Irish Wilderness – Lens & Pen Press

Scenes along the Mississippi 1848 and 2017

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Jan 272024

Hogan describes the scenery along the river as the tug pulls the clipper ship slowly toward New Orleans, 107 miles distant.

Once I looked out over the ship’s bulwarks and saw we were between what seemed to be two long, low earth-mounds, one on either side of the river; there was a bend in the river at the place. These mounds, on which there were trees and houses and gardens and people, were the first patches of elevated grounds that I saw since the tug took us in tow. I was told they were fortifications or land batteries, Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson by name, guarding the approach to New Orleans from invasion by sea.

At the end of our day of exploring Passe a Loutre we took time to ride and walk through the remains of the two forts Hogan mentions.

Fort St. Philip on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, is only accessible by boat or helicopter. Despite its deteriorating condition, it was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1960. “The earthen works fort was established in the 18th century. Fort St. Philip’s major engagements were 10-day naval sieges during the War of 1812 and American Civil War. The site is privately owned and deteriorating. Recent hurricanes like Katrina have added to the damage.” (Wikipedia)

Fort St. Philip is accessible by boat or helicopter.

Fort Jackson (below) on the west bank, is a historic masonry fort, constructed as a coastal defense of New Orleans, between 1822 and 1832, and it was a battle site during the Civil War. It is now a National Historic Landmark. It was damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and its condition is threatened

Since 1970, The grounds of Fort Jackson have been the site of both the Plaquemines Parish Fair and Orange Festival. The fort was used to treat oily birds in the early weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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Bishop Hogan recounted his childhood memories and his voyage to America and to the priesthood in Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir, written in 1898 and published in 1907. His second memoir covered his early missionary years on the Missouri frontier, to his consecration as bishop of St. Joseph in 1868. Our companion volume to Mystery of the Irish Wilderness contains both those memoirs plus additional biographical information I was able to learn from the archives of both the Kansas City-St. Joseph and St. Louis dioceses.

On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir is available on our website for 10% off ($22.50), postage paid at www.beautifulozarks.com Companion volume, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness, is also available for $17.00, postpaid.

“Alas! No help for me now; I am on the Mississippi, and must go it.”

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Jan 202024

The Berlin was picked up by aptly named ‘tug’ boats, that tugged it through sandy shallows to the deeper water of the main channel. Then one tug headed back out for another incoming ship and one “began its hard task, towing us up against the current to New Orleans, 107 miles distant.”

My 2017 exploration was a reverse course – downriver from Baton Rouge to meet my guide, Richie Blink (Delta Discovery Tours) at the docks in Venice, where the road ends and we kept on going. Venice is the last community on Highway 23 accessible by automobile, and it is the southern terminus of the Great River Road. This has earned the town the nickname “The end of the world.”

I had explained my purpose and Blink’s recommendation was that we head for Passe A Loutre, the eastward most channel of the “mouths of the Mississippi,” since Hogan’s ship was coming from the Keys.

Put-in ramp at Venice, Louisiana docks. This town on the west bank of the river is truly the “end of the road.” The land road, that is. From here we headed out into the Gulf.

We motored along jungle-green channels where water lilies and elephant ears had invaded (non-native species), to reach the main channel of the river.

There’s nothing like dashed expectations to put a damper on one’s enthusiasm for any endeavor. Hogan was not an exception:

…(T)here was no ebbing or flowing tide, not enough rise of tide to cover a croaking frog; no belt of strand to mark the boundary between land and water, for land and water seemed interlocked and of the amphibious kind—an impenetrable jungle of swamps and bushes, infested with sharks, snakes, and alligators. There was water enough, of the kind it was, but who dare drink of it? Ha! That from the marshes smelt of toads and reptiles; that from the Mississippi suggested a fish trap, for, besides mud, it may have a young alligator in it. And this is America—America indeed. Alas! No help for me now; I am on the Mississippi and must go it.

