Monday, August 11, 2014

The Most Famous American You've Never Heard Of...

Maybe I'm overstating things with the title.  That said, my great-great-grandfather was a relatively historic figure.  His name was Joseph Baker Donavan, and he was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1842.  My great-grandfather, Wallace Collins Donavan was his youngest son, born in 1880.  My grandfather, Wallace Collins Donavan, Jr. was born in Denver in 1923, the same year his grandfather, Joseph Baker Donavan - about whom I will write - died of heart disease in a Denver store.

According to accounts written later in his life, Grandpa Joe tried throughout his adventures to stay relatively well out of the press.  Kitt Carson and Bill Cody were friends, but he shied away from the press that, whether or not encouraged, followed the more well-known figures of the era.  There are lines about him in the histories of the Pony Express, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's start with myth and better-documented occurrences...

Grandpa Joe was born on a farm in Pittsburgh, Penn to a family that had ties in the country back to the time of John Smith.  Grandpa Joe's grandfather on his dad's side fought in the Revolutionary War at Bunker Hill. His father was a Captain, I believe in the War of 1812.  The family were frontier people, which I think explains a bit where Grandpa Joe got a highly romanticized impression of adventuring.

At the age of 12, Grandpa Joe ran away from home to join an uncle who was a steamboat captain at Cairo, IL, Mark Twain-style.  From here, most of his life is documented throughout the Denver Post of the early 20th Century.  He road between Cairo, IL, to New Orleans, LA for 2 years, working for some of that time on the port in New Orleans.  In 1856, he found himself in St. Louis and in the company of the sons of John Brown - literally.  Like, the kids who got strung-up later for trying to forcibly free the slaves in Kansas.  He decided to join them in a raid their father was conducting on Oalthe, KS. Again - Grandpa Joe was 14.  He was grazed by a few bullets in the raid, but escaped largely undamaged.  But from a very early age, it was obvious by his course of conduct that Grandpa Joe cared deeply in justice for all humans, even those of different skin colors and languages.

After the raid on Oalthe, Grandpa Joe signed up to become a government scout.  He caught a train for Ft. Laramie to begin his work - the train was transporting livestock to supply the fort.  I will admit that these specific details come from his son's notes, but tie in fairly closely to the documented portions of the story.  Apparently, the train was hijacked by a group of Arapaho, and several of the horses / livestock were taken.  Grandpa Joe and the few others aboard the train escaped and made for the fort.

This brings me to the portion of the story that I've been thinking about today.  As a kid was shot in the streets of St. Louis and left to lay in the street for hours without an ambulance called for him.  As people riot in the street while the family of the victim begs for peace.  While I watched these images on the news this morning, I thought about Grandpa Joe.

It's a bit of a tenuous connection, I'll grant you.  But there's something in the air.  In San Francisco, we call it earthquake weather when it gets warm and overcast and a little humid - it's what the weather was like in 1906.  Politically it feels like earthquake weather.  It feels like there are a lot of people ready to set fire to the streets, and I kind of get it.  But cooler heads must prevail.

Back to Grandpa Joe - he escaped the train and made it to the fort.  There he found that the chief of the Cheyennes had been taken prisoner - charged with the robbing of the horses and livestock on the train.  The chief, Sloanecka (according to most of the accounts, there were a few where his name was differently spelled), asserted his innocence, but the men in charge at the fort had already sentenced him to hang.  Grandpa Joe snuck into the room where the chief was being held, tied to some manner of sawhorse, from what I can gather, and liberated (words from papers in 1910 were very heroic) the chief from imprisonment.  He then gave the chief his own horse and sent him off.

The homies at the fort in the morning were not surprisingly angry.  They threw Grandpa Joe in lockup of some sort, but several days later, the chief returned with the 5 Arapahoes responsible for the raid, as well as the horses and livestock.  Grandpa Joe was released - by all accounts, he earned the respect of the fort's leaders and became a friend of the Cheyenne.

