Here Comes Trouble (10 page)

When word spread through Elba that the Chippewa had the measles, the settlers set up an immediate quarantine and forbade any white person to have contact with any Indian. This did not sit well with Silas.

The Indians would send runners to the quarantine line and beg for help. Their people were dying. They needed food and medicine. They were told by the white settlers that there was nothing the people of Elba could do but pray for them.

Silas believed in prayer, but not in prayer alone. Disobeying the edict, he took his canoe out into the middle of Lake Neppessing. Once there he waved and shouted to the Indians on the other shore. Those who were well enough came out of their lodges and waved back. He motioned for them to come out onto the lake to meet him. Two of the Chippewa, one of whom was the chief, got into a canoe and paddled out to meet Silas. As they got closer he motioned for them to not come any farther.

“I am here to help,” he said, his voice raised so they could hear him. “I am here to help. How many of you are sick?”

“Many,” said the chief. “Some die. The rest, we need food and supplies.”

“I will see what I can do. Meet me here tomorrow at this time.”

Silas went back to his side of the lake. He told Caroline of the predicament the Indians were in.

“I’m going to see what I can gather up from the others,” he said.

Silas rode around to the families in the Elba area to collect food and provisions to give to the Indians. Most contributed, even those who had spoken ill of the tribe before. There were those who thought Silas was taking an unnecessary chance, and they warned him that if they believed he was coming down with the measles himself, they would send him to the quarantine area to live with the Indians.

The next day Silas paddled out to the middle of Lake Neppessing. Behind him he towed another canoe full of food and supplies. The chief and a half-dozen men were already waiting on the lake.

“I will leave this here. You take everything.” The Indians paddled toward it and unloaded the provisions into their canoes.

“In two days, I will bring more food. Our doctor is also bringing some of our medicine for you. You might wish to try it.”

Two days later, Silas filled what he could into his canoe and went back out to meet the Chippewa, who had brought the empty canoe back out into the middle of the lake. When Silas got to the empty canoe that sat between him and the Indians, he was very careful not to touch it so as not to contract the disease.

The sharing of this canoe went on for a few weeks. Silas’s neighbors pitched in on his farm so he wouldn’t fall behind, and most continued to contribute to his efforts to save the Indians. But none would join him in his trips across the lake.

Most of the Chippewa recovered, and for years they would never forget the generosity of Silas Moore. When his son, Martin, was of school age, instead of sending him to the Elba school (which was farther away), Silas sent him to the Indian school that the county had established near his house. In later years, he insisted that Martin and his other four children all go to high school in Lapeer. Martin would go on to college and then return to open a general store in Elba. He would hold many elected positions in the community—clerk, treasurer, supervisor—but it was said that none were more important to him than the post of “overseer of the poor.” He would tell the story about the Indians and his father, Silas, to his daughter, Bess, and she would tell her daughter, my mother.

And my mother would tell me.

Pietà

I
WAS LOST
.

I had paused for perhaps too long to inspect the statues in the hallways and the Rotunda, bronzed and marbled renditions of an odd assortment of great and not-so-great Americans: Will Rogers, Daniel Webster, George Washington, Robert La Follette, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Brigham Young, Andrew Jackson.

And then there was the statue of Zachariah Chandler. Not well-known outside the state of Michigan (and not well-known there, either), he was a four-term United States senator representing the Great Lakes state in the mid-nineteenth century. Historians who feel a kinship with the Confederacy credit
him
with starting the Civil War. On February 11, 1861, two months before the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, Chandler gave an inflammatory speech on the Senate floor where he threw down the gauntlet and called for some “bloodletting,” to purge the nation of its proslavery sentiments. In other words, once we kill a few of these slave owners, they’ll get the message that slavery is over. The South took this as an unofficial declaration of war and they continued to prepare for the bloodletting
they
would initiate.

Chandler is also credited with being a founder of the Republican Party. On July 6, 1854, he led the first effort in the nation to form a statewide antislavery party. He called upon all abolitionists to meet him under a giant oak tree in Jackson, Michigan—and six short years later they saw the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, win the White House.

By the age of eleven I was fascinated with history and politics. For this, along with those too-early reading lessons, I blamed my mother. Her father (my grandfather) was a leader of the Republican Party in our town of Davison during the early half of the twentieth century. Being an immigrant from Canada, Dr. William J. Wall brought with him a Canadian common sense and a keen interest in the “goings-on” of government. He also believed that books and music were necessary companions in the pursuit of happiness.

Born and raised on a farm between Sarnia and London, Ontario, “Will” was one of eleven children. Reaching adulthood, he obtained his own small farm next to his brother Chris’s farm, and together they tilled the soil by day and played the Irish fiddle by night. The Wall brothers and their fiddles became much in demand for the local dances and shindigs. Even during their midday break from farming, they would get together and play their fiddles.

Within time, Will, who was well regarded by those in the village, was asked if he would teach at the one-room schoolhouse during the winter months. He accepted the offer and soon grew to like teaching so much that he ceded his farm to his brother.

After a few years of teaching, Will decided he wanted to be a doctor. The nearest medical school was across the St. Clair River in the state of Michigan. In 1898, medical school took one year, as that was all the time needed to teach everything that was known then about healing the human body. After finishing medical school in Saginaw, he traveled through Michigan’s “thumb” and happened upon a village called Elba, about thirteen miles east of Flint. He liked the people of Michigan and he liked the Americans, and though he would remain proud of his Canadian roots, he saw America as a place full of curious, inventive, progressive people and ideas. He decided to settle in Elba.

