Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • February 17, 2010 Lions and tigers and bears and mainstream historians For the first time in I won’t say how many years, I’ve been nominated for a prize – the Western Writers of America Spur Award – for a story I wrote analyzing what probably happened in one of the American West’s most persistently rumored scandals. Rumor has it that George Armstrong Custer kept a Cheyenne Indian teenager as his concubine while he was in the middle of one of the great romantic marriages of American history, portrayed in the last of the umpteen movies by Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. The story has been around since 1868, and the article I wrote about what probably happened may have settled matters once and for all. After the facts, nothing remains but the poli- tics. Here’s what a history writer who used to bang out one best-seller after another had to say about the leg- endary liaison: “More nonsense has been said, written and believed about (Custer) than any other (U.S.) Army officer. The Mo-nah-se-tah story is a prime example…. Eventually the story began to appear in serious historical studies and is now firmly established as one of the ele- ments of the Custer myth.” People who read best-sellers probably do not delve back to primary source books very often, but if you read what George and Elizabeth Custer have to say about Monahsetah, you will realize this brush-off was bogus. But when you are dealing with history as a popular myth rather than an analysis of facts, don’t expect anything but a superficial understanding of reality. The Cheyenne are no longer a threat, but letting mythologizers write about Islam or East Asia could be a serious menace to our for- eign policy. Same historian, different subject: the death of Meri- wether Lewis, the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expe- dition. Lewis, serving as governor of the new Louisiana Territory, was headed for Washington to square his books with Congress, which would not honor some of his expenses. On Oct. 11, 1809, Lewis arrived at a pair of cabins known as Grinder’s Stand, in Tennessee. He got a bed in one cabin, the landlady slept in the other cabin, and Lewis’ servants, new hires he barely knew, slept 200 yards away in the barn. The next morning, Lewis staggered out of the cabin, badly hurt. Shortly after the sun came up, he was dead. The report was that Lewis had been drinking and was found with one gunshot wound in his head, one in his chest, and knife cuts all over his body. The money he was known to have had with him was missing, as were his watch, pistols, and prize rifle. The verdict: suicide! End of case according to the popular historian. To add insult to injury, the historian runs in a story that Lewis had contracted syphilis while living with the Indi- ans and that the agony caused him, however ineptly, to kill himself. The historian says the agony of syphilis caused Lewis – an experienced hunter since he was 10 years old, with a lifetime of experience around guns – to fail to shoot himself both in the head and in the heart with large-bore pistols that discharged correctly, and then to slash himself all over the body, rather than going for the jugular vein. There are a few problems with that analysis. Tertiary syphilis usually takes decades to kill its victims or drive them mad, not a couple of years as in the purported case of Lewis, and the victims often have episodes of intermittent blindness. Check out “The Sea Wolf” by Jack London, or the excellent film with Edward G. Robinson, Alexander Knox, and John Garfield. If you have the coordination to load a black-powder pistol, it’s not that hard to shoot yourself in the head on the first try, or in the heart on the second try. At the risk of being crude, what happened to the money Lewis was carrying? One of his servants committed sui- cide a year later, and may have been involved. More than likely, Lewis was sleeping after a single shot of whiskey when somebody who thought he was totally bombed tried to steal his pistols and wallet. Lewis, who was 35 and a tough frontiersman, put up such a good fight that his assailants fatally wounded him trying to escape with the plunder. The Lewis family believed Lewis had been murdered. The Grinder family offered garbled accounts that show Lewis was preoccupied with his appearance before Con- gress, but otherwise those stories do not make a lot of sense. Vardis Fisher, a Western writer of some probity, did a survey of various accounts and found that, before the 20 th century, almost everyone who studied the case believed Lewis had been murdered. Thomas Jefferson, who knew Lewis quite well, proclaimed the death a suicide, and that is how it stands in the best-seller stacks. The trouble is that the evidence is all wrong for a suicide by a forceful man who was familiar with guns and knew something about medicine and anatomy. Keep in mind that Jefferson also denied he was keep- ing a teenaged slave named Sally Hemings as his mistress. The DNA tests indicate Jefferson was lying about that. Was Jefferson secretly glad to be rid of Lewis, who was a strong proponent of the rights of the Indians? Was Jef- ferson simply eager to get the whole issue behind him? We may never know, but saying that the death of Lewis was an open-and-shut suicide on the word of Jefferson is amateur history at its worst and a bad case of hero worship of the type reputable historians should leave to Fourth of July orators. Here is more by the same writer on a different case. In a rewrite of the originally superb “American Heritage History of World War II,” we are told by the same histo- rian that Roosevelt did not connive to get American into the war that 80 percent of the American public did not want. There was no advance warning of Pearl Harbor. We are told this on the