I don't want to over-romanticize my great-great-grandfather.  I'm sure he could be a son-of-a-gun when taken to task, but in the overarching story of his life, he was known for acting in a way that helped people come together - helped differing parties understand one another.  He did so often against his own physical safety, and he did so time and again.  And in so doing, he changed the course of history for the better.

Grandpa Joe spent that winter with the Cheyenne, and managed to learn a bit of their language, as well as that of the Arapaho and 2 other tribes whose names I will butcher without proper source citation, which I don't have with me at the moment.  There was a story published indicating that the Cheyenne plucked out all his eyebrows in some sort of ceremony to make him an honorary chief, and his eyebrows never grew back in.  Whether or not credible, photos taken later in his life show he really didn't have eyebrows.

In the Spring, Grandpa Joe went to rejoin his parents, who had relocated to Salt Creek, NE.  All indications from newspaper articles were that his mother, Rosanna, was pissed.  I'm not sure whether it was while Grandpa Joe was at home, but the city of Lincoln, NE was founded in his father's (William Trimble Donavan's) frontier home in Salt Creek (predecessor name to Lincoln).  They named it for their party's newly elected leader.  They were abolitionists, radicals of their day, Republicans.  Now it seems not quite to go together, for reasons we can get into separately, but which have largely to do with FDR almost a century later.

For the few years after his adventure with the Cheyenne, Grandpa Joe returned to government scout work, mapping most of Colorado and the Dakotas.  While he was scouting, he and a small group of trappers camped the intersection of Cherry Creek and the Platt River.  Grandpa Joe had "discovered" (or at least had been to before anyone else recorded) the site of present-day Denver.  Years later, he would be honored in Industrial Parades and in Colorado Day celebrations, as he had been to the site of Denver on August 2, 1858 - in Colorado, pioneers to the area were generally known as '59ers, to give you some idea of the isolation and wilderness in which he found himself.  It reinforces in my mind the meaning of the term 'Wild, Wild West'.  The few players on the scene could act with relative impunity, but still Grandpa Joe decided to do right by whomever he could.

By the time 1860 rolled around, Grandpa Joe found himself called to St. Joseph, MO, to ride for the newly formed Pony Express.  There are various references to him in their documented history, but generally only a few lines describing some squabble between settlers and natives he helped resolve, or in one instance, a story of him rescuing two settler girls from a band of Navajo on the war-path.  (Please, please forgive me for the culturally insensitive references I'm making - I'm taking a lot of this verbiage from articles written in the 1910s, for the sake of brevity.)

While he was riding for the Pony Express, Grandpa Joe heard that shots had been fired on Fort Sumter from a passing group of pioneers.  He returned to St. Louis, and immediately enlisted for the Union.  According to papers published after the fact, Grandpa Joe fought throughout the war, was wounded 4 times, and each time returned to the field.  I haven't yet confirmed this with actual military records.  I do know that he was offered a government pension for his service later in life, which he refused.

O.G. Badass, Grandpa Joe.

After the war, Grandpa Joe returned to Colorado.  At various points, according to his granddaughter, he owned the land on which the Brown Palace Hotel sits (sold for a pack of mules), and Donavan Ranch (a 980 acre ranch he sold back to the government, which would later become the US Airforce Academy).  Incidentally, Grandpa Joe was the one who coined the Donavan family motto: "Buy High, Sell Low", which should surprise no one based on the aforementioned real estate deals.  The family largely tries to ignore the motto these days, and is sometimes successful.

Back to the point...  One of my favorite hymns is Battle Hymn of the Republic (for non-American audiences, Glory Glory Hallelujah).  Most people don't know it's based on an even older religious song, which was modified to fit lyrics having to do with John Brown, the man Grandpa Joe followed into a raid in 1856.  It was known as John Brown's Body - several versions were written as camps songs for Union soldiers, but I'll cite the one written by William Weston Patton.

John Brown's Body:

Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.

