Living History

My grandfather, Percy Whisler, was born fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. At the time there were only 50 million Americans living in thirty-eight states, and Iowa had been a state for only thirty-four years. That year James Garfield was elected president.

In 1880, Andrew Carnegie was forty-five, J. P. Morgan was forty-three, John D. Rockefeller was forty-one, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were both thirty-three, Henry Ford was seventeen, and George Washington Carver was just sixteen years old.

By the time Percy reached his first birthday, Billy the Kid was killed, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory took place, and Sitting Bull surrendered. The following year Jesse James was gunned down. Percy was three when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, four when the Washington Monument was completed, six when the Statue of Liberty was dedicated, nine when Confederate president Jefferson Davis died, and ten when the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred. Also that year, the Federal government announced the American frontier had closed.

Percy’s father, Hiram Whisler, was born two months after Dolly Madison died, when Zachary Taylor was president, only the twelfth man to hold that office since the nation’s inception. The Gold Rush was in its second year even though California wouldn’t become a state for two more years. Hiram was eight years old when the Supreme Court delivered its infamous Dred Scott decision and nine when Lincoln debated Douglas. He was twelve when the Civil War broke out, sixteen when Lincoln was assassinated, and twenty-seven when Gen. George Custer met his demise at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Percy’s life overlapped with his father’s for fifty-five years.

Percy knew his grandfather, Abraham Whisler, for twelve years while growing up in southern Iowa. Abraham was born in 1811, when James Madison was president, at a time when there were only seventeen states. Washington DC had been the capitol of the United States for only eleven years.

That year Daniel Boone was seventy-seven, Paul Revere and John Adams were both seventy-six, Thomas Jefferson was sixty-eight, James Madison was sixty, Alexander Hamilton was fifty-four, James Monroe was fifty-three, Andrew Jackson was forty-four, Daniel Webster was twenty-nine, and Abraham Lincoln was only two. George Washington had died twelve years earlier and Samuel Adams had been dead for only eight years. In Europe, Napoleon was just forty-two.

In another year the War of 1812 would break out. Six years later construction on the Erie Canal would commence. Two years after that the future British monarch Queen Victoria would be born and in America the Missouri Compromise would be reached. When Abraham was nineteen the Oregon Trail opened. The Battle of the Alamo occurred when he was twenty-five and two years later the Cherokee Nation began its Trail of Tears to the Indian Territory.

Imagine my grandfather talking with his grandfather about all of these American luminaries and events mentioned above. And then imagine these two talking about Abraham’s father, who died only thirty years before Percy was born.

Abraham’s father, John Whisler, was born in 1769 and shared thirty-nine years with his son before his death in 1850. When John was born Benjamin Franklin was sixty-three, George Washington was thirty-seven, John Hancock was thirty-two, and King George was thirty-one. Four years later the Boston Tea Party occurred. Two years after that shots were fired in Lexington and Concord that started the American War of Independence. He was seven when the Declaration of Independence was signed and twelve when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. When John was thirty-two Thomas Jefferson moved into the newly constructed White House and two years later Jefferson negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. One year after that Lewis and Clark embarked upon their western expedition.

The lives of these four men – Percy, Hiram, Abraham, and John – descendants of mine on my mother’s side - span two centuries of American history, from John’s birth in 1769 to Percy’s death in 1969. All of this rich history was sitting right next to me on the back stoop of my grandfather’s farmhouse when Percy was snapping green beans he’d picked that morning from his huge garden.

Think of the questions I could have asked him. Grandpa, what did you think when the Statute of Liberty was finished? How did you learn about the Wounded Knee massacre? What did your dad tell you about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or about Lincoln’s death? Did your grandfather ever travel the Oregon Trail? What did he remember about the War of 1812? How did he feel about the fall of the Alamo? How did he react to the news that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the very same day? What did your great-grandfather ever tell your grandfather about George Washington or the Revolution? What did he ever say about Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the West?

Two hundred years of American history could have unfolded before me if only I had known what questions to ask even though I was only about eight or nine years old when I was snapping beans with Percy. It would have been better if John, Abraham, and Hiram had committed the story of their lives to written journals that future grandchildren could have devoured. My great-grandfather on my father’s side, Thomas Edwin Bond Hudson, fought in the Civil War and left a handwritten diary of the years he spent as a soldier in the Union army.

As long as I can remember early American history has fascinated me. When still quite young I daydreamed about digging up Revolutionary War muskets in the backyard, or finding old colonial maps that led to secret patriot hideouts. If only I could build a time machine, I thought to myself, then I could travel back and help throw the tea into Boston harbor, or join Paul Revere in warning Lexington of the march of the British Regulars, or serve as Washington’s aide-de-camp during the War!

If I adjusted the settings on the time machine, then I could travel back to become the fastest gun in the West – sometimes as an outlaw and sometimes as a lawman – like Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp. At the same time, I could have witnessed the marvel of the American prairie – open as far as the eye could see – and filled with 60 million buffalo roaming the vastness without a care in the world. And I can only imagine what the night sky would have been like on that prairie without so much as a candle of light pollution to obscure seeing the Milky Way.

Time machines don’t exist but these Whisler men did live through what I could only dream about. If only they’d written stuff down so I could have seen what they saw. Then I wouldn’t have to leave so much to my imagination which tends to run in multiple directions at once. Their personal recollections would have made history come alive like it ought to be experienced. No one can really argue with an eyewitness anyway. We can only listen or walk away. For me, it’s the listening that adds richness to life and it’s the walking away that dumbs us down.

Perhaps it’s all about perspective. Can four men who have lived through two hundred years of history tell me anything about what life means or where it’s headed? I think they can if I’m patient enough to snap a few more beans with Percy, and let him remember those things from long ago that shaped the times. The long ago is not so long ago when history is charted by those who lived it.

PostScript:

A few days ago, I watched a documentary about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was six years old, in First Grade, when he was killed in November 1963. The superintendent’s office was down the hall from my classroom, and during the continuous news coverage of the aftermath, he had each classroom, one by one, come to his office and sit on the floor in front of his black and white console television to watch history in the making.

I had little understanding of who Kennedy was or what had happened. Yet, I was watching events unfold that would become milestones in American history. The memory of watching Kennedy’s funeral procession has never left me because Jack Hoenshel had the presence of mind to bring me and my classmates into his office to bear witness to it. Sixty years later I was watching that documentary and reflecting again on what I lived through when only six.

Then, I thought about my father, born in 1925, only sixty years after the end of the Civil War! The span of six decades – from the Civil War to my father’s birth, from JFK’s funeral to right now – is a wisp of time. Sixty years from today I will be dead, all my children will be dead, you will be dead, and my granddaughter Clare will be 65, perhaps thinking about the week she spent with her grandmother and me sixty years earlier. She will know then what I know now – that history frames and informs our lives so we gain perspective about our world and our place in it.

Few are granted the privilege of molding history by their very lives, but all of us are given the opportunity of observing its advance. In the progression of the grand American arc of causes and effects my solitary life is its own marker of events great and small with significance only for me and maybe for Clare, too, when she asks Grandpa, tell me your story. What did you live?

Percy Whisler was born the year Thomas Edison began the commercial production of light bulbs. He died the year Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. The year Clare was born the world got its first glimpse of electronic synapses that can power artificial neural networks, planes without propellers that fly using electro-aerodynamic propulsion, DNA programmable medications, smartphones that can see through walls, and edible electronic circuits imprinted on food to chart health effects. Before she dies will we have walked on Mars or have a colony on the Moon? More importantly, in the twilight of Clare’s life who will ask her what was in your eyes when you were given the world to see?