This ship I am on won’t stop until I get to New Orleans; and if I throw myself overboard and attempt to swim ashore, maybe the alligators or the buzzards will get me. See the miserable, muddy banks, not high enough above water for a drowning rat to dry himself on.

Some views looked the same in 2017 as in 1848:

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“The Mouths of the Mississippi”

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Dec 202023

Thursday, December 14, 1848, Hogan’s ship approached the continent. As the outflow of the Mississippi River reached the Berlin, he wrote:

To a person from the British Isles, the United States, as seen at the mouths of the Mississippi, is a mockery of sublime anticipations.

This is possibly my favorite sentence of all the sentences in both memoirs. Encapsulated in those five words (“a mockery of sublime anticipations”) are the romantic dreams of an Irish schoolboy, envisioning the windswept prairies and their indigenous inhabitants awaiting the word of Jesus that he, that dreaming boy, would bring. Never, in his sunny, clear-day imaginings did a scene like this appear. There before him, the riverine drainage system for most of the North American continent carried its sedimentary load from Rockies and the northern forests, from glaciated plains and lowland swamps to the then-sparkling clean Gulf. The rich mud of the continent swirled into the waters his clipper ship cut through, clouding them as they fed the richness of the continent to the teaming estuary.

Hogan’s reference to the “mouths (plural) of the Mississippi” I initially thought was a typo or a fault of the optical character reading program we used to convert the print text to electronic files. But I found him to be precisely accurate in his description when I decided one weekend to explore the areas he described.

Cell phone photo of a chart of the lower Mississippi clearly showing the point at which the river becomes several channels to the Gulf.

This scene was acquired by the ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite on May 24, 2001. This false-color composite was created by combining shortwave infrared, infrared, and near-infrared wavelengths (ASTER bands 4, 3, and 2). Image provided by the USGS EROS Data Center Satellite Systems

“Turbid waters spill out into the Gulf of Mexico where their suspended sediment is deposited to form the Mississippi River Delta. Like the webbing on a duck’s foot, marshes and mudflats prevail between the shipping channels that have been cut into the delta.”

(From NASA Earth Observatory)

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Bishop Hogan recounted his childhood memories and his voyage to America and to the priesthood in Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir, written in 1898 and published in 1907. Our companion volume to Mystery of the Irish Wilderness contains both those memoirs plus additional biographical information I was able to learn from the archives of both the Kansas City-St. Joseph and St. Louis dioceses.

Clipper ship Berlin, north from the Dry Tortugas

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Dec 062023

A brick lighthouse replaced the original in 1858 – about the time Hogan was making land claims in the Ozarks. The Dry Tortugas lighthouse, along with the Garden Key lighthouse at Fort Jefferson, were the only lights on the Gulf coast that stayed in full operation throughout the American Civil War. It was decommissioned in December 2015.

Having passed Key West, the next landmark was the Tortugas. In 1825, a lighthouse had been constructed at Garden Key (one of seven Keys included in the “Dry Tortugas”) to warn incoming vessels of the dangerous reefs. All eyes on board the clipper ship Berlin searched the night’s horizon for that light.

In the early hours of the night of December 11th, as we were sailing westward of Key West, a sailor was sent aloft into the rigging, having orders to look out northwest to starboard for a lighthouse, which he was to report as soon as seen. … Later on I thought I saw a light glimmer; again I saw it, and again and again I saw it at short intervals. I reported so quietly to the ship’s officer on duty on deck at the time. He looked in the direction that I did and affirmed my observation that the glimmer on the surface of the sea was from the lighthouse we were looking for. …The Tortugas light having been sighted, orders were given to change the ship’s course to northwest for the mouths of the Mississippi.

Today, 70 miles west of Key West, lies the Dry Tortugas National Park. Per Wikipedia: Fort Jefferson National Monument was designated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under the Antiquities Act on January 4, 1935. (Comprising 47,125 acres (19,071 ha) The monument was expanded in 1983 and re-designated as Dry Tortugas National Park on October 26, 1992 by an act of Congress.

