“Aunt Becky” Young – Civil War Heroine

“Aunt Becky” Young was well-known during the Civil War and her efforts to take care of soldiers led many of them to have such fond memories that when she died in in 1908 newspapers around the country, including the New York Times, carried the headline “”Aunt Becky” Dies” secure that their readers would know who they meant.

“Aunt Becky” was not her real name. She was born Sarah A. Graham in Ithaca, New York in 1830 and had been married to Abel O. Palmer before the war started, so she was known as Sarah Palmer during the Civil War. She served as a nurse during the war, but she resented being called Mother by the wounded men. One of the soldiers said she looked like his Aunt Becky and she figured that was better than mother and it stuck.

Her first husband, Abel O. Palmer, died early on in the Civil War and shortly thereafter “Aunt Becky” joined the service as an army nurse in 1862. She served in hospitals in Baltimore and Bladensburg and was put in charge of the hospital at Beltville. Later falling the battles, she established and ran an army hospital at Falls Church. She provided nursing service at Fredericksburg, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, Chancellorville and Petersburg. She received personal commendations for her work from both General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln.

Aunt Becky reported this story to the Philadelphia Press and it was reprinted in the Jan. 13, 1900 Richmond Planet, now available on the Library of Congress website.

Aunt Becky reported that she had a group of wounded soldiers that she knew would die if she didn’t get them to Washington, D.C., but she couldn’t get exchanges for them that would allow them to travel. “So I went to up to the Quartermaster’s office to make a call and there were a lot of tickets of exchange lying on the desk. I shoved some off with my elbow, and when I got back I found that I had captured 14 of them. Without saying a word to anybody I pinned them on the worst cases and when the sick from other divisions were being carried down to the boats, I had one nurse carry these men down to meet them, and they were safely packed off.”

“Well, the next morning the doctor came around. ‘Where is Brother Jonathan?’ said he, asking for one of the patients.’ ‘Gone to Washington,’ the nurse told him.”

“‘By whose orders?’ he asked.”

“‘Aunt Becky’s,’ they said.”

“Then he came right down to me, and he was furious.”

“‘I’ll discharge you at once,’ he threatened. ‘I’d like to know on whose responsibility you sent those men off.’”

“‘On my own,’ I said, very quietly. ‘They’d have died if they stayed here.’”

“So he went straight to General Grant to complain of me, and he told how I had stolen the tickets for them and all.”

“General Grant laughed and said: ‘I’ve got nothing to say. Aunt Becky out ranks me!’”

“I didn’t get discharged, you may guess, laughed Aunt Becky, as she told this tale. “And listen,” she called, “those men who went to Washington all got well.”

After the War, “Aunt Becky” remarried in 1867 to Mr. D.C. Young and they moved to Des Moines, Iowa. In 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out, “Aunt Becky” took the head of the Iowa Sanitary Commission for this new war. She served as its President, and chair of the purchasing and forwarding committees. Ten years later Aunt Becky passed away and was survived by her second husband for two more years.

She was laid to rest in Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines. The GAR had erected a flag pole by her grave, but it had rusted and been forgotten. Just this year, the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War led an effort to get a proper military stone for her grave and to replace the long rusty flagpole. They were dedicated on Veterans Day this year.

Read more about Aunt Becky and her monument here:

http://www.iowacivilwarmonuments.com/cgi-bin/gaarddetails.pl?1248728661~2

Buy a re-print of Aunt Becky’s book about her Civil War experiences here:

http://www.awb.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=3943

Book: Lost Pueblo by Zane Grey

Back in August, something reminded me of a book I had read a LONG time ago. I asked and posted it everywhere in hopes somebody else could help me identify the book. Thanks to everybody who sent a suggestion or a possible author. Finally, I got the correct answer Thanks to “Needle in a Haystack” online newsletter, although some of the other suggestions I got were close. It was Lost Pueblo by Zane Grey. I was wrong that it was a dude ranch, not her father’s ranch, and we, and the heroine, Janey Endicott find out about the set up nature of the kidnap a lot earlier, but other than that it was just like I described. The hero is an archeologist named Phil Randolph I’m including the description I posted before below so you’ll remember which one I mean. Thank you very much.

Ok, this is officially driving me nuts. I’m trying to remember the name of a Western I read about 10 years ago. The story was about a spoiled brat of a young woman who is kidnapped and taken out into the wilderness. Eventually we find out that her father hired the kidnapper to keep her from marrying this total idiot in a fit of rebellion. They end up having to stay out in the wilderness longer than originally planned because of a flood. She resists, but they fall in love. She finds out her father was behind it all and pretends she doesn’t really love the guy who kidnapped her, but makes him marry her “to protect her reputation.” She then hires some thugs of her own to kidnap him and throw him on the train with her of the end, to get them back on an even footing. It’s a true love happy ending.

Sloo and Slough

When I was in De Smet this summer, we were talking about the Big Slough and as always a quote from Emily of Deep Valley popped into my head. Other people in the conference planning group said they had the same thing happen to them. It’s so nice to be with people who understand you. I hope all our readers get that chance at the conference this summer.

