Monthly Archives: November 2014

November 22, 2014 · 11:06 am

Speaking of immigrants

With all the discussion of immigration, I’m reminded of a family story that I found to be even more intriguing than it first sounded. (This is not about Richmond, by the way, unless it counts because I live here.)

Rough riders headline 11 21 14

I had always heard from my mom of her step-grandfather, Hugh McGuire. Though he wasn’t a blood relation, he was the only grandfather she ever knew; both of hers died before she was born (under circumstances that are stories in themselves). She knew he was a Spanish-American War veteran, and she had heard him speak of helping build the subways in New York City when he was young. That was about it.

As I started digging, it turned out Hugh led quite a life. He came from Ireland when he was just 17, in 1877. He bounced around New York for a while and worked on the elevated trains that ultimately became part of the subway lines.

Then he headed west at some point in the late 1800s and ended up in Idaho. It’s not clear what kind of work he was doing, but he had definitely learned to ride a horse. We know that because in 1898, after Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst brewed up their “splendid little war” with Spain, recruiters for the Rough Riders came looking for volunteers among the Western cowboys.

McGuire signed up in May 1898 and was accepted into “the other Rough Riders,” a regiment of experienced horsemen raised in Wyoming and led by Jay L. Torrey, a Wyoming rancher. In organizing the regiment, Torrey became, of course, “Col. Torrey.” The regiment headed for Florida, where they were to embark for Cuba.

Then, on the afternoon of June 26, their train collided with another near Tupelo, Mississippi. Four of “Torrey’s Rough Riders” were killed immediately along with a train porter, and Torrey himself was injured. The story of the wreck made page 2 of the New York Times.

Apparently Hugh McGuire was unhurt. The train wreck, however, short-circuited McGuire’s Army career, along with that of all those in the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. While they were held up for several days in Mississippi, Theodore Roosevelt was getting his Rough Riders to Cuba first. The 2nd Cavalry made it as far as Jacksonville, Florida, where disease broke out in camp. The war in Cuba was essentially over in weeks, and McGuire and his fellow soldiers never saw combat. He was discharged with the rest in the fall of 1898.

That is not the end of the story. I will point out that much of my family comes from Corinth, Mississippi, which is about 50 miles from Tupelo. But I’ll leave the rest of it for another day.

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November 15, 2014 · 10:23 am

Backstory

I come from a line of restless people. That’s not unusual in America, but it took a little while for me to figure it out.

My family is from the United Kingdom – mostly English, some Scots, some Irish. We arrived in the first century or so after Jamestown’s founding, and we didn’t stop for long anywhere. We mostly landed in Virginia and Maryland, then moved on to the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Mississippi; our sons and daughters pushed on to Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. If you plot their path on a map, it looks like a long, horizontal, backwards S. And that’s all before the Civil War. Since then, we’ve continued to spread out, and it would be extremely difficult to map now.

All the states I’ve mentioned are Southern. There are Northern Whartons (yep, that business school) and Southern Whartons, and I don’t think they connect much, not that I’ve seen. I am a Southerner, descended from farmers and railroad men. There’s some baggage which comes with that; I’ll get back to that another time. (How many Virginians does it take to change a lightbulb? Three – one to change the bulb, and two to talk about how fine the old bulb was.)

But for now I want to return to that matter of restlessness.

First, it’s an ugly fact that when these settlers moved, more often than not they were moving onto land recently taken from Native Americans. The Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw peoples, among others, all were steadily forced from their lands across the South, sometimes by violence, sometimes by treaties signed under pressure, often simply by the inexorable push of European settlers looking for new land. That dawned on me slowly as I looked into my family history. We forget that, long before the wars fought with Native Americans over Western lands, there were people living coast to coast on this continent (for a good read on the subject, try “The First Frontier” by Scott Weidensaul). I don’t believe I still bear responsibility, as a descendant of those who did the evicting – but I do want to acknowledge it.

The funny thing about those restless settlers is that I feel as if there’s something in the blood. When I look at my own parents, and the family I’ve made, for that matter, I see the same urge, to leave home, push on, find somewhere new. It’s not so much frontiers anymore, it’s just a willingness to go, to find a place to make your own. I don’t know why that is, but it’s there.

And yet – look at me. I came back to Virginia, without ever realizing I was completing a circle.

 

 

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November 13, 2014 · 10:41 am

First thoughts. . .

So, let’s start where Richmond started, with the river.

It’s reasonably common knowledge that Richmond’s location was first staked out by the earliest Englishmen coming upriver from Jamestown. In the opening lines of Virginius Dabney’s “Richmond: The Story of a City” he describes Captain Christopher Newport and his men planting a wooden cross at the Falls, “near the heart of today’s downtown.” They were looking for gold, Dabney says. Probably so, since most English explorers of the time, jealous of Spain’s windfall in South America, were hoping to find a new source of the stuff.

Instead of gold, they had found granite. Richmond’s location is due to a geologic formation called the “fall line” — a point at which the hard rock of the mountainous regions gives way to the softer stuff of the coastal plains. Simon Winchester, in his excellent book “The Men Who United the States,” points out that this line, snaking up the East Coast, defined where many cities were founded.

“Hints of the origins can still be spotted, though,” Winchester writes. “Invariably there will be a bridge in each city, spanning the river that brought the first boatmen here hundreds of years before. Cast your eyes over the parapets, and the stream below will quite probably be running through the bridge fast and furious. This is where the first sailors stopped, and the speed and temper of the river are the reason why.”

Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia, even Montreal, all owe their locations to this barrier encountered by the earliest explorers.

In Richmond, the James River runs fast through a granite riverbed, easily observed from Belle Isle, that contains the only Class III and IV rapids within a city limits in the U.S. You can see where granite was historically mined in the abandoned quarries of Belle Isle, and this perenially useful stone is still drawn from the ground within a short distance of Captain Newport’s first stop in 1607.

That’s how it started, and why. Let’s see where it goes. . .

 

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