In September 1901, Dr. Wall traveled back to Ontario to visit his family and, at the last minute, decided to take the train over to Buffalo to see the much-anticipated Pan-American Exposition. This Exposition, with its City of Light, was the talk of the nation, as it would be one of the first times such a large area would be lit up with electric lights. There were fascinating exhibits on display, including the first X-ray machine and numerous other turn-of-the-century inventions, that filled the crowds with wonder and excitement. There was even a ride simulating the “First Trip to the Moon.”

The Exposition also provided a chance for Dr. Wall to see a president of the United States. And it was there, at four in the afternoon, on September 6, 1901, as my Grandpa Wall waited to get a glimpse of President William McKinley, that a shot rang out in the Temple of Music. An anarchist from Detroit (by way of Alpena, Michigan), Leon Czolgosz, fired two bullets in the ribs and abdomen of President McKinley. McKinley’s security guard would later admit (in an early and tragic case of racial profiling) that he had been distracted by keeping his eye on the large black man standing behind Czolgosz. It was that large black man, James Parker, who actually stopped Czolgosz from firing any further shots when he knocked him to the ground.

My grandfather, being a doctor, tried to get through the mob that had descended on the Temple from the fairgrounds when the shots rang out. An ambulance was there within minutes, and though Will announced he was a doctor and could help, they had already placed the president in the ambulance and were rushing him off to the temporary hospital that was part of the Exposition. Although there were electric lights located all around the fair, no one had thought to place any in the emergency room at the makeshift hospital. The surgeons had to operate on the president by having nurses hold metal trays in the direction of the windows in order to bounce enough light onto the president’s wounds. Unable to locate one of the bullets, the doctors decided to sew McKinley back up.

Remarkably, as is often the case after an operation, President McKinley recovered rapidly and seemed in good spirits. He was transferred to the home of the Exposition’s president so he could recuperate. But within six days, McKinley was dead of gangrene and a build-up of fluid. In spite of the Exposition’s heralding of new inventions like the electric vacuum sweeper, the wireless telegraph, ketchup in a bottle, and the X-ray machine, there was not much known about infection and how to prevent it from spreading.

Dr. Wall returned to Michigan. The violence he had witnessed (no Canadian prime minister had ever been assassinated; this was the third killing of an American president within thirty-six years) did not deter him from becoming an American citizen. Like McKinley, he also became a Republican. He met his wife, my grandmother, when he stopped by her father’s store to see about renting some space to set up his doctor’s office. Martin Moore was happy to oblige, as Elba was in need of its own doctor. He invited Will over to the house for dinner, and when Will came in he saw Martin’s daughter, Bess, playing the piano. He asked if she could play along if he brought his fiddle over. She said yes. Within a couple years the two of them were married and moved to nearby Davison.

The walls of their home were lined with books instead of wallpaper. I’m not even sure if there were walls. A piano sat in their parlor, and Will’s doctor’s office was at the back of the house with its own entrance. By the 1920s, a large radio sat on the floor in the living room, and it was here that the Walls would listen to the music of Caruso and Rudy Vallee, news shows and baseball games and
The Lone Ranger.
As no pictures were provided, they had to invent the images in their heads. Doc Wall loved imagining the streets of New York, the lair of the Green Hornet, or the canyons through which the Lone Ranger and Tonto would ride. Across the street from the Wall house was the local cinema, where the main feature would change two or three times a week. The village doctor made sure he never missed one, and he would sit there always hoping that newborns would be kind enough to take their time until the closing credits.

My grandfather enjoyed being in the thick of politics, and the local Republicans would meet at his house to plan their campaigns. His youngest daughter, my mother, Veronica, was bitten by the political bug and it would never leave her. And thus it was in our garage in the fall of 1960 where I, as a freshly minted first grader, heard my mother and father have their first argument.

“President Eisenhower,” my mother said as she handed my dad a box of old clothes to store in the attic, “He won the war and, despite the fact he’s not campaigning for him, he does support Nixon. What more do you need than that?”

“Yes,” my dad responded, “I like Ike. But Kennedy—
our first Catholic president!
” That was enough for me. But not for my mom.

“He’s too young, he’s inexperienced—and
he’s a Democrat!
”

“That’s a plus! We Moores’ve been voting for Democrats since Roosevelt!”

“Oh! Pshaw!”

Pshaw?
Yes, she said “pshaw” a lot. And “ice box” (never “refrigerator”). And “grip” (instead of “suitcase”). The Bible on her shelf, from her mother’s side of the family, was from the 1840s. The complete volume of Shakespeare, also from the 1800s, was from her father. Her language and mannerisms were also from the nineteenth century. And clearly her view of the Republican Party was also lodged somewhere in a lost time. My dad was always fond of reminding her which party was in charge when the nation was sent reeling into the Great Depression. She would ignore such slights, as they were irrelevant to her. Her father, being the village doctor, was paid through the Depression with chickens and eggs and milk, not to mention a used sewing machine here or an oil change there. My dad, on the other hand, had memories of much more difficult times, and if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that
he
would be a Democrat ’til the day he died.

And so throughout September and October of 1960 I would listen to this back-and-forth parental sparring during the great Nixon vs. Kennedy presidential election. My sisters and I were with my dad (my youngest sister was only three and a half, so she just nodded when we told her to). I felt bad for my mom, as she was up against not only the four of us but also God—because the Catholic Church was the One True Church. The nuns and priests could barely contain their excitement that 170 years of anti-Catholic bigotry was about to end. We said daily prayers, held rosaries, conducted novenas, and did everything we could to implore the Almighty to put the Catholic in the White House. In the end, the value of Catholic prayer was proven to be quite powerful, and Kennedy “miraculously” became president. It would be another twenty years before my mother would finally toss the Republicans overboard.
“My father would not recognize these Republicans!”
she would say (and for that I have Ronald Reagan to thank).