How to Have Healthy Skin

HOW TO HAVE HEALTHY SKIN

LOOK carefully at the products you use, particularly if you have `sensitive' or problem skin. A reputable company will happily tell you precisely what is in its products. If you're not sure what an ingredient is, ask. Rhaya Jordan suggest: `In general, if it's long and difficult to pronounce, it's probably too unpleasant to put on your skin.'

BE wary of highly perfumed or coloured products. The chemicals used to make products look and smell nice often cause the biggest problems.

BE wary of products which offer a quick fix. If you force your skin to do anything fast, it will undoubtedly rebound on you. And beware of products which `force' wonder ingredients into the skin.

BE gentle with your skin: don't rub it and don't vigorously exfoliate it. The outer layer of the skin is there for a reason, so treat it carefully.

MAKE sure your skin is really clean. Adopt a thorough but gentle cleansing routine, morning and night. Avoid products which strip the skin of its natural oils.

AVOID using a heavy moisturiser at night, because it won't allow the skin to carry out its natural nightly detox - rest and repair. Instead, use a light cream or herbal gel.


DRINK more water. Although experts dispute whether it actually `plumps out' the skin, there is no doubt that drinking fresh water helps eliminate toxins.

TAKE an anti-oxidant supplement. Biocare's Cellguard Forte is a good high-quality antioxidant supplement, while Edge is a pleasant-tasting herbal tea packed full of anti-oxidant herbs.

MAKE-UP is as full of chemicals as skincare products. Always try to limit the time you wear foundation, in particular, and make sure you always remove all make-up thoroughly.

Gardening is especially suited to Americans

The term gardening is an inclusive one, meaning both ornamental gardening and vegetable gardening. In American popular culture, however, a reference to a garden more often than not means a vegetable garden. And though horticulture and gardening mean the same thing, horticulture is generally used to refer to ornamental gardening. Ornamental gardening is an important part of American culture, but it is the vegetable garden that is the major preoccupation of many Americans.

Gardening is a topic of conversation almost as popular as the weather. In the fall, individuals ask, "Is your garden ploughed?" In the winter, gardeners discuss seed catalogs. And in the early spring they begin to till the soil and plant seeds. And though the fundamental purpose of a garden is utilitarian--to grow food--in American culture gardening is more nearly a recreation. It is one of the major sporting propositions in this country.

Gardening is especially suited to Americans. It permits American individualism and self-reliance to thrive, and it also allows for creativity. Producing a successful, well-arranged garden is artistry. But because gardening is the ultimate challenge, it remains popular because it satisfies the American desire to compete. The competition works on levels from the spiritual to the frivolous. A gardener competes with the mystery of birth. A seed is planted in the dark soil, appearing at its own secretly appointed time, beginning anew the cycle of the seasons and philosophically the cycle of birth, growth, death, and growth again. The gardener competes with the elements and unpredictable weather conditions. Both drought and excessive rain can damage a crop; hail storms can beat plants into the ground; strong winds can bend and break plants. The gardener is at the mercy of insects and plant diseases, competing by means of the miracle of chemicals or age-old methods of outwitting his adversaries. And the gardener competes with himself--with his accomplishments in last season's garden.

Gardening in the Americas began with the Indians in North, Central, and South America. Three of the most popular garden items in the United States are indigenous to Central and South America: corn, called maize by the American Indians; tomatoes, called tomatl or xtomatl by the Mayans 8 and potatoes, called papas by the pre-Inca Indians of the Andes mountains. 9 North American settlers, beginning with the Pilgrims, brought European seeds and cultivation methods with them, but gardening began here long before their arrival, and it began elsewhere in the world long before that.

Gardening as people currently define it has a long ancestry, reaching back to the Middle East, where the first plots of what can be called cultivations appeared. According to Anthony Huxley in An Illustrated History of Gardening, the earliest cultivators apparently lived around Jericho in Palestine about 8000 B.C. The cultivation of such plots seems to have evolved both from the wild grains, which grew in the area, and from seeds and pits casually spat out or dropped by persons having eaten wild fruits. These seeds eventually reappeared as trees, growing within the areas of habitation and leading finally to selected planting of grains and fruit trees as well as seeds collected from wild plants. Gardens then moved throughout the Middle East and eventually to Europe through Greece. Huxley approximates the dates for organized cultivation in Greece at sometime before 6000 B.C.; in Egypt and Crete, 5000 B.C.; China, 5000 B.C., and in South America, 2500 B.C.

Gardening even has its own folklore and its own heroes, such as Johnny Appleseed, Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, and Euell Gibbons, to name a few.

Most newspapers, even weeklies, have a regular gardening column, and many general interest magazines also feature gardening articles. But when a subject is on both video and audio, its time in popular culture has come.

The car as a vehicle for recreational purposes

Almost from the beginning, Americans recognized the enormous potential of the car as a vehicle for recreational purposes. Easily the best introduction to this topic is Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 19101945 by Warren J. Belasco. The author does an excellent job of linking the emergence of the motel business with such social issues as class conflict, the growth of the consumer ethic, and the weakening of family ties. A broader perspective is offered by John A. Jakle in his The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America, which contains four chapters devoted exclusively to the automobile. Also useful in this regard is John Baeder Gas, Food, and Lodging, which uses postcards as illustrations to portray the changing face of roadside culture (including both people and places) that travelers encountered between 1918 and 1939. In a humorous vein, Jack Barth et al. have written Roadside America, which describes some of the more bizarre tourist attractions that have appeared alongside our nation's highways. (See the chapter on architecture above for additional references in this regard.

Americans interested in motorized travel soon realized the advantages that might accrue from being able to bring something akin to their house along with them. Such thinking led to the commercial development of the car trailer, the mobile home, and the van. Two good introductions to the multiple aspects of this phenomenon are provided by Margaret J. Drury Mobile Homes: The Unrecognized Revolution in American Housing and Michael A. Rockland's Homes on Wheels. Airstream, by Robert Landau and James Phillippi , is an uncritical description of the history and way of life associated with one of the most famous of these vehicles.

The car culture also has spawned a host of leisure-time hobbies that require little or no travel for participation. While probably the best known one is the restoration of antique cars, there are others such as the collection of automotive toys, mascots, ornaments, license plates, and even automotive art. A fine overview of the field can be found in Automobile Quarterly's Complete Handbook of Automobile Hobbies, edited by Beverly Rae Kimes. Also good are Jack Martells Antique Automobile Collectibles and, with a more international flavor, Michael Worthington-Williams Automobilia: A Guided Tour for Collectors.

In regard to automotive toys, the most recent, and probably definitive, work is Lillian Gottschalk American Toy Cars and Trucks, 1894-1942. In addition to physically describing 475 different items--almost all Americanmade, Gottschalk does an excellent job of linking their histories to those of the real cars they represent. The text also is accompanied by superior photographic work. Another good work, covering a later period in which Japanese and German toy makers excelled to an extent unequalled since, is Dale Kelley Collecting the Tin Toy Car, 1950-1970. Also worth examining is The World of Model Cars, edited by Vic Smeed, which discusses not only collecting and building such vehicles, but also the racing of radio-controlled models. The latter is covered in more detail in Robert Schleicher Model Car Racing.

Not everyone into collecting model cars purchases the work of others. There is another group of hobbyists who enjoy making their own. Some insight into this form of leisure can be gained by perusing The Complete Book of Model Car Building by Dennis Doty, Scratchbuilding Model Cars by Saul Santos, and The Complete Car Modeller by Gerald A. Wingrove.

In addition to full-size and model cars, many Americans have chosen to collect ornamental parts of automobiles. Representative of the literature in this regard are William C. Williams Motoring Mascots of the World, a study of hood ornaments; Keith Marvin License Plates of the World; Scott Anderson's Check the Oil: Gas Station Collectibles with Prices; and Jim Evans Collectors Guide to Automotive Literature, the latter defined as sales brochures, stock certificates, and other ephemera.

What Is the Experience of Loss?

The maturational process, ideally a step-by-step evolution of continuous growth and integration, is frequently undermined by events which either undo some of the steps that have been taken or which inhibit the taking of further steps. In this chapter, I shall take a look at that most pervasive phenomenon that does both, namely, the experience of loss. It is when one must deal with such issues that he sees the most crucial difference between such conceptions as social man and self-actualizing man, on the one hand, and psychological man on the other. Earlier theories offer the executive little to increase his perception and awareness of such problems. However, with such perception and awareness, the executive can move to avoid impairment or to compensate, both in his own life and that of others in his organization, for the consequences of the loss experience.

Loss is a universal problem and probably the most psychologically costly one. It is the psychological experience underlying alienation, rootlessness, and the severe stresses of the family. Those terms and phrases -- alienation, transiency and the stresses of the family -- are short descriptive capsules that encompass complex and subtle processes. However, they say little about the underlying psychological loss experience on which they are based or how to cope with this loss.

1. Why is this experience so significant and how does it have its effects?

2. What implications does the significance of this experience have for the manager and his family?

3. What implications does it have for organizational practices, particularly those relating to people?

The reason the loss experience is so powerfully destructive can be seen in a simple analogy.
Imagine a tree rooted in the ground. The roots serve not only as a transmission route for nourishment but they also give the tree stability against the elements. When any of these roots is destroyed, some of its leaves begin to wither; some of the tree dies. If the tree is to be moved, a wise tree mover will cut away some of the more extended roots on one side of the tree, allow the tree time to adapt to that loss by developing new roots, then cut away some on the other side of the tree, leaving a large ball of dirt in which the remaining roots, including the newly proliferated ones, are contained. The human experience is much like that of the tree. We attach ourselves to other people, places, things, goals, wishes, aspirations, skills, knowledge and even life styles.

The experience of loss is the reaction to the destruction of attachments. It includes mixed feelings of deprivation, helplessness, sorrow, and anger in varying degrees. Deprivation of different kinds of psychological nourishment constitutes the essence of the loss experience. Among the most critical are: (1) loss of love, (2) loss of support, (3) loss of sensory input, and (4) loss of the capacity to act on oneself or the outside world.