(Chorus) Glory, Glory, Hallelujah...

John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true and brave,
And Kansas knows his valor when he fought her rights to save;
Now, tho the grass grows green above his grave,
His soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

He captured Harper’s Ferry, with his nineteen men so few,
And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled thru and thru;
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew,
But his soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

John Brown was John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see,
Christ who of the bondmen shall the Liberator be,
And soon thruout the Sunny South the slaves shall all be free,
For his soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

The conflict that he heralded he looks from heaven to view,
On the army of the Union with its flag red, white and blue.
And heaven shall ring with anthems o’er the deed they mean to do,
For his soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

Ye soldiers of Freedom, then strike, while strike ye may,
The death blow of oppression in a better time and way,
For the dawn of old John Brown has brightened into day,
And his soul is marching on.

(Chorus)

... And heaven shall ring with anthems o'ver the deed they mean to do, for his soul is marching on...  It makes me tear up in a totally non-sarcastic way.

My grandpa was never referenced as being an overly religious man.  He was a master mason, for what that is worth, which meant he focused on morality throughout his life.  This country used to have a deeply-felt, religious connection to justice for all, at least in many circles.  Quakers ran the underground railroad.  John Brown swore himself a warrior for God's justice and mercy.  But generally, these were minority voices that weren't able to be fully galvanized until the support of the government was behind them OR the public opinion shifted.  Grandpa Joe fought because he thought it was right.  Other people fought for other reasons.

It became patently obvious that the situation was unjust - it had been obvious to many forever.  But just because we now consider this outcome a given, we shouldn't expect that every voice within America at the time was behind the North as a liberator of the slaves, and the South as a defender of a terrifying practice.  Most were, more or less reluctantly, fighting either to preserve the Union or to preserve individual and state freedoms.  That's why brothers ended up fighting each other on the battlefield.  I can't imagine there were so many families where one sibling and not the other came to feel slavery was an unjust institution - though there may have been.  It wasn't because slavery was questionably moral - it was whether states and individuals had the right to differ from the values set out by the founders and to use that as a reason to leave the Union...  Or it was about justice and the inalienable rights of all humans...  Or it was about a religious calling...  Or it was about the right to continue to preserve a way of life...  Or it was about being too poor to avoid conscription...  It was about a lot of things, but individual choices for why one engaged in the conflict weren't always just about what was obviously right and obviously wrong.  Not then, and not now.

So too, I think we must remember in our current political climate, with current events headlines implicating stop-and-frisk, the prison industrial complex, stand-your-ground and other issues...  Today, too, people stand on both sides of the divide for very different reasons.  And if we are to ever come to a common ground, we must first understand that many of us have similar goals, but very different reasons for wanting to achieve them.  And that's OK.  The goal is what's important.  It's easy to assume people standing across the aisle from you are just wrong... Obviously they're the Indians that stole the horses from the train - I mean, they're Indians, right?...  But that's not going to get you anywhere, certainly not to the right conclusion.  And viewing the world that way is basically self-defeating if you want people to get along and stop shooting each other.  Sorry - them's the facts.

This country needs a dose of pragmatism.

I think we must remember to view these issues with an eye to our future legacy.  Do we want our great-great-grandchildren to remember our generation as the one who hopelessly deadlocked over petty squabbles, could not find a solution to an obvious problem - who stood by and wrung their hands at the impossibility of fixing it all?  Do we want to let differences in why we don't like things impact our shared desire and ability to change them?...

What sort of world will they inherit if we decide to do that?  Isn't imagining that enough to make you angry?  Because when I think of my great-great-grandpa Joe fighting at 14 years old in a raid to free the slaves, when common wisdom was the raid was crazy, it makes me really angry that people in positions of power (ahem, Congress) seem to be unable to enact a law, or even a policy, that might fix something... ANYTHING.

