This is the fourth of five installments of “Whose Father Was He?” — an investigation into a photograph of three children found on the dead body of Amos Humiston, a fallen Union soldier, at Gettysburg in 1863. Part one can be read here; part two here; and part three here.
In 1870 Dr. Bourns hired Rosa J. Carmichael. The doctor wrote in his recommendation, “As a teacher and disciplinarian, Mrs. Carmichael has few equals, and she is a most assiduous and faithful worker, laboring often beyond her strength in school and out.” Indeed. She was the Cruella de Vil of the Homestead. Except she was no comic-book villain, she was the real thing. Rumors began that all was not well with the children. Locals noticed that they were no longer allowed to participate in Memorial Day activities like putting on a pageant and decorating graves. The orphans were instead forced to watch while “happy children” brought flowers to the various cemeteries around town. Edward Woodward, a local veteran, wrote, “They are kept like galley slaves, while strangers decorate their fathers’ graves.”[12] Woodward’s poem was preserved in the Gettysburg College Library, with a letter from the donor introducing the poem and its author:
REV. STANLEY BILLHEIMER, D.D.
226 East Oak Street
PALMYRA, PENNSYLVANIANovember 28, 1945.
Librarian, Gettysburg College.
Possibly the enclosed might find a place among Gettysburgiana. If not, they may be discarded. Woodward, author of the poems, was an eccentric veteran of the Civil War, living on “Woodward” avenue. He was an umbrella mender, well known to the students of the 80’s and 90’s. He often spoke in rhyme, in ordinary conversation. He was an expert in opening dud shells found on the field.
Respectfully,
Stanley Billheimer, ’91 [13]
More stories began to circulate about strange goings-on at the Homestead. Little Lizzie Hutchinson and Bella Hunter were forced to wear boys’ clothes for more than two months as punishment for tearing their dresses. Mrs. Carmichael even conscripted one of the older children to serve as informant and stooge. John M. Vanderslice, a Philadelphia investigator, Assistant Adjutant General of the Department of Pennsylvania, Grand Army of the Republic, reported, “The boy beats and kicks in the most cruel manner little children of tender age and does it with the apparent delight of the matron and with her certain approval.” Vanderslice also made his strong opinions about Dr. Bourns evident. He called the Homestead “a summer resort of Dr. Bourns, where he is waited upon by the little inmates, whose fathers sleep in the adjoining cemetery.”
May 30, 1876, marked the beginning of the end. The nightmare conditions at the orphanage were finally exposed in a series of newspaper articles. The orphans had been denied food, clothing and schooling. Not only had they been beaten, but leg irons and hobbling chains were also used. Were these really necessary? Were the orphans behaving so badly that they needed to be hobbled?
Courtesy of William J. Little and Larry R. Runk. From “Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier” [14].
In 1877, Dr. Bourns was charged with embezzling. The charge included “mismanagement, waste of property and violation of trust.” On Dec. 21, 1877, the Star and Sentinel (the local paper in Gettysburg) noted that the orphanage was “about winding up.” And on Jan. 18, 1878, the property was seized by the sheriff, and later that year its contents auctioned.
Shortly after my interview, I sent an e-mail to Mark Dunkelman asking him about Dr. Bourns:
“Bourns continues to fascinate me. What kind of man preys on widows and children?”
Mark Dunkelman responded:
“I get the impression that there were Jekyll and Hyde aspects to Bourns’s personality. At first he used the ambrotype to instigate the wave of publicity that eventually led to Amos’s identification. Most likely he paid for the initial, pre-identification cartes de visite out of his own pocket. And he stipulated that proceeds from the sales of the cartes and the Hayward and Clark sheet music were to benefit the “orphan children” — meaning the Humistons. All of those seem to be acts of true and heartfelt altruism. And Bourns must be given credit for seeing his dream of an orphanage for soldiers’ children become a reality. But at some point after the founding of the Homestead, Bourns went wrong. Was he suffering financial difficulties, or was it simply greed? We don’t know. In addition to the Sunday school monies he embezzled, there’s the question of the sales of the photographs. By then the cartes of the children were being produced in mass quantities. What sort of financial arrangements Bourns had with the manufacturers — and how much of the proceeds went into the doctor’s pocket — I have no idea.”[15]
And then Mark Dunkelman sent me another e-mail. This time going much further into the character of Dr. Bourns and adding recent information that was not available for his book:
“During my recent New York research trip, I came across an article, ‘The Gettysburg Orphan Asylum,’ in the Aug. 29, 1868, issue of The Soldier’s Friend, a newspaper aimed at veterans. It published a letter from a member of a Grand Army of the Republic post inquiring about placing orphans in the Gettysburg asylum, and a reply from Dr. Bourns stipulating the requirements: ‘Orphans are received only on the nomination of shareholding Sabbath-schools. A Post of the G.A.R. might constitute some Sabbath-school a shareholder by contributing the amount of one share ($25) or more, for the purpose, and the school could then nominate the orphan desired to be placed in the institution, only agreeing annually to contribute something toward the maintenance of its orphan ward, the amount of this yearly donation being left entirely to the option of the Sabbath-school. The Homestead being dependent absolutely upon public charity for its existence, the arrangement made with the Sabbath-schools represented by the orphans in the institution secures a handsome yearly revenue to the treasury.’ So in addition to paying $25 to place an orphan in the Homestead, a Sunday school had to make an annual donation toward the support of said orphan. In the end, Bourns was not only cheating the orphans themselves, but all the little Sunday schoolers who supported them.”
