The Life of a Book That Survived Two Wars and a Great Lake

Sometimes the history of a book can be as interesting as the book itself. I recently came across such a book --  a book that reveals its story through names, dates and places written inside and placed on labels.  There is even an interesting piece of paper stuck between the pages -- but I will get to that later.. The name of the book?  Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, ’54 ‘55 by Elisha Kent Kane, Volume II copyright 1857.

The first owner of the book could have been the U. S. Government, and if not, then likely John James Abert, Chief of the Topographical Bureau at Washington, and colonel in command of that branch of engineers.  Abert is associated in the supervision of many earlier national engineering works and map making projects.  It would be appropriate that he would have a copy of Elisha Kent Kane’s book.

John James Abert

Inside the front of book a light yellow label has been adhered, most likely being the label used when this book was shipped from Washington where Abert was.  In the right upper right hand corner:  “On Official Business , Bureau Topopgraphy,” then in different handwriting J. J. Abert., Col. Corps. T E. (Colonel of the Corps of Topographical Engineers).   This yellow label has a postmark dated Feb. 9, 1857 and says “Washington Free”.

Close-up of the postmark

It appears to be the actual handwriting of Abert on this envelope when compared to a sample of Abert’s signature found online in a couple of places.  Here is one I found in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1897. 

Abert may have even known Elisha Kent Kane. After all, they were both explorers in their own fields.   An interesting aside is that Kane died seven days after the postmark found in this book, on February 16, 1857, at the age of 36, while in Havana traveling for his health.

Now we come to the second owner of this book, Joseph Adams Potter. 

Joseph Adams Potter

The yellow label is addressed to Adjutant  J.A. Potter, Survey of the N W Lakes, Detroit Michigan.  J A Potter’s name is also written on the title page of the book, along with the date, 1857.  At the time Potter received the book he was working as a surveyor on Lake Superior, under then Captain George Meade, a name with which you may be familiar, because he later was a Major General during the Civil War.   And this surveyor would also became an officer  -- a brevet general --  and a quartermaster in the Union army during the Civil War.  Possibly Abert sent Potter this book since his bore similarities to Potter’s own work as a surveyor in the north waters.

The Civil War arrived, and during the war the now quartermaster Potter moved around as soldiers are apt to do. Did the book go with him?  

When the war ended Potter continued to act in the capacity of a quartermaster, and in 1867 found himself stationed in Galveston, Texas.  Much to his bad luck, there was a yellow fever epidemic while he was there, and he was not spared. One day he was attacked by the fever and on the evening of the third day he was pronounced dying.  He had a young wife and an infant son, and they both caught the fever, too.  The night Potter was pronounced dying the fever took a favorable turn, and he lived.  When he was well enough to leave his bed twelve day later, he found that his wife, his commanding general, and his two body servants were all dead, and no one left but his little boy.  His house was in the hands of servants and strangers, and every trunk and drawer ransacked, and many valuables gone.  But not the book.

Was the book with Potter in Galveston?  We’ll never know for sure, but we can surmise the next and third owner, is Potter’s son H. W. Potter (Howard), the little boy who survived the Yellow Fever.  His label is in the front of the book.  H. W. grew up, married, and had two daughters who were born in Streator Illinois.  And when H.W. came to Streator the book must have come with him, some time in the late 1800’s.

Now we come to the fourth owner.  This is F. L. (Frank) Angier.  Just how did he get it? My guess is that he bought it as a used book, or perhaps even was given it.  A bookplate in the front of the book shows that Angier lived or worked in Kangley, Illinois, which is not far away from Streator, Illinois, where H W Potter lived.

Angier was also in the army, a Colonel during the Spanish American War, and his name is written in the book, along with Major General Matthew Calbraith Butler’s name.

My speculation is that during the Spanish American War Angier worked for Major General Matthew Calbraith Buter.  Butler’s name is in the same handwriting as Angier’s and it doesn’t appear to be Butler’s handwriting, and so was probably written there by Angier.