I don't really care what your reason for being angry is.  I don't care if it is that you are fed up with a small, vocal minority in our country having sway over our political leaders to such an extent as to grind our government to a halt.  I don't care if you're angry because a largely white-male government is making decisions that adversely impact non-white males, who are also supposed to be their constituents.  I don't care if you're angry that you and your spouse can't cross state lines without worrying whether your marriage will be respected and/or legally recognized there.  I don't care if you're angry that even though black people and white people do drugs at the same rate, black people are taking all the heat in terms of who gets sent to jail.  I don't care if you're angry that kids are being shot in the streets by police officers that are sworn to protect them, and that somehow the only kids the police officers seem to need to shoot are the ones who are black.  I don't care if you're angry that there are people, Americans, going down to the border to further terrorize little terrorized children, who didn't chose to come here in the first place.  I don't care why you are angry.  But I do care that you are angry.  I do care that we are angry.

There were lots of guys throughout history like my Grandpa Joe.  The fact that he did quite a bit in the country and is largely unrecognized gives me hope that there are other actors out there today, bucking the overwhelming urge we have historically felt (and largely given into) as a society to stay with the status-quo - to maintain comfortable realities for some citizens at the expense of others.  We need to remember that this is unacceptable.  And we need Grandpa Joes now.

If we are to learn from history, we must realize that change will only come when we are willing to speak out and act out for it.  John Brown and Grandpa Joe were willing to do it before it was popular.  So too, today someone will have to take the first step - to speak out and to act out.

Not to act out with violence as the kids in the streets of a St. Louis suburb, like we saw over the weekend.  But to act out with kindness and compassion.  Kindness in respecting the grieving of the families.  Kindness in respecting the need for peace in our communities.  Compassion in our taking some of the burden from those families.  Compassion in taking some of the grief we commonly feel at the state of affairs and putting that grief to use.

We need to understand how our complacency in allowing the alarm bells to sound unheeded has led to this.  When we have billions of dollars being pumped into the government from people who own prisons, is it any wonder we have lots of prisons?  Why are we funding prisons instead of schools?  When men are acquitted of shooting and killing a black child because they felt threatened by that black child, is it any wonder that other black children are shot? Where does that slippery slope go? Don't we all live with a certain level of perceived-threat from "others"?  Hasn't it leached in from negative discourse in every sector - the harsher sentence for a black man than a white man for the same thing; an urgent feeling of dread as you see a police officer walking toward you, afraid he'll stop you for your mere presence on the street; a second glance at the black kid on the corner, when you probably wouldn't even have noticed a white kid standing there... The triggers for conflict or anger on both sides are pretty easy to state, whether or not there's any reason for them...  If we want to constrain the argument to purely racial and personal terms, OK.  As a white woman, the only man that's ever held me up at gunpoint was certainly not a black man.  So... what, me worry?

In the immortal (paraphrased) words of Katt Williams - black people, get yourself a white friend; and white people, get yourself a black friend.  Grandpa Joe wasn't able to advocate effectively for the Native Americans until he understood their language and could see their concerns in the flesh.  I'll admit that when I saw a child lying in the street after having been shot in the head by a police officer, I didn't understand the reality of that... I'm not sure I can, not that anyone should have to.  My world has never given me a view into that sort of experience.  But understanding how my black friends experience these news stories has been eye-opening.  This could be one of them - their kid.  And it makes me so mad I want to scream.  It's easy not to worry when it isn't going to be your kid or your friend's kid.  But how do we still have cities with this level of racial strife, and how are they the same literal locations that were hotbeds of that conflict in Grandpa Joe's time?

We aren't going to be able to fix any of these problems until we understand how they're actually impacting people.  As much as going John Brown on some folks with a sword and declaring oneself the righteous soldier of God sounds good to me sometimes, it's not overly practical in today's era.  It obviously wasn't very practical back then either... I'd argue Grandpa Joe's path was no less principled, but he lived to be 81, and died of natural causes.  All I'm saying is, it can be done.  Just because people might not end up writing songs about you doesn't mean you can't make a difference.

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