Easy Chair Series

The Falsification of History

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 68-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC370

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 370, September the fourth, 1996.

In this session, Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss the falsification of history.

One of the things that we see increasingly is that people are rewriting history not to correct, but to falsify it. For example, when I was a child I was taught about George Washington and every child could recite about him first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen. Now you learn hardly anything about Washington in school and about 30 years ago I began to hear from students and occasionally met teachers who insisted that Washington was a scoundrel and then proceed to state things that were somewhat pornographic, obviously untrue, but venomous about Washington. Not only about Washington. You can hear this about any man who doesn't meet the current idea of political correctness.

Well, we have dirtied up a great deal of history. One of the things that has concerned me especially has been the false image of the West. About, oh, let me see. I forget just when it was. Oh, it was 1989 I read a very interesting book by an historian Roger D. McGrath, Gun Fighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. Well, what Dr. McGrath pointed out and I would like to read a letter from him and he says, “John Lofton asked me to send to you a copy of a book I wrote comparing frontier crime with that in America today. I made a number of points in the book Gun Fighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes, but most importantly I think I demonstrate very clearly that modern crime had absolutely no connection with the violence and lawlessness that occurred on the frontier. In the booming mining towns of Aurora and Bodie, for example, robbery, burglary and theft occurred only infrequently and rape seems not to have occurred at all. Racial violence and serious juvenile crime were absent also. The homicides that occurred almost invariably resulted from gun fights between willing combatants in a fair fight. The old, the weak, the innocent, the young and the female were not the targets of violent men. The frontier West was a far better place than any American city is today. Those on the left resist this idea because it forces them to concede that the changes they have wrought in our society during the last generation or two, have caused a precipitous decline in our civilization. I did not set out to romanticize the old West, but, nonetheless, I found the most romantic characters imaginable, men and women who were courageous, adventurous, honest, honorable, entrepreneurial and self reliant.

“One other interesting and telling point about he westerners I studied was the values they held. Although they went west to strike it rich, materialistic and to be sure, they held very dearly as clearly demonstrated by their actions such non materialistic values as courage, patriotism, loyalty and honesty.”

Now Dr. McGrath is absolutely right and when you look at western history and then the West as depicted in films and on television, it is a very different story. There were a few cities from Kansas on to Arizona that were rather wild. However, what we are not told is that those were wild towns just for a few months. They began as way stops, say, for miners or for cattle drives and the like. But very quickly businessmen and churches moved in and the church women united with the businessmen to bring about law and order. So the criminal element quickly left. They were run out of town or sent to the state penitentiary. And some of the people who were glamorized like Wyatt Earp who really would come in to a mining camp to be the protector of the house of prostitution, he had to move on regularly, because there was no need for his services. The mining towns were law abiding places.

And Dr. McGrath shows how rape was a rarity. Even Indian women were supposed to be raped at will. Such rape was exceedingly rare. Indians were well treated. Mexicans were well treated. Blacks were well treated. Bigotry was not a mark of the frontier or the mining camp.

This aspect of our history is very much suppressed. In fact, we are given the myth that we have been a wild country all our history. You read—and, of course, there have been films about the roaring 20s and what a wild, wild place Chicago was. Well, in the Capone days when Chicago was a horror to the United States as a whole there were fewer crimes committed in a year in Chicago than are committed in a month, fewer murders, fewer crimes of any kind. So the Capone Chicago compared to the present one and to any present city was a fairly law abiding place.

Now this does not mean there were not wild cities occasionally, but they were not the frontier towns by and large except very briefly. We did have a very, very wild city in San Francisco. And most people are not aware of the full extent of it. But it was a port town. It was a point of entry to get to the gold fields. And it had the influx of criminal gangs, the Sydney ducks from Australia and so on. By and large our history has been one of a law abiding country with a few spots here and there that have been bad. But we dirty up our history. We dirty up our first president. We dirty up anything we can think about because the exposé and the shock filled film or TV program are more appreciated than the truth.