The National Park Service webpage describes it:

The seven keys (Garden, Loggerhead, Bush, Long, East, Hospital, and Middle) collectively known as the Dry Tortugas, are situated on the edge of the main shipping channel between the Gulf of Mexico, the western Caribbean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The strategic location of the Dry Tortugas brought a large number of vessels through its surrounding waters as they connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Early on, the shipping channel was used among Spanish explorers and merchants traveling along the Gulf Coast.

With the key landmark sighted, and the ship’s course changed, they continued for several days:

After that we had fair skies and good sailing across the Gulf of Mexico … The distance between Key West and the mouths of the Mississippi, 550 miles, was sailed in 72 hours, at average speed of 7.1 miles an hour. The whole distance, from Liverpool to the mouths of the Mississippi, 5,250 miles, was sailed in 5 weeks and 1 day, at the rate of 146 miles per day, or 6.1 miles per hour.

I recently acquired an ex-libris copy of Hogan’s Nautical Distances. Despite his hopes in making this information available for schools that “it would lead many talented, aspiring young men to enter naval schools and academies, to prepare themselves for brilliant careers as practical seamen …” it had been checked out of the Library of St. Paul’s College, Concordia, Mo. only once, Nov. 3 – but no year noted.

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On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir is available on our website for $10.50, postage paid at www.beautifulozarks.com Companion volume, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness, is also available for $9.50, postpaid.

John Hogan’s Journey to America – Part 2: Liverpool to the Florida Keys

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Nov 092023

We left young John Hogan in Liverpool a week (and 175 years) ago. After his arrival from Dublin, he walked the docks and scanned the ships waiting for cargo and preparing to sail. There among them was the Forfarshire, on which he had already engaged his passage to New Orleans. The sight of it was a let-down:

She was a wide, large, dirty, heavy-looking ship. Her sails were anything but snow white, with plenty of pitch and tar splashed on her decks, bulwarks, and rigging; besides, she looked very deep in the water, and near her, on the wharf, there was a whole cargo yet waiting to be stowed in her between decks. I was greatly discouraged, and still more so when I had learned, upon inquiry; that the Forfarshire was a slow ship, her usual voyages between Liverpool and New Orleans being from seven to nine weeks.

Time to rethink that plan. He went to the office of the shipping line where he had his ticket and inquired (politely, of course) as to the possibility of changing his plan. Unlike today’s reservation system, they were amenable to the change (no change fees or separate charges) and recommended another of their ships:

“…the Berlin, an American clipper ship, commanded by Captain Smith, a Boston Yankee. The Berlin is a good ship and a fast sailor.”

This is a public domain image of a three masted clipper ship. I could not find an image of the Berlin itself.

Clipper ships were the sleek, fast, nimble ships of the era, plying the trade routes to China and India and the Americas. Pirates loved them too. They were three-masted vessels (though rarely four-masted) and were fully square-rigged on all masts. Speedy contemporary vessels with other sail plans, such as barques, were also sometimes called clippers. They dominated the seas in the middle third of the nineteenth century, before being phased out by the advent of more modern iron-hulled sailing ships, which eventually gave way to steamships.

Wikipedia has a long list of ships but the Berlin was not among them. Newspapers.com had no mention of the arrival of the Berlin in New Orleans that I could find. Nor did Hogan name the Boston company that owned the two ships. Better researchers than I could probably dig this information out!

Hogan does not mention how he passed his time in Liverpool for the week between the two launch dates, other than one activity, watching the Forfarshire up anchor and head to sea:

The Forfarshire sailed on her appointed day, November 1st. When I saw her leaving port, her dirty sails unloosed in the wind, I considered myself fortunate to be waiting for the Berlin.

