chimney of your nose.
(Admonition to schoolchildren, 1886)
I always go through a few old history books every time I'm in a library. I usually turn up something for my notebooks. I don't know that I'll ever use all the notes I have but they're pleasant to compile.
But my real task was finding a book on the homes of the Cedar Rapids elite. It took a while but I found one.
The burned-out Victorian house I'd been in the other night did not appear in the book.
I looked through three different histories of the city. Many, many wealthy homes were alluded to and shown. But not the one I wanted.
I asked a woman at the reference desk if there were any more books on local architecture. She said there were, and told me where I'd find them.
It was a lazy afternoon, and it felt good and comfortable and fun to be inside the library, the way it had always felt when I was a young boy searching the shelves for science fiction and mysteries.
I spent an hour there but found out exactly nothing about the mystery house.
Then I started looking up the history of the Shipman family in Cedar Rapids. The kin of Claire Heston née Shipman had done well by themselves and the city. Local Shipmans could be found in business, medicine, government, the arts (though I wasn't sure what that meant) and law. Great-great-grandfather's first name had been Douglas and a fine-looking, generous man he'd been, helping hospitals, symphony orchestras, soup kitchens, prisons and churches with his millions. And then, in 1903, something seemed to have happened. Several stories in the main newspaper suggested trouble without saying anything specific. It was duly noted that, over a period of four months, Douglas Shipman a) resigned as President of his railroad b) resigned from his position on the Mayor's Select Committee c) resigned from the board of Trawler College (the local liberal arts school) d) took an extended trip to Europe — which proved to be longer than a year. After that, there was very little mention of the once-prominent man. Not until his funeral six years later was he depicted on the front page again.
Something terrible had happened to Douglas Shipman but what?
F rontier historians generally complain about how money could always buy off justice on the plains. But this was no less true in any other part of the country. Of course, justice was for sale in Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma just as it was for sale in New York and New Hampshire and London and Paris.
Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal
D eep summer came, a time of picnics and roller-skating and boating and minstrels and, Anna's favorite, chautauquas, at one of which she heard a stirring young woman proclaim: "Away, and for ever, with the idea that a married woman can make no progress in study. It is difficult sometimes to make women believe this and to dispossess them of the idea that marriage is an insuperable barrier to education."
And then there was the murder trial.
Even with all the windows open in the courtroom, the temperatures scaled ninety degrees and over. Fans could be heard flapping, loud as bird wings.
There were only a few seats for spectators and these were allotted each morning by drawing straws.
Indians appeared in small groups every so often and stood in the back of the courtroom.
Tall Tree sat glumly, watching the lawyers perform their lawyerly tasks, rarely saying anything except once when a witness described the dead woman as 'beautiful and delicate of soul."
The curious thing was, nobody seemed to know where the young woman had come from — or where she lived.
The presumption was that she'd been raised on one of the nearby settlements. Yet nobody stepped forth to claim her.
The other presumption — since she was so often seen shopping in Cedar Rapids — was that she was from town. But, again, nobody stepped forward to claim her.
Anna attended court one day. She spent most of the time watching Tall Tree. In a way she could not explain, she
(Admonition to schoolchildren, 1886)
I always go through a few old history books every time I'm in a library. I usually turn up something for my notebooks. I don't know that I'll ever use all the notes I have but they're pleasant to compile.
But my real task was finding a book on the homes of the Cedar Rapids elite. It took a while but I found one.
The burned-out Victorian house I'd been in the other night did not appear in the book.
I looked through three different histories of the city. Many, many wealthy homes were alluded to and shown. But not the one I wanted.
I asked a woman at the reference desk if there were any more books on local architecture. She said there were, and told me where I'd find them.
It was a lazy afternoon, and it felt good and comfortable and fun to be inside the library, the way it had always felt when I was a young boy searching the shelves for science fiction and mysteries.
I spent an hour there but found out exactly nothing about the mystery house.
Then I started looking up the history of the Shipman family in Cedar Rapids. The kin of Claire Heston née Shipman had done well by themselves and the city. Local Shipmans could be found in business, medicine, government, the arts (though I wasn't sure what that meant) and law. Great-great-grandfather's first name had been Douglas and a fine-looking, generous man he'd been, helping hospitals, symphony orchestras, soup kitchens, prisons and churches with his millions. And then, in 1903, something seemed to have happened. Several stories in the main newspaper suggested trouble without saying anything specific. It was duly noted that, over a period of four months, Douglas Shipman a) resigned as President of his railroad b) resigned from his position on the Mayor's Select Committee c) resigned from the board of Trawler College (the local liberal arts school) d) took an extended trip to Europe — which proved to be longer than a year. After that, there was very little mention of the once-prominent man. Not until his funeral six years later was he depicted on the front page again.
Something terrible had happened to Douglas Shipman but what?
F rontier historians generally complain about how money could always buy off justice on the plains. But this was no less true in any other part of the country. Of course, justice was for sale in Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma just as it was for sale in New York and New Hampshire and London and Paris.
Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal
D eep summer came, a time of picnics and roller-skating and boating and minstrels and, Anna's favorite, chautauquas, at one of which she heard a stirring young woman proclaim: "Away, and for ever, with the idea that a married woman can make no progress in study. It is difficult sometimes to make women believe this and to dispossess them of the idea that marriage is an insuperable barrier to education."
And then there was the murder trial.
Even with all the windows open in the courtroom, the temperatures scaled ninety degrees and over. Fans could be heard flapping, loud as bird wings.
There were only a few seats for spectators and these were allotted each morning by drawing straws.
Indians appeared in small groups every so often and stood in the back of the courtroom.
Tall Tree sat glumly, watching the lawyers perform their lawyerly tasks, rarely saying anything except once when a witness described the dead woman as 'beautiful and delicate of soul."
The curious thing was, nobody seemed to know where the young woman had come from — or where she lived.
The presumption was that she'd been raised on one of the nearby settlements. Yet nobody stepped forth to claim her.
The other presumption — since she was so often seen shopping in Cedar Rapids — was that she was from town. But, again, nobody stepped forward to claim her.
Anna attended court one day. She spent most of the time watching Tall Tree. In a way she could not explain, she
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