[Murray] Well, when you are talking about our first president, Washington, I think you have to conjure the picture in your mind. If you take out a dollar bill and realize that this very homely looking man almost bordering on ugly with false wooden teeth and I am sure that his ... they... there was no mouth wash available in those days. I am sure that his reports of amorous adventures are way overblown. But there is a ... there is an old newspaper saying that when the legend becomes bigger than the man, print the legend. And, here again, we have the influence of the media of those days romanticizing what was going, isolated instances of violence in the... in the frontier and they were trying, I suppose, to create a... a sense of adventure to try to lure people into the unknown. Horace Greeley, Go West, Young Man, the overblown tales of riches to be found in the gold fields when probably only somewhere between five and 10 percent of the people who came out here actually did very well. The rest of them either starved to death or went home broke or went somewhere else. There was a great deal of romanticizing of frontier life and the ... the media of its day just blew it all out of proportion. They would look for anything that was out of the ordinary when, in fact, women were held in very high regard, because they were so few of them.

And I mean I hear many stories that come down through my own family and other families up here of... of... of early day women that ran boarding houses here for the miners and they were revered. I mean, they were... they would, you know, some guy who got hurt, for instance, in the mine, they would take him in and feed him until he got well. I mean, they were like an army of Florence Nightingales. The {?} Hotel here in town {?} was one of those. My wife’s great grandmother {?} over in Big Oak Flat, she ran the stage line in the Wells Fargo office and a boarding house and they were revered. And you take a look at the pictures, the tin types and some of the first motion pictures of the gold fields and you find women in long black dresses working, shoveling, you know, helping their husbands, because it was do or die. You either... there was no welfare. There was no safety net. You either found gold or you were going to be in rough shape. You were going to... you were going to have to rely on ... on somebody else’s help and ... and that thought was almost unthinkable to people. They would work 10 times harder trying to support themselves.

So the ... and the violence... there were those occasional romanticized individuals like {?}, you know, violence was done to his family. His wife was raped and murdered and, you know, he went nuts. I mean, he was.... he went psycho and just, you know, lost all control. But even he was romanticized. You know, they supposedly cut off his head and put it in a jar and displayed it, you know, in a bar room. Well, they didn’t even know if they had walking {?} head or not. You know, but it... it brought in the customers so it didn’t matter.

[off mic voice]

[Murray] But, you know, the... I ... my ... my grandmother was a child and rode in a covered wagon coming ... coming west in the Oklahoma run. She remembers going across the Oklahoma panhandle when they opened up the territory there and she was a kid in a covered wagon. And I asked her, you know, I... you know, I had seen a lot of the ... the cowboy and Indian pictures when I was a kid and I said, “Oh, it must have been terribly dangerous and so forth.” She says, “No.” She said, “Everybody wore a gun. They were very polite to each other.” But there was restraint. There was civility. There was courtesy, because everybody was up against the same adversity.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Murray] And everybody knew that they had to rely on each other to some extent to survive.

[Sandlin] Key point, yeah. Yeah.

[Murray] But there were stories like even here in Angel’s Camp before the road was paved in down town Angel’s Camp. It was ... it was ... if a woman wanted to cross the... the street in down town to... to get from one store to the other on opposite side of the street, a man would pick her up and carry her through the mud in... in... in calf deep mud across the road. I mean there was... you know, today that... if the same situation existed, I doubt that that would happen.

[Sandlin] All the women... all the women are liberated and the men would never want to do it.

[Murray] Yeah. Well, or would be afraid you would get... they would get knocked out or something.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Murray] Get kicked.

[Rushdoony] You mentioned Joachim Murietta. What we nee to realize, that was blown up out of all proportion. It was not a representative incident. Rapes of that kind were very, very rare.

When I was still a student back in the 30s I did a great deal of reading on California history and the Indians and the thing that startled me was that when the miners came here, of course, white women were a rarity. In fact, if they heard one was coming, all work would stop and people would line up at the sight of a woman.

[Murray] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] And they would take their hats off...

