At the outset one would think: how can you put Wyatt Earp, Sitting Bull, President U.S. Grant and professional baseball together in a book that makes sense?
Then add Col. George Armstrong Custer and Wild Bill Hickock.
What you have is “The Summer of 1876: Outlaws, Lawmen, and Legends in the Season That Defined the American West” (St. Martin’s Press, 320 pgs., $30) by Chris Wimmer. It is a masterful compilation of facts and great storytelling all fit into four or five legendary months.
Wimmer, a specialist in the Old West, can take you quickly, but not confusingly, from the Little Bighorn River and a heroic Indian stand against the Blue Coats of the Seventh Cavalry to the Chicago White Stockings and the first summer of professional baseball.
The Washington Independent Review of Books said it much better than I could have: “It’s an engaging, thoroughly rewarding read on its own terms, lean as a greyhound, a swift slice to the bone of resonant truth.” This history makes for a great read.
If you want to compare movieland’s Old West to the version described by Wimmer, one is fictionalized history; the other is well-documented history.
Two major elements of that summer hold sway in Wimmer’s narrative. The Last Stand of Custer and the fabled Northfield, Minnesota, bank robbery by the infamous James-Younger Gang.
Regarding Custer vs. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the author provides a week-by-week, almost day-by-day, narrative that eventually puts all the characters in the same action near the banks of the Little Bighorn in southeast Montana.
Don’t expect Custer to come out of this story as some sort of hero!
Custer’s flare and arrogance developed during his youthful Civil War military days and did not diminish as the Indian Wars began. His status as a leader was still celebrated prior to his last stand. “No other Native American battle compares to the Little Bighorn,” Wimmer proclaims.
The Northfield Raid was the last of the Jesse James-Cole Younger Gang’s combined efforts to rob as many banks as possible in the mid-1870s. The raid was botched from the start and the townspeople rallied to save their money, their bank and their friends. The story of the outlaws eluding the posse for days makes the raid a great tale.
Take those two significant events and toss in great tales of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and the infamous city of Deadwood and the lawmen of Dodge City. Here you have a Wild West yarn worthy of a summer’s read.
You will also enjoy Wimmer’s take on the beginnings of the National League and American baseball and the last year of Grant’s presidential term and the activity leading up to the contentious election of 1876. All that is combined in the swift moving narrative.
Founding Fathers
Legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen’s “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America” (Simon & Schuster, 368 pgs., $28.99) takes an important historical concept and brilliantly explains its importance in the creation of America’s values as expressed through the words of the Constitution.
A professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Rosen knows of what he writes. Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns describes Rosen’s efforts succinctly: “A life invested in understanding the past may in fact be a happier one. There are lessons here for preserving our democracy today.”
Taking the words of the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers, Rosen stresses the Founding Fathers found inspiration realizing the pursuit of happiness was a “quest for being good, not feeling good.” It was a lifelong quest, not a short-term contentment.
Rosen takes six of the major founders — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington — and shows how they pursued “their happiness.”
This is neither an easy read nor a quick read. Take time and savor what Rosen presents and appreciate how it formed an indelible mark in America’s constitutional philosophy.
Paratroopers on D-Day
Often paratroopers are the forgotten element in the Battle of Normandy. However, historians like Stephen G. Rabe do not want people to forget the important story of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions on D-Day clashes beginning June 6, 1944.
“The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village” (Cambridge University Press, 262 pgs., $24.95) tells about the village of Graignes, France, that welcomed members of the two units. They were unfortunately scattered, off target in the drop and not organized when townspeople found them.
Rabe, son of one of the paratroopers and history professor emeritus at the University of Texas, took time and effort to document this nearly forgotten story of the men and the 900 villagers who welcomed them. The town was deep behind German lines, and the American troopers decided to remain and defend the town until support arrived.
Much of the equipment the paratroopers needed was scattered around the area, just like they had been. However, “on their own initiative, villagers had taken their boats into the flooded areas to retrieve the bundles of equipment that had been dropped in distinctive blue parachutes. The paratroopers now had radios, machine guns, mortars and ammunition,” Rabe writes.
Ultimately, a German attack on June 11 forced the paratroopers to withdraw. When the Germans took over the village, townspeople suffered Nazi brutality. It was a month before Allies liberated Graignes.
In postwar wedding celebrations, many brides took their vows in gowns made from white parachute silk, partly in honor of the Americans’ fight for their town.
Have a comment or suggestion for Kale? Contact him at Kaleonbooks95@gmail.com.