The grown Humiston children eventually weighed in on Dr. Bourns’s character. Alice Humiston, in particular, was concerned about recovering the ambrotype from Dr. Bourns. In the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, Oct. 31, 1914, she was quoted, “He refused to return it, saying that we would receive it at his death. Even then we did not recover it and although my brothers have made a number of efforts since that to find the picture, they were unsuccessful in the work.” And then there is a handwritten notation by Alice on an envelope now in the possession of David Humiston Kelley. It contained a carte-de-visite copy of the original ambrotype. “The original was never handed over to the rightful owners, who were cheated out of all the profits from the sale of the picture by Dr. Francis Bourns who never did a stroke of work after the pictures began to be sold but lived in comfort all his days. He had absolutely nothing until then. So my mother was told by a Lady who knew him well. My mother was young or this would not have happened.”
Dr. Bourns will forever be an enigma. Who was this bachelor who intervened in the lives of the Humiston family? Was he a Good Samaritan, a villain or something of both? Mark Dunkelman found a diary that Dr. Bourns had kept as a young man. He had read his first book at age eight or nine, John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” — the story of how Bunyan’s pilgrim makes his way from the Valley of Humiliation and the Slough of Despond to the Gates of the Celestial City. Did Dr. Bourns imagine himself as a pilgrim on a similar journey?
Among the many clippings collected by David Humiston Kelley is a poem written by Dr. Bourns in 1888 and published in the Episcopal Recorder, about ten years after the demise of the Homestead Orphanage and about ten years before Dr. Bourns’s death on Dec. 20, 1899. It is reprinted in Mark Dunkelman’s book:
Thou Light above! the powers of darkness come,
Environing where thou hast ever shone;
Hope and perception grope in baffling gloom;
Despair’s chill terror in my soul I own,
And hope-abandoned, now I am alone.
But what does the poem mean? Does it humanize Dr. Bourns, or is it merely a villain’s maudlin journey into self-pity? At the very least, the poem tells us that history is always open to reexamination, if only because something new can show up or something forgotten can resurface.
*******
Mark Dunkelman urged me to talk to Amos Humiston’s two great-grandchildren, David Humiston Kelley, an expert on archaeoastronomy, and Allan Lawrence Cox, a retired salesman. David Humiston Kelley’s curriculum vitae is impressive. He is in part responsible for deciphering the Mayan hieroglyphs, has written the definitive textbook on the astronomical techniques of ancient civilizations, and has pioneered research on routes of communication between ancient Egypt and the civilizations of meso-America [16]. David Humiston Kelley was clearly impressed by Mark Dunkelman’s achievement, but mentioned a piece of evidence that had slipped away — the log of the whaling ship that Amos Humiston had taken half-way around the world.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: The log was actually on sale shortly after Mark became interested. But he didn’t know it was on sale at that time. It got sold, and we’ve never been able to find out who bought it. This was the captain’s personal log, as opposed to the official ship’s log. And it would have had details.
ERROL MORRIS: Mark also told me that you have prepared elaborate genealogies of many families, including your own.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: By my standards, not nearly elaborate enough, but still, yes.
ERROL MORRIS: Some that go back to King David?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: The material on King David isn’t yet published. I have been working on the King David materials, and I’m collaborating with Bennett Greenspan, who does DNA testing.[17]
ERROL MORRIS: Really?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Of course, social descent does not always coincide with biological descent. Particularly, you get adoptions of close relatives. A man may adopt his sister’s son or his brother’s son. If he adopts his brother’s son, the male-line DNA is going to be the same. But if he adopts his sister’s son, it might be, but more likely it isn’t. And it’s remarkable that you have a few examples of cases where there hasn’t been a shift, that it is a valid male-line descent the whole way.