John Hogan’s account of crossing the Atlantic is remarkable in its detail. Somewhere in the archives there may be a journal of his early years. It’s hard to imagine he could recall with such detail the days of passage, the sightings of land (the Azores, the Bahamas, weather and climate changes, the change in the night skies), the speed and course of the ship without some personal record. As they rounded the tip of the Florida peninsula, Hogan noted this: “The course we had sailed from Abaco to Key West … was about 300 miles. Time, from 6 P. M. Friday to 10 A. M. Monday, 40 hours; average sailing per hour, 7 ½ miles.”

In later years as Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, he published a small book, Nautical Distances and How to Compute Them for the Use of Schools, dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt. It is a small book, a copy of which is in the archives of the diocese. Interestingly, amazon.com has a listing for this book (published 120 years ago – 1903)… currently listed as unavailable.

At this point, he was one month from Liverpool and nearing New Orleans, his first destination.

John Joseph Hogan’s Missionary Life Begins – 175 years ago

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Oct 252023

One hundred seventy-five (175) years ago today, October 24, 1848, John Joseph Hogan, age 19, departed from his family home in Cahirguillamore, County Limerick, to travel to St. Louis to study for the priesthood. Not the traditional path to holy order perhaps, but his chosen path to fulfill his desire to become a missionary on the plains of the still-new country in America.

Young John Hogan was the eighth of nine children of James Hogan and Ellen Connor.

My father, though educated for a profession, had the good sense to confine his ambition to the safer and less contentious way of living as a farmer of land and a dealer in cattle and crops; and besides, the penal laws, then in force in Ireland, debarred Catholics from the learned professions and from Government office, unless upon recusancy of their faith, which, in my father’s case, was an insuperable objection.

His education and background set him on a path to holy orders. But unlike one of his brothers who studied for the priesthood in Rome, Hogan dreamed of being a missionary to those who had not before heard of Jesus Christ. To this end, he determined that the place most suited for him was the plains of North America.

MY MIND MADE UP

I had learned from many reliable sources of information that in the far-away Western World, on the banks of the Mississippi, a great diocese was growing up that had immense missionary fields, over which the Church was spreading rapidly. One of my sources of information, the American Catholic Almanac, sent regularly every year to my father by his brother, my uncle and namesake in America, gave full description of the diocese of St. Louis and had a well-executed frontispiece engraving of the Cathedral of St. Louis and buildings adjoining it, so that I had become greatly familiar with the place.

Priests were not needed in Ireland, where for every vacancy there were twenty or more applicants. In the St. Louis diocese it occurred to me that possibly there might be more vacancies than applicants, as it was a new country. Why not go where, as it was reasonable to suppose, “the harvest was great, and the laborers few”? Besides, I preferred going where few had gone before me and where new paths had to be opened. Of “perils of rivers” or of “perils of the wilderness,” I was not afraid. St. Louis was, as I regarded it, my foreordained place. I made up my mind to go there. This conclusion was reached by me on Thursday, the 9th day of October, 1848. I sought an interview with my father and informed him of my purpose and of the reasons that led me thereto.

He unhesitatingly gave me his necessary permission to depart and that I might begin at once to make preparations for the journey

Travel in 1848 was a more arduous exercise than today (although holiday travelers with cancelled and delayed flights or families in cars stuck in traffic might argue that point). But Hogan’s journey started with a full day of riding and consulting with shipping agents to determine his itinerary.

The next day I rode twelve miles to Limerick to consult the shipping agents as to the best way to go to St. Louis. The shipping agents informed me that, as the American railways had been built only as far west as the western boundaries of New York and Pennsylvania, the journey thence westward to St. Louis, about 1,000 miles, was too great to be attempted by uncertain ways, such as stagecoaches and sailing on lakes and rivers, especially as the cold, freezing weather of winter was about to set in.

