousands of men who took to the roads and rails of the United States between the coming of railways and the 1930s, an era when—for all its harshness and its frequent tragedy—the traveling life was regarded by many romantic young men as the ultimate test of manhood. Some traveled because they had to, because they were craftsmen who had grown up in towns too small to make full-time use of their services. Others were itinerants who met the need for seasonal labor on farms. And a smaller, but far from insignificant, number drifted because it suited them. “To those who idealized them, hoboes and tramps were the last of the rugged individualists,” the writer Richard Wormser notes. “But the reality of the hobo world was often far different. It was a life in which a man might go days without food, weeks without a decent place to sleep, and months without clothing…. Jack London, who chose tramp life as a teenager, saw it for what it was: ‘I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the schools and charnel house of our civilization. This is the part that society chooses to ignore.’ ”

What drove John S. Smith onto the roads is harder to know. He confided to a woman in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that he had left home in 1934 because the Depression had “got on his mind”; she suspected, rather, that he had “got loose from an institution and has been lost ever since.” The most romantic depiction of the tramp can be found in a letter written by a young woman from San Antonio, who received a check for $6,000 from him. “He stated that he purposely wore ragged clothes and rewarded those who helped him,” she recorded.

That letter, and others like it, found its way into the files of the Irving Trust—a New York institution based at 1 Wall Street, the successor of the defunct Irving National Bank and the unwilling recipient for reams of correspondence that flowed in from people who encountered John S. Smith. Most of the letters were accompanied by Smith’s grease-stained slips of rough brown paper. They inquired whether the checks could be cashed, and adopted a variety of tones: some suspicious, some disbelieving, not a few filled with hope. “I received these checks from an old gentleman who ate breakfast at our home,” a Texas farmer wrote in December 1937. “I asked the bank here to handle same for me, and they seemed to think they were no good. This man had no reason to give us these checks knowing they were no good. So I still believe he wanted us to have this amount of money and we sure need it. Wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.”

According to the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, who was given access to the tramp’s odd file in 1940 in exchange for his promise not to name any of the hopeful letter-writers, the clerks at the Irving Trust devoted considerable effort to solving the many mysteries John S. Smith created. First they puzzled over the problem that the Irving National Bank had gone out of existence in 1923, 11 years before the first checks drawn on it were written; did this mean the old tramp had long ago kept an account there? They searched their records, together with those of the old Irving National, for any that might have belonged to a man who had been born in Riga, Latvia, Europe. None could be found under any name at any date. Next, believing that Smith might once have worked in their building as a janitor or guard, they scoured their employment rolls. Again, they found no trace of any John S. Smith.

In the end, Mitchell noted, the Trust officials concluded that Smith was “a simple-minded, goodhearted old man who feels that he should reward those treating him with kindness.” They made no attempt to trace him or have him arrested, since there was no evidence of forgery or fraud, and he seemed never to attempt to cash a check or actually buy anything with one. “The bank people call him Santa Claus Smith and wish that he had millions of dollars on deposit,” Mitchell added, and he noted that, from time to time, a bank official would pull the Smith file and amuse himself by tracing the tramp’s peregrinations on a map.

For a short time, it seemed the mystery might be solved. A letter written by John S. Smith, postmarked Wabash, Indiana, and (Mitchell observed) “scribbled wildly on the back of seven lunchroom menus” was delivered to the bank. Sadly, while it began, “Irv. Nat. Bank of N.Y. Dear Sir,” it then became illegible. The letter had apparently been kept in the tramp’s pockets for a while and become stained with grease and tobacco crumbs. After that it appeared to have been dipped in water, reducing Smith’s scribbles to nothing more than purple blots. Still, one of the bank officials fetched a magnifying glass, and—”after a considerable amount of agonizing labor,” Mitchell wrote—made out a handful of phrases. These were: “listen those three waitress,” “put something in that bank,” “in USA for 26yrs 30yrs 22,” “mortgage and now,” “to see about cats,” “waitress girl in that place in Ohio,” and “all over USA.”

Attached to the letter were two of Smith’s checks. One was for $15,000 and the other for $6,000. Both were written on the Irving National Bank, and both were made payable to the Irving National Bank. Somehow, it seemed a fitting end to the tale of one old tramp’s perpetual circuit of the country.

Sources

Joseph Mitchell. Up in the Old Hotel. New York: Vintage Books, 1993; Mark West. Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011; Richard Wormser. Hoboes: Wandering in America, 1870-1940. New York: Walker & Co., 1994.

Before the coming of the railways, and the buses, and the motor car, when it was not uncommon for isolated farms to be a day’s walk from the nearest shops, the closest many people got to a department store was when a wandering peddler came to call.

Wheeled transport was still expensive then, and most rural roads remained unmade, so the great majority of these traveling salesmen carried their goods on their backs. Their packs usually weighed about a hundredweight (100 pounds, or about 50 kilos—not much less than their owners), and they concealed a treasure trove of bits and pieces, everything from household goods to horsehair wigs, all neatly arranged in drawers.  Since the customers were practically all female, the best-sellers were almost always beauty products; readers of Anne of Green Gables may recall that she procured the dye that colored her hair green from just such a peddler.

Over the years, these fixtures of the rural scene went by many names; they were buffers, or duffers, or packmen, or dustyfoots. Some were crooks, but a surprisingly high proportion of them were honest tradesmen, more or less, for it was not possible to built a profitable round without providing customers with a reasonable service. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been estimated, an honest packman on the roads of England might earn more than a pound a week, a pretty decent income at that time.

For several hundred years, the packman was a welcome sight to many customers. “He was the one great thrill in the lives of the girls and women,” the writer H.V. Morton tells us, “whose eyes sparkled as he pulled out his trays and offered to their vanity cloths and trifles from the distant town.” Indeed, “the inmates of the farm-house where they locate for the night consider themselves fortunate in having to entertain the packman; for he is their newsmonger, their story-teller and their friend.”

I’m interested here, though, in chronicling the decline and fall of this age-old way of life—for the packman could not survive the coming of the modern world, of course. Exactly when the species became doomed is still debated; in Britain, historians may point to the year 1810, when it became law for peddlers to purchase a pricey annual license in order to carry on their trade. There’s evidence, however, that the packmen prospered for at least a little longer than that; census statistics suggest that the really precipitous decline in their numbers, in England at least, dates to between 1841 and 1851, when the total plunged from more than 17,000 to a mere 2,500, a fall of more than 85 percent. Henry Mayhew, whose lively survey London Labour and the London Poor is our greatest storehouse of information on marginal lives in the Victorian age, noted in 1851 that “the system does not prevail to so great an extent as it did some years back.” Mayhew found that there were then only five packmen and  a score of ‘”duffers” and “lumpers” still active in the capital, concluding: “This trade is becoming now almost entirely a country trade.”

Meet the last of the Cornish packmen after the jump. (More…)