Loss of love is easy to understand when a relative or a close friend dies. In the business world, being removed from one's old friends or business associates on whom one has depended for certain skills and competences and exchanges of information is an example. The separation from a highly valued business partner or colleague sometimes may be equally as painful as separation or divorce from a spouse. Movement within or out of an organization where important sources of regard and approval are left behind are other examples.

The second kind of loss, loss of support, occurs in the same three areas -- close personal relationships, moving, and career changes -- when one has to establish new ties or relationships, find new people to depend upon, and adopt new ways of doing things. This is one of the reasons why many people are confused in new situations, even when the new situation is a long-sought-for advancement. Loss of support also occurs when a man can no longer use once-valued skills, practices, or theories, particularly if he depended on them for his self-esteem. This is one of the major reasons why new advances are not adopted in business practice.The loss of sensory input occurs when people find it difficult to get the kind of data they need to protect and orient themselves. When people are in new situations as a result of being promoted, demoted, or reassigned, or when they have moved to a new city, they usually require some time to pick up significant cues about how to behave in a given location. This is particularly evident when people do not have the language facility or the familiarity with customs that the new place or new situation requires.Finally, when, for whatever reasons, we feel more dependent on others and less able to act to solve our own problems, we are less the masters of ourselves and our own fates. We don't like our incomplete, less adequate selves. The consequence is that we feel more helpless and, therefore, probably more frightened, more vulnerable, more defensive, more frustrated, more angry, and more depressed. This is seen most often when reorganizations take place, in mergers, and in the installation of new technical or managerial processes.The effects of loss are conspicuous in organizations. Certainly much of what is viewed as remaining on an organizational plateau, becoming organizational deadwood, or losing interest in one's job, even much of what is referred to laughingly as having risen to a level of incompetence, results from the burden of depression due to the sense of loss. The import of the loss experience for management goes beyond these common experiences. It is encapsulated in three axioms:

1. All change is loss. Promotion, transfer, demotion, reorganization, merger, retirement, and most other managerial actions produce change. Despite the fact that change is necessary and often for the better, the new always displaces the old and, at some level of consciousness, loss is experienced.

2. There is evidence to indicate that losses, particularly if they are chronic and are accompanied by a sense of hopelessness, precipitate major illness, including life-threatening maladies. All losses have important psychological and physiological significance, Extreme examples related to work include long-term unemployment or the inability to change or escape oppressive conditions of work. Less striking examples are the symptoms that arise when the plant itself is moved or when there are significant changes in the way work is done, as in automating work processes.

3. Moreover, when not inhibited from doing so, people automatically begin a restitution process to recoup their losses and compensate for them. And the manager, with little more effort than it takes to ignore the effects of loss, can become a facilitator of the restitutive process. Thus he is in a position to be both an agent of prevention and a healer while, at the same time, carrying out his managerial role more effectively.

Captain Cook worshiped as a god


















Cook's second visit

Returning in November from the north with the idea of wintering in the islands, Cook first sighted Maui. The natives of that island manifested the same willingness to trade that had been shown by those of Kauai and Niihau. Indeed the Englishmen found evidence that reports of their previous visit had been spread throughout the entire group. Off the coast of Maui the ships were visited by Kalaniopuu, king of the island of Hawaii, and a group of his followers, among them being Kamehameha, who remained on board all night. Nearly two months were spent in sailing along the coasts of Maui and Hawaii, without landing at any point, though a more or less continuous traffic was carried on for provisions. In the middle of January, 1779, the two ships sailed around the south of Hawaii and on the seventeenth day of that month came to anchor in Kealakekua Bay, where they were at once surrounded by a
multitude of canoes. "Besides those who had come off to us in canoes, all the shore of the bay was covered with spectators, and many hundreds were swimming round the ships like shoals of fish."

Cook worshiped as a god

The ships were immediately visited by several chiefs, among them a priest, who paid their respects to Captain Cook in a formal manner. On going ashore he was treated with religious veneration by chiefs and common people alike, being taken to the heiau of Hikiau where he was made the center of an elaborate ceremony, by which the natives meant to acknowledge him as an akua. There can be no doubt that at first the Hawaiians looked upon Cook as the incarnation of their god Lono, though this fact does not seem to have been clearly understood by the Englishmen.

The next day astronomical instruments were landed from the ships and set up in a sweet potato patch which was tapued for them by the priests. Part of the crew went ashore to fill the water barrels and others were put to work repairing the ships. The Hawaiians looked at all of these operations with much interest, helping the crew at times, frequently visiting the ships, and every day sending on board large quantities of hogs and vegetables. On the twenty-fifth of January King Kalaniopuu arrived from Maui and greeted Captain Cook in a truly royal style, presenting him with a magnificent gift of a feather cloak and helmet. Among the entertainments provided for the strangers were boxing and wrestling matches; and in return the natives were allowed to witness a display of fireworks.

Unpleasant incidents

During this time the relations between the Englishmen and the Hawaiians were on the whole very friendly, this being especially true in the case of King Kalaniopuu and Captain Cook. Lieutenant King, who had charge of the sailors on shore, also became a great favorite with the natives. Nevertheless, a number of unpleasant incidents occurred, growing in part out of some rather high-handed actions of the strangers, in part out of the natural tendency of some of the natives to take whatever suited their fancy, but more from the misunderstandings due to the imperfect knowledge each side had of the language, customs, and habits of the other. It is also likely that some of the Hawaiians came to doubt that Captain Cook was a god. But the efforts of the leaders on both sides prevented any serious trouble, and on February 4 the two ships took their departure, after Captain Cook and Lieutenant King had received from King Kalaniopuu gifts which astonished them on account of their value and magnitude.

Death of Captain Cook

A week later the ships returned to Kealakekua, a serious defect having been discovered in one of the masts which made it necessary to take it on shore for repair. At this time the ships were not received quite as cordially as before and serious quarrels very soon broke out. Finally on the night of February 13 a boat was taken from the Discovery by the natives, removed to another part of the bay, and broken to pieces for the nails which it contained. The next morning Captain Cook, considering this a serious matter, took determined measures for the recovery of the boat. He first put a blockade on the bay and then went ashore to the village of Kaawaloa for the purpose of persuading or compelling the king to go aboard the Resolution, meaning to keep him there until the boat was returned or satisfactory reparation made for it. This was a method which he had already used in the South Pacific and up to this time it had never failed to accomplish its purpose. At first it seemed that it would succeed in this case also, but Kalaniopuu's wife and several chiefs tried to keep the king on shore and this caused him to hesitate.

A quarrel quickly developed between the Englishmen and the natives, which soon led to blows. At about the same time a chief entering the further side of the bay without knowing about the blockade was killed by a shot from one of the boats. News of this came swiftly to the place where Cook was standing, surrounded by natives. One of the chiefs "seized Captain Cook with a strong hand, designing merely to hold him, and not to take his life; for he supposed him to be a god, and that he could not die. Captain Cook struggled to free himself from the grasp, and as he was about to fall uttered a groan. The people immediately exclaimed, 'He groans -- he is not a god,' and instantly slew him."

Besides Captain Cook four marines and about a score of natives were killed in this unfortunate affray. The bodies of the five Englishmen were immediately carried off by the natives and treated according to the Hawaiian custom. The bones of Captain Cook were divided among the high chiefs and priests.

In spite of the tragedy which had occurred, the policy of Captain Clerke, who succeeded to the command of the ships, was to bring about a reconciliation with the natives and to recover the bodies of Captain Cook and the marines who had been killed. In these efforts he was fairly successful, though the English sailors were eager for revenge, which made it hard to keep them under control. After the first burst of anger had cooled, the Hawaiians, with few exceptions, seem to have sincerely regretted their own part in the tragedy and did what they could to restore the former friendly relations. Most of the bones of Captain Cook were recovered and these were buried beneath the waters of the bay on Sunday, February 21, with an impressive funeral service, a tapu being placed on the bay for this occasion by the Hawaiians.

The following day final preparations for departure were made and that evening the ships sailed out of the bay. "The natives were collected on the shore in great numbers; and, as we passed along, received our last farewells with every mark of affection and good will." After brief stops at Oahu and Kauai the English ships continued their course toward the north in order to complete their explorations in that region.

Captain Cook and the Discovery of Hawaiian Islands


Hawaiian islands unknown

Until after the middle of the eighteenth century the Hawaiian islands remained unknown to the civilized world of Europe, America, and Asia. There are some reasons for supposing that a few Spanish or Dutch sailors may have landed on Hawaii at some time in the sixteenth century or about the beginning of the seventeenth century, but if such a landing took place it did not result in bringing the islands to the knowledge of the outside world

Search for northwest passage

In fact very little was then known about the geography of the Pacific Ocean and the lands bordering it and of the islands which it contained. There were many strange ideas held by geographers and scientists. Among these ideas was a belief that there was a strait through the northern part of America, by which it would be possible to sail from Europe to Japan, China, and India, without making the long voyage around Africa or South America. It was considered very important to find this strait and so a great many expeditions were sent out to look for it. England took the greatest interest in this search because she would profit most from the discovery of a shorter route from northern Europe to Asia. Among the men who headed these expeditions were Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, and Baffin; their names are now to be found on the map of the northern coasts of America. These men tried to find the entrance to this strait on the Atlantic Ocean side. Finally it was decided to send an expedition into the Pacific Ocean to look for the strait from that side. Captain James Cook was selected to head this expedition.

Captain James Cook

James Cook was born in 1728 of humble parents. At an early age he was apprenticed to a shipping firm on the east coast of England and entered upon the career of a sailor. Young Cook was industrious and eager to learn. Seeing this, his employer gave him opportunity to study and acquire experience in navigation. He soon rose to the rank of mate in the merchant service, and then, in 1755, volunteered as an ordinary seaman in the British navy. Almost immediately he was promoted to master's mate and during the next few years sailed in different ships, serving in America in the French and Indian War. From 1763 to 1767 he was engaged in surveying the coast of Newfoundland, and in the following year was placed in command of an expedition whose purpose was to go to Tahiti to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun and to carry on explorations in the South Pacific. He thus began a series of explorations in the Pacific Ocean and the southern hemisphere, extending over a period of ten years and giving him a distinguished place in the history of maritime discoveries.