ERROL MORRIS: What would be an example of that?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Well, the two families that I’m particularly interested in with American and English ancestry go back to the 8th century AD before they have any common ancestry. But the DNA evidence gives a rough estimate of mid-8th century, which is almost perfectly correct. And that means that both lines have common male line ancestry all the way from the 8th century to the present, biologically.
ERROL MORRIS: Now, you became interested in this research in connection with your own genealogy, or independent of that?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Independent, essentially. I became interested in genealogy when I was in high school. And there were all kinds of fake royal genealogies, including some that had descents from the House of David. And I found about one in 20 royal genealogies were valid. And, at that time, my critical sense was probably as good as it is now. But it was much more sporadically applied, so that I looked at some things and said, “Oh, that can’t be.” Other things I just said, “Oh, this says such and such . . .” and let it go at that.
ERROL MORRIS: I would be interested in your connection to the Amos Humiston story, what you knew about it prior to —
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Oh, I knew all about it. I was brought up with it. My mother came from Jaffrey, New Hampshire. And that’s where my grandfather, Franklin Humiston, was the local M.D. And he was Amos’s son. I saw Fred occasionally, but I very rarely saw Alice. Her niece, Alice Mildred Humiston, was the librarian at UCLA. She was a cataloguer[18]. She started there the year before they actually had the campus open. And she became chief cataloguer before she retired, and wrote a history of the catalogue department. And she was actually the one who gave me Ann Axtell Morris’s “Digging in Yucatan,” which led me into my professional work and my archaeology.[19]
Courtesy of the Peabody Museum, President and Fellows of Harvard College. 
Courtesy of the Peabody Museum, President and Fellows of Harvard College. DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: I had a genealogy that my great aunt had prepared. It showed our descent from Roger Williams. It turned out to be incorrect, because there were two men named Hiram Williams, in the same town. And one of them had two brothers, and the other one didn’t. And the one who didn’t lived next to the two brothers, and the other one lived well away from town. And she, of course, thought that the three brothers were living together, which made normal sense — but wasn’t right.
ERROL MORRIS: How were you able to uncover this error?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Well, puttering away. You know, you check one thing, and then you check another thing, and then you check a third thing. And eventually, you find something.
ERROL MORRIS: But you knew about the Amos Humiston story from your childhood?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Yes. I certainly did. I don’t remember when I first heard about it. It probably was one of the times when Great Aunt Alice or Fred was coming to visit. I was probably five or four or six, somewhere in there. From a very early age, I knew about Philinda Betsy Ensworth Smith Humiston Barnes. That, of course, was Amos’s wife. She was married first to Justin Smith, who was in western New York and a cousin of the famous prophet. They got married very young, and he died right away from some disease. I don’t know what. And then, she married Amos. And they went out to Flint, Michigan, and they saw relatives there. I’ve never been able to find out whom they saw. The Humistons didn’t keep much contact with each other.
ERROL MORRIS: You have the original ambrotype of Amos, if I’m not mistaken.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Yes.
ERROL MORRIS: But the ambrotype of the children has been lost.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Right.
ERROL MORRIS: The whole story of Dr. Bourns is odd. There’s a paucity of evidence, but clearly he saw an opportunity to make a dollar.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Well now, what’s bothering you particularly?
ERROL MORRIS: There’s something interesting about making money from a photograph. Bournes grasped the possibility of turning the ambrotype into a cause célèbre, and conceived the idea of marketing it.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Yes. That is Dr. Bourns’s doing, very largely. Who, incidentally, was alleged to be a relative of that famous Robert Burns. He changed the spelling. He was supposed to be a descendant. And given the 13 children, it’s quite possible.
ERROL MORRIS: Adding the “o” to “Burns” is very peculiar. At least, it strikes me as peculiar. What is Dr. Bourns’s reputation in the family?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Bad. It seems quite clear to me that he collected money and did not pass it all on, that he profited a bit more than he should have from this tragedy. He profited in ways that were not quite scrupulous.
ERROL MORRIS: What would those ways be?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Well, allegedly he had connections with that remarkably nasty woman who was running the place, the matron in charge. And she was actually taking money intended for food for the orphans and skimming it, and giving them less expensive food, less food — sometimes no food. I don’t remember how much of this Mark talked about, because, of course, there are some things that, even today, can put you in trouble if you talk too much about them.
ERROL MORRIS: How so?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: People can claim ancestral connections and say that it ultimately damages their reputation. I’m not saying that this argument has ever met much support from the courts, but it has happened on occasion.
ERROL MORRIS: That you’ve gratuitously defamed the memory of Dr. Bourns?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Yeah. And of the lady in charge of the orphanage.
ERROL MORRIS: But this goes back to the 1870s.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Particularly if you haven’t got awfully good proof. And there isn’t awfully good proof. There are a number of strong indications, and the belief in the family.
