Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor:

Serialized novels and short stories in early Hendricks County papers enraptured voracious readers, eager for the sensational. Heroes were popular fare, as well as tales, sometimes true, of the cowardly and criminal. Countering lies, recounting the weird and commentary filled the bill, too.

I think Nineteenth Century newspapers sought to be everything small, nearly self-sufficient communities needed.

From an excerpt of “The Boy Buccaneer” The Gazette carried in September 1881, I read of the lad, Daring Davy, cutlass in his teeth, leaping overboard from a burning frigateen just before it “blew up with a tremendous shock, like the banging of a picnic car door.”

(I do not know what a picnic car door is and when I searched on-line, I was directed to myriad used auto parts, none of which I particularly need and can ill afford.)

A blazing mainmast then struck Davy fully on the head, the rigging sending him to the bottom.

Freeing himself, he valiantly swims toward golden-haired Milly Morninglory clinging to a chicken coop adrift four miles distant across 15-foot waves, only to be distracted by a piece of coral which he pockets, and delayed by a monster shark which he blows up and a whale which he promptly guts.

The distance behind him, Davy reaches the chicken coop and just as he was to “clasp

Milly to his crime-stained but noble heart,” a giant octopus grabs his right toe. And that was it. Readers would have to wait for the next installment. Which toe? Big toe? Little toe? One of the three in between? Not until next week. There was “Shavehead” from Hardscrabble, a January 1885 tale from 1856 by Ben E. Factor, Republican correspondent. The poor scholar, clad in motley patched clothing, bald from a fever and cruelly persecuted as a result, rose to great occasion and bravely declaimed Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” winning a prize box of drawing materials.

There were dastards, such as the bigamist who deceived an innocent woman and bribed someone to fire a mine. Finally caught by 20 miners in a February 1885 issue of The Republican, he is savagely beaten before the law steps in.

“. . . so, at last the law raised what seems a bag of bones; nothing left on him but one boot and fragments of a shirt, ghastly, bleeding, covered with bruises, insensible, and to all appearances dead.” And next? To be continued next week. I’ve no idea of whom The Republican referred -- unless it was a notoriously celebrated Western outlaw – when in a May 1885 editorial it bemoaned the apparent “decline” in convicted criminals’ punishment, “or it has rather lost its force.”

A gallows-bound convicted murderer, declaring it “a pleasure to die” in that way “plainly indicates a looseness somewhere in the moral codes of the land . . .

“Life seems to be held almost in contempt, and he who commits the greatest crime is the hero of the day.”

A correspondent in February 1883 complained about “human vultures” who cornered people on the street and let loose with a barrage of “barefaced and foul lies.” They made themselves “the hero of some unusual thing.”

The correspondent wished he was “as tall as the Court House tower, with a leg as big as a walking beam, and a foot as large as the average St. Louis girl’s foot.” A swift kick would send the offenders as far as Uranus or the Big Dipper.

One night in August 1882, a man incarcerated in a Chicago bridewell was beaten to death with his own wooden leg. A cellmate “regarded as an idiot,” unscrewed it and committed the crime.

The Republican compared the case to the uxoricide of one-legged Miss Killmansegg, who was equipped with a golden lower limb. Her husband, “a rascally foreign adventurer,” had married her for her money, and he dispatched her with the “auriferous” prosthetic while she was abed. “Down came the limb with a frightful smash,” a poet-painted scene informed. The lady had been killed by her own leg; her husband was found not guilty. Precedent established, a verdict in the Chicago case could thus acquit the perpetrator, “and it must be said that it is quite in accord with many of the renderings of modern juries in murder cases.”