1 “ONE IF BY DAY AND TWO IF BY NIGHT …” “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY 1.This is the manner in which President Ford recited the poem as he stood at Concord Bridge during the Bicentennial Celebration. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW a 1314 Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita. which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would render as:2 MIDWAY upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I 2. You’ll do considerably better with Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1451 It was possibly in about this year that the Iroquois tribes of the area that would become upstate New York were tugged out of their incessant internal struggles by the appearance of Deganawida (Two River Currents Flowing Together), a Huron who would become famous as the “Peacemaker.” This negotiator apparently was hindered, like Moses, by some sort of language or speech difficulty, but eventually won the support of Ayawentha (He Makes Rivers), an Onondaga who became a war chief among the Mohawk (and who would achieve a posthumous poetic fame as “Hiawatha”).3 The distinguished duo were somehow able to convince the other Iroquois tribes that in order to achieve ascendancy over other redskins, they needed to bring their own incessant internal strugglings to an end. Since the legend has it that Deganawida produced a miracle of blotting out the sun, and since we know that a solar eclipse would have occurred in upstate New York in 1451 if it wasn’t too cloudy that day to be seen, this would be a possible year for the conciliation work that would bring peace and unprecedented prosperity, and political unity and unprecedented military power. At first, the Iroquois would function as two related alliances: the Seneca, Cayuga, and, to a lesser extent, the Onondaga would merge as the western Iroquois while the Mohawk and Oneida would merge as the eastern Iroquois. 3.The life of this politician has been cartoonized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem of 1855, which is approximately as historical as the more recent Disney biography of Pocahontas. Longfellow and Disney were strangely alike: each, pretending to build bridges to understanding, built only walls. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (Deganawida’s “Great Peace” would never be extended to anyone outside the Ongwi Honwi, superior people, of the Five Nations. From the outside, this “Great Peace” would more resemble a “Great War.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1570 It seems to have been at about this point that the famed League of Five Nations was founded (some will try to tell you that this had happened as far back as 900 CE). The government that was being constructed would have a 50-seat assembly of delegates from the nations. (Although it has been said that Hiawatha, just about the ultimate political animal, was one of the founders of the Five Nations Confederacy, the actual Iroquois seems to have lived some four or five generations earlier than this.)4 All water falls, in the Dakota tongue, are called Ha-ha, never Minnehaha [“as Longfellow has it,” Thoreau remarked here in brackets]. The “h” has a strong guttural sound. The word is applied because of the curling of the waters. The verb I-ha-ha primarily means to curl; secondarily to laugh because of the curling 4.The life of this politician has been cartoonized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem of 1855, which is approximately as historical as the more recent Disney biography of Pocahontas. Longfellow and Disney were strangely alike: each, pretending to build bridges to understanding, built only walls. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW motion of the mouth in laughter. “Authentic Minnesota Scene” postcard of the Minnehaha falls HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1638 October: John Josselyn, Gent. arrived at his brother Henry’s home in Scarborough,5 where he would abide for some 15 months. While walking in the woods he spied what he presumed to be a kind of fruit: chanc’t to spye a fruit as I thought like a pine Apple, plated with scales. It was as big as the crown of a Woman’s hat.... (I) made bold to step unto it with an intent to have gathered it ... but no sooner had (I) touched it but hundreds of Wasps [burst out.]... At last I cleared myself of them, being stung only on the lip; and glad I was that I ’scaped so well. His lip “swelled so extreamly” that by the time he had stumbled home “They hardly knew me but by my Garments.” When he had recovered, he would give further thought to the strange gray nest: “Of what matter it’s made no man knows, wax it is not, neither will it melt nor fry, but will take fire suddenly like Tender.” What he didn’t realize was that the nest was pulp paper made from wood fiber by the paper-making Hornet, and had he succeeded in mastering this technical process, he could have revolutionized the paper-making industry of his age, based as it was at the time on the iffy supply of cotton and linen rags, and transformed himself from a comfortable into an extremely rich man.6 Josselyn was bemused by the story of the “Mere-man” seen by one “Mr. Mitton” out in Casco-Bay ... “Who laying his hands on the side of the Canow had one of them chopt off with a hatchet, which was in all respects like the hand of a man, the Triton presently sunk, dying the water with his purple blood, and was not more seen.” One can almost see him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, scribbling away before the winking fishermen. “These with many other tales they told me” he admits, “The credit whereof I will neither impeach nor impune, but will satisfy myself with — ‘There are many strange things in the world than are to be seen between London and Maidenstone’.” SEA SERPENT SIGHTINGS Jocelyn was the first to mention the famed sea-serpent of Nahant and of Egg Rock, in this year. He wrote that the serpent had been observed “quoiled up on a rock at Cape Ann.” (This apparition would be repeatedly seen in Gloucester Bay in August 1817, and occasionally also in Nahant Bay, by hundreds of observers. One skipper would allege soberly that it was “longer than the main-mast of a seventy-four.” Another would compare its length to the height of the steeple of the Gloucester meeting-house.) 5. His “Beloved Brother” was agent for the heirs of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, the proprietors of old Maine and New Hampshire and would rise to be the deputy governor of the province. The town is at the mouth of the Nonesuch River in what is now Maine. A suburb of Portland, it originated as “Black Point,” Thomas Cammock’s settlement, which combined in 1658 with Blue Point and with Stratton’s Islands to form a community modeling itself upon the Scarborough that is a resort on the North Sea coast of England. 6. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would make use of this incident in his THE NEW ENGLAND TRAGEDIES. In the verse play “John Endicott” the innkeeper Samuel Cole would be made to exclaim: I feel like Master Josselyn when he found The hornets’ nest, and thought it some strange fruit, Until the seeds came out, and then he dropped it. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1686 The Red-Horse Tavern was opened in Sudbury, on the main road west from Boston. This would become the locale of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Tales of a Wayside Inn.” Just take the 128 freeway to near Waltham, get off at the Route 20 exit heading West, drive something like ten miles past Weston and through Wayland and through South Sudbury, and start looking on the right. If you get to Marlborough, you’ve passed it. You can’t miss the place. Although it’s not the same building now, they’ve changed the name from Red- Horse Tavern to Wayside Inn in order to make certain that the tourists get the drift. Ask for a Harvey Wallbanger and mention that it was Hank Longfellow’s favorite libation. (BEFORE) HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1807 February 27, Friday: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine7 to a mother who was able to trace her ancestry to the John Alden who had been first off the Mayflower at Plymouth. His father was descended from the William Longfellow who had been born in Hampshire, England in 1651 –emigrating to Newbury MA where in 1676 he had married Anne Sewall– who had in 1690 drowned at Anticosti, an island in the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. All his life he would be embarrassed at his family name, since it blatantly emphasized that in fact he was quite a shortfellow. (You’d suppose that, for a guy with the attitude he had about an altitude problem, for appearances they would have buried him in a casket with a few feet of headroom — rather than in a casket that, for a person of normal height, they’d obviously have needed a shoehorn and a chainsaw to fit him into!) The federal Congress was, on this day, considering the possibility of their issuing a clarification of Section 8 of their “Act to prohibit the importation of Slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, from and after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eight.” This section gave permission for the continued buying and selling of slaves inside the borders of this nation.