The Hawaiian Islands discovered

On his third voyage Cook's instructions were to go first to the Society Islands and to sail thence to the coast of America at about 45 degrees north latitude, from which point he was to skirt the coast northward in search of the supposed strait. In accordance with these instructions the ships under his command, the Resolution and the Discovery, sailed north early in December, 1777, from Borabora in the Society Islands. At daybreak on the morning of January 18, 1778, an island was sighted on the northeast side of the ships and a little later another island came into view to the west of that first seen. These islands were Oahu and Kauai. The next day as the ships approached the coast of Kauai a number of canoes came out to meet them. Captain Cook wrote:

"They had from three to six men each; and, on their approach, we were agreeably surprised to find that they spoke the language of Otaheite and of the other islands we had lately visited. It required but very little address to get them to come alongside; but no entreaties could prevail upon any of them to come on board. I tied some brass medals to a rope and gave them to those in one of the canoes, who, in return, tied some small mackerel to the rope, as an equivalent. This was repeated; and some small nails, or bits of iron, which they valued more than any other article, were given them. For these they exchanged more fish and a sweet potato, a sure sign that they had some notion of bartering or, at least, of returning one present for another."

Going slowly around the island, the ships came to anchor in the bay of Waimea, where, during the next few days, the natives had an opportunity to observe more closely their strange visitors from across the sea. Captain Cook in his account of the voyage speaks about the great astonishment of the natives and their interest in iron. These two points are also clearly shown in the Hawaiian account of this event:

"It is at Waimea, on Kauai, that Lono first arrived. . . . He arrived in the night at Waimea, and when daylight came the natives ashore perceived this wonderful thing that had arrived, and they expressed their astonishment with great exclamations.

"One said to another, 'What is that great thing with branches?' Others said, 'It is a forest that has slid down into the sea,' and the gabble and noise was great. Then the chiefs ordered some natives to go in a canoe and observe and examine well that wonderful thing. They went, and when they came to the ship they saw the iron that was attached to the outside of the ship, and they were greatly rejoiced at the quantity of iron."

The English ships remained at Kauai and Niihau until February 2, engaged in filling up their water barrels and in trading with the natives, buying for trinkets and bits of iron large quantities of hogs, yams, and other food stuffs. To the entire group of islands Cook gave the name Sandwich Islands, in honor of his friend and patron the Earl of Sandwich. Finally he sailed away to the northwest coast of America without having seen the three large islands to the southeast.

Polynesian civilization

During the 2,000 years which may have elapsed between the coming of the first Polynesian immigrant and the visit of Captain Cook, the Pacific colonists had increased until perhaps 800,000 Polynesians were living on the many islands suitable for habitation. They were too widely scattered to form a nation under one government; but they had lived so long near each other and had been so long separated from people in other parts of the world that they became one race or group of people. No other people look like them or do things as they do them.

As one group of colonists after another came into the Pacific they brought with them ideas and customs from their old homes and changed these ideas and customs in ways more suitable to life in their new homes. Thus there grew up a Polynesian civilization which is remarkable because it was made by a people who knew nothing of the use of metals.

The Polynesians had no iron, no pottery, and no beasts of burden. Their tools, weapons, and utensils were of stone, wood, shell, teeth, or bone. From hard wood or soft wood tipped with hard wood, effective spears and harpoons were made. Bowls and boxes were made with stone tools and engraved with stone or tooth knives. The canoe maker's tool chest contained adzes of stone, chisels of stone, shell, or bone, rasps and files of coral, and polishers made of coral or the rough skin of fish. In place of screws and nails cord made of fibers was used.

Although they lived in a "Stone Age," the Polynesians learned to make good use of all the things at hand and showed skill in the making of houses and clothing and in the cultivation of fields; in their art, government, and religious ideas they reached a high stage of development.

Houses

The Polynesian house was well suited to the tropical climate. It was chiefly a place to sleep; cooking, washing, and other household activities were usually performed in the open.

The ordinary family dwelling house was about ten feet wide and twenty feet long. It was set among trees, usually on a stone platform raised a few feet above the ground and extending beyond the walls of the house as a lanai. There were also large houses in which several families lived together and houses used for public meetings. The essential part of the house was the roof of thatch supported by poles. The sides of some houses were also thatched; many others were not walled in. The floor was the stone platform covered with mats, and there were no partitions to separate rooms. The material for the framework was the trunks of coconut, breadfruit, or other trees fastened together with sennit (fiber) lashings skillfully arranged. The thatch was usually dense layers of coconut, pandanus, or breadfruit leaves fastened to rods of bamboo or hibiscus. In Hawaii grass was used for thatch, and in New Zealand, where timber is abundant and material suitable for thatch is scarce, it was customary to make the entire house of planks hewed and carved with stone adzes.

Little clothing needed

On low tropical islands and along the shore of high volcanic islands, where most Polynesians lived, the need for clothing was small. A loin cloth (called malo in Hawaii) for men, a short skirt for women, and sandals for fishing on the reefs or walking on lava were the only essential articles. But the instinct for adornment led to the making of skirts, cloaks, and even headdresses which were attractive as well as useful.

The Polynesians, The Micronesians, The Melanesians

The Polynesians

The Polynesians are not a pure race -- all descended from the same ancestors. Like the English, the French, and the Americans, they are a mixed race made up of men and women of different races who came from different places at different times. By intermarriage since they came into the Pacific these people have become more mixed. It is possible to recognize four types of people among the natives of the Polynesian islands; the Polynesians themselves recognize the differences and have terms to describe them. The people known as "typical Polynesians "live in all the islands, but more of them in southern than in northern Polynesia. They resemble the Caucasians and in several respects are like the race from which Europeans have sprung. They are unlike the Melanesians, and are quite different from the Negro.

The Micronesians

The Micronesians are a combination of races. Among them are some people who resemble the Polynesians; but most of them show mixture with the Japanese, the Filipinos, and the Melanesians. The people on the different islands -- Marshall, Caroline , and Marianas -- although all Micronesians, are almost like different races. The Micronesians are said to lack the courtesy and hospitality of the Polynesians. They are able warriors, skillful fishermen and navigators, and make fine mats and clothing by weaving bark and leaves. As farmers and gardeners the Micronesians are much less skillful than the Polynesians and the Melanesians.

The Melanesians

he Melanesians differ widely among themselves in bodily form, language, and customs; but as a race they differ much from both the Polynesians and the Micronesians. Their features resemble the Negro. Their color varies from brown to black, and their hair is crisp, curly, or even tufted. They are ferocious warriors and once practiced cannibalism to an extent beyond that of other Pacific peoples. They are less intelligent than Polynesians, but their skill in carving and decoration is remarkably good.

Sailing by stars

As guides in voyages far from land, stars were chiefly used. Probably many voyages started at night when stars were visible and at times of the year when recognized stars remained for some time above the horizon. A favorable time was when the dog-star, Sirius, appeared. Polynesian navigators were familiar with the position of important stars and knew of their change in position from month to month. Five planets were known and named and the time and place of their appearance kept in mind. Thirteen "canoe teerers' stars," among them Sirius, Regulus, and the Pleiades, were known, together with the months in which they appeared, the time they reached the zenith, and the times of rising and setting. In the Northern Hemisphere, Aldebaran was used, and the North Star was known as one in an unchangeable position, which could be relied upon throughout the year. The stars in an east-west belt over the equator were commonly used as guides in sailing.

A youth studying navigation in Hawaii was taught to view the heavens as a cylinder on which were marked "highways of navigation stars." One highway led from Noholoa (North Star) to Newa ( Southern Cross). The portion of the heavens east of this line was "the bright road of Kane," that to the west was the "highway of Kanaloa." A line drawn east and west through the place of the sun in winter was "the black shining road of Kane," and one drawn through the southern limit of the sun's course in summer was "the black shining road of Kanaloa." Within these limits are the stars to be used in sailing; outside, are the "strange" stars. The young man was taught that, in going southward to Tahiti, new sets of stars will be seen and that after passing the equator the North Star disappears. In the legend of Hawaii-loa, the navigator Makalii sailing eastward is said to have used Iao and Hokuula (Aldebaran) to guide him to Hawaii. On a journey from Hawaii to Tahiti the Southern Cross was the guide.

Kinds of boats

In making their voyages among the islands the Polynesians made use of three kinds of boats: the single canoe, the outrigger canoe, and the twin canoe. The simplest form of single canoe -- a short, narrow log hollowed out by chipping with stone adzes -- was little used. Such canoes capsize easily and are suitable for little else than fishing in lagoons and in shallow waters. Where large trees were available, single canoes with lengths exceeding fifty feet were made; some Maori single canoes were more than one hundred feet long and five feet wide and were capable of carrying one hundred thirty men and a cargo of provisions on voyages within bays, up rivers, and along the coast.

Outrigger canoe

The outrigger canoe is the type of craft most common in Polynesia. By the attachment of an outrigger, small narrow canoes are made seaworthy and are much less liable to overturn; if carefully constructed they may be safely used for voyages of considerable length even in rough seas.

Twin canoe

The twin canoe consists of two canoes placed side by side, several feet apart, fastened together by wood crosspieces or by a platform which occupies the space between them. It is like a raft which can be paddled from both canoes or sailed by erecting masts.

On the platform of large twin canoes canopies were erected to shield the voyagers from sun and rain, and even thathed houses were built which served the same purpose as cabins on modern steamships. Such craft were remarkably seaworthy, and the larger ones could accommodate as many as 200 men, women, and children, together with domestic animals and the provisions necessary for a long voyage. One canoe of a Kamehameha twin canoe, cut from a single log, measured 108 feet.

Canoes with sails

Many outrigger canoes and twin canoes were equipped with sails made of pandanus or coconut leaves, attached to masts which were permanent or set up when needed. For long sailing voyages with canoes, outriggers were faster and were considered safer than twin canoes, as twin canoes when broken apart were helpless.