Oh, and the other thing the quote makes pop into my head is Cherry Jones reading Farmer Boy. Jones, clearly not a farm girl, says hay mow (rhymed with row) instead of hay mow (rhymes with now). Every time I listen to it, I spend the whole time automatically correcting her. Now you can too.

Lovelace, Maud Hart. Emily of Deep Valley. New York: Harper Trophy, 2000. ISBN 0064408582

“The Deep Valley slough, pronounced sloo, was the marshy inlet of a river. When Emily had first read Pilgrim’s Progress, after finding it mentioned in Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women, she had pronounced the Slough of Despond sloo, too. She had called it sloo until Miss Fowler had told her in English class that Bunyan’s Slough rhymed with “how.” Miss Fowler had made the correction in a casual unembarrassing way, putting her emphasis on the fact that Emily alone, out of the class, had read Pilgrim’s Progress.” pp.15-16.

Emily Webster, an orphan living with her grandfather, is not like the other girls her age in Deep Valley, Minnesota. The gulf between Emily and her classmates widens even more when they graduate from Deep Valley High in 1912. Emily longs to go off to college with everyone else, but she can’t leave her grandfather. Emily resigns herself to facing a “lost winter,” but soon decides to stop feeling sorry for herself. And with a new program of study, a growing interest in the Syrian immigrant community, and a handsome new teacher at the high school to fill her days, Emily gains more than she ever dreamed. This is one of three non-Betsy-Tacy novels she set in the same community of Deep Valley, a stand in for her home town of Mankato, Minnesota. Betsy and Tacy do make a brief cameo appearance. I love this book because it really depicts the time period so well.

Story Belongs to the People

A recent book by Elaine Showalter has an interesting mention of Laura in a section called Story Belongs to the People.

“One cultural contribution of the 1930s was the radio soap opera; daytime radio offered a rich choice of serial dramas about women, stories to brighten the lives of lonely housewives. Their shared theme, one historian notes, was women’s strength in the face of male weakness. “The men in their lives were handsome, but unreliable. They had affairs… they failed in business… or they were left helpless by blindness, amnesia, or some crippling trauma.” Women had to step into the breach, save the family, and take over as breadwinners. These drastic solutions to female fantasies were deplored by male writers, as they had in the days of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. James Thurber complained that ‘the man in the wheelchair’ has come to bet he standard Soapland symbol.” and William Faulkner described the era in Hollywood soap and weepie movies as ‘the Kotex age.’

The popular fiction of the thirties and even children’s literature by women also provided resourceful women characters to overcome the anxieties of the decade, or told stories of survival in hard times. Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) began in 1932 to publish her fictionalized memoirs of homesteading as a girl with her beloved family in the woods of Wisconsin and the Dakota Indian Territory. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and its sequels became favorites with children, teachers, and librarians.”

(pp. 356-357)

Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.

When I was growing up, I read a lot of my grandmother’s books from when she was growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. I loved not only Nancy Drew and the related series the Dana girls, but also “Helen in the Editor’s Chair” and the “Dorothy Dixon Earns Her Wings” series. These were all stories with active girls. I got so disgusted with the popular “girls” books of when I was growing up because all these girls seemed to do was worry about how to get a boy or to scheme against each other. The girl heroines of my grandmother’s old books were active, had goals, had plans and did things. They solved mysteries, righted wrongs, flew planes, and ran newspapers. I loved them. Like Laura’s books they provided resourceful women characters to model myself on. It never occurred to me that Laura’s resourcefulness was part of a literary trend in the 1930s, but it certainly is an interesting angle.

Like these other capable girls, Laura did things. She got scared, faced her fears and persevered. I hope in reading these books I learned to do the same.

Book: Emily of Deep Valley by Maude Hart Lovelace

When I was growing up, somehow I missed the Betsy-Tacy series when I was growing up, but I come across Emily of Deep Valley, unknown to me of 3 books by Lovelace set in Deep Valley that weren’t part of her classic series, and absolutely adored it. It is such a perfect depiction of high school at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. I really love it. It had everything from her support of the Bull Moose Party, to a proper Decoration Day celebration, to what it was really like to go to class in the classic 1910s high school that we’ve all seen.

I recently re-read the book so I could find her quote about the slough – sloo. I’m going to Mankato, MN that Lovelace used as the basis for Deep Valley next summer. I hope to see you there.

Looking for a Book Title

Ok, this is officially driving me nuts. I’m trying to remember the name of a Western I read about 10 years ago. I thought it was a Zane Grey, but none of the descriptions on Amazon of his books sound anywhere close. (I checked Louis L’amour and just using keywords from the plot too and no dice.) The story was about a spoiled brat of a young woman who is kidnapped and taken out into the wilderness. Eventually we find out that her father hired the kidnapper to keep her from marrying this total idiot in a fit of rebellion. They end up having to stay out in the wilderness longer than originally planned because of a flood. She resists, but they fall in love. She finds out her father was behind it all and pretends she doesn’t really love the guy who kidnapped her, but makes him marry her “to protect her reputation.” She then hires some thugs of her own to kidnap him and throw him on the train with her of the end, to get them back on an even footing. It’s a true love happy ending. I know I read it at least twice and I think it may have had Canyon in the name somewhere, but I’m just hitting dead ends. It was a book on tape. Any ideas anyone?
I hope this rings a bell with somebody who puts me out of my misery.

