This Inglorious Indian War
On November 17, 1890, Major Guy V. Henry of the 9th Cavalry, commander of Ft. McKinney, Wyoming, received a telegram ordering him to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Two days later, Henry and D Troop of the 9th Cavalry, commanded by my great-great-grandfather Cpt. John S. Loud, set off on the roughly 300-mile journey to the lands of the Lakota people. The 9th Cavalry’s D Troop were not the only soldiers ordered to proceed to South Dakota at that time.
Declaring Independence
I was recently in Boston, Massachusetts, where I visited the Old State House, built in 1711 to hold the offices of the colonial governor and council. There I learned that the Declaration of Independence was read from the building’s balcony on July 18, 1776. The task of reading the Declaration fell to William Greenleaf, the sheriff of Suffolk County and my third cousin eight times removed. Unfortunately, William’s voice was quite weak so he was obliged to recruit the help of Thomas Crofts, who repeated each line after William read it.
The Dominion of New England
Growing up, one of my favorite books was The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. The novel, which won the Newbery Medal in 1959, tells the story of a young woman who, in 1687, comes to live with Puritan relatives in Wethersfield, Connecticut (Speare 1958). So I was delighted to discover relatives of mine among the founders of the earliest English settlements in Connecticut, including Wethersfield.
Lost on the Lady Elgin
On September 8, 1860, the steamship Lady Elgin, overloaded with passengers on a fundraising excursion, sank on Lake Michigan, an incident which remains the deadliest wreck on the open waters of the Great Lakes