History on Display: An Unexpected Civil War Museum
Several months ago I received an email inviting me to speak about Civil War nurses at the Civil War Museum in Kenosha Wisconsin. Betraying the biases of someone who grew up in Missouri, with Civil War history in her back yard,* I thought it sounded a little odd. Why, I wondered, would Kenosha have a Civil War museum? But I love to stand up in front of people and talk about history,** so I shrugged my shoulders and said yes.
Unidentified soldier of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry REgiment
In fact, Kenosha has a wonderful Civil War museum with a unique focus: the Civil War as experienced in the upper Midwest. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin not have been contested ground, but they sent more than one million men to serve in the Union army and provided much the food and raw material on which that army depended. The museum looks at personal stories of loss and large scale issues of logistics–and at the places where the two meet. I was fascinated by the story of Cordelia Harvey, known as the Wisconsin Angel, who was instrumental in influencing Lincoln to build military hospitals in the north. (The stories about women in the Civil War just keep rolling in.)
The heart of the exhibits, both physically and emotionally, is a ten-minute panoramic movie titled Seeing the Elephant–the term Civil War soldiers used to describe their first experience with combat. Shown on a 360 degree screen surrounding a raised platform, Seeing the Elephant is the modern equivalent of the cycloramas that thrilled audiences in the nineteenth century. It is a powerful combination of new technology and an old idea. It packs quite a punch in ten minutes.
The museum also has a non-circulating Civil War reference library for Civil War enthusiasts interested in the Midwestern experience.
My Own True Love and I are plotting a trip back to Kenosha in the summer–the wind off the lake is a bit nippy in February. I’ll keep you posted
*You think I’m joking? The Missouri-Kansas border was the incubator in which the Civil War was born. By the time Confederate forces opened their bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861, western Missouri and eastern Kansas had already been at war for seven bloody years. Virginia was the only state to suffer through more battles in the war.
**If you’re interested in knowing where I’m speaking and what I’m speaking about, just keep an eye on the events page here and on my website, www.pameladtoler.com.
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A Travelers Tip:
If you’re looking for Americana with your breakfast or lunch, try Frank’s Diner, home of an inside-out omelet known as the “garbage plate”. My Own True Love was delighted to discover Spam on the menu. I stuck with the veggie option.
Sailing on the Etoile, or Outed in Tahiti
Over the last year, as I’ve wandered through the dusty attics and flooded basements of history in my search for women warriors I’ve stumbled across plenty of other fascinating women that I–and presumably you–had never heard of. Case in point: French botanist Jeanne Baret (1740-1807), part of the astonishingly large number of women who disguised themselves as men. In some cases to escape abusive situations at home. In other cases to gain access to better financial prospects, , more freedom, more rights, more education–more everything.
Jeanne Baret was raised in a family tradition of plant lore. She learned to identify plants and use them to treat wounds and illnesses–the kind of thing that got you labelled a wise woman if you were lucky and a witch if you weren’t. She was apparently very good at it. And unlike most village “herb women,” she was able to use her knowledge in the broader world. A young nobleman in her region, Philibert Commerçon, was a serious amateur botanist–back in the days when amateur did not disqualify you from being taken seriously as a scientist.* When he met Jeanne he was impressed with her knowledge and hired her as his teacher/assistant. They soon became lovers.
In 1766, French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville put together an official expedition of exploration. He hired Commerçon as the expedition’s botanist. Baret accompanied Commerçon on the expedition, disguised as his valet and assistant. She was his mistress, but according to Bourgaineville, she was also a skilled botanist in her own right who did her fair share of the botanical work on the expedition.** As Commerçon’s assistant, she carried the tools when they went plant hunting on land, including the heavy wooden plant-press. She may have been responsible for their most dramatic discovery: the colorful, flowering bougainvillea. (Guess who they named it after.)
Baret went undetected for more than two years in the tight quarters of the ship, surrounded by a crew of 300 men. When they landed on Tahiti, the Tahitians immediately recognized her as a woman; her trousers did not signal “male” to them.
Her travels ended when they reached the French colony of Mauritius, where Baret (now pregnant) and Commerçon were left on-shore, with the support of the French governor Pierre Poivre*** who provided a cover story to explain why Commerçon left the ship. Baret returned to France in 1774, sometime after Commerçon’s death.
In his memoir, Bougainville described Baret as a skilled botanist who did her fair share of the botanical work on the expedition. Someone in the French Navy must have agreed, because she received an unexpected pension of 200 livres a year for her botanical work on the expedition–roughly $42,000 in today’s dollars by one calculation of relative value.
Incidentally, Jeanne Baret was also the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Move over Nellie Bly.
*Unless you were female. Because.
**Also a botanist. In English, Peter Poivre would be Peter Pepper. He gained low-grade immortality in the tongue-twister “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
The Pirate Queen
I came across Barbara Sjoholm’s The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, when I was in the midst of my own search for Grace O’Malley, the sixteenth century Irish pirate who was a thorn in the side of English officials in Ireland.*
I must admit, I’m a sucker for books in which someone heads out on a quest to discover the traces of a historical personage or idea or event: say traces of Roman Britain or the trail of the Cheyenne Exodus. ** The Pirate Queen is a wonderful example of the genre–good enough that I kept reading it in little bits and pieces over the course of months until I couldn’t stand it anymore and gobbled down the last hundred pages this morning.
Sjoholm begins with the question “Where are the stories of women and the sea?” Ultimately, for reasons of language, she decided to limit her search to the British Isles and Scandinavia although she was aware that other maritime cultures also had legends about seagoing women. Beginning in Grace O’Malley’s home turf of Clare Island in Ireland and ending in Tromsø, Norway, she tells the story of her search for the sea-women of history and myth and her discovery of new aspects of her. She tells stories about women who went to sea, and women who worked on the land as part of maritime industries. Grace O’Malley was just the best known. She tells the stories of the Viking princess Alfhild who chose to “go a-viking” rather than marry and Lief Erikson’s (married) sister, who sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland. Mrs. Christian Robertson, who ran a maritime warehouse and whaling agency in the Orkney Islands in the nineteenth century. “Trouser-Beret”, a Sami woman who captained fishing boats off Norway twenty years earlier. Hundreds of Scottish “herring lasses” who came to the Orkney Islands each summer in the 1930s to work in the fish industry. She considers weather witches, sea goddesses and the statues of women staring out to sea that appear in harbors throughout Scandinavia.
The stories are well-told and interesting in their own right. But I found the story of Sjoholm tracking down the stories even more interesting. It made me want to set out to sea in search of history.
*And who will not appear in Women Warriors, alas! I planned to include her in the chapter on women commanders, but the chapter fell apart in my hands. Grace O’Malley was left an orphan.
**One of those stories I stumbled across in search of something else. After the defeat of George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the U.S Army hunted down the tribes involved. The Northern Cheyenne were relocated to the Indian Territory (aka Oklahoma). In 1878, a small group of them fled the reservation and attempted to make their way back to their home on the northern plains—an effort that turned into a 1000-mile running battle with tragic results. I’ve only dipped briefly into Alan Boyle’s Holding Stone Hands: On The Trail of the Cheyenne Exodus, but it looks like an excellent example of the genre.