Escalante’s Dream, or The Spanish Lewis and Clark
In 2011, I became a reviewer for Shelf Awareness for Readers: an on-line bookish newsletter that comes out on Tuesdays and Fridays.(1) It was a wonderful experience. I reviewed Big Fat History Books, quirky little reference books, and an occasional cookbook. (2) In April, 2017, I resigned. It just about broke my heart, but I was deep into writing Women Warriors and I just couldn’t keep up.
I recently put my reviewing hat back on, which means I’m reading books I otherwise might not read and have goodies to share here on the Margins.
First up: Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest by adventure writer David Roberts.(3)
It will not surprise any of you to learn that the the phrase “the Spanish Lewis and Clark” caught my imagination.
In 1776, two Franciscan friars, Francisco Atansio Domíngues and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante,(4) led an expedition across the southwest in search of a land route from Santa Fe to the new Franciscan mission at Monterey. (Note the date: Lewis and Clark began their expedition in 1804.) I had never heard of them. As Roberts discovered, most of the people who live along their route haven’t heard of them either.
In 2017, Roberts and his wife Sharon recreated D & E’s journey, guided by Escalante’s first hand account and the report of “exploratory rediscovery” created for the expedition’s bicentenary in 1976. Roberts’ account of their travels is part road trip, part historical exploration, and part love story. It’s a combination I find appealing. (This will come as no to surprise to anyone who’s been hanging out here in the Margins for a while.)
Frustration is the dominant emotion for much of Escalante’s Dream. Roberts wrestles with the inadequacies of Escalante’s account as a travel guide, the bicentennial report’s lack of academic rigor, and the absence of historical markers commemorating the expedition’s travels through the southwest. He worries over his inability to like, or even understand, the men whose footsteps he follows.
Roberts also struggles with new physical limitations, the result of a two-year battle with throat cancer. He opens the book with the admission that this six-week journey is both tame compared to the adventures that defined much of his adult life and the most extreme challenge he is now able to face.
By the book’s close, Robert’s frustration is replaced by appreciation both for the friars themselves and for the value of this “tame” adventure in the company of his wife, “the best thing we had ever done together.”
(1) Just like History in the Margins, but without the occasional stutters in the schedule.
(2) To quote the late great Leonard Bernstein: “And what’s more, baby, I can cook!”
(3) I was weirded out to learn that David Roberts is a well-known modern travel writer. In my world David Roberts is a nineteenth century Scottish artist and travel writer best known for large-scale lithographs of his travels in Egypt and Palestine.
(4) Hereafter to be referred to as D & E
A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
History, Memory, and the First Moon Landing
Several years ago* I was at the Adler Planetarium with my youngest sister. We stopped and watched a video of the first moon landing. At the end, I turned to her and said “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in color before.” She answered, “I’ve never seen this before.”
Not surprising. She was less than a month old at the time. (For the record, I had just turned eleven.)
As I write this the 50th anniversary of the first moon walk is almost upon us. I had intended to write about my memories of the moon walk. But when I sat down to write, I realized that my personal memories are about watching the moon walk, not about the event itself.
It was hot and sticky, as July days so often are in Missouri Ozarks. We were gathered in the living room, watching a small black and white television. The windows were open and a fan was blowing, because we did not yet have air conditioning. In my memory, it was afternoon—which suggests that I remember the landing rather than the walk itself. It’s possible that I have all the details wrong. (Except the heat and the humidity. That I’m positive about.)
If truth be told, I have far more vivid memories of earlier rocket launches. When they occurred on a school day, everyone in my grade school carried their chairs to the all-purpose room. Sitting in tidy rows, we watched the lead-up to the launch and then counted down with the television: 10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. BLASTOFF! My memory is hours of mind-numbing boredom ending with a few seconds of excitement.
Even in the case of those earlier launches, my memory is more about the experience of watching than the events themselves.