ERROL MORRIS: I went to the astronomy library, and got a copy of your book, “Exploring Ancient Skies.” Your own interest in doing archaeoastronomy or piecing together —
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Well, my interest in archaeoastronomy is very, very secondary, even though it ended up with that book. I started by being interested in the Maya. And then I became interested in the chronology of the Mayas, and in the things that they did in their books. And particularly in the Dresden Codex [20]. I’m very interested in connections between cultures around the world. I’m very interested in continuities, both geographic and temporal. And so, I have worked on these, both genealogically and archaeologically, and ultimately calendrically and astronomically.
ERROL MORRIS: When you say you were interested in continuities, it is if you are trying to find patterns in a morass of historical materials?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Yes. In the new world, what ideas are there? Where do they come from? Are they separate inventions? Or, are they things that they learned from other places, and then modified somewhat? All of that sort of thing. I’ve found out, recently, that there were Egyptians in Meso-America. I had thought there were connections, but I had thought they were secondhand through an intermediate, perhaps through Phoenicians or Greeks or somebody. But I didn’t think they were directly Egyptian. But I now have massive evidence that they were.
ERROL MORRIS: And when you say massive evidence, for example?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Three different calendric types of continuity. That’s one sort. Then I’ve got over 30 deities and mythical place names, starting with Egypt itself. The Aztecs say that they came from Tlapallan, which is the ancient red land. And the Egyptians called their land red land/black land. The Aztecs actually called it Tlillan Tlapallan, which is black land/red land. And they were under the leadership of the inventor of the calendar, who was called Cipactonal. And Cipactli means “crocodile,” and Tona is “day” and is related to the word Tonatiuh, which is “sun god.” And Tona relates to Aton in Egypt. And Cipactli relates to Sebek or Sobek in Egypt. So you’ve got linguistic evidence for a very complex name.
ERROL MORRIS: I was interested in what Mark Dunkelman was doing, because of the nature of this kind of historical exercise — trying to put together a picture of the past from odds and ends of material, bric-a-brac. I’m not sure whether it’s more difficult to reconstruct the story of a 19th century individual or an ancient civilization.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: I wouldn’t say there’s much difference. That may sound funny, but there is, of course, a great deal more bric-a-brac to deal with. But in terms of the way you go about it, I don’t think it’s that much different.
ERROL MORRIS: How so?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Well, you’re trying to fit together pieces. And some pieces come together relatively easily, and others only with great difficulty. You can find certain similarities and explain them, and then you find that they seem to contradict other similarities, which suggests a different interpretation. It’s much the same sort of thing.
ERROL MORRIS: But you do believe, in principle, it is possible to recover the past?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Yes. But only in part. I don’t think we’re ever going to know how many times Egyptians sailed to the New World. I don’t think we’re going to know who the captains of any of the ships were or anything about the crews. We can say a lot about it, but we can never say the sorts of things that we can say about the Titanic. And there’s a lot we can’t say about that.
ERROL MORRIS: You use the word “similarities.” What makes one thing similar to another?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: One, rarity of occurrence and two, specificity of unusual arbitrary characteristics. Arbitrary characteristics, particularly ones that are unusual, are good evidence. Things like a lion’s head with pink and white whiskers on a snake’s body. I’ve got the lion’s head in Egypt, and I’ve got jaguar heads in Meso-America, with the pink and white whiskers. I have jaguars with snake bodies, but they aren’t specifically identified with the jaguar with the whiskers. But still, when you put the two together, it makes a reasonable similarity with this Egyptian one. And it’s a very arbitrary similarity.
ERROL MORRIS: Arbitrary? In what sense?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: Lions don’t have snakes’ bodies.
ERROL MORRIS: Ah.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: They are very rarely thought of as having snakes’ bodies. Felines, of any sort, do not have snakes’ bodies. And neither do they have red and white whiskers.
ERROL MORRIS: Yes, it’s not something that would just happen accidentally, this kind of pattern?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: That’s correct. It isn’t due to the common workings of the human mind. There are no other cultures anywhere in the world that I know of that have either a feline with a snake’s body or red and white whiskers.
ERROL MORRIS: Where can I read about this? Have you written this up?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: There’s some of it in “Exploring Ancient Skies.” It’s in the last chapter, fairly near the beginning.
*******
Shortly after my conversation with David Humiston Kelley, I turned to my copy of “Exploring Ancient Skies.” In the last chapter, chapter XV, “The Descent of the Gods and the Purposes of Ancient Astronomy,” Kelley writes, “We draw attention to notable similarities and differences among cultures around the world and offer some interpretations of the patterns we recognize. The major difficulties of interpretation lie in deciding which material is relevant.”
