In
1879 a twenty-five-year-old Indianapolis attorney decided to give up the rigors
of the law for a potentially more lucrative career—prospecting in the Colorado
silver fields. That young man, Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr., never struck it rich, but
he discovered something far more important, the two callings he pursued throughout
his lifetime—journalism and history. Forty-two years later, Dunn, now a
respected Indiana historian and political reformer, left his native state for
another grand adventure. Well into his sixties, Dunn traveled to the island of
Hispaniola (the present-day countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) with
the announced intention of finding Christopher Columbus’s lost gold mine.
According to a page-one account of the trip in the Indianapolis Star, Dunn sought to uncover the mine from which Columbus took the gold that he presented to the Spanish court on his return from several of his voyages to the New World. In this case, as in many other instances throughout his life, Dunn was exercising his well-known wit by spreading such a story. The main purpose of his Caribbean journey involved prospecting for a mineral potentially as valuable as gold—manganese, which was used in steel production, glassmaking, fertilizers, and paints.
Karl Detzer, who grew up in Fort Wayne at the turn of the century and often explored that region with Dunn for artifacts, learned through the Indiana historian that history did not merely consist of facts printed in books, but could instead be “a swamp where your feet sank into deep Indiana muck; or a sandbar across a creek; or a trail winding through willow thickets to what looked like an ordinary low hump of earth; or a faint, narrow path zigzagging up to a high point where . . . you saw down below, not just the prosperous new red barns with their Mail Pouch Tobacco signs, but the glorious past that helped erect them.”
Dunn brought that same active spirit he used in pursuing his historical research to his battles on behalf of various reform efforts, including fighting for the Australian ballot law in Indiana, securing a new city charter for Indianapolis, and writing a proposed new constitution for the state.
The man whose friend Samuel Ralston, Indiana governor and U.S. senator, described as “slow to admit that he could not accomplish anything he undertook,” was born on April 12, 1855, in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, the third of five children raised by Jacob and Harriet Louisa Dunn. The senior Dunn, a cattle trader for a time, was one of many who traveled to California in 1849, the Forty-Niners, seeking his fortune in the goldfields. In the summer of 1861 the Dunn family moved north to Indianapolis, where the senior Dunn opened a slaughter and pork-packing business in partnership with James McTaggert.
After attending private schools for several years, the young Jacob entered public schools in Indianapolis in 1867. Four years later his parents sent him to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Dunn was one of ten people in Earlham’s graduating class of 1874. While the rest of the graduates indicated that they planned careers in teaching or medicine, Dunn was the only one to choose the field of law. He journeyed to Ann Arbor to study law at the University of Michigan. After receiving his degree in 1876, Dunn returned to Indianapolis and continued his studies with the prestigious local law firm of McDonald and Butler. The young lawyer made a good impression on one of the firm’s partners, John M. Butler. In a March 11, 1879, letter of introduction to former Civil War general and Ben-Hur author Lew Wallace, Butler described Dunn as a trustworthy man, a good lawyer, and a person possessing an understanding of business—“a gentleman in every sense of the word.”
The practice of law, however, was no match for the lure of the untamed West. In 1879 Dunn and his brothers left the Hoosier State for Colorado to look after their father’s silver mine investments and to seek their own fortunes. Just a year earlier there had been a rush to Leadville, Colorado, with the discovery of large deposits of the precious metal. “There are a great many strangers here, ‘tender-feet’ like myself,” Dunn wrote a friend in Indianapolis from Silver Cliff, Colorado, “who have come to seek their fortune. If half of us find it, we will carry off the State bodily.”
Dunn discovered that the life of a prospector in Colorado’s mountains was a hard and thankless one. Just obtaining supplies proved to be a major, and financially draining, undertaking. As one history of Colorado noted, profiteering in the area “seemed the rule, not the exception.” Hay, for example, sold for two hundred dollars a ton during the winter; food cost four times more than in Denver; and Leadville shopkeepers could expect to make fifteen-hundred-dollar profit on a single barrel of whiskey. Other fortunes were also made in the hills of Colorado. Between 1879 and 1889, approximately $82 million dollars worth of silver was extracted and shipped from the Leadville area.
Dunn did not share in these riches, but he did mine a collection of humorous stories about his misadventures. On one prospecting trip into the mountains Dunn had camped near a stream and had gone to sleep only to awake at ten o’clock that night nearly frozen: “Moved up nearer fire. Woke up 11 P.M., fire out; frozen to death; ditto at 12, 1, 2, 2:30, 3, 3:30, 4, 4:30, 5.” In the morning he found that his burro had wandered from camp and he spent a considerable time navigating the mountain’s treacherous slopes to track it down. “The man who wrote ‘Not for gold nor precious stones would I sell my mountain home,’” Dunn said, “was either a greenbacker or some other idiot who had never seen a mountain. I shall not go out of my way to climb mountains any more. If one approaches me I will defend myself, but I seek no trouble with them.”
The Hoosier native had some trouble getting accustomed to the differences between the West and Indiana. For example, as Dunn discovered in tracking down his burro, every inch of ground in Colorado seemed to slope in every direction. “An old-timer told me that he went down into the plains for a couple of weeks last summer, and while there had to wear a stilt on one foot and sleep on a house-roof,” he noted. Bothersome, too, were the strange animals he observed—white quails with pink eyes, blackbirds with white eyes, fish equipped with scales that could not be removed, and tiny (compared to those in the East and Midwest) squirrels. “I saw a bumble-bee last week, and he looked so old-fashioned and natural that I wanted to shake hands with him,” Dunn remarked in a July 4, 1879, newspaper article for the Indianapolis Herald.
A gang of mountain rats also devoured Dunn's provisions and the lining of his hat and were just about to eat the hobnails from his boots when he picked up his revolver and fired. Unfortunately, the rats escaped without injury; the same could not be said of Dunn’s spirit lamp. After the incident the young prospector resolved to put away his handgun as it weighed too much to carry comfortably on the trail. He did, however, dream of a day when he could lure a mountain rat “down into some mesa where there is nothing in range but prairie dogs and cactuses, and then—ha! ha! revenge!”
Despite these troubles, Dunn became enraptured by his new surroundings. The thin air in Colorado’s high elevations seemed to be affecting his mind, making him almost giddy. He particularly remembered one occasion when he was climbing along the side of a mountain with a pickax slung over his shoulder and happened to spy three deer. He went on to report: “They saw me at the same time and started to run around me. I, with a ‘zeal but not according to knowledge,’ started to head them off. After I had run for about a mile it occurred to me that they were out of sight. In my excitement I had forgotten to watch them. I do not think they run any harder than I did, but there seems to be an element of speed about a deer that I do not possess. I carry a stout rope with me now, and when I see a deer, I tie myself to the nearest tree.”
During his time in Colorado Dunn loved to hear tales from old-time prospectors, whom he called “glorious liars.” These men often would “collar the unsuspecting ‘tenderfoot’ and stuff him till his mind is in the condition of a Thanksgiving turkey, and he goes off to retail their statements and get a reputation for their utter unreliability,” Dunn noted. He also became fascinated with Native American lore and history. Inspired in part by the appearance in 1881 of Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor, an indictment of whites for their unjust treatment of Native Americans, he began to collect information on the clashes between white and Indian cultures, which motivated him to write what became the book Massacres of the Mountains: A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West, 1815–1875.
Along with starting him on the path to his career as a historian, his time in Colorado also gave Dunn a chance to exercise what a fellow Indiana historian, James A. Woodburn, described as “a versatile mind and a facile pen” through his work for several newspapers in the state. Dunn contributed articles to the Denver Tribune-Republican, Leadville Chronicle, Maysville Democrat, and Rocky Mountain News. He later used his journalistic skills to land jobs and writing assignments at Indianapolis newspapers. His dealings with politicians and corruption as a reporter in the West also may have inspired Dunn’s subsequent commitment to political reform.
Returning to Indianapolis in 1884, Dunn embarked on a career as a “political man of letters,” successfully merging throughout his life careers in both history and politics. During his lifetime, Dunn worked as state librarian, Indianapolis city controller, editor for the Indianapolis Sentinel, and as a member of the Indiana Public Library Commission. With all this, he also found time to marry and raise a family in this Pennsylvania Street home built by his father-in-law. Dunn was the only male in a household that included his wife, Charlotte; two daughters, Caroline and Eleanor; and a sister-in-law. Charlotte seemed to understand her husband’s need to get away from his responsibilities at home, writing in a letter to Dunn during his Caribbean adventure about “getting this out of your system” and “having a complete change and a good time.”
On his trip to Hispaniola, Dunn served as field agent for the Hispaniola Mining Company, a group that included as officers such prominent Indianapolis men as Ralston, Solomon S. Kiser of the Meyer-Kiser Bank, and Elmer W. Stout of the Fletcher American National Bank. The company charged Dunn with journeying to the island and, if possible, obtaining a concession for mining manganese under the local laws. Along with a three hundred-dollar payment as provision for his family during his absence, those involved in the company placed fifteen hundred dollars in a fund for Dunn to use for expenses on his trip. Charlotte’s cousin, Edgar Elliott, headed a Haitian-American sugar company and offered Dunn his help in the venture. “From him [Elliott] my father had heard about Haiti, and probably recalled his early silver mining experiences in Colorado,” noted Caroline. Also, Richard Lieber, head of the Indiana Department of Conservation, helped strengthen Dunn’s position with U.S. officials in Haiti (American troops occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and U.S. advisers dominated the government there) by appointing him as a special deputy geologist for the collection of exhibits for the Indiana State Museum.
As he had many years before as a prospector in Colorado, Dunn threw himself wholeheartedly into his trip, frequently writing his family back home in Indianapolis and keeping detailed journals of his experiences in six 3 ½ by 5-½-inch logbooks. Leaving the United States two days before Christmas in 1921, Dunn journeyed south aboard the Panama Railroad Steamship Line’s SS General W. C. Gorgas, on which he occupied a tiny cabin. The room’s small size, and its unfortunate location over some steam pipes, failed to diminish Dunn's good humor. He noted that his quarters were no “worse than a Pullman on the Chesapeake & Ohio [railroad].”
Onboard the General Gorgas Dunn displayed the same affability he was known for back in Indianapolis. To help the passengers become better acquainted, Dunn organized a Christmas Day celebration for the small number of children on the ship. He did have some difficulty finding a Santa Claus costume, but with some whiskers out of a mop furnished by the steward, and with the aid of a bath robe, a canvas hat, and some rouge, Dunn came up with what he called “a fair imitation” of Saint Nick. Armed with the cover story that Santa had arrived by airplane, Dunn presented the children with stockings filled with raisins, nuts, and candy. After a quick costume change, he returned and led the passengers in rousing renditions of such songs as “Tipperary,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here,” and “How Dry I Am.” The evening’s entertainment ended with some dancing, which shocked the straight-laced Dunn. He wrote that the younger women danced the most modern dances, including one called “the wiggle.” He complained that he did not understand “how a decent woman can make such an exhibition—am sure she wouldn’t if she could hear how the men talked about it.”
Arriving in Port-au-Prince on December 29, 1921, Dunn found lodgings provided by the Haitian American Sugar Company (known in Haiti as Hasco), the firm that employed Elliott. Before journeying into the countryside, Dunn consulted with Professor Edward Roumain, who oversaw Haiti’s exhibit at the 1904 Saint Louis Exposition. “I am convinced,” Dunn confided in his log, “that he [Roumain] was the only man on the island who knew about minerals.” Roumain welcomed the Hoosier explorer “with open arms” and promised to help Dunn find a guide for his trip. After conferring with Roumain, Dunn busied himself with purchasing his supplies. He bought a horse, complete with saddle and bridle, for thirty-six dollars and furnished himself with a pickaxe, frying pan, small stew pan, two teaspoons, two tin cups, two small cans of Armour pork and beans, and three cans of sardines. On the advice of American officials worried that he might be set upon by thieves during his journey, Dunn received permission from Haiti’s chief of police to carry a .44-caliber Colt revolver, serial number 264804, and twenty rounds of ammunition.
Dunn was embarking on a truly strenuous endeavor as Haiti is more mountainous than even Switzerland. One story about the country’s hilly terrain has an English admiral crumpling a sheet of paper, placing it on a table, and remarking to King George III: “Sire, Haiti looks like that.” For his ambitious trip into the Haitian interior, Dunn hired a guide named Oceart Noël, a bespectacled black man he described as being only four feet, six inches tall. Noël agreed to be Dunn’s guide for five days, furnish his own horse, a pack animal, and an interpreter, all for twenty-nine dollars. The interpreter, named Salomon Télamour, “proved to have command of about thirty words of English, but is quite proud of them,” Dunn said.
Leaving Port-au-Prince late on January 9, 1922, the three men attracted quite a bit of attention from the Haitians. “I was clad in khaki shirt and pants,” said Dunn, “with leggings, and my artillery swinging on a belt.” Noël, the guide, wore a black coat, Panama hat, and spectacles. The interpreter, Télamour, was described by Dunn as “the dude of the party,” as he wore a two-piece suit of light-colored material with a dark stripe, white canvas shoes, and a Panama hat. Télamour provided a bit of comic relief by riding on top of the packhorse. His legs “stuck out at angles of about 45 degrees, and were in constant motion, as were also his arms,” Dunn commented in his log of the trip. “He carried a stick with which he belabored his [horse] and also cheered it by yelling ‘Kurrk’—or something that sounded that way. Most of these people talk to their horses . . . just as they would to a person.”
The descriptions of this small band of explorers particularly tickled the fancy of Charlotte, who wrote her husband that it seemed to her “that you and your retinue, when you start out prospecting, must look not unlike Don Quixote and his Sancho Panza! Your dun-colored steed and your long, thin legs! But I hope you may have all the good luck you desire, as well as the adventure.” Charlotte was so taken with the Don Quixote imagery that she addressed later letters to her husband as “My Dear Don Quixote.”
The elderly Dunn survived his excursions into the mountainous countryside without too much difficulty. The local food did upset his “internal workings,” which he later calmed with liberal doses of milk of magnesia, and when arising in the morning after trying to sleep on a hammock (the cold night air kept him awake), he had to “do gymnastics for several minutes” in order to relieve his cramped muscles. Although his companions claimed that Dunn spoke the native language “like a French oyster,” he developed good relations with the Haitians he encountered on his travels by tendering a “substantial [monetary] reward for any service rendered.”
Dunn may have had good luck in charming the Haitians with his largesse, but he failed in his quest to discover enough manganese to risk the large-scale mining operations sought by his Indianapolis financial backers. Returning with his specimens to Port-au-Prince on January 17, 1922, Dunn had his first bath and shave in almost a week. “Appearance somewhat improved,” he observed in his log, “but a trifle gaunt. The trip had evidently been some strain.” Refreshed, Dunn took the specimens he collected to be analyzed at the sugar company’s laboratory by a Doctor Joy, a Haitian chemist employed by the firm. “We satisfied ourselves,” Dunn said, “that there was not a particle of manganese in any of them.” He later wrote his wife the following about his unfortunate news: “I am including the log herewith, and there is little else to say. The manganese scheme is gone glimmering, and I expect to know pretty soon whether there is anything in the gold proposition.”
Although his guides for his prospecting trip spoke no English, Dunn was able to make himself understood and tramped through the mountains searching for the riches he had been led to believe were there for the taking; it was all for nothing. His journal reported his bad luck: “Strenuous day. . . . I finally got to the place at 1:30, and by the time I had taken a look at it, and eaten lunch it was 2:30. It is no good.” Charlotte sympathized with her husband’s misfortune, writing: “Too bad about the manganese. I hope other things will look more promising—but you know I was never very optimistic. Still, success would be most welcome! At any rate, you are getting this out of your system, and having a complete change and a good time. Perhaps something good will ‘turn up’ when you return.”
A disappointed Dunn returned to the United States the same way he had gone—by boat. As with the trip south, the voyage north proved to be a fine opportunity for Dunn to enlarge his circle of acquaintances. “The men on the boat are mostly Americans and are a thoroughly argumentative outfit,” he noted. “We have discussed and disposed of a large number of questions already.” Unlucky at prospecting, Dunn found he had better luck at cards, winning a reputation as a “card sharp” for his skill at pinochle, where he won the impressive sum of thirty-six cents during one high-stakes game. The only sour note on his return home was struck by an Irish lady who recommended that Dunn read an editorial in the Smart Set by H. L. Mencken. “It was rotten stuff,” said Dunn, “and she was very much disgusted with my lack of appreciation—observed that I might be ‘one of them boobs that believe in prohibition and that sort of stuff.’”
The Hoosier historian arrived back in New York Harbor on March 2, 1922, and made his way overland to his Indianapolis home. His bold undertaking provided Dunn no riches from precious metals, but it offered him the opportunity to investigate and write about Haitian dialects and the island’s voodoo religion for Indianapolis newspapers. Dunn also wrote a particularly lively series of articles engaging in a battle of words with Ernest H. Gruening, managing editor for The Nation magazine, about an article Gruening penned for the periodical Current History discussing the American occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo. Dunn believed that Gruening’s article had besmirched the reputation of the American marines and attempted to set the record straight in articles for the Indianapolis News. After all, he added, before Gruening’s piece of “propaganda of defamation,” Current History had established a reputation for reliability. “Getting misinformation from it,” Dunn said, “is like getting poisoned food from a trusted friend.”
Engaging in such skirmishes might have provided a way for Dunn to salve an ego bruised a bit by returning from the West Indies empty-handed, but a far greater chance to redeem himself beckoned a year after his Haitian experience. Ralston, newly elected as a U.S. senator, selected Dunn to be his private secretary for his Washington, D.C., office. Before this appointment the two men had enjoyed very cordial relations, with Dunn serving as an adviser to Ralston on public policy issues and Ralston was a business partner in Dunn’s Hispaniola explorations.
In offering his advice during Ralston’s governorship, Dunn, the veteran of many political wars, and one who was not afraid to state his opinion on any subject, counseled Ralston to use the same direct approach in his public life. On the matter of Ralston’s position, for example, on the National Prohibition Enforcement Act, passed in 1920 and more commonly known as the Volstead Act, Dunn advised him to “go the whole hog” on the issue and take a solid position supporting prohibition. To Dunn’s way of thinking, there existed no middle ground on “this question that will satisfy people who are really interested on either side, and if you are going to lose one crowd you can profitably gain the other.”
In his letters to Caroline in Indianapolis, Dunn seemed to be enjoying life in the nation’s capital, commenting in his correspondence on politics and society, including the funeral of former president Woodrow Wilson. Although many in Washington were disappointed that Wilson’s wife declined a state funeral for her husband, Dunn supported her actions, telling his daughter that he suspected Edith Wilson did not want “to accept any hypocritical favors from the bunch that hunted Wilson down.” He compared the situation to what happened when Theodore Roosevelt died and “all the Republican standpatters discovered what a wonderful man he was, and fell over each other mourning him, although they had laid awake hating him before his death.”
In other letters Dunn informed his family that the burdens of his office were few and far between. “The worst task,” he said, “is listening to people talk when you would like to throw them out, but know that you have to be moderately polite.” The historian turned bureaucrat did go on to say that many persons came into Ralston’s U.S. Senate office who were “sources of pleasure, so that it balances up fairly well.”
Dunn’s time in the nation's capital proved to be short-lived. During his travels in Haiti he had contracted some form of tropical disease that left him susceptible to jaundice. His ill health caused him to return to Indianapolis, where he died on June 6, 1924.
Commenting on Dunn’s death, Ralston expressed his “great admiration” for his fellow Democrat. Ralston noted that the first time he heard Dunn make a speech its subject was the value of circulating libraries to citizens. “It was characteristic of him to be most interested in those things that most benefited the people,” said Ralston. “He could become as indignant as any man I ever knew at the failure of a public official to perform his duties.” Dunn was not only loyal to the truth, at whatever the cost, Ralston continued, but also loyal to his friends. “And trustworthy—absolutely so,” he said. “I shall miss him.”
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