[Murray] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] ...when she passed by. Well, the Indian tribes were decimated for a number of years because every Indian woman between the ages of 14 and over 40 even had no trouble finding a white man who would marry her. And the sons and daughters of the golden West, your old Californians all have a great deal of Indian blood. It is diluted by now, but that is how they started, because there were very, very few American women in California in those days. And it was some time before any came.

So that, as a student, interested me and amazed me greatly because the common stories were beginning then to appear in popular fiction about the abuse of the Hispanic or Mexican and Indian women. Of course, the biggest tear jerker, oh, in the 20s, I believe, or early 30s was the film Ramona. Well, the reality was very different. The white men here treated the Indian women with great respect. They married them. They made them into the mothers of the first generation Californians. It is a very different story from what we hear.

[M. Rushdoony] I have often asked... told my students regarding the Indians, I said that there were... there were relatively few compared to modern population of the United States, but we didn’t kill them out. They ... they intermarried and they are still around.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[M. Rushdoony] It is just that they go by every name imaginable. And so I asked them. I said, “How many of you have English blood in you?” You know, half the classroom or more raised their hand. Half are, you know, have Scotch or Scottish blood in them mixed. Some of the... how about German? Go through. And I said, “How many know that there is some Indian blood in you?” And most of {?}. That is what happened to them. We didn’t kill them off. {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is very, very true.

[Murray] Yeah. Sure. Quite {?}

[Rushdoony] One anthropologist a few years back said... attacked that myth. And he said, “If you want to know where the most of the Indians are, just stand at any street corner in a major city. A fair percentage of those who walk by you will have Indian blood.

[Murray] Yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] But it is interesting. Anthropologists say that doesn't count. They have lost the culture and so we have killed off the American... the... the culture and it is... it is tantamount to genocide. It doesn't matter whether those people are perfectly happy and content in their way their lives are now.

[Sandlin] Yeah, yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] That is not the good enough for the anthropologist.

[Sandlin] Exactly.

[Murray] {?} eating bugs and grubbing for roots and {?}

[M. Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] Doing a little better now and...

[Sandlin] Well, I was going to mention just quickly another era that is really the object of, Rush, what you have called the falsification of history is the discovery of American and Christopher Columbus.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] And that sort of thing. I mentioned that. It is on my mind because on the... those of you that receive the Chalcedon Report, I believe it is the September issue has an excellent article by Brian Edwards on that very topic, on colonial intent.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] As though he was here to enslave people and rape the land and cared about nothing but making money.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] But anyone who reads his diaries knows just the opposite. He was a godly man trying to do what was right to do.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[M. Rushdoony] In fact, it was not really politically correct to make too much of a big deal about the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] Because they had to spend most of their time apologizing for Columbus and, therefore, they... not a great deal was made of it.

[Murray] When I was a kid they had Columbus Day celebrations in San Francisco. And they actually got out there in a little boat with a sail on it and some guy dressed up looked like Christopher Columbus and he would walk ashore at ocean... at a marina down there in San Francisco and the... the Italians, most of them who were very wealthy who owned shares in the Sunset Scavenger Company which was a... the garbage collection company in San Francisco, had bought shares, you know. When they came to this country they were offered the opportunity to work for shares. And as the company grew they became immensely wealthy. Well, they would all be out standing there at marina in San Francisco watching this Columbus day celebration and it was... it was probably the biggest event in San Francisco.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Across the country Columbus Day when I was growing up was a major holiday. Now it is nothing.

[Sandlin] I think one reason that he is singled out for such hatred is he was a man that was, indeed, exercising godly dominion. He wasn’t perfect.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] But he was exercising godly dominion and those who hate the Christian faith despise that with a passion.

[Rushdoony] He was an interesting man, too, in that the evidence points to his being a converted Jew. And he actually took someone who was fluent in Hebrew along with him thinking he might encounter the Jews of the 10 lost tribes or the Israelites in the East Indies.

[M. Rushdoony] He wanted to refinance... he wanted to find the wealth of the orient because he wanted to finance another crusade to capture the holy land.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[M. Rushdoony] You don’t hear about that too often.

[Sandlin] No.

[Rushdoony] And he felt that he was going to fulfill the prophecies of Isaiah carrying the faith to the uttermost isles of the earth.