This is indeed a central question. Which material is relevant? How do we see the pattern in the morass of data? But the problem is, of course, much worse. There is at the same time a morass and a paucity of data. You would think that it is easy to lose an ambrotype or a document or even the entire story of one man, but how about the story of an entire civilization? That seems unlikely, and yet the decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphs in which David Humiston Kelley, Amos Humiston’s great-grandson, played a significant role, was hampered because virtually all of the original historical material created by the Mayas was destroyed by the Spanish invaders. As Michael Coe writes in “Breaking the Maya Code,” “What we are left with are four [books] in various stages of completeness or dilapidation…and monumental inscriptions, many weathered beyond recognition…”[21] Diego de Landa (1524 – 1579), Bishop of the Yucatan, who played a crucial role in the destruction of the Mayan bark books, wrote, “We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Maya] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”[22]
Last but not least, I felt that I had been remiss in not asking David Humiston Kelley about the often repeated claim that the Mayan calendar fixes the end of the world as (the Winter Solstice) December 21, 2012 – less than four years away. The Times felt that this was topical enough to devote an entire article in the Sunday Magazine to the date and the prophecy [23]. And so, I called him back, and we talked about the Mayans, their concept of time and the apocalypse.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: The Mayans could talk about dates that happened roughly five times the present supposed age of the Universe. They were fascinated with time. We can’t say much more than that.
ERROL MORRIS: Did the Mayans really predict that the world would end on December 21, 2012?
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: No. It’s based on a false assumption.
ERROL MORRIS: Please explain.
DAVID HUMISTON KELLEY: They are 208 years too early. [The correct date is December 21, 2220 – E.M.] I wrote a long article on various ways of solving this problem. I included in a footnote that you could almost get things to matchup correctly, if you used correlation 660205, the Julian day number of the base state of the Mayan calendar. Which is also the interval between the translation of the number in the Mayan baktun, katun date, if you add that number to that date you get what we would consider to be the equivalent date. Ha! A bit complicated but I think you can follow. The colonial Mayas, most of them didn’t have any clue about this. The ones who did were the calendar specialists and they made sure to keep their mouths pretty tightly shut because the Spaniards were burning people at the stake for maintaining pagan ideas of which the calendar was a major part. The calendar determined all the ceremonies and rituals, when people were sacrificed, all the nasty things and all the good things.
*****
At Mark Dunkelman’s urging I contacted Allan Cox, the other great-grandson who had found the Humiston letters.
ALLAN COX: My mother was in the nursing home, and I was at the house to feed the cat. And the phone rang. It was him. He said, “Is this Allan?” (He didn’t know I lived there, because I didn’t. I just happened to be there that day.) And I said, “Yeah.” But, we just talked, and he told me what he was doing and everything. And we got together one day and had lunch. And then we ended up at the dedication down in Gettysburg for the monument. So that’s basically how it all came together.
ERROL MORRIS: Just so I understand the genealogy . . . . You are related to whom?
ALLAN COX: Eleanor Humiston Cox is my mother. And her grandfather was Amos Humiston.
ERROL MORRIS: And which of the three children was her father?
ALLAN COX: Not the doctor. Not Franklin. Fred. He’s the one who was the salesman.
ERROL MORRIS: Did you know that your mother had these letters?
ALLAN COX: Mark copied them all. I was going to give them the originals and he said, “No.” And then I got thinking about it, and I told him again that I was going to give him all the letters just so he could have them and put them in the library in —
ERROL MORRIS: Portville? [The town where Amos Humiston lived before joining the 154th NY and going off to war.]
ALLAN COX: Yeah. He was going to donate them to them. I haven’t followed up. They’re in a box some place, and I haven’t gone through all the boxes. So I haven’t found the letters to give him. I looked through the boxes and stuff like that. My back is screwed up, and to bend over and go through all that stuff, I haven’t got the energy to do it. But I did go through quite a few of the boxes that I have, and I couldn’t find the letters.
ERROL MORRIS: Is there anyway that I could help?
ALLAN COX: Not really, it’s just two boxes. What I’ll do is some day I’ll get a couple of friends of mine or something, and I’ll go through the boxes again. Because I got the boxes right here.
ERROL MORRIS: I was thinking I could send someone over, or I could get someone to help you do it. It’s not the letters; it’s getting scans of them and of the poem.
ALLAN COX: What I’ll do is go through what I’ve got, the boxes here, and I’ll see if I can find them.
ERROL MORRIS: And if you need my help or anything like that, I’m happy to either send someone over from this office, or I’ll come myself.