Importance of outrigger and twin canoes

It was with the aid of such craft that the traditional war expeditions and peaceful migrations were carried on, and in the life of the Polynesians they played a very important part. They were the only means of travel from island to island and were required for fishing. Nearly every man, woman, and grown child could handle a canoe while fishing or in battle or during the frequent regattas (races) in which as many as one hundred canoes took part. But to build a big seaworthy canoe with nothing but stone adzes, stone chisels and coconut-fiber lashings was the work of trained craftsmen. There were building superintendents and special workmen for making hulls, sails, and outriggers. The principal chiefs kept canoe builders at their courts; other people hired them. The canoe meant so much to the island dwellers that it is not surprising to learn that each canoe had a name and that special ceremonies and special chants were associated with felling the tree, shaping the wood, and finishing and launching the boat.

The Lost Cause: Robert E. Lee


When finally the smoke of battle cleared, this much was certain: the North had the victory, but the South had Robert E. Lee.

Almost a century after he took arms against the Union, Lee is today viewed as one of our greatest, if not our greatest, soldier, and a personification of the Lost Cause. His military defeats are considered inconsequential compared to his spiritual victories. Of all Americans, he comes closest to our conception of a true aristocrat.

Born in 1807 at Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee led a life that was simple and unswerving--that, of a soldier, a Christian, and a gentleman. After graduating from West Point in 1829, he served as army engineer, an officer in the Mexican war, and the superintendent of West Point. His Federal troops suppressed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. When offered the field command of the Union army, he resigned his post to lead Virginia's troops in the Confederate army. Brilliant victories took him eventually to Gettysburg, from which he was forced to retreat. Thereafter he was on the defensive. In 1865, two months after being appointed commander-in-chief of all the Confederate forces, he surrendered his army at Appomattox. A civilian again, he became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. In 1870, five years after assuming this academic post, he died. This is the brief history of the most admired Southerner in American history.

Lee legends have an unmatched mellowness and tenderness.

Consider these examples. One Sunday morning after the war, at an elegant Richmond Episcopal church, the Rector invited the congregation to come forward to the communion rail. A newly-liberated negro approached humbly and knelt at the altar. The people gasped. Bitter after the recent warfare, they held back from such an association. Looking up from his meditation, a white-haired figure saw this, walked quietly down the aisle, and took his place beside the former slave. The gentleman's name was Robert E. Lee.

As President of struggling Washington College, Lee urged a student to better his study habits, so he could stay on at the college. "We do not want you to fail," said the former warrior. "But General, you failed," blurted out the youth with a brashness characteristic of sophomores everywhere. "I hope you may be more fortunate than I," Lee replied quietly.

On his last visit to Northern Virginia, Lee was talking with friends who greeted him. A young mother brought her baby to him to be blessed. "What shall I teach him?" she asked. He took the infant in his arms, looked at it and the mother slowly, and said, "Teach him he must deny himself." This was the quality of the man.

While still commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, he was thought by his comrades to have almost superhuman ability and insight. As sober and independent a soldier as "Stonewall" Jackson said he would follow Lee into battle blindfolded. Even when he was retreating from the Northern onslaught, the Confederate Congress expressed its complete faith in Lee, and offered him dictatorial powers over the waning Confederacy. He craved no such power. At the Appomattox surrender John S. Wise said, "You are the country to these men. They have fought on for you without pay or clothes, or care of any sort; their devotion to you and faith in you have been the only things which have held this army together." It was the type of devotion Charlemagne, Arthur, and Napoleon had elicited. At the moment of darkest defeat Lee preserved his legendary aura. Grant's uniform was muddy and spotted; Lee's was immaculate.

Southerners admired his humility and earnestness in peace as much as his audacity and brilliance in war. The sacrosanct Lee was the solitary, noble figure in his twilight years, clad in a gray uniform from which all the Confederate buttons had been removed, making his way to a ravaged Virginia village to begin life anew. The impact of his death, a few years later, was felt by tens of thousands. At Lee's own college the editor of the Southern Collegian wrote: "We stop our paper from going to press in order to make the saddest announcement which our pen ever wrote. Our honored and loved president is no more. He died as he lived, calmly and quietly, in the full assurance of the Christian's faith."

The Lee Memorial Association, formed the day the General was buried, was composed largely of his ex-soldiers. The women would not be outdone in devotion; shortly afterwards feminine admirers met in a Richmond parlor and instituted the Ladies' Lee Monument Association. So successful was it that by 1887 they were able to lay the cornerstone of a sixty-foot statue of the General bedecked with sash and cavalry sword, mounted on Traveller. The twenty years between Lee's death and the statue mark the militaristic period of the hero-worship. Then Lee epitomized for Southerners their military command, their courageous defense, their honor salvaged from defeat.

The earliest Lee book appeared a few months after the surrender. Coming from the Richardson Press in New York, it was entitled Southern Generals, Who They Are, and What They Have Done. The publisher did not list the author, Captain Willian Parker Snow, C. S. A., until a second edition appeared a year later. Post-war anthologies, such as Emily Mason Southern Poems of the War. also played up Lee of the battlefield. While Lee's own history of his campaigns was abandoned in 1866, three former associates, John W. Jones, Jubal Early, and Walter Taylor, wrote reminiscenses. Edward Lee Childe's biography appeared in France as early as 1874. Lee was carefully studied by the Prussian militarists in that decade. On a popular level, too, he proved an apt subject for Judith McGuire, Emily Mason, and James Lynch. The most readable early Lee novel was John Esten Cooke Mohun, or the Last Days of Lee and His Paladins. (We have met Cooke before among the hero-makers of Pocahontas.) His book, begun just after Lee's death, gave a vivid contemporary account of Lee's career and leadership.

The first writer who moulded Lee's reputation sufficiently to deserve the title of hero-maker was an ex-Confederate private, Talbott Sweeney. He sought a line of justification that would satisfy the skeptical Yankees. A native of Williamsburg, Sweeney studied at the College of William and Mary, and in 1849 entered the law school there. When the Civil War came he enlisted in the Williamsburg Guards. Later he served as head of the State Mental Asylum in Williamsburg, which was occupied by the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry in 1862. At sixty he set out to show that on Northern as well as Southern principles Lee's action in joining the Confederacy was justified, and to give him a national rather than a regional standing.

Sweeney's vindication was based on simple premises, though adorned with elaborate generalizations. If by following the dictates of a conscience Robert E. Lee was a traitor, then so were Oliver Cromwell, Patrick Henry, and George Washington. If Lee's interpretation of his loyalty to the Constitution was erroneous, then so were those of the patriots who wrote it and the legislators who adopted it. By reproducing excerpts from the Constitutional Convention in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, he made a strong case, and concluded with this tribute to the former Confederate chieftain:

"The shades of your patriotic and distinguished Revolutionary ancestors appeared to your vision and pointed out to you the only path which you could and should tread . . . But what shall be said of the reputation of Robert Edward Lee? Steeped in the red and black of Treason and Perjury, as his enemies declare? What monstrous and wicked absurdity and stupidity to think it".

Sweeney was not the first writer to vindicate Lee; but he was one of the cleverest, and the first who got much of a hearing in the North. Influential Republicans wanted to make an example of Lee, the arch-traitor, but some of their colleagues, seeing that this would only create a martyr, opposed the idea. With the gradual emergence of a more tolerant of view, and the healing of the open wounds of battle, Sweeney's Lee came forward. He was a man who had many other non-military claims to fame. Slowly the North came to view him not as a traitor but as a servant to his own high principles. In order to be shown as more than a mere soldier, Lee had to be championed by writers whose interest was not military, and extolled on different levels.

During the 1890's his story began to reach a larger American reading public through four new channels. Lee first appeared in an encyclopedia in 1890, when Nathan Burnham Webster did a sketch for Chamber's Encyclopedia. Appleton Company's "Great Commanders" series, was the first to be included in such a collection. Five years later William P. Trent Robert E. Lee appeared in the "Beacon Biographies" series; during the same year George Marouby's Robert Lee, Generalissime des Etats Confederes du Sud was published in Paris in the Feron-Vrau "Les Contemporains" series.

Significant too were the juveniles. Whenever a hero reaches a position that necessitates his story being presented to children, he has arrived. G. A. Henty With Lee in Virginia was well received and reissued twice in the next decade. Mary L. Williamson The Life of General Robert E. Lee, for Children, in Easy Words, was widely read after 1895. In these and other accounts Southerners, while not belittling the achievement of Lee between 1861 and 1865, accentuated instead his greatness in the period 1865-1870. He had opposed removing Confederate bodies from Northern graves, on the grounds that this would increase antipathy. Whenever he had appeared in parades with officers of the adjoining Virginia Military Institute (where "Stonewall" Jackson had taught) he marched out of step, so as not to seem militaristic. He had even chastised a Washington College faculty member who scoffed at General Grant, and forbad him ever to do so again in his presence. Thus he won a spiritual victory.

The North, which after 1876 rejected the radical Republicans, sensed the importance of Lee's gestures and the extent of his magnanimity. Such a realization was expressed by a former Federal soldier who faced Lee's soldiers at Gettysburg, and represented the quintessence of New Englandism. He stands with the leading Lee hero-makers. Charles Francis Adams was a member of the only American family whose continuous leadership rivalled that of Lee's --a fact to be kept in mind here. Like Lee, he was trained to think and act in terms of family; like Lee, he was to know defeat more often than triumph in his life.

Son of the Union's Civil War Ambassador to Great Britain, Adams entered the U. S. Army as a first lieutenant. He was released to civilian life in 1865, a physical wreck, with the brevets of a brigadier general. No one would have expected him to call the country's attention to the genius of the leader of the Rebellion. Yet on October 13, 1901, Adams read to the American Antiquarian Society a paper called "The Confederacy and the Transvaal: A People's Obligation to Robert E. Lee." By prohibiting guerrilla warfare and preaching reconciliation, Lee had saved both North and South much misery, and avoided a possible repetition of Boer War tactics. The personality of Lee intrigued Adams, who during the next year prepared three papers which shocked Massachusetts; "Shall Cromwell Have a Statue?" "Lee at Appomattox," and "The Constitutional Ethics of Secession." If Fitzhugh Lee's acceptance of a major generalship in the United States Army during the Spanish American War helped bring together the South and the North, these studies by an Adams helped reconcile the North to the South.