[M. Rushdoony] I believe that as Christian historian John Eismo actually wrote a book on Columbus and Cortez.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[M. Rushdoony] That then dealt with just... it is largely a number of citations and quotes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[M. Rushdoony] ...about these men.

[Sandlin] Generally American... the Indians were treated quite well in colonial history.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[M. Rushdoony] In fact, it was to the advantage to the Indians to deal with the settlers and they liked being in close association because of the trading potential and very early on the idea of having the English as their ally against the ... their ... their Indian enemies was... was very important. Of course, that is why the Iroquois confederate... confederation became aligned with the English early on and the Algonquin became aligned with the French, because that was an early on they... they picked... they sort of picked sides and picked their European allies.

The... some of the greatest injustices, not to surprising of our Indian relations came in when it became an area of government bureaucracy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[M. Rushdoony] And the government was dealing with them at... at very remote... and Washington was dealing with Indians hundreds and hundreds of miles away that they... that the real injustices occurred. {?} not early in history.

[Murray] Robert ... Robert Service wrote Tales of the North about the Klondike...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] ... big, thousands of guys went up there around 18, I guess 1890s and it was the Klondike gold rush and everybody... he romanticized, but it was brutal. I mean, absolutely brutal. You read some of the diaries of the men that went there and the conditions were just unreal. I doubt if there is one in a thousand men today that could survive what those people went through. And very few of them found any wealth, but it was the adventure that drove them. But Robert Service himself was a bank teller. He never turned a shovel full of dirt, but he wrote about it as if he had done it all. And I think there is... there was a lot of that. There were... weren’t there, Rush, there were some penny novels or...

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Murray] ...that writers in those days used to crank out that romanticized the old West.

[Rushdoony] Dime novels.

[Murray] Dime novels of the...

[Rushdoony] They created a vast of myth. Their readers wanted excitement. And television and the films have picked up on those dime novels.

One scholar in the past 10, 15 years wrote an account of the mining camps in this area. And what he pointed out in his very interesting book was the miners would spend their Sundays writing letters home and reading their Bible. They would welcome the circuit riders who had come through to preach. They were anything but the wild characters they have been depicted as being. I think the evidence of that we have all noticed on highway four as you go down towards Stockton. Before you leave the hills off to the left there is an oak tree with a fine iron fence around it and a grave with a beautiful stone there. And it is in memory of an Englishman who came here and then took sick and died a long, long ways from home. And so his fellow miners, at no small expense, because he had no one here and they didn’t know his family back in England, put up that fence and that stone in his memory.

Well, that tells you something about the 49ers. They were not the wild characters they are portrayed as having been.

[Murray] No, it is not as lawless, because they very quickly organized, before there was any, you know, U. S. Marshalls or sheriffs or anything else. They formed mining districts and, boy, if you... if you stole from somebody, I mean, back in those days you could leave your... your bag of gold sitting on your table and go to town and come back and it still be there, because you didn’t dare steal in those days. They would... they would hang you right now.

[Rushdoony] Back in the mid 1970s when we moved up here, about that time I meet someone who was an old timer in this area and he told me, he said something that was a law abiding area, the gold rush country. And he said, “I know a little bit about the real crime that occurred there.” And he said it was by surveyors. He said, “In those days if you bought a property, a piece of property, you had a surveyor come in from some distance.” He would come up and he would take a look at the weather and the terrain and how muddy it was and he would invent your property lines.

[Murray] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] And then hurry for the nearest bar to warm up with some liquor. So he said there are very often, especially with the old pieces of property, real problems trying to establish the meaning of the original description of the property. But he said apart from that, it was a law abiding area.

[Murray] Well, they didn’t, you know, they used ... they used trees...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] ...quite often for property corners. And, of course, a tree get hit by lightning and burn up or something, it is not there anymore. You know, they didn’t... they apparently didn’t go to the trouble of driving in iron pikes or anything. They would say so many feet on a northerly course. They, you know, take a compass with them and they would lay off a course from a tree to a rock and so forth and so many feet down the other way until they described the entire property. But a lot of times these landmarks were gone. And they had frequent fires up here. You know, every time the lightning goes over these hills as we have seen just recently with all these fires, well, this is not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for a long time and all of these... a lot of these landmarks that used to be property corners have gone. They put up posts, wooden posts, because that was all that they had.