ALLAN COX: I’ll get somebody. It’s about 10 boxes, I don’t know. They’re here. I don’t know why the hell I couldn’t find them when I went looking for them for him, because I wanted to just give them to him. Originally, I had wanted to give them to him anyway to start with, but he said, “No.” So he just made the copies[24]. I’ll look through what I’ve got in the boxes. See, I moved since then. I was living in Watertown. Originally I was living in Belmont, and then I bought a condo in Watertown. Then I sold that. The house that I’m in now was my mother and father’s house, which was my grandmother’s to begin with. It’s a matter of just going through the boxes that I’ve got here. O.K., this was like a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t find them. And maybe I missed one of them and whatever. But it’s probably four closets with boxes is what it amounts to. I remember just what they look like. It is tied around with a rope, and they were altogether. Maybe they got lost when I moved. Maybe somehow or another they disappeared when I moved. I just don’t know.
******
Four closets with boxes. The letters (at least, Amos Humiston’s side of the correspondence), were saved by Philinda, passed down to Fred, to Fred’s daughter, and eventually to Allan Cox, who may have misplaced them or even lost them. Could it be that the act of rediscovering them — Allan Cox finding them in his mother’s house that he just happened to be visiting — caused them to be permanently lost? Can we predict who our heirs will be or whether they will be interested in our artifacts from their past? David Humiston Kelley is obsessed with genealogy, but it is Allan Cox who inherited the letters. Luck of the draw.
The letters themselves may have vanished, but their content has been preserved in the Xerox copies made by Allan Cox and given to Mark Dunkelman, who transcribed them, preserving the inaccuracies in spelling and grammar. As Amos Humiston made his way from Jamestown, NY, to Gettysburg, PA, he left a trail of dates but also of letters, letters that tell an endlessly sad story of a shattered family, an uncertain future, and vain hope. There is the longing for his wife and children; his illness (“. . . the dirty hurty” or “the Virginia quickstep . . .”); his close brush with death at Chancellorsville, two months before Gettysburg; followed by his acknowledged receipt of the ambrotype. And sadly, we know where he is heading.
Adapted map from Seat of War, Horace Thayer, Library of Congress. September 5, 1862: “Dear wife, . . . tel the babies that I want to see them very mutch.”
October 11, 1862: “. . . the prospects is that we shal have a fight before long . . . ”
November 22, 1862: “. . . if thare is a place on god’s earth that I hate, that place is virginia . . .”
December 2, 1862: “. . . I am nothing but an old frame. My fingers looks like birds claws but I feal quite well . . . thare is some thing in the wind that we can not tell. But we are going to leave this camping ground, that is shure . . .”
December 8, 1862: “. . . you would be surprised to see me coming home about the first of May with an honerable discharge. That may or may not be. We can not tel.”
December 22, 1862: “. . . you will hardley know the old soldier when he gets back. You will be so grand in your new house and other fixings.”
January 2, 1863: “If I ever live to get home you will not complain of being lonesome again or of sleeping cold for I will lay as close to you as the bark to a tree.”
January 11, 1863: “. . . our tent is full this morning talking about home and the close of the war . . . I think that we shal have to serve our time out here . . . If you were here I would not care but thare is no use talking. That cannot be.”
January 29, 1863: “. . . how I should like to call in this morning and se how you are getting along and then I should not like to leave you again. Remember me to the children and be a good girl.”
March 9, 1863: “It has ben very loneley here without you but thar is no use in talking about it. Let us hope for the best.
March 25, 1863: “. . . my health is poor but I am some better than it was . . . The Captain and the regamentle sergeon have ben trying to get me a sick furlow for 30 days but they cannot do it . . . .”
April 3, 1863: “Captain Warner is going to start for home . . . I want you to see him and make him promise to give me a furlow if it is onley for ten days. But don’t let him know that I wrote to that afect.”
May 9, 1863: “I got a wipe in the side with a spent ball that made me think of home. It struck on the short ribs just over the hart but glanced off . . . I got the likeness of the children and it pleased me more than eney thing that you could have sent me . . . .”
May 24, 1863: “I want you to write to [me] as often as you can and not wait for me and be a good girl and keep your courage up. So good by. Yours truly, A Humiston.”
FOOTNOTES
[12] Mark Dunkelman, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier, pp. 203ff.
[13] Letter and poem courtesy of Gettysburg College, Musselman Library, Special Collections. As a service to the reader, the Woodward poem is presented here in its entirety:
Is this the thirtieth day of May,
On which a Nation its floral tributes pay?
Nature hath lavished her gorgeous powers,
In the form of the choicest flowers,
To decorate the soldiers’ graves,
Who fought like freemen – not likes slaves.
Where are the children of the slain,
Are they enjoying freedom or in pain?
No! they are kept like galley slaves,
While strangers decorate their fathers’ graves.