Adams saw that the public attitude towards Lee was changing very rapidly, and said so in Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers. The criticism which his essays had drawn forth in his own section, Adams noted, "was in no case couched in the declamatory, patriotic strain, at once injured, indignant, and denunciatory or vituperative, which would no less assuredly than naturally have marked it thirty years ago."

George H. Denny, then president of Washington and Lee University, invited Adams to make the Lee Centennial address on January 19, 1907. A large crowd, including many who had studied under the General at Washington College, gathered to hear a former enemy of Lee praise him. "The situation," as Adams told his audience, "is thus to a degree dramatic."

In a carefuly phrased speech, a high point in Lee oratory, Adams placed him among the greatest Americans, not for his triumphs in the battlefield, but for those of his own mind. If Lee-the-soldier had been unable to save the Confederacy, Lee-the-citizen had helped preserve the United States. To overestimate this service would be difficult. The Yankee closed his speech with a quotation from another hero worshipper, Thomas Caryle: "Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as one of our sacred men? Whom do you wish to resemble? Him you set on a high column that all men looking at it may be continually appraised of the duty you expect from them." As he spoke, his audience gazed past him to the Lee monument.

Adams was Lee's most effective Northern apologist. Competition for such a distinction was keener in the South since most Confederates who could put pen to paper wrote something about the noble Lee. If one Southern hero-maker must be chosen, it should be Thomas Nelson Page. Born on a Virginia plantation in Hanover County, son of a Confederate officer and great-grandson of two state governors, Page grew up with praises of Lee ringing in his ears. He entered Washington College while Lee was still president there. To Page, the South was the recognized field of romance. Robert E. Lee, astride his white horse, led the field. He wrote his popular Lee biography "in obedience to a feeling that as the son of a Confederate soldier, as a Southerner, as an American, I owe it to my country." Never has a hero been more lovingly presented. "His monument," Page concluded, "is the adoration of the South: his shrine is in every Southern heart." At least in Page's heart, this statement was verified.

Between 1910 and 1930, Lee was metamorphosized from a figure idolized wherever the Stars and Bars had flown, to one admired everywhere. It is hard today to understand the stir caused in 1912 when the Massachusetts biographer, Gamaliel Bradford, published his Lee, the American. Bradford indicated Lee was no longer a mere military hero. No Southerner could have handled his subject with greater sympathy and warmth. Die-hard Yankees winced when they read it.

Lee's admirers considered him a man of infinite dignity and almost ascetic self-effacement. That Bradford, so different from Lee in training and experience, could grasp this was quite an accomplishment. Literary figures flocked to Lee's banner in the twentieth century, as historians had done in the nineteenth. Playwright John Drinkwater depicted Lee as a latter-day English country squire. Mary Johnston approached the General, who "exhibited sunny shreds of the Golden Age," with reverence. Lee was the impeccable hero of Ellen Glasgow The Battleground, a soldier who held an army together with his personality. Most Southern magazines, and many Northern ones, published Lee poetry. Of all the literati who dealt with him, Stephen Vincent Benet has left the deepest mark. Once again it was a Yankee who best stated Lee's case.

Boone alone has a comic counterpart Davy Crockett


Among our major figures, Boone alone has a comic counterpart --Davy Crockett, that "yaller flower of the forest" whose career became a grotesque frontier joke. His saga is Boone's turned upside down.

In 1818 there lived near Shoal Creek, Tennessee, a frontier squatter who had, in his own colorful words, "suffered only four days of schooling." When his neighbors decided to set up a temporary government, they elected him justice of the peace. Davy Crockett's amazing career was thus launched. Throughout it all he relied on "natural born sense, and not on law learning; for I never read a page in a law-book in all my life." After a term in the state legislature, he accepted (apparently as a joke) the challenge to run for Congress. He won, and served satisfactorily.

The Whigs, stressing his eccentricities, humor, and lusty pioneer spirit, turned him into a vote-getting buffoon.

Party journalists wrote, but attributed to the almost illiterate Crockett, Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett ( 1833), An Account of Col. Crockett's Tour to the North and Down East ( 1835), A Narrative of the Life of D. Crockett, of the State of Tennessee ( 1834), and The Life of Martin Van Buren ( 1835). Alexis de Tocqueville was intrigued by Crockett, refer. ring to him as one who "has no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods." The Whigs went so far as to let Davy sit on the platform with Daniel Webster. For a while Tennessee's greatest bear-hunter even expected to be nominated for the presidency. Instead, he failed to be re-elected to Congress. So he told his constituents they could all go to hell, and he would go to Texas.

Off he went. His death at the Alamo put just the right finishing touch to his own vigorous legend. Once the real Crockett was dead, the heroic buffoon and folk character took over, via the Crockett Almanacs, issued from 1835 to 1856. In them ghost writers attempted to fit humans and animals of Homer's proportions into the raw, gigantic, American landscape. Bumptious Davy mastered with ridiculous ease the cruel frontier world and the snarling beasts that dwelt in it. He made jokes of situations which too often were tragic; he mastered the impossible effortlessly. The backwoods became a fairyland.

In it the fairies played rough. Fed on Buffalo milk and weaned on whiskey, Davy sprouted so that his Aunt Keziah thought it was as good as a day's vittles to look at him. The animals finally stopped trying to defy him. "Is that you, Davy?" they would shout when he reached for his gun. "Yep," he would say. "All right, don't shoot. Can't you take a joke? I'm a-comin' down!"

Most Crockett tall tales were based on oral tradition going back to Daniel Boone. They are conscious inversions. Pranks, practical jokes, and boasts seemed beneath Boone. So a Davy Crockett who specialized in these very things was invented. His hero-makers were mostly Whig politicians, who saw that by using Crockett they might split the Jacksonians in the west.

People wanted to hear about that rascal Davy long after his political mission was forgotten. And they kept talking about him, until he got to be a hero. A paradox runs throughout his career: although he won fame because of his horse sense, he endured in folklore because of the nonsense written about him. Settling the frontier was grim business; Indians took real scalps. As often as not the people there laughed, as Mark Twain observed, so that they would not cry.

Hence there is almost a hysterical note to the accumulated gusto which gave us Davy Crockett. There is also poetic justice; for he is the necessary complement to the brooding Boone, rounding out the most genuinely American myth which our culture has yet created.

Dan Boone's reputation - Boy Scout organization


Dan Boone's reputation got first aid from Dan Beard, whose Boy Scout organization became the most important youth movement in our history. Drawing consciously on the popular image, Beard turned millions of young Americans into trail-blazers and Indian fighters. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Beard studied art in New York and instructed there from 1893 to 1900. The outdoors called loud and clear. He went west and met such picturesque characters as Yellowstone Kelly, Buffalo Bill, John Burroughs, Bat Masterson, Buffalo Jones, and Charles Russell. But he admittedly modeled his boy's clubs on the figure Cooper had used for Deerslayer and Leatherstocking:

"I suggested a society of scouts to be identified with the greatest of all Scouts, Daniel Boone, and to be known as the Sons of Daniel Boone. Each 'member' would have to be a tenderfoot before he attained the rank of Scout. Eight members would form a stockade, four stockades a fort . . . I never realized that the Boy Scouts would sweep over much of the world and become my real life's work."

The Boy Scout movement depended on stock Boone symbols: the rifle, the buckskin clothes, and the coonskin cap. Patent nativism and glorification of frontier days explain the movement's rapid growth. At the invitation of that perennial Boy Scout, Theodore Roosevelt, Beard visited the White House in 1907 to explain his plan and win official support for it. The conference ended with Roosevelt shouting "Bully!" and pounding on the table with his fist. It was Boone's greatest victory since Boonesborough.

Beard supervised the publication of the early editions of the American Boys' Handbook. This became the official Boy Scout manual which has been a best-seller ever since. His own American Boy's Handbook ( 1882) was the model on which all later editions were based. Beard claimed that more copies of this publication were distributed in the decade following World War I than any other volume except the Bible.

Boone worship reached its peak in the bicentennial year, 1934. Thousands bf khaki-clad Scouts from all over America met in Covington, Kentucky, for a secular revival meeting. Parades and pageants were staged there, and all over America. The names of Dan Boone and Dan Beard, who had modeled his life, dress, and movement on the earlier Daniel's achievements, were linked together. This was entirely fitting. The two merged into the one lofty, anachronistic figure of the frontier fighter and hunter. Beard adapted the Boone story to suit an America hungry for symbols and scalps. A not unfitting reward came when an Alaskan peak was officially named Mount Beard by the Federal government.

During the Boone Bicentennial, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Order of Pioneers, and the Boone Family Association prodded politicians and officials into a frenzy of Boone adulation. S. M. Wilson tapped some of the prevailing clichés to describe Daniel Boone as "this Prince of the Pioneers, this Founder of Boonesborough, this foster-father of Kentucky, this favorite son of all America, this peerless pilot of the Republic, this instrument divinely ordained to settle the wilderness." What could a man add except "Amen"?

The General Assembly of Kentucky set up a commission to "promote and direct a fitting celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Boone's birth." Shrines were established at Boonesborough, Boone's Station, Bryan's Station, and Big Licks Battlefield. Congress authorized the minting of 600,000 souvenir half dollars. Eulogies of Boone were heard everywhere. His position as pattern-maker for western American heroes was assured.