[Sandlin] You know, another object of revisionism is in the founding of our country itself, the idea that the founders were all enlightened humanists which, of course, is a lie.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] I... I ... I want to urge people to read some of the works of {?} Bradford on that point. He has demonstrated and, of course, also, Rush, is this Independent Republic: A Nature of American System, but demonstrated the... the strong Christian faith of the vast majority of the ... of the men who founded this country and it is... it is a secular humanist assertion picked up by some misled Christians that the country was founded by people who wanted to overturn Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

[Rushdoony] Well, all you would have to do is to get an atlas and look at the old place names, Bethlehem, Salem. One name after another taken out of the Bible.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And others that reflect biblical perspective, Philadelphia, city of brotherly love and so on, Salem.

[M. Rushdoony] Providence.

[Rushdoony] Providence.

[Sandlin] Providence.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] Sure, absolutely.

[Murray] Well, people that traveled west in covered wagons had to discard items, particularly as they came over the mountain passes, because they had to winch these wagons down sheer rock cliffs. So you didn’t take any unnecessary stuff with you. And the... the deserts that they crossed and the plains that they crossed is littered. Today there are people go out with metal detectors and find remnants of things that people cast off, baby buggies and odds and ends that they ... that weren’t absolutely essential. But the one book that was essential was the Bible. It is the last thing that they would give up. If they had to make a choice out of if they had three or four books or a dozen books, they would... if they had to discard something, they would discard the other books, but they would not discard the Bible.

[Sandlin] Yes, that is right.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the things that marked California, too, and other states as well, the high percentage of the founders who had a Christian faith. The University of California was founded as a church college. It wasn’t the only one. But these people would come out into a strange area, a wilderness and the first thing they thought of was starting churches and then schools.

[Murray] Well, it was the hub of social activity. And it was a stabilizing influence on the community and it was a mechanism, a means by which they could dispense charity without making it on, you know, on a personal basis, because people were, you know, extremely sensitive to accepting charity because people were of much more self reliant in those days and they... they just hated to be, you know, to be beholding to anyone but the church, because they knew it wasn’t a personal gift, you know, they understood... they truly understood the meaning of charity.

[Rushdoony] Well, there is a book now, a very superior book written by a Marxist, Genovese, the historian. Dr. Genovese in writing this book on the south says that it is important to read the great southern Calvinistic theologians in order to understand the south. The same can be said for other parts of the country. The influence of Jonathan Edwards is known, but what about Bellamy and Hopkins, two of his followers? Their influence was very important. Hopkins founded the first anti slavery society. We are not aware of the contribution of godly men to the development of this country.

[Sandlin] And, of course the famous Mathers and the so m any others in the history of the United States.

[Rushdoony] One of the things we need to get back to and I trust the Christian schools will in time, is the rewriting of history. What they have done is to give us so far a rather conservative picture and a more patriotic picture of American history than the public school text books do.

However, they have not gone back to the basic material to see what the Christian character was.

[Sandlin] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] And this is an important thing. We hear a great deal about the pioneers who moved west, but how many history books tell us about the circuit riders? The circuit riders were Christians, pastors whose church, so to speak, was a thousand miles of territory. And they covered that. They not only covered it from one end of the United States to the other, but later on they moved up to Alaska and covered Alaska.

Well, these people were the only peoples many, many people would see during most of the year. I know in my own time I remember one such man, Adam Shriver, a fine old pastor who would get in his car and go from one mining camp and one isolated ranch to another all over Nevada. Everything outside of the cities was his parish, the entire state. And he would bring them Christian materials to teach their children, hold worship and sometimes in very strange places in mining camps. But he was constantly on the go.