In Gettysburg at the Orphans’ Home,
A modern Borgia does rage and foam,
On the consecrated Memorial Day
When a Nation its grateful tributes pay
To the memory of the noble dead
Who fought and oftener bled.
During the first, second and third of July
The fathers of the orphans fight and die;
At night no one to lift them from the cold sod,
No one to hear them cry but their God;
All for love of country. Then tell me why
The Soldier’s Orphans should mourn and cry.
To you, their father’s living comrades:
You saw them use their muskets and trusty blades.
In those days of carnage and bloody strife,
That gave the Nation new hope of life.
Remember the mess, the bivouac fires,
When you conversed with our now dead sires.
You promised to be kind one to another.
Then defend the children of a dead brother.
Grand Army of the Republic if you are strong,
Think of those who are feeble and young;
Our fathers fought, starved, bled and died,
And left us helpless, their hope and pride,
Ere secession’s cruel war’s alarms
Caused patriot soldiers to fly to arms.
Have the orphans no privileges to claim? –
We are told their dead are handed down to fame.
Are we to be ruined in body and soul –
Are there no laws a wretch to control
Who clothes two females in men’s attire,
While the sun burns like scorching fire?
Afterward abused and driven to bed,
Causing us to wish we were dead.
Spirits of our fathers speak from your graves,
If your comrades act like thoughtless slaves!
Then let us orphans, not strangers, decorate the graves
Of our loved and honored country’s fallen braves.
Far better shut the bastile [sic] – set us free
Than cripple us in our infancy.
[14] Reproduced by permission of ABC-CLIO, Inc. Santa Barbara, CA. All rights reserved.
[15] [Update | 11:45 p.m. An Addendum.] Dunkelman continued, “I also can’t imagine why he used several photographers rather than giving one exclusive rights. From the frequency with which they turn up, the cartes produced by Wenderoth & Taylor (later Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown) seem to have been the most numerous. On the other hand, the only cartes of Amos as a soldier that I’ve ever seen were by Frederick Gutekunst. At the risk of boring you, here’s a list of some of the Humiston cartes in my collection:
Sgt. Amos Humiston, Co. C, carte de visite by F. Gutekunst, Philadelphia, PA.
The Humiston Children, carte de visite by H. C. Phillips & Brother, Philadelphia, PA (pre-identification horizontal version).
The Humiston Children, carte de visite by H. C. Phillips & Brother, Philadelphia, PA (pre-identification vertical version, inscribed in pencil, “January 11th 1864”).
The Humiston Children, carte de visite by F. Gutekunst, Philadelphia, PA (pre-identification horizontal version).
The Humiston Children, carte de visite by Wenderoth & Taylor, Philadelphia, PA (pre-identification horizontal version, oval print).
The Humiston Children, carte de visite by J. E. McClees, Philadelphia, PA (“The Children of the Battle-Field,” vertical version, with red lines on mount).
The Humiston Children, carte de visite by J. E. McClees, Philadelphia, PA (“The Children of the Battle-Field,” vertical version, with unlined mount)…
The list goes on and on… But what does the list mean? I kept wondering: is there some pattern in the data that I am missing? The names of the photography studios? Their location? The pre-identification cartes vs. the ones issued post-identification? The horizontal version vs. the vertical format? What can we learn from this information? There is an inherent problem in historical research. You can never know in advance where evidence will lead you. It could be to somewhere or to nowhere – or to nothing terribly useful. Three of the four Philadelphia studios involved in the duplication of Dr. Bourn’s cartes de visite are located on the same block of Chestnut Street. But so what?
Adapted from Bird’s eye view of Philadelphia, J. Bachman, Library of Congress.I kept looking for more information. I tried to project myself into Dr. Bourns’ world. I tried to imagine him scurrying from one studio to another and wondered: Is it possible that all of the photography studios operating in Philadelphia were enlisted in his crusade? I looked for photographs of the studios, themselves, and couldn’t find any. But I found one photograph (from The Free Library of Philadelphia) taken on Chestnut Street in 1865 during the celebrations that marked the end of the Civil War. The view is from the 500 block looking west towards the 900 block of Chestnut. Could you imagine that one of the men in the photograph is Dr. Bourns in transit to Wenderoth & Taylor or J.E. McClees? And if so, what would it tell us about his underlying motivation? It may just be that not every collection of data yields something of interest. Or I have yet to uncover a pattern in this data that reveals something exciting and interesting about the past.