State pride has also contributed to the adulation. Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri have all claimed Boone as their very own. Consider the contribution of a few local historians of the Old Dominion. The Scott County History of Robert Addington contains extravagant praise for Boone. Its author examines minutely every link in "the chain of cause and effect which connects us with Daniel Boone." William Pendleton's Tazewell County History calls Boone the greatest man who ever set foot there; only his presence enabled Virginians to push westward to Kentucky. Goodrich Wilson, author of Smythe County History and Traditions, credits Boone's vigorous defense of southwest Virginia with that area's emancipation from the Indians. Finally, Oren F. Morton, in his Story of Daniel Boone, proved that Pennsylvania-born Boone was a Virginian at heart.

Abingdon, a cultural center for western Virginia, is the locale of many Boone stories. The town site is said to have been his camping ground, and its creek is named after him. A local citizen still treasures a piece of bark on which is inscribed Boone's legendary trademark: "D. Boon kilt a bar." Although skeptical about this relic, James Taylor Adams, editor of the Cumberland Empire, admits Boone makes an admirable hero: "There are many legends of his bravery and daring adventures. He spent one winter and part of a summer in Russell County and his son was killed in Lee County. Scarcely a creek or hollow in this part of the country but a tree has been reported there bearing his name, initials, or the carved statement that ' D. Boon kilt a bar.' If all these inscriptions were true, Old Daniel must have put in the better part of his time carving on the bark of trees."

Boone's has not been the type of fame to rival that of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Unlike these, he bears no relation with governmental or political symbols. Instead, he represents man's protest against the restraints of society and an everencroaching, self-righteous technology. Newsmen sensed this; for during World War II they wrote about Daniel Boone VI who, at his primitive forge in Burnsville, North Carolina, turned out handforged hollow-ground combat knives with deer-horn handles. Though aware of modern methods, the contemporary Daniel would have none of the electric hammers, welding torches, or pneumatic drills. "New ways are quicker," he was quoted as saying, "but old-fashioned ways are best." Thus a major American legend was brought up to date for our times.

William Carlos Williams has summarized Boone's appeal: "Possessing a body at once powerful, compact, and capable of tremendous activity and resistance when roused, a clear eye and a deadly aim, taciturn in his demeanor, symmetrical and instinctive in understanding, Boone stood for his race, the affirmation of that wild logic, which in times past had mastered another wilderness and now, renascent, would master this, to prove it potent."

In this affirmation and this mastery, the reputation of the first major Western hero, the man whom others have closely followed, is preserved as a permanent part of the American heritage.

Daniel Boone's place in American history is unique and secure


Daniel Boone's place in American history is unique and secure. He set the general pattern which later western heroes followed, personified the epic move westward, and "Kilt a bar" that became a myth. The prototype for Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Paul Bunyan, and the American cowboy, he has not been outshone by more spectacular or successful adventurers. Boone was the American Moses who led us into the Promised Land.

That he was also a modest man who claimed to have killed only one Indian, an illiterate man who had difficulty writing his own name, and an unsocial man who drifted westward in search of elbow-room, only heightens his achievement. It also raises the question: how is it that Boone has been exalted, more than such equally brave companions as Squire Boone, Harrod, McAfee, and Logan?

His fame rests both upon the quality of his life and acts, and upon historical circumstances. Boone had the good fortune to be active when many writers and intellectuals, influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, dreamed of the noble savage who was free from the shackles of society and convention. Despite its coonskin trim and backwoods flavor, Boone's image is modeled after the Enlightenment "natural man." John Filson's biography (translated into French in 1785 and into German in 1790) spread Boone's fame. Here was the innately good man of the forest; a rustic Ben Franklin. His very weaknesses (aggressive individualism, mania for solitude, non-conformity) appealed to his admirers. Even Lord Byron was impressed, as his Boone tribute in Don Juan shows. He sums up Boone's life, to which he devoted seven stanzas of Canto Eight, thus:

"Boone lived hunting up to ninety;
And what's still stranger, left behind a name
For which men vainly decimate the throng
Not only famous, but of that good fame
Without which glory's but a tavern song,--
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
Which hate nor envy e'er could tinge with wrong."

Later, Boone made an admirable hero for the Jacksonian Democrats of the 1830's. He remains today the unsurpassed pathfinder of a nation which no longer has a western frontier.

The elevation of Boone was the triumph not only of the times, but of five Americans who fostered his reputation. John Filson, Timothy Flint, James Fenimore Cooper, Lyman Draper, and Dan Beard were largely instrumental in establishing him as a major American hero. He would probably have achieved high status even had lesser men championed his cause, though he himself did little to publicize his exploits. Not to discredit Boone (who was a sterling man) nor to make heroes of his publicists (who were less heroic) is this analysis made; but to illuminate the relationship between the great man and those who revere him.

Boone was born near Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1734, the sixth son of Squire and Sarah Boone. The promise of religious freedom had caused Daniel's grandfather to leave England and settle twelve miles north of Philadelphia. Eventually he moved to Oley Township, now Berks County, Pennsylvania. The Boones were born wanderers, always answering the call of that something which manages to stay just beyond the ridge. Young Daniel got little education even for that place and time. Later he made some attempt to further his training and improve his highly individualistic handwriting. Uncle John Boone tried to guide Daniel in bookish ways, but gave up because Daniel lacked interest. To John Boone, Squire Boone made the much-quoted (probably apocryphal) statement in defense of his son: "Let the girls do the spelling, and Dan will do the shooting." Daniel was early exposed to the wilderness, and became familiar with wild life in the dense Pennsylvania woods. He learned his forest lore while caring for his father's cattle on twenty-five acres located miles from the main farm. That task he neglected, and the herd was usually left to wander at will.

Dan Boone was fifteen when his parents left home and headed for the Valley of Virginia. For a year and a half they lived near Harrisonburg before moving to Rowan County, North Carolina. (A nearby Virginian neighbor was John Lincoln; his great-grandson would share America's top heroic honors with George Washington, whose ancestors were by then well established on the Northern Neck.) Daniel Boone married young after having almost shot his wife-to-be while "fire-hunting" for deer. In those days, the hunter would flash a torch until he attracted a curious deer; light reflected in the animal's eyes revealed his target. Boone once caught sight of gleaming eyes and raised his long rifle to shoot, but discovered just in time the figure of Rebecca Bryan. She rushed home to tell her father she had been chased by a panther. Later on, at the proper moment, she rushed into the panther's den.

The young couple had been married three years when Boone took his wife and two children to Virginia to avoid the Indian uprising brought about by wanton killings of Cherokees. They settled in Culpeper County, where he made a living hauling tobacco to Fredericksburg. But this was no life for a man of Boone's temperament; so he sold his property and left with six families and forty men for Kentucky. The party was attacked by Indians near Cumberland Gap. Six were killed, including Boone's son James, who was in the rear of the main party. Such memorable tragedies as this merely added to Boone's fame. Virginia's governor chose him to warn the surveyors in the Kentucky territory of the impending uprising. Boone and "Big Mike" Stone covered eight hundred miles in sixty-two days, going as far as the Falls of the Ohio. After that Daniel was placed in command of Moore's Fort in the Clinch River Valley. In 1775, he was commissioned by Colonel Richard Henderson to hack out the Wilderness Road to Boonesborough, where he built the fort that has been re-built for plays and movies a thousand times.

Here he and his companions resisted several savage attacks and rescued Jemima Boone and the Calloway girls, who had been kidnapped by the Indians. Later Daniel himself was captured at Blue Licks, adopted as a son by the Shawnee Chief, Blackfish, and given the tribal name, "Big Turtle." The following year he escaped in time to warn his comrades at Fort Boone of an Indian raid. These were ideal episodes for the legend-makers, who found good hunting in the tales of the Dark and Bloody ground.

In later life Boone's chief concern was contesting the loss of land which he had improperly entered. Ejectment suits deprived him of his holdings. Dismayed, the old hunter left the Kentucky that later considered him its special saint, and moved west. Eventually he reached what is now Missouri, where his son Daniel lived. There he became magistrate of the district. Once again his holding was voided, this time by the United States land commissioner; but in 1814 Congress confirmed his claim. He traveled back to Kentucky to pay off his debts and (says tradition) ended up with fifty cents. He stayed only long enough to transact his business. Then he headed west again to spend his last years with his son Nathan. Admirers traveling into the wilderness to see the frontier sage wondered why he preferred to live his life out on the cutting edge of the frontier. His supposed answer was in keeping with Rousseau's natural man. "It was too crowded back East. I had to have more elbow-room."

Boone's uneventful later years did not dull his earlier achievements, nor diminish the respect with which Americans viewed him. James Audubon recorded after interviewing him: "The stature and general appearance of this wandered of the western forests approached the gigantic. The very motion of his lips brought the impression that whatever he uttered could not be otherwise than strictly true." This appraisal is all the more remarkable when we note that Boone was only five feet eight inches tall. Audubon viewed Boone as more than a historical figure. The component parts of the myth were recognizable even then: a Promised Land beyond the mountains; land-hungry families who considered it a new Eden; someone leading the people westward; a lone wanderer guiding his generation on a God-sanctioned mission.

That scores of people had preceded Boone in Kentucky--Couture, Walsh, Nairns, Morgan, Finley, and Stone, for example-served but to enhance the Boone saga. Their achievements were laid at his feet. Some have lamented this and seen it as a gross injustice. Actually it is a normal process with heroes; their lives polarize many of their contemporaries' feats and accomplishments. Certainly in Boone's case, as Clarence Alvord put it, "popular fancy was granted opportunity for unrestrained imagination in creating myth, which age so hallowed that even well trained historians have hesitated to submit it to the violet rays of scientific analysis." 2

Boone himself tried in vain to discredit the idea that he never relished civilization. Actually he got along reasonably well with his neighbors, and sought companionship, particularly in his old age. Boone was no sulking misanthrope. With his native capacity for leadership and decision, his enduring stoicism despite setbacks, and his love of the outdoors, he epitomized the unmachined men of our frontier. These qualities are particularly appealing in our own twentieth century, now that science and technology have brought on perplexing problems. Americans look with nostalgia at the image of a man most happy when farthest away from multiple gadgets, factories, and smokestacks of civilization. An apt epitaph for Boone is Mark Twain's last line of Huckleberry Finn: "But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." So had Daniel.