At some level, that is always what we remember about the big historical events that we did not actually participate in. The kind of event that punctuates our lives, that may even shape our lives from a distance, but in which we did not play an immediate role. No one asks you, “What happened when Kennedy was assassinated?” They ask, “Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy was assassinated? What were you doing?”
Those memories do not tell us about the event itself. But taken together, they tell us about the context for the event. How people reacted. Why it mattered. In short, they, too, are the stuff of history.
*And by several years, I mean at least twenty and possibly more.
__________________________
I’d like to give a shout-out to excellent works by two of my writer friends that look at the moon landing from slightly different and fascinating angles:
I Love You, Michael Collins by Lauren Baratz-Logsted is a middle-grade novel centered on the moon walk, as seen from the perspective of a 10-year-old girl whose family is falling apart. It made me laugh. It made me cry. And it made me think about the moon landing in a very different way. Highly recommended for adults as well as kids.
Erin Blakemore had the opportunity to interview Poppy Northcutt, the only woman who was part of Mission Control for the Apollo flights. It’s a good one: Inside Apollo Mission Control As Seen by the First Woman Engineer
Enjoy!
The Red Summer of 1919
I have long been familiar with the role that World War I played in the struggle for India’s independence from Great Britain. Indian regiments sailed overseas and fought alongside their Canadian and Australian counterparts. (If you visit the memorial gateway at Ypres, you will see how many of them died in defense of the empire.) Indian nationalists loyally supported the British government during the war, fully expecting that British victory would end with Indian self rule on the dominion model. Instead of self-rule, India got repressive legislation that resulted in the Amritsar Massacre.
Earlier this year, I was stunned to learn that a similar toxic combination of high hopes and racist backlash resulted in violence across the United States. Here’s the short version:
When the United States enter the war in 1917, African-American civil rights leaders responded to Woodrow Wilson’s call for national unity against the German threat. W.E. B. Dubois summed up their position when he urged African-Americans “while the war lasts forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own while fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.
Almost 400,000 African American men who served in the war suffered from the same —— that they experienced at home. The four regiments of the all-black 93rd division who served in France, each assigned to a different French division, had the new experience of being treated as equals. The regiments served heroically at the front alongside the French, and were highly decorated for their gallantry in action.
When they came home in February 1919, members of the 369th Infantry, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters, were greeted with a victory parade down Fifth Avenue in New York. But the heroic welcome was short-lived. Black soldiers came home to an atmosphere of increased racial tension fueled by competition for jobs and housing, white fears of black upward mobility and black discontent with the state of civil rights. “We return from fighting,” Dubois wrote in May 1919, “We return fighting.”
From April through November, anti-black race riots broke out in cities across America, including Washington D.C. (The count varies from 25 to 50, depending on the source.) The number of lynchings nationwide increased: ten of the victims were African-American veterans, some of whom were lynched while in uniform. Given little support from law enforcement officers at any level, African Americans took up arms to defend themselves against lynchings, bombings, and riots.
The most dramatic violence occurred in Chicago. The city’s lakefront beaches were segregated, by custom if not by law. On July 27, an African-American teenager named Eugene Williams floated his homemade wooden raft across the invisible line into a “white” area on the South Side; he was stoned and drowned. The Chicago police refused to take action against Williams’ attacker, even though witnesses identified the man who had thrown the stones. Young black men took matters into their own hands. Young white men retaliated. For a week,* mobs battled in the streets. The Illinois militia were called in to restore order. The violence left 38 people dead—23 of them black. More than 500 were injured, two-thirds of them black. Hundreds of homes and small businesses burned to the ground on the South Side, most of them black-owned.
Like the Amritsar Massacre, the Red Summer of 1919** marks a historical shift. One worth remembering.
Want to learn more?
Check out this website created by Chicago’s Newberry Library as part of a year-long program surrounding the Chicago riots in the Red Summer of 1919* Personally I’m tempted by the Bughouse Square section on July 27.
*Or maybe thirteen days.
**The name was coined by James Weldon Johnson, the field secretary of the NAACP.