Chestnut Street between 5th and 6th Streets, Print and Picture Collection. Free Library of Philadelphia. [16] Mark Stengel, in an article in The Atlantic on the controversy between the “diffusionists” and the “independent inventionists” suggests it comes down to an argument about what constitutes significant historical evidence. “The influential archaeologist David Kelley, of the University of Calgary…is a Harvard-trained scholar of catholic interests, which range from ancient calendrics and archaeoastronomy to the prehistory of the Celts to the decipherment of Mayan glyphs. In conversation he seems to guide by indirection, answering questions with questions or with references to the writings of his peers. His wispy eyebrows sit above eyes undimmed by more than forty years of serious scholarship; a tight-lipped smile suggests that there are many things he will not say about himself or his accomplishments. Indeed, he is almost painfully reticent about what most scholars now consider to be a monumental achievement in the field: his having broken a century-old logjam in Mayan epigraphy. Prevailing amid a hail of academic and personal attacks, Kelley made a persuasive argument for a phonetic, as opposed to an ideographic, method of interpretation. Drawing on the work of the Russian linguist Yuri Knorosov, Kelley’s work offered a way to unlock the sounds and meanings of glyphs that had stood mute for centuries – inaugurating a new age of decipherment that is transforming Mayan studies.” http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001stengel2.htm
[17] Bennett Greenspan is a well-known researcher and entrepreneur in DNA and genealogy.
[18] David Humiston Kelley reminded me that the story of the Humistons didn’t end with the three children from the ambrotype, instead they are branches on a continuously growing Humiston family tree. Frankie grew up to become a doctor, and had a large family and well-respected practice in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Freddie became a successful traveling salesman, based out of Boston near his mother and sister Alice. In fact, there were two Alice Humistons. The Alice from the ambrotype moved several times as an adult, living in numerous towns in New England, finding employment as an office worker, a care taker, even a chicken farmer. She never married. As an elderly woman, she headed West to Los Angeles where her niece Alice worked in the UCLA library. According to Mark Dunkleman, one morning (December 16, 1933) the elderly Alice was tidying her rooms when her skirt came too close to the flame of a heater. Within seconds she was engulfed, and though her neighbors quickly came to her aid to douse the fire and dress the burns, she died in the hospital two days later, attended at her deathbed by her namesake. That Alice, Alice Mildred Humiston, played a crucial role in David Humiston Kelley’s own life. She was the one who gave him his copy of Digging in Yucatan. David Humiston Kelley also noted that there was another namesake in the family, a contemporary Amos Humiston, who was in the military and worked for the CIA.
[19] It is fun to page through Ann Axtell Morris’ Digging in Yucatan. Could David Humiston Kelley’s experience of reading the book parallel Dunkelman’s experience of reading Minnigh’s Gettysburg, What They Did Here – the excitement of being introduced to an unknown world? We could be in a Nancy Drew mystery. Ann Axtell Morris writes, “Those old diaries and letters make thrilling reading today. The tales of battles and plots, of gold and precious stones, of American kings and Spanish conquerors, fascinate as much by what they leave untold as by what they actually say.” Ann Axtell Morris, Digging in Yucatan (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1931), p. 29.
[20] The Dresden Codex is one of the few books of Mayan writing to survive.
[21] Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1992).
[22] Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007) p. 67.
[23] Benjamin Anastas, “The Final Days,” July 1, 2007.
[24] My brand of craziness is different from Mark Dunkelman’s. For Dunkelman it is the text of the letters. The odd turn of phrase, “fingers like bird claws” or “music in a dream.” To me, it’s the written words on a page. I need to feel the documents. And if I can’t hold them, I need to able to see them. The Xerox of the poem, complete with misspellings, has emotional weight. And yet there is still something missing. It is that connection with the original document, that scrap of history that has been passed down through 150 years.
Addendum [11:45 a.m.] to footnote 15: I received a recent email from Mark Dunkelman (shortly after part four was posted in The Times) taking me to task for being somewhat dismissive about the list of cartes-de-visite in his collection. Here is an excerpt from the email and the photograph of the interior of Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown:
“As for my collection of cartes, it identifies the various photographers used in the fund-raising drive (with two non-Philadelphians of interest); it reveals a larger proportion of pre-identification cartes than might be expected, with all the sad implications; it charts the evolution of the charitable effort through the inscriptions; and it offers occasional glimpses into notions of the story held by contemporaries, such as this handwritten note found on one example: “Found at Gettysburgh in a Bible of a Union Soldier killed after the battle July 1864.” Taken together, I think the collection has
more to offer than strictly antiquarian interest. And of course there is the pleasure of handling these tangible links to the past.
I’ve got a photograph of the interior of Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown’s studio circa 1869, from the Library Company of Philadelphia. It’s one of many illustrations that were omitted from the book because of lack of space. Attached is the resized photograph.”
The Library Company of Philadelphia.Wenderoth, Taylor, & Brown Fine Art Gallery, c. 1869.
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