Butler has an interesting past, too. From South Carolina, he is a famous Civil War Confederate cavalry officer, related to prominent people of the south, has Revoluntary War heroes as ancestors, and married the daughter of Governor F. W. Pickens.  After the Civil War he was elected to the United State Senate, and later appointed a major-general in the volunteer army of the United States, for the war with Spain.  That’s when this book must have been in his hands, when  he was at Camp Alger, Virginia.

Matthew Calbraith Butler

After the Spanish American war Angier must have retained the book for some time.  Inside the book I found a little slip of paper, a campaign advertisement if you will, for the 24^th Annual Encampment of the U. S. W. V. (United Spanish War Veterans).  It says . “F.L. Angier, Let us vote for ‘Friday’ on Saturday.  Angier ran for some office during this encampment that probably took place in 1923.  This means Angier owned the book for at least 25 years, and maybe longer.

So there you have it.  A book with ties to one great lake and at least two wars, and some people of note in America’s past.

You may ask, how is it that I have this book.  Serendipity I suppose. It was a part of a group of books that sat in an old railroad depot in the Midwest, not far from Streator, untouched, for many years, and finally sold at auction a few months back.  Will the book’s history revealed end here?  I don’t know, but it has come a long way already.

Sutures for a Surgeon's Journal

A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts is a book originally published in 1816 anonymously, but well known at the time to have come from Benjamin Waterhouse, the first doctor to vaccinate for Small Pox in the United States.  But that’s a different story. 

The book was a best seller when originally published. And it turns out that Waterhouse didn’t write the book, but instead edited it.  The actual author was another American surgeon named, Amos Babcock who served on a ship during the War of 1812, and was taken prisoner by the British.  Subsequently, he spent time as a prisoner of war in a number of localities, the most notorious and last being Dartmoor Prison, in Britain. 

Dartmoor – at the time the name alone sent chills down a grown man’s spine. If he were British it was because the place was on the moor and was considered a place of evil.  Babcock adequately describes this:

This moor affords nothing for subsistence or pleasure. Rabbits cannot
live on it. Birds fly from it, and it is inhabited, according to the
belief of the most vulgar, by ghosts and daemons ; to which will now
doubtless be added, the troubled ghosts of the murdered American
prisoners. . . It is a fact that the market people have not sufficient
courage to pass this moor in the night. They are always sure to leave
Princetown by day light, not having the resolution of passing this
dreary, barren and heaven-abandoned spot in the dark. Before the bloody
massacre of our countrymen, this unhallowed spot was believed, by
common superstition, to belong to the Devil.

If he were French or English, it was because of its reputation for being a prison  with cramped and deplorable conditions.  

Most Americans today probably don’t know that around 1,500 Americans died at Dartmoor during the War of 1812 while prisoners of war. -- mostly from malnutrition and disease.

Babcock arrived at the Dartmoor prison October 1814, and he was there the day of an event called the Dartmoor Massacre of April 6, 1815. Seven Americans died and 31 were injured that day.  The war was essentially over when this happened.  The Treaty of Ghent had been signed.  Ships were on the way to bring the Americans home.  He includes official documents about the event and also tells what he witnessed of it, before, during and after.

I recently acquired a first edition copy of this fascinating book.  Because the Dartmoor Massacre is probably most famous event the writer describes, a foldout diagram showing the layout of Dartmoor Prison is the book’s  frontispiece,  It is referred to a number of times in the text.  I can imagine readers perusing the book and then going to the front to look at the diagram, folding it out, and then folding it back out – and then going back to the text.  That, I imagine, is why a large section of the frontispiece is missing from my copy, and I suspect quite a few other antique copies of this work, when you can find if and when you can find one.

My copy, however,  does still have the central panel of the Dartmoor Prison frontispiece.  Even that has been ripped in half, but painstakingly sewed back to together with tiny stitches.  It must have been sewn back together many years ago, probably sometime later in the 19^th century.

Why would someone go to such trouble?  One can only guess. The events were much closer to those 19^th century readers than to us.  We barely know or would care that the British ever held Americans prisoners of war on their native soil.    But Americans reading the book in 1820 probably read the book eagerly to know what the world was like – as seen by one man’s eyes, a Young Man from Massachusetts.