Now here was a very gracious and superior man who in our time you wouldn’t see outside of a cushy urban pulpit and yet Adam Shriver were drive here, there and everywhere often roll out his sleeping bag and sleep on the side of the road and then fix his own breakfast in the morning before he drove on. His life story, if someone could have written it down and there was just a little paper back book about him, would have been a dramatic one. But those were the men that civilized the country.

I know once when I was on the Indian reservation I drove over the mountains into the Columbia Range and there were two ranches there and then on the side of a mountain this young man with his wife and two sons had a little mining claim there. Nobody else came in there except a few deer hunters during deer season. But they knew Adam Shriver. And, of course, I left material there in his place to spare him the trip.

These were the me who tamed America. There were countless numbers of them. Their importance is great because some of them would occasionally be sent to Congress. Everyone in their district, when the area became a state trusted these circuit riders more than anyone else. And the would elect them, send them to Congress. Most of them wouldn’t serve too long because they wanted to get back to their work, but they would for a time represent these isolated ranchers, farmers, loggers, whatever they were. It is a part of our history that has been neglected. And it is a very colorful and exciting part.

[Murray] It wouldn’t be allowed to ... to dot hat nowadays because all of the public parks belong to the state and...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] ... governmental entity and the ACLU would immediately cry for separation of ... no... no religious observances on the... on government owned property.

I just... I was thinking the other day, you know, San Francisco, how far we have come. When I was a kid, everybody looked forward to going up to Mount Davidson when they had that big cross for the Easter services. Now they want to tear it down. I mean, there are thousands of people who would go up there on Easter morning and watch, you know, sunrise and have sunrise services up there. And we thought that was the most exciting thing that happened all year.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, the ...

[Murray] And we would walk up there. It was almost like a...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] ...like a religious pilgrimage every year. We would walk from home and it was miles to get up there, start out about 3:30 in the morning.

[Rushdoony] You still see relics even here of the circuit riders. Consider, for example, that in Angel’s Camp there is a little congregational church, the oldest church there. And Murphys, there is another little congregational church. And if you go through these old mining camps you will see a lot of them. Now they are in the hands of Modernists and too often a woman preacher because a man doesn't... they don’t want to go to these out of the way places. But those were started by congregational circuit riders who in the old days covered every little mining camp. And those men in those days were hard core Calvinists.

[M. Rushdoony] We have to give credit where credit is due, too. A lot of the circuit riding was done by Methodists.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[M. Rushdoony] Even though they weren’t Calvinists, I would prefer Methodists of my generation to many of the Calvinists today, because they had abiding faith.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Methodists were very, very good in the border states.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...and the South and Texas, that whole area. They did remarkable work and some of them were rather amazing characters. I am trying to think of the name of the one man...

[Sandlin] Wasn’t Peter Cartwright one of the...

[Rushdoony] Peter Cartwright. Peter Cartwright, an amazing man. You might be able to find his autobiography in some old used bookstore. But Peter Cartwright was a giant of a man. He served a term in Congress and he once when a storm was brewing came to this isolated cabin, went in and the woman was something of a shrew. She did not welcome a guest. And so she got far more obvious and open in her remarks which showed her antagonism to the faith as well as to Peter Cartwright. And the man was very, very obviously embarrassed. So Peter Cartwright said something innocuous such as, “Excuse me a moment and if you don’t mind...” And he went over, picked up the woman bodily with his two hands, went to the door, opened it put her out there and then barred the door.

It started to rain and she was screaming in a total rage as profane as could be and the husband was very nervous and upset and Peter Cartwright said, “Pay her no mind. Enjoy your food.” And went on eating and finally she was pleading for mercy and he called out, “Do you promise to behave?” Oh, yes. I don’t mean just tonight. I mean for the rest of your life? You are not going to embarrass your husband and so on. And he got every kind of promise from her.

And finally he let her in and told her to go over the fire... go over to the fire and dry herself out. And apparently she was a good woman after that, because she didn’t know when Peter Cartwright might check up on her and might not happen the next time.

But I know I told John Lofton about one of the wildest of the characters among circuit riders, Lorenzo Dow and the Dow chemical corporation. He was one of the original fathers of that family although it was a few generations later that they developed into a wealthy corporation.