They advised that I sail from Liverpool to New Orleans and take steamboat from New Orleans to St. Louis, which I might possibly reach in the early part of winter, should the Mississippi River be then free from ice, as they thought it might be, on account of its more southern latitude than that of the northern lakes and rivers. Accordingly, I engaged passage from Liverpool to New Orleans on the first ship sailing on that voyage that I could reach, which was the Forfarshire, advertised to sail on Wednesday, November 1st, the intervening eleven days being sufficient for my preparation and the journey to Liverpool. On that same day that I went to Limerick, Friday, October 20th, I returned to my home at Cahirguillamore and announced my purpose to finally leave home on the following Tuesday, October 24th, feast of St. Raphael Archangel.

Archangel Raphael with Bishop Domonte. Painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682). Wikimedia commons

In the Old Testament book of Tobit, a faithful and wealthy Israelite living in Nineveh, suffers reverses and is blinded. He sends his son, Tobiah to retrieve money he has left in a place several days’ journey from his home. But Tobiah is young and unfamiliar with travel. They engage a guide, who is the Archangel Raphael in the guise of “an Israelite, one of your kinsmen” who says his name is Azariah (“Yahweh helps”). The Old Testament story of course is detailed, intricate and enlightening. From this singular event, the Archangel Raphael has been considered a protector of travelers. A fortuitous date for the commencement of Hogan’s life.

Departure day arrived and young Hogan rose at 4 a.m. After sad adieus he traveled to Limerick:

I reached Limerick in less than two hours, and was at the railway station on time for the departure of the morning train for Dublin. The train went out on the Limerick and Waterford Railway as far as the Limerick Junction and there turned northward on the tracks of the Great Southern and Western Railway for Dublin.

Arrived at Dublin in the evening, I straightway proceeded from King’s Bridge terminus by the Liffey along the quays past the Custom House to the North Wall, where I found the steamship Royal William with steam up bound for Liverpool. The Royal William, then one of the fastest steamers afloat, made the voyage from her Dublin pier to her pier in Liverpool in ten and a half hours.

The first leg of his journey was accomplished in little more than 24 hours. From Liverpool, his sites were set on New Orleans, Louisiana …. far across the Atlantic.

On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir is available on our website for $10.50, postage paid at www.beautifulozarks.com, Companion volume, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness, is also available for $9.50, postpaid.

Billy Griffin Part 2 – Return to the Irish Wilderness after the Civil War

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Jul 142021

When the Civil War ended, Billy Griffin mustered out of Gen. Marmaduke’s Confederate forces at Batesville, Arkansas, and returned to the Current River area. There he found the community of Irish scattered. His parents had held on but few others. Billy moved his parents to Ironton, but he returned to the area near Wilderness where he lived the rest of his life. Few of the other original settlers ever returned.

In 1868, Billy married Mary Ann Snider, widow of Samuel Cusic Snider and ten years Billy’s senior. Billy and Mary Ann Snider Griffin had three children, Mary Catherine (b. 1869, married name Mrs. Harvey Smith, of Fremont) and Patrick (b. 1871) and John Ruben (b. 1873). The only reference I’ve seen to the two daughters Mary Ann Snider brought into the marriage is in his obituary: “He is also survived by two step-daughters, Mrs. Cusic Brown of Dry Valley, and Mrs. Sarah Hanners of Rockford, Wash., to whom he was a kind and affectionate father.”

The article about their aging cabin made passing mention of the Irish Wilderness: “The Griffins and their neighbors had to travel many miles to mill with their wheat and corn. They went to the mill at Falling Springs or across the Irish Wilderness to Turner’s Mill on Eleven Point River.”

The article continued: “In 1885, the Frisco railroad built the Current River Branch road to Grandin from Willow Springs (see our post on lumber industry in the Wilderness) and the track ran through the Griffin farm on Pine Creek. The logging industry had come into the Ozarks and saw mills sprang up and the pine forests were stripped from the hills of Carter County around the old house.”

Billy Griffin became the source of knowledge about the early settlement for local historians and the curious. The Current Local newspaper in Van Buren interviewed him. Billy gave a detailed account of how the little settlement was created, their trials and difficulties, joys and romances.

But they were happy, those simple people. Happy and industrious in their wilderness. On the Sabbath they had religious services and the monotony of life in the woods was broken by merry making in their cabins. Into their life there came romances and there came sorrow. The young priest was called on to marry the young and to bury the dead. Faithfully he stood by them, cheerfully he encouraged them.

A few years later the sorrows of the civil war … found its way out into that wilderness and the little crops of those simple people were ruthlessly taken and their livestock driven away by skallawags who took advantage of the deplorable conditions of the time. … And the country that had begun to smile under their industrious efforts once more became a wilderness.

This story was told to the editor of Community a number of years ago by “Uncle Billy” Griffin, a respected citizen of Carter County, the last survivor of those colonists. To the writer it seemed a pathetic story and the pathos was all the greater when Uncle Billy said: ‘We came to America, fleeing from persecutions in Ireland. We came far out into the wilderness to make our homes. It was hard for us to understand why Americans, who had always stood for us as the greatest exponents of justice and chivalry, should have robbed us of our homes and our happiness.’

Billy’s two siblings, Thomas and Catherine, lived in the Pilot Knob area. Julia Billingsley shared that Thomas never married; Catherine married David Gunton and had two children who did not marry so the Griffin line continued through Billy.

Billy Griffin died January 4, 1918 at the Alexian Brothers’ Hospital in St. Louis. Blood poisoning was listed as the cause of death. His obituary in the Van Buren newspaper noted, “For fifty years Mr.Griffin was one of the foremost citizens of this section of the country. … Perhaps no man in this section had more friends than ‘Uncle Bill’ Griffin. … He was an honorable gentleman of strong convictions. … He will be greatly missed.”

Billy, Thomas, Catherine and her children, Emmet and Julia, are buried in Pilot Knob Catholic Cemetery – an unmarked cemetery on Middlebrook Road near Ironton. Elizabeth, Billy’s mother is buried in Middlebrook Cemetery about two miles north.

Lens & Pen Press is having a warehouse sale and offering all titles for half price, postage paid.

Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness and On the Mission in Missouri are available on amazon.com or discounted 50 percent on this website, postage paid.

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Billy Griffin of the Irish Wilderness

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Jun 182021

One of the great rewards of researching, writing and publishing our books on the Ozarks has been learning more on the subjects from people who are personally connected with them. Such is the case with our two books on John Joseph Hogan and the Irish Wilderness in Oregon and Ripley counties.

We recently received emails from Juliana Billingsley asking for help researching Billy Griffin, her second great grandfather. Billy Griffin was among the original Irish settlers in Father Hogan’s community in the Ozarks just before the Civil War. Hogan mentioned Billy Griffin several times in his memoir, On the Mission in Missouri. We found Patrick Griffin’s name (Billy’s father) in correspondence with land agents and on deeds to land in the area we identified as areas of the settlement during research for Mystery of the Irish Wilderness.

Conversations with Juliana Billingsley and review of newspaper articles provided additional details on how Billy Griffin and his family came to Father Hogan’s settlement.

June 24, 1843, William (Billy) Griffin was born to Patrick and Elizabeth Delaney Griffin, in Newcastle, West Limerick, Ireland. He was the middle of three children, with older brother Thomas (b. 1838, d. 1914) and younger sister, Katherine (b. 1848, d. 1923).

In 1852, the family emigrated to America. Billy was about 9 years old. According to a substantial obituary in the Van Buren newspaper, the family was in Boston first, then Zanesville, Ohio, then Carondelet, Missouri (near St. Louis). No specific dates known for these different locations.

In 1857, the young Irish priest, John Joseph Hogan was exploring northern Missouri, looking for pioneering Catholics, when he met the railroad contractors, Griffin and Shea. They were from Madison, Indiana, which is on the Ohio River.

The following is pure speculation on my part: Consider that river travel was a major transportation method for settlers moving west in the first half of the 19^th century, when railroads were just pushing into the interior of the country. Zanesville, Ohio is on the Muskingum River, which feeds into the Ohio River, a major watery thoroughfare to the West. Follow the Ohio west from Marietta, float past Huntington, West Virginia and Cincinnati, Ohio and the next stop is Madison, Indiana. From there the Ohio is a good conduit to the Mississippi and St. Louis for a family moving west. It is plausible that Griffin (Patrick and/or Billy) connected with Shea there in Madison and got a job, which took him to the prairies of north Missouri and a chance encounter with a traveling priest,

When Hogan visited the railroad camp near Breckenridge in Caldwell County, west of Chillicothe, Billy Griffin would have been about 14 years old. Perhaps he was there with his family. Some families were with the railroad contractors as Hogan noted baptizing two children.

“Returning eastward I stopped for the night near where Breckenridge now is, at a place then called Garryowen—the camp of Griffin and Shea—railroad contractors from Madison, Indiana, who with a band of good sober men were at work on the grade of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. There, on the evening of August 12th, I baptized two children of the pious edifying railroad community. Garryowen and Billy Griffin had so many attractions for me, and were so intimately associated, in name at least, with places and persons dear to me since childhood, that I stayed there, though aside from the purpose of my journey, a day and night longer.”

On the Mission, page 40

Imagine the nostalgic conversations around the evening fire as they shared memories of County Limerick and the Irish city of Garryowen .

Then a year later (1858), we find Patrick Griffin’s name listed in a report from the Land Agent, saying the acreage he had paid on was already sold to another:

“JACKSON, Mo., APRIL 30, 1858. I find from examination that the following tracts, applied for by you, have been sold, to-wit; application of James Murray, North West 1/4, and lot I North East 1/4, Section 6; application of Denis Sullivan, South West 1/4, Section 21; application of Denis Hurley, South West 1/4 Section 24, application of Thomas Mulvehille, South East 1/4, Section 22; application of Michael Mara, North 1/2, Section 22; application of Stephen McNamara, West 1/2, Section 23; application of Patrick Griffin, South 1/2 of North East 1/4, Section 36; application of Patrick Rowe, North West 1/4, Section 30. All these have been sold to others. Very respectfully, G. W. FERGUSON.”

On the Mission, page 64

The Iron Mountain Railroad, which would run from St. Louis to Texarkana, Arkansas, was under construction then, a possible source of employment for the Griffins. Billy was 15 by that time. In Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, we listed Billy’s father, Patrick Griffin, as a likely settler in Ripley County.

When the War came with its violent disruptions and savage ebb and flow of forces, Billy Griffin joined the Confederate Army, which would not have sat well with Father Hogan. But wars make decisions for individuals.

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A PRETTY BUT MISLEADING PHOTO OF GRANDIN, MO, CIRCA 1905

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Feb 102021

This seems an appropriate card to post this week as temperatures fall and freezing mist turns roads into treacherous slides.

Entitled “The Woods in Winter, Grandin, Mo. Hinchey Photo,” this toned real photo postcard is puzzling. When this photo was taken, Grandin was the largest sawmill operation in the world, yet this scene is anything but industrial. Pennsylvania capitalists created the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company and, with the help of thousands of mill hands, converted a large percentage of the virgin pine forests of the southeast Ozarks into dimension lumber. (See details of that industrial lumbering operation in our book, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness.) Presumably, the puny trees along the brook were safe from the sawmill blades. But who, in this nexus of industrialization, would be interested in a poetic snow scene?

R. E. Hinchey was the “official photographer” for several railroads. They produced heavily illustrated booklets on the Ozarks, which not only promoted farming, mining, and wood products but also portrayed the region’s natural beauty. This postcard image was likely an outtake from his assignment to depict the area for Frisco sales material.

Several Lens & Pen Press books discuss the evolution of the Ozark landscape and our effects on its rivers. Check out Damming the Osage and James Fork of the White on www.beautifulozarks.com All our books are now on sale for half price, postage paid. Order on www.dammingtheosage.com

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Nov 142020

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