A picture of the frontispiece shown Dartmoor Prison as can be found at history.navy.mil

The frontispiece sutured up.

Why Is That Monkey Boiling a Cat, or "Pleasant Pictures"

I recently came across an antique children’s book called “Pleasant Pictures”, published in 1896 by Donohue, Henneberry & Co..  There is no author attributed to the book.  Many of the illustrations are signed by Harrision Wier, a famous British illustrator and cat breeder of some repute. Other illustrators are also represented in this book, but I can’t identify who they are.

The illustrations in this book cover a variety of themes, and they all either contain animals or children.  However, some of the pictures seem very strange, even disturbing, especially considering this is a children’s book.

Here are some examples:

Poor Puss is in bad luck.  The monkey has taken a notion that Puss ought to have a bath, and so while the cook is out of the kitchen, Mr. Monkey douses Miss Puss into a kettle of water that has just been placed over the fire.  

The  poor little puppy is dead and its mamma has dug it a little grave in the garden as is going to bury it.  See how sad the poor mother look sad she stops in her work to gaze for the last time on her dearly loved and lost little pup.  This is one of the Harrison Wier illustrations in the book.

Pussy is moving to another town from that where she and her kittens have been living.  She is carrying her kittens one at a time, and will be tired enough by the time she has her whole family moved.  She has moved all the kittens but one, and that one seems not to like being left along very much. This is another Harrision Wier illustration.

The back cover has an illustration of two little girls sitting on the floor consoling each other. A cat sits on a chair above them.  On the floor behind the Girls is a bird cage, and scattered around them are bird parts.

Perhaps the readers of this book were expected to be closer to the possibility of death. It seems that today we want nothing more than to protect our children from anything bad and evil.  Perhaps that was true in 1896 as well.  Maybe death wasn’t considered bad and evil by the writer and illustrators of this book, but the way of the world, that even a child had to live with on a daily basis.   Did the publishers of this book want to indoctrinate their young readers into the world that included death as a matter-of-fact event, or were they simply telling young readers about reality as they saw it?

Glasses, Vision and Charisma

I live in Ronald Reagan's Boyhood Home -- Dixon, Illinois.  Reagan's 100th birthday just passed, and there was quite a celebration here.  -- a gala ball, commissioned music, a specially commissioned statue and ... a book.  It's a book that could only come from Ronald Reagan's boyhood home, published by the local media company.  It’s called Ronald Reagan, The Dixon Connection. It is filled with photographs of Reagan, mainly taken while he was in Dixon growing up, and when he returned on visits as a movie star, or as a politician. The photographs are rather interesting to peruse, whether you are from Dixon, or not.

One event that brought Reagan back home was Injun Summer Days, August 1950.  While here, he dedicated the opening of the local pool, a new wing of the local hospital and a softball diamond.  He stayed at Walgreens estate, founder of the Walgreens drug store chain.  But what he is remembered for during this visit particularly is riding a Palomino horse in a parade.  He cut quite a figure that day, even in the plain clothes he wore.

Because I live from Dixon, I've seen a number of photographs over the years of Reagan atop that palamino horse.  Many local citizens went to the parade with their cameras to see Reagan and the 600 horseback riders accompanying him.  And those pictures turn up from time to time.   What strikes me as interesting is that he was wearing glasses that day.  You don’t find too many photographs of Reagan wearing eyeglasses.

And yet, on the back cover of the book Ronald Reagan, The Dixon Connection, is a photograph of Ronald Reagan on that day –without eyeglasses – probably for a special photo opportunity.  Little did he know how many photographs would be taken of him that day with his glasses on.

Glasses or no glasses, Reagan was a man with vision and charisma, two important qualities for somebody aspiring to the highest office of the country.  Whether you agree with his politics or not, you can’t argue that he exuded these qualities.  And you can almost imagine him as Mr. President even in those parade photographs back from 1950.

This book is for sale at:  Amazon: Ronald Reagan the Dixon Connection