And you can find his collected works here and there in one fat volume and it is a treasure trove. I told John Lofton a few stories about Lorenzo Dow once which he greatly enjoyed. So he looked here and there for a copy and he found one but it was so expensive he couldn’t afford it and he went to Ohio to preach at some church and went to a used book store and in the discard bin of things that were reduced to 50 cents or less, he found The Collected Works of Lorenzo Dow, is fat volume for 50 cents. And he let out a whoop of joy and the owner’s wife came over and said, “Did you find a treasure?” And he held it up. Lorenzo Dow. And she said, “Oh, yes, that is a good book, but we had it here at a high price. We have had it for years. We reduced it. We knew it was an important work but it is of no use to us if no one will buy it. So we finally put it in that discard bin for 50 cents. The next stop would have been the dump.”

Well, Lorenzo Dow... oh, speaking of the Peter Cartwright incident with the woman, he became a widower and he remarried a somewhat younger woman and found that he really had inherited a mother-in-law as well. So he had two women in the house. And they were out to civilize Lorenzo Dow and he found it very trying being nagged by two women. So finally in disgust he went out and wrote on a board, “Women rule here,” by... on his gate. And the neighbor across the way asked him to wait a minute. And he went and got a board and wrote on it, “They do here, too.”

But Lorenzo on one occasion, if I may digress a bit, because this is a part of our history that you don’t encounter anymore. Well, I will tell a couple of stories about Lorenzo. On one occasion he stopped at this inn and someone during the evening came from their room. It was a primitive long cabin in. Something had been stolen and that was rare on the frontier. And Lorenzo said, “No problem.” And he said to the inn keeper, “Go out to your hen house and bring in a chicken.” They brought it in and he said, “Douse the lamp.” And he said, “Each of you line up now by this table where this hen is squatting. And as you go by when I give you the notice to do so, each of you pat the hen on the back. And the one of you who is a thief God is going to make that hen cackle and reveal who he is.”

Well, what he did the minute they doused the lights was to go over to the stove and get some soot and put it all over the hen’s back. Everyone went by. The hen did not cackle so he told the inn keeper’s wife to light the lamp. And then he said, “Let me see your hands.” And one man had clean hands. He said, “There is the thief.”

That was Lorenzo. On another occasion he was speaking at a camp meeting out in the open where a stand had been rigged for the speaker and there were, oh, between five and 10,000 people who were coming to camp out there and listen to the preaching. And Lorenzo Dow when he was looking over the facilities to make sure everything was the way he wanted it, heard a little black boy, a slave boy blowing a little trumpet a little ways off and he got an idea. And he told the boy what to do, to get up in the tree and he was going to pay him so much that he would get up in the tree before folks came, get up there with his trumpet. And when he gave a certain signal he was to blow for all he was worth.

So he preached on that occasion on the last judgment and it was a fire and brimstone sermon. And he said, “And what if Gabriel’s horn were to blow this very evening? Are you prepared to meet your maker? Are you going to be one of the redeemed? Or are you going to go to hell for all eternity?”

And he really worked them up to a fine pitch. And hit again on the trumpet of Gabriel and gave the signal and the black boy blew for all he was worth and they say there was a... one gigantic moan as people keeled over and {?} and when they came to and realized it was a little black slave boy they wanted to kill him. And Lorenzo Dow bellowed out, “Don’t lay a hand on that boy. If a little black boy blowing his trumpet scares you half to death, how much more will Gabriel on the day of judgment unless you repent?”

He had the biggest crowd come forward that evening he had ever had.

Well, there are so many stories like that about Lorenzo Dow. And he was one of a great number. One of the wildest characters was a cowboy evangelist in Texas and Arizona, but that is another story.

Anything any of you want to add now before we close?

You see, here is a great part of American history. Think of the things that could be written about it. There was one book written about 10, 15 years ago, maybe 20. It was about the frontier circuit riders. The title was, I believe, Pistol in Pocket, Bible in Hand and it was an account of these peoples. There was some interest in the time of maybe having a television series of these true stories, but it fell through.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.