Seth Robinson, 1848-?.
19th Century political activist and pioneer.
About this early American publisher, trailblazer, and wagon master, very little fact is recorded, though rumor and story abound. Fortunately, several photographs of him have survived the decades, of which I have located copies of four.
One fable of his early years concerns the beginnings of his passion for politics and the news, which was born in the fall of 1860, when his father brought him to see a debate between Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, held in a shady square in front of City Hall, in the town of Springfield, Illinois.
Young Seth was so inspired by Mr. Lincoln's stern and wise demeanor that he resolved then and there to always revere the good, the beautiful and the true.
He would sometimes speak of his youthful resolution being validated later in that fateful debate, when Douglas referred to a lockbox in which he would keep a state's right to secede the Union safe from those who might hold the Union itself sacred. The boy couldn't help but laugh out loud at this "darn fool notion," drawing the attention, and scowl, of the confusticated Mr. Douglas which, Seth would proudly say, he rather enjoyed.
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The first part of his adult life he passed in quiet anonymity, tending 120 acres of corn and tobacco in western Ohio, raising a family and publishing, at his own expense, a weekly gazette which he called The Free Republic. It was a slim 8 pages containing both opinion and news of the day, which he acquired from conversation with workers and passengers, as well as newspapers, cablegrams and rumor gathered from the sidewalks and gutters of the local train station and riverside docks.
Seth Robinson, far right, at the first recorded 'Freep', held at the
just opened toll-bridge outside the town of Hope, Arkansas,
circa 1873. A notation on the back of the photo identifies the
gentleman standing at the chuck wagon as a Mr. Carlo1A.
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In 1877, Seth is recorded as the buyer of seven Conestoga wagons, and seven teams of horses, along with tack and supplies, in the frontier outpost then known as Sawtooth Gap, on the west side of the Platte River. Local stories say that he then led a wagon train of friends and extended family (who called themselves Freepers) west across the Great Divide and into the mists of legend.
Their vision and intention was to follow the sunset and found a new community of freedom loving Americans, informed and prosperous. Whether they ever reached their destination and established their town of Freeperville, history has yet to tell.
Mrs. Josiah Heapgood, painted from memory
by her granddaughter, Mrs. Constance Emery Shepherd,
wife of the the famed Lt. Col. Caldicott Shepherd,
who served bravely under Gen. Washington at Yorktown.
Mrs. Josiah Heapgood, 1598 -?.
When the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower - 102 aboard - to the New World, our WVNan's forebear happened to be the wife of The Reverend Josiah Heapgood.
While no written record exists, legend has it this rather spirited good woman sometimes dressed as a lad and clambered up onto the ship's rigging, hoping to spot land.
On that momentous December day in 1620, it was attributed to someone named NAthaN Tucker as the one who yelled, "LAND HO!!" upon sighting what became known as Plymouth Rock. Fact is, it was she!
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She quickly organized the womenfolk to do chores, help with the crops and led a Bible study group. When the Indians became friends, she was behind the idea to invite them to share the harvest in 1621, even directing an elaborate play she wrote for it, every person participating.
We would have loved to have seen Chief Massaquoit and his ninety men following her patient direction, everyone singing Kumbaya! Records indicate the feast went on for three days, the Indians providing five deer and plentiful fowl to supplement the turkeys and pumpkins.
Nan the First, naturally, was thrilled to be in charge of all that cooking...:))
Our own Nan still clings to her Rock - - -
Louis deWolff, Cairo, Illinois, circa 1857.
Louis deWolff, 1831-1923.
19th Century gambler, entrepreneur and adventurer.
Rumored to be the son of the notorious voodoo queen, Marie Leveaux, and a mysterious French-Italian-Spanish nobleman in exile who lived in a mansion hidden deep in the bayou, and was feared by the local Cajuns to be a loup garou, deWolff was raised by his maternal aunt, Tante Bert and her husband, Jack O'Reagan, who favored the young lad, and took him on as apprentice in his New Orleans hat shop.
Lured by the promise of easy money and adventure, on his 17th birthday, young Louis asked permission to leave his uncle's employ at the haberdashery, and, with the blessing of his adopted family, signed on as a stevedore and deck hand aboard the riverboats that plied the mighty Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
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After two years working as a laborer, his natural flair with a deck of cards, and the ladies, enabled him to step into the role of professional gambler.
His skill at the gaming table, and reputation for honest play and straight dealing, soon won him no little fame up and down the length of those great rivers. Wise with his winnings, and investing in properties with the same shrewd eye that made him an ace at the table, in a few years' time he owned a small fleet of the finest riverboats then afloat, along with several saloons, general stores and liveries in towns small and large along the winding waterways of a young America. Anonymously, it is said, he also established and funded several orphanages.
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deWolff's luck took a bad turn just before the Civil War, when, as the story has been told, he refused the attentions of a wealthy widow from a venerable Boston family. After being threatened with his life, and the ruin of his reputation, he quietly made arrangements with his lawyers and deeded his entire fortune and legacy to an orphanage in St. Louis, and then simply vanished from the streets and rivers so familiar to him.
It is rumored he fought for the North, as a scout and rifleman, and that after the War, he travelled westward where he trapped in the Rockies and, later, lived with the Indians of the Plains regions.
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In 1874, he is known to have taken part in a week long poker match in Kansas City. There is no more record of him until a notice in the Tombstone Epitaph makes mention of his arrival in town as the guest of the Earp family, just after the death of Morgan Earp. It is a little known tale of the West that deWolff rode with Wyatt as the famed peace officer sought vengeance amongst the outlaw cowboy gangs, but such has never been authentically documented.
Louis deWolff at the faro table in Brown's Hotel,
Tombstone, Arizona, 1882.
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Louis deWolff then again disappears from the pages of history, the only clue to his fate being a small ad which appeared in the pages of a St. Louis newspaper, in October of 1887, announcing the marriage of a clergyman's daughter, who had worked as a teacher at an orphanage for thirty years, to a Mr. Lobo, known only as a prosperous rancher and landholder from the West. Local myth says that he and the lady, Miss Rebecca Davenport, had been acquainted in younger days.
After some months spent in the St. Louis area, the handsome stranger then took his bride, along with four children from the orphanage, away West; they passed their remaining years in quiet retirement amidst the vineyards and rolling hills of northern California.
The only known portrait of the mysterious Mr. Huang Deaux,
in a silhouetted cameo, from about the age of 12 years.
Jean Huang Deaux, 1783-?.
The JohnHuang2 lineage makes, possibly, its first appearance in France, where there is found, in the court records of a small town called Vézelay, in the Burgundy countryside southeast of Paris, a record of the birth of a male child born to a Mlle. Bernadette Huang, she being the daughter of the mistress of an un-named Ambassador to the court of the King of Siam.
At the age of 19, Mlle. Bernadette began working as a hostess at the L'aigle Or Confections & Expresso Salon, an establishment in the neighborhood of the American Embassy in Paris that was said to be a favorite of the political and intellectual classes as a purveyor of the finest chocolates in France.
Benjamin Franklin, while serving as America's Commissioner to France during the War for Independence, is known to have spoken fondly of the candies and pastries for which Paris is famous, and is said to have been a frequent customer at the little salon, stopping by weekly to purchase strawberry truffles and chocolate torts for his diplomatic staff and guests.
Mlle. Bernadette, being yet an unmarried maiden, turned her infant son over to the nuns of the Abbey at the Basilique Saint Madeleine, who raised him until the age of five, when the young mother married Mr. Roland Deaux, a minor official in the city of Lyon, who adopted young Jean as his son and heir.
Jean attended school in Lyon until enrolling in the University in Zurich, but he left after less than a year, saying only that he was going to America to 'get a genuine education', and that he wished to see the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. After saying his goodbyes to family and friends, he departed from a port on the Normandy coast, and here our story must end, for the trail goes cold when that ship set sail west across the wide Atlantic.
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Perhaps here it is appropriate to note the similarities between the known writings of Ben Franklin, and our own JohnHuang2. An example follows:
Over two hundred years ago, Franklin wrote "A penny saved is a penny earned." More near our own day, JH2 has written, "Sure, a penny saved is a penny earned, but you can have my two cents for nothing - -"
A coincidence worth considering? This reporter thinks so.
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