Reading Rainbow Ends Broadcasts

Although this is one show that I can remember beginning to broadcast, “Reading Rainbow” has long taken its rightful spot alongside “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” as both a classic of children’s television and a powerhouse of broadcasting on PBS. However, making new episodes stopped several years ago and host LeVar Burton was interviewed at the time saying he couldn’t believe they couldn’t get funding for a program that had done such a successful job of promoting children’s reading. I’m very sorry it’s come to this. I hope they will continue to be available in some format and that a new program will eventually come and take its place.

http://www.current.org/education/education0915rainbow.shtml

MLA 7.0

A new edition of the MLA citation system is out with substantial changes. I’ve been banging my head against the wall as I worked on updating our MLA page for the library, but I did find a couple of bright spots. I found a great quote about how they see citing digital sources:
“Electronic texts can be updated easily and at irregular intervals. They may also be distributed in multiple databases and accessed through a variety of interfaces displayed on different kinds of equipment. Multiple versions of any work may be available . In this sense, then, accessing a source on the web is akin to commissioning a performance. Any version of a Web source is potentially different from an past or future version and must be considered unique. Scholars therefore need to record the date of access as well as the publication data when citing sources on the web.”

The web as performance that gives you something to think about.

Book: Founding Mothers

Founding Mothers : The Women who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

Here is another audio book. Unlike David McCullough, I had no high expectations about the work of the author going into this one, so I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. While collections about women are becoming more common, I remember about 10 years the Hoover National Historic Site wanted to do an exhibit on the mothers of Presidents and had to come out with their own book because they couldn’t find one. The collections about women still tend to be general and brief. It’s still hard to find books about generations of women, generations of men, sure, but women are far more rare.  This book looks at the Revolutionary Generation with a focus on the women and the men relegated to the supporting mentions that women usually inhabit. Oh, you run into the likes of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton throughout the book, but the focus is on the women and their role in the Revolution. While many of the names are from leading ladies of the day, other women, like the ones who created a decorated bridge for Washington to cross the Delaware on the way to New York for his inaguration are not generally noted by history. Roberts not only gave biographies of women, but describes how they are connected and interacted with each other. She describes not only their achievements, but their shortcomings. The main women involved are Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Pickney, Mary Bartlett, and Martha Washington.  All of whose names you should recognize. If you don’t and even if you do, I highly recommend this book.

Book: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

I have read several biographies of Teddy Roosevelt. I don’t know of any particular reason. I guess part of it is the time he served is an interesting part of history and part is an on-going quest to understand him. It’s interesting because more so than any other figure I’ve read about multiple biographies on (except maybe Abraham Lincoln), people tend to try to make of Teddy Roosevelt what they want him to be and to judge him by modern standards. The one I read before this was particularly bad and tried their best to make him a modern Liberal Democrat, so maybe part of the positive glow on this book is reflected on how poor that one was.

This biography is the best on him I’ve read so far and no wonder considering David McCullough wrote it. He resisted the temptation to re-make TR for the most part. McCullough’s only slip in this regard of putting modern sensibilities on a 19th century man is his reaction to TR’s naturalist activities. At that time naturalists documented nature by killing and stuffing it. There was a whole culture of collecting natural specimans and I don’t think there was anything particularly odd about how he did it except that he had the money to go more exotic places than many did and that he attacked it with his characteristic gusto. McCullough admits that no one at the time reported it as something odd, but he still insists that it was somehow.

What makes this biography especially interesting and enlightening is that unlike most biographies on him, which focus on his middle years from the time he enters national politics on, this one starts with who his parents were before they met, their family backgrounds, their very different takes on the world, which they ultimately fused into one on everything but the politics of the Civil War (she was raised in the South and was a Southern Sympathizer throughout – he worked to help the soliders of the Northern army). Teddy idolized his father and was devoted to his mother and McCullough shows this impact on his later life. It wasn’t just a close family life, but his father’s interests, his choices for educating his children, and how the whole family used to take around the world trips that lasted years that impacted his future “by choosing these particular parents.” (Inside RWL joke)  It also talks about his time at college, his first marriage, his time in the west, and how his second marriage came about. It even talks about what his little daughter Alice was doing all that time he was gone. It certainly helps you understand his daughter Alice in a way no other biography I’ve read on him does. If you really want to understand how Teddy Roosevelt thinks, this is the book for you. McCullough might have taken a page from Rose Wilder Lane who called her biography of Herbert Hoover’s early life The Making of Herbert Hoover, this much more robust book is definitely “the Making of Teddy Roosevelt.” For those then ready to take on his later life, follow this up with The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and his Family in Peace and War by Edward J. Renehan Jr.

Alice Roosevelt is also a very interesting person. How many people do you know that have a color named in their honor (Alice Blue)? Just this morning I was recommended to read a new picture book about her,

Kerley, Barbara.

 

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALICE?