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.
Dunn’s
trip to
Hispaniola, as had his earlier adventure in Colorado, ended in
disappointment. He failed to find manganese in enough quantity to justify
large-scale mining operations. His two prospecting trips, however, revealed
much about Dunn the man. He could not bear standing on the sidelines; Dunn sought
an active in life. This meant that as a young man he could not resist trying
his hand, as his father had, at prospecting. In his historical research, he
spent many hours in libraries sifting through documents, but, as his daughter,
Caroline, noted, he also could be found rushing around trying to interview some
old-time Indianapolis resident in an attempt to gather information on life in
the city during its early days.
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.”