The first writer to perceive epic qualities in the Boone story, and to record them, was an early schoolmaster and explorer named John Filson. Born on a southeastern Pennsylvania farm in 1747, Filson was struck by the vision of frontier adventure. At the close of the Revolution he moved west, spent a year in Kentucky as a school teacher, and secured several thousand acres of land. He wrote The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky. The appendix, called "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone," is the first authentic sketch of Boone. Florid and pedantic, it purports to be an autobiography, though meditations in "sylvan shades" about "the ruins of Persepolis or Palmyra" were about as familiar to the real Boone as discussions of the latest coiffures at Versailles.

Only Daniel's illiteracy saved him the shock he might have got from reading such a line as this: "The diversity and beauties of nature I met with in this charming season expelled every gloomy thought . . . At a vast distance I beheld the mountains lift their venerable brows and penetrate the clouds." Small wonder that the book made much more of an impression at Versailles than it did at Boonesborough. The 1785 translation couched in Chateaubriandlike prose, became popular among French writers and courtiers. Though later scholars have considered Filson's story pompous and inaccurate, it was endorsed by Boone himself, both as being the best account of his life, and as "not having a lie in it."

The book's popularity can be gauged by the number and variety of editions it enjoyed. Five years after the first printing in Wilmington, Delaware, it appeared in Paris as Histoire de Kentucke, Nouvelle Colonie a l'ouest de la Virginie; in Philadelphia as the Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, One of the Original Settlers of Kentucke; and in Leipzig as Reise nach Kentucke und Nachrichten von dieser neu Angebauten Landschaft in Nordamerika. After that, excerpts and paraphrases cropped up almost continuously.

Among Filson's other accomplishments were the publishing of the Kentucky Gazette, and the laying out of Losantville, which grew into Cincinnati. There was an ironic as well as a tragic note to his death. The man whose pen had caused so many Indians to bite the dust was himself tomahawked while traveling up the Little Miami River in October, 1788. And there was no Daniel Boone to save him.

In 1934 Kentucky's Filson Club celebrated its semi-centennial and the sesquicentennial of the Filson volume, which the club's president called "one of the most important in American pioneer history, the foundation of Boone's reputation." Filson was following the great trail blazer through the unpredictable realm of Public Acclaim. To Timothy Flint, as to Parson Weems before him, history was a means of conveying moral ideas and edifying stories, not a scientific recounting of past events. When Weems finished describing Washington, and Flint Boone, their subjects had haloes. Born near North Reading, Massachusetts, Timothy Flint graduated from Harvard in 1800. Sharing the fate of most of his classmates, he became a preacher. Soon he agreed with his congregation that his was not the theological bent. While supposedly preparing sermons, he was reading Chateaubriand. While thinking of Biblical analogies, he was dreaming of frontier heroism and collecting autographs of early pioneers. "There is a kind of moral sublimity in the contemplation of their adventures and daring," he wrote. "They tend to reinspire something of that simpliciyt of manners, manly hardihood, and Spartan energy and force of character which forms so conspicuous a part of the nature of the settlers of our western wilderness."

He learned about Boone, "the Achilles of the West," through Daniel's grandson, Albert Gallatin Boone. While inaccuracies dot Flint's biography, Albert always maintained that it was the best of the Boone accounts. Some vividness comes from Flint's romantic conception of Boone as a walking embodiment of coonskin individualism, and America's unique contribution to history. In his mind he saw Boone as he saw William Weldon in his own novel, Shoshonee Valley: "disgusted with social and civilized life, and anxious to purge his own soul by lonely treks into the interior." To cleanse his own spirit, Flint traveled thousands of miles in the west, suffering from fever and ague, always moving restlessly on. His was indeed a life of quiet desperation, of endless wandering and adoration. Only the strength of his own hero worship sustained him.

Unlike the Parson, Flint did not hit upon any legend remotely comparable to that of George Washington and the cherry tree. The event of Boone's life which comes closest is the killing of a bear, and the subsequent carving on a birch tree, "D. Boon kilt a bar." How many trees have been subjected to real knifes, and how many bears slain by imaginary Daniel Boones, historians dare not guess.

Flint pictures, without historical justification, his hero slipping tartar emetic into the whiskey bottle of his Irish schoolmaster, and this becomes the episode which ended Boone's brief schooling. In his last chapter Daniel takes up the creed of the noble savage. "Such were the truth, simplicity, and kindness of his character, there can be but little doubt, had the gospel of the Son of God been proposed to him, in its sublime truth and reasonableness, that he would have added to all his virtues, the higher name of Christian." When some objected to such fabrication on Flint's part, he replied with an unanswerable line that Parson Weems might have endorsed: "Like Pindar's razor, the book was made not for use but to sell."

And sell it did. Fourteen editions appeared between 1833 and 1868. Flint's stories were retold by others and his fanciful Boone dialogues plagiarized so blatantly, that even the typographical errors were copied without much correction. The Trailblazer most people read about today came first from the brain of Timothy Flint and has been public property ever since.

Against the forces of evil the "sinewy sons of Enterprise" prevailed, pushing on into the "rude featured Wilderness". Finally reaching the Mississippi, they envisaged a time when "Freedom's Cities and Republics too" would prosper. As poetry it was a bit embarrassing; but it suggested a nice mythology.

The author who best moulded the fictional image of Boone was born in his father's village of Cooperstown, New York and raised near the eighteenth century frontier. James Fenimore Cooper's literary career began on a playful wager, but his novels soon established him a serious American writer. William Thackeray thought Cooper's Leatherstocking a better fictional figure than any invented by Scott, one to rank with Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverly, and Falstaff. And Leatherstocking, like his fellow creations Hawkeye, Natty Bumpo, and Deerslayer, was a thinly-disguised Boone.

Cooper specifically acknowledged his debt to the Boone stories and based part of The Last of the Mohicans on Daniel's rescue of his own daughter and the two other white girls from the Cherokees. He said Boone went beyond the Mississippi "because he found a population of ten to the square mile inconvenient." While there is some question of the extent to which Cooper drew directly from Boone's life, it is certain that he used him as a model. Like Boone, Leatherstocking had a historic mission. Both appealed to an America intoxicated with the heady wine of Manifest Destiny, typifying moral stamina, courage, and will-power. Cooper's paragon looked and dressed like the real Boone: he was tall, leathery and solemn. His long rifle was as essential for a public appearance as his trousers. So was the coonskin hat, sitting casually on his noble head. The Old World could--and did--contemplate him in admiration.

The Leatherstocking Tales presented vividly and convincingly the struggle for empire in the forests, modeled actually on Boone's struggle for survival. Utterly simple and admirable, Leatherstocking demonstrated that it was not polish or costume that made for greatness. What a man was inside, not how he appeared, really mattered. In this way the country cousin, America, justified herself to that debonair rake, Europe.

During Boone's own lifetime he served as model for such books as James Hall Legends of the West and Robert Montgomery Bird Nick of the Wood. In the hands of a writer as skillful as William Gilmore Simms, clever variations of the theme appeared. Boone's reputation rose like smoke from a mountain cabin on a crisp, still December morning.

In the National Capitol, Horatio Greenough portrayed the contest between civilization and barbarism as a death struggle between Boone and an Indian brave. He set an artistic prototype. Many chose to use this figure, but only one artist painted Boone from real life. This was Chester Harding, who traveled to Missouri to see Boone in 1819. John J. Audubon, Thomas Sully, Alonzo Chappel, W. C. Allen, Reuben Macy, J. B. Langacre, and Y. W. Berry did portraits; but George C. Bingham best reflected Boone's symbolic importance in "The Emigration of Daniel Boone." This showed the old man leading a group of eager settlers into the new Eden. It epitomized American thinking on the subject and the leader.

Walt Whitman added considerably to the growing cult of the coonskin Moses. A Long Islander, Whitman fell in love with the western mirage, and then with the west, which he visited in 1848. His 1855 volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was a loud and indiscriminate yes. In it even a mouse was miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. The stereotyped hero who roamed through its cacophonous pages was closely related to Boone:

"Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, Have you your pistols? have your sharp-edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers! Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!"

Thus Whitman glorified the kind of leader of which Boone was the original, praising the trailblazer's exploits in vigorous and explosive verse. He said well what many already believed: the true America was west.

Boone has long been a favorite with our historical novelists. Winston Churchill's protagonist in The Crossing ( 1903) meets Sevier, Boone, and Kenton in a fictional account of the Wilderness Campaign. Elizabeth Maddox Robert The Great Meadow ( 1930) uses the spirit of Daniel Boone as a motivating factor. The family of Berk Jervis travels from Virginia to Harrod's Fort, where its members are separated by an Indian attack. The intervention of Boone brings about their final reunion. Stewart Edward White' The Long Rifle ( 1932) has as its central figure Andy Burnett, who inherits a long rifle from his grandfather's friend, Daniel Boone. The list of novels also includes D. M. Henderson Boone of the Wilderness, C. H. Forbes Lindsay Daniel Boone, Back-woodsman Horatio Colony Free Forester, A. B. Guthrie The Big Sky, Caroline Gordon's Green Centuries, Katherine Clugston Wilderness Road, and Felix Holt Dan'l Boone Kissed Me.

More than all of these writers, however, it was dilatory Lyman C. Draper who brought Boone into historical prominence. Young Draper inbibed tales of frontier heroism from his father in nineteeth-century western New York state, and read even more of them during his years at Graanville College in Ohio. He became Peter A. Remsen's protege, and collected material for the latter's histories and biographies. Eventually Draper moved to Wisconsin. There, as Secretary of the Wisconsin Historical Society, he set to work in 1854 to make its archives one of the most important in the nation.