writer’s own authority. As a matter of fact, the U.S. Navy handed Franklin Delano Roosevelt a decoded Japanese document sev- eral days before the attack in which Japanese consulates around the world had been told to break up their decoding machines and burn their records. That is about as clear a declaration of warlike intent as hitting somebody in the face with your glove. FDR also shortly read a decoded Japanese diplomatic memo which he correctly under- stood: “This means war.” It is an absolute matter of record that he did this on Dec. 6, but we are asked to believe that nobody in the entire administration had the presence of mind to telephone Pearl Harbor – the most obvious target in the Pacific – and tell them war was about to break out and the fleet might want to get its air patrols into the sky and load its anti-aircraft guns. The catastrophe that followed killed 2,400 Americans and could have killed thousands more if the Japanese had bombed the oil tanks, but they didn’t for a reason that has been denied to the American public: The Japanese “war lords” knew they could not possibly win a war with the United States, felt the attack had been forced on them by the oddballs in FDR’s administration, and hoped for the best possible terms if they minimized collateral damage to civilians. Instead, they got the Tokyo Fire Raid – pre- dicted three weeks before the war started by General George Marshall – and ultimately Hiroshima and Naga- saki. Same historian, different topic: A Canadian historian named James Bacque blew the whistle on the huge number of German POWs who died from exposure and malnutri- tion while they were in American custody in the two years after World War II. Bacque said the numbers of starved POWs in American custody approached one million – probably far too high – but our official statesman said the total was probably about 60,000 and the other people who were listed as admitted but never listed as discharged from American POW camps could be explained because the kindly Americans realized that the old men and kids who made up the once-mighty Wehrmacht in 1946-47 were no threat, and simply told them to go home. That is not what a lot of Germans remember. Stories about being starved in American custody in the two years after the war were routine. While Bacque may have gone over the high side in terms of numbers, he was on the right track. Recent figures suggest that premature deaths among German non-combatants were higher in the two years after the war than they were during the last two years the war was in progress. Suddenly, in 1948, as some of the Soviet agents in the former Roosevelt administra- tion found themselves facing espionage charges before Congress, it became obvious that nobody in FDR’s White House had been watching the store, that the Soviets were not about to allow the Poles and the Czechs to run their own countries, and that the Germans might still be useful because the Russians were still afraid of them – not with- out good reason. That was the end of the purported starva- tion program. We gave the Germans back their guns and pointed them eastward. Loving America does not mean telling readers that the United States has never made a mistake. Loving America means having the guts to point out the mistakes so they do not keep happening. I have to tell the truth as I discover and understand it, and not tell people what they think they want to hear until the truth crashes down on their heads. Emmanuel asks... Can You Help? Our hat’s off to Cal McNulty who celebrated his eighth birthday by having his guests bring a donation of grocery store gift cards for families in the Northern Region. Way to go, Cal! He was very proud of his decision to do this, and so are we. You, too, can have a party with a purpose and make a difference. The Midland Park Student Senate gets our thanks for their recent “Souper Bowl” collection of soup and cereal. We thank Leon Varjian and the faculty and students of Midland Park High School for their continued support. An update on one of our families: Last week, we wrote about Ralph, a Bergen County resident who was diag- nosed with osteosarcoma that claimed one of his legs. Now, it has spread to his chest and into his blood. As a result, he is receiving a bone marrow transplant and is 4-29-09 karen/janine due to be released from the hospital very soon. His father is EmmanuelHelp3x.75(4-29-09) laid off disabled and cannot work, and his mother was from x her job and is looking for work. A local roofer called 3 .75 in to help, so that need is handled. Now, we are looking for new area rugs (an 8’ by 10’ and two 11’ by 14’ rugs) to give to a new family whose child is returning from a bone marrow transplant. We now need the following items: long grain rice, tomato sauce, dried or canned beans (red, black or kidney), corn meal, cooking oil, bottled olives, bread crumbs, mango juice, and canned beets. Some of ECF’s families would appreciate Goya brand foods. We also need toilet tissue and paper towels at the ECF Regional Center. Remember: Your company, house of worship, or group of friends can hold a mini-fundraiser and help us keep all of our programs in place. Contact us or visit www.emman- uelcancer.org for more suggestions on how to help. The following times are available for office volunteers: Wednesday and Friday from 1 to 5 p.m., Thursday from 2:30 to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Call us at (201) 612-8118 before you stop by. Please do not leave items at the center without checking with us first. Our storage space is limited. Our current hours are Monday, 10 to 1; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Northern Regional Center is located at 174 Paterson Avenue, Midland Park, NJ 07432. Visit us on the web at www.emmanuelcancer. org. As always, thank you for helping the children and their families!