For half a century the meticulous Draper used his limited funds and support to assemble 478 bound volumes covering the years 1735-1815. No one is better represented in them Daniel Boone about whom 39 volumes center; five embody Draper's longhand life of Boone up to 1778--still the most detailed and authoritative ever written. Sixteen contain information on Boone furnished by descendants, neighbors, and friends. Others deal with inscriptions, stories, and legends. They prove that Boone was the subject of apocryphal stories even in early manhood, and specify places that claim to be the one where "D. Boon Kilt a bar." There are "eye-witness accounts" of Indians being killed by Boone, in contrast to Boone's own statement that he killed only one Indian in all his life; letters from Boone's relations and associates; original documents and surveys; and notes and allusions pertaining to his life. While gathering these, Draper contacted all the direct and collateral descendants of Daniel Boone, and was authorized to do a biography. He collected a variety of documents unequalled for any frontier figure, and opened them up for historians and text-book writers. His material supplied valuable testimony about Boone's status among his contemporaries. Draper impressed a group of people who might not have been touched by Filson, Flint and Cooper. He made Boone a respectable subject of scholarly historical probing. Dusting off the coonskin hat, Draper found an exalted position for it in the academic hat-rack.

Draper's obsession with details eventually became a curse, and his procrastination an albatross. "I have wasted my life in puttering, but see no help for it," he wrote. "I can write nothing so long as I fear there is a fact, no matter how small, as yet ungarnered." He was fascinated by the physical exploits of men he would have emulated, had not an undersized body and a desk job rendered such things impossible. Like Timothy Flint he found atonement in endless travel, copy work, and the dream world of vicarious adventure. How dark and somber it can be under the lengthening shadow of a great man!

In 1854 Draper and B. J. Lossing entered a contract for the joint authorship of a Boone biography. Draper's dallying prevented the partnership from maturing. It lasted, on paper, for fifteen years, during which Lossing published some Boone material on his own. Draper finally completed King's Mountain and Its Heroes in 1883. Exacting in scholarship but discursive in style, it embodied the romantic concept that frontiersmen, fresh from the farms, could defeat the disciplined regiments of the British tyrant. In 1889 Draper did a perceptive essay on the collection of autographs (a phase of the hero-building process in which he was a past master), but he never completed another book. No crumb from a hero's table was too small or insignificant for this little man. Like T. E. Eliot's memorable J. Alfred Prufrock, Draper wondered how he should begin, and how he should presume. Yet he did the archivistic job so well that, so far as the early frontier is concerned, no one need undertake it again.

Washington novels, plays, books


"It is a dangerous business to involve Washington in the machinery of a work of fiction, for he is in no way a fit subject for satire," John R. Thompson warned William Thackeray in 1858. Americans have got so used to the remote Washington that to see an intimate literary portrayal irritates them. Putting so high a figure in a trivial situation smacks of blasphemy. It is as if a Japanese were asked to portray the Mikado in a sequel to the Gilbert and Sullivan opera (which, incidentally, caused an international incident).

To date, none of the novels in which Washington figures has fully satisfied the public. A gallant, aloof, and unreal first president steps gingerly through the pages of novels by Fenimore Cooper, Maria Sedgwick, John Neal, and John Esten Cooke. They were all writing in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, who set the pattern for the nineteenth century historical romance; but they lacked the master's touch.

Playwrights have found it hard to put the Father of their Country on the boards. Samuel Shirk studied Washington dramas, and summarized their mediocrity. Of the 75 plays and pageants on Washington written since 1875, none was a real success. Only five-- August Thomas' Colonel George of Mount Vernon, Percy MacKaye's Wakefield, Maxwell Anderson Valley Forge, Sidney Kingsley's The Patriots, and Paul Green Faith of our Fathers-have been even moderately well received. The quiet integration of Washington's personality and the scarcity of startling dramatic situations work against portraying him convincingly.

Washington's reputation has of course declined in some periods. When the Jeffersonians were forming the party that swamped the Federalists, the President was one of their primary targets. Freneau, Bache, Madison, and many others attacked him; the Jay Treaty of 1795 brought strong protests. Another low point occurred after the Civil War. Lincoln emerged after his martyrdom as the national symbol of unity and greatness. The South found a new idol in the defeated yet untarnished Lee. Washington was temporarily discarded. The most serious attack came in the 1920's, when smartness and light took over. William E. Woodward's George Washington: The Image and the Man (1926) was the debunker's major sally, portraying a vain, ordinary, and undemocratic man, "almost as impersonal at the top of the government as a statue on top of a monument would have been." Strange that Woodward, aware of this haughty impersonality, should launch a pea-shooter attack against a marble man.

His ammunition did not penetrate. Cal Coolidge, whose monosyllabic granite-block answers made him something of a folk hero in his own right, disposed of the debunkers in a few words. When asked if they could destroy George Washington, he looked out of the White House window. "Washington's Monument is still there," he said.

Washington's aloofness preserves his reputation, but it also minimizes his warm-blooded, human side. There was fire and venom and drama enough in the real Washington. Think of Washington at Newburgh in 1783 when fronted by the impetuous document of his officers who felt mistreated by the Continental Congress. "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind in the service of my country," he said. Not a man felt, after the simple statement, that he should complain.

Recall the directions Washington's step-grandson gave a visitor at Mount Vernon. "You will meet with an old gentleman riding alone, in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand, and carrying an umbrella with a long staff, which is attached to his saddle bow. That is General Washington."

Legends are the slowly perfected fruit from a shoot of imagination grafted onto a tree of fact; a blur and blend of what was and what should have been. Some of Washington's can be attributed to specific sources. We know that Parson Weems invented the cherry tree story, and the one about a Quaker named Potts finding Washington praying fervently in the snow-covered woods near Valley Forge. But historical research (which proved that Weems first used the Valley Forge prayer story in the Federalist for March 12, 1804) cannot kill the image. The praying Washington remains fixed in the stone of the New York Sub-Treasury Building and indelible in millions of postage stamps. All the scholars put together cannot erase the prayer legend.

To no single source can be attributed the notions that Washington, like Saul of Old, stood head and shoulders above most of his countrymen (actually he was shorter than Thomas Jefferson, whom we seldom think of as tall); that he was a man apart, with no real friends, and too heavy a burden to smile; that he concealed a deep unrequited passion for a haughty colonial beauty; that he carved his initials on Natural Bridge and a score of other landmarks; or that he slept in almost every house of eighteenth century America.

More elaborate are stories of Washington's miraculous escapes from danger. One has an Indian chief turning to his men during the Braddock rout and saying, "Mark yon tall and daring warrior? He is not of the red coat tribe. He hath an Indian's wisdom and his warriors fight as we do--himself alone is exposed. Quick, let your aim be certain, and he will die!" But no Indian bullet can find him. "It is in vain," concludes the chief. "The Great Spirit protects that man and guides his life." What miracle story of medieval times could be more marvelous?

Some legends flatly insist that Washington was protected by the gods. His mother is said to have had a prophetic dream in which young George saved the house (symbolically the Republic) from destruction by flames. Like other favorites of the gods, Washington allegedly had a sword with special properties. Samuel Woodworth asserted in The Champion of Freedom ( 1816) that this blade would bring forth a message from beyond the grave, that in times of crises it would "flash and brandish itself, arousing the living characters to action." Just as King Arthur is supposed to turn up to announce the millennium, just as Charlemagne is scheduled to reappear when his great white beard thrice encircles the stone table before him in Untersburg, so Washington is expected to make a return engagement in order to fulfill legendary requirements.

In all these tales Washington epitomizes the traits of which young America was fondest: virtue, idealism, and piety. His flaws seem pale when held up against this central proposition; he was willing to stake his life and fortune on his high principles, to take up without question a task others could not perform. This is the basis of his real fame and "second fictional life." The South was particularly proud of this Virginia aristocrat, who became the model for the ante-bellum planter class. "How much more delightful to an undebauched mind," Washington wrote to Arthur Young in 1788, "is the task of making improvements on the earth than all the vain glories which can be acquired from ravaging it." Even the Republicans, out of sympathy with Federalist policies, were in accord with Washington's agrarian sympathies. Thomas Jefferson, so unlike Washington in many ways, nevertheless appreciated his true stature. "Washington's justice was the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision," Jefferson wrote to Dr. Walter Jones on January 2, 1814. "He was indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man."

Robert E. Lee grew up under Washington's shadow, and took his life as a model for his own. When he joined the Confederate forces he must have recalled that Washington too had led a revolutionary force against established authority. The WashingtonFranklin Roosevelt parallel is also worth noting at this point. Not since the Virginia dynasty had there been a president who was so much a country squire as Roosevelt; Washington was the model squire. Like the first president, Roosevelt was an aristocrat who
loved tradition, attracted subordinates easily, and exhibited an Appalachian strength in adversity.

But we should not forget that Washington's cult flourished most during those years when Queen Victoria sat on the British throne and Britannia ruled taste as well as the waves. Washington made a most admirable Victorian hero. He was a "code man," proper, pure, and personable; a man of property and substance; a man who would have appreciated Tennyson's poems, Galsworthy's novels, and Rogers' figurines. This is not to say he was a prig or a kill-joy. In him there burned a mad hell which, on the few occasions when it was freed, seared the souls of those who stood in its path. He was the General who wanted "news on the spur of speed, for I am all impatience," and who had no sympathy with his routed troops when they ran "like the wild bears of the mountains." No one could have been more gallant with the ladies when circumstances permitted. Once he danced for three hours without a pause. When it came to Madeira wine, he was an acknowledged epicure. His stories about jackasses were decidedly Rabelaisian. There was hotter blood in Washington's veins than this century dreams of. His real strength lay in his controlled gentleness. He played his part as if he knew exactly what the fifth act would be like.

Instead of revering the Washington of Madeira, clay pipes, thundering oaths, and jackass jokes, we admire the one Brumidi painted on the dome of the National Capitol in Washington. "The Apotheosis of Washington" depicts the distant demigod, with Freedom at his right and Victory at his left. Here is a Washington for the ages, a leader who symbolizes the finest qualities our nation can produce. To contemplate his character has given millions of Americans a sense of achievement and promise. Even when lifted out of reality and temporarily overshadowed by dazzling but ephemeral stars in the hero heaven, he manages to keep his place. History has affirmed the people's opinion of George Washington. He remains the greatest of great Americans.