Red Devils - 2 - Letters to Barnum and Bennett

13^thJanuary, 1880

Both Cora Sue and I decided that the first thing we needed to do regarding our projects was to write letters. Hers was very easy, as Mr. P. Barnum lives locally, and we could hand deliver his letter. She showed me it to see if I agreed with what she had written.

7 Park Avenue,

Bridgeport, Connecticut

13 January, 1880

Mr. P.T. Barnum

Waldenese

Marina Drive

Bridgeport, Connecticut

Dear Mr. Barnum,

Our Bridgeport High School English class has been given a topic to write an essay on, “Which Famous Person Would You Most Like to Meet and Why”, and I have chosen you. I am so very interested in how you have created and developed the circus, and would like to know how you managed to do it and what sorts of problems you encountered along the way.

Would it be possible for me and my sister to meet up with you in the near future to ask you some questions about your life? It would have to be on the weekends, so might I suggest next weekend, if you are available.

Yours sincerely,

Cora Sue Kellogg

I told her that I thought she sounded a bit silly in the part where she is saying why she chose him, but she felt that she had to make him feel flattered so that he would agree, as he must be a very busy man.

My letter was a bit more difficult to write, as I was asking a much bigger favor of Mr. Bennett (pictured above).

7 Park Avenue,

Bridgeport, Connecticut

13 January, 1880

Mr. James Gordon Bennett

New York Herald Office

New York City, New York

Dear Mr. Bennett,

Thank you again very much for the money that you send my sister and me each month. We give most of it to our aunt who takes care of us, but we would like, this year, to spend some of it on a trip to New York. We would very much like to meet you and be able to thank you in person for all that you have done for us since our Pa died.

I have another reason for wanting to visit you, and that is to find out from you whatever I can for a school project that I am doing. In our senior English class we have been given the assignment to write about someone famous whom we would like to meet. I wanted to write about my Pa, but the teacher said that it wouldn’t be fair, as that wouldn’t involve much research on my part. So she said I should do it on General Custer. However, what I really want to find out what the whole Battle of the Little Big Horn was about. I know that the army was sent to put down an Indian uprising, but I want to know why the Indians were so upset. I want to know why after General Custer and the others in his company, including my father, were massacred, that the other army groups were not treated in the same way. I want to find out what happened to the Indians involved afterwards, and where they are now. I think that you, as a good newspaper man, will know much of what I am asking. I suspect that you will have had someone interviewing the Indians involved and will have found out their side of the story. So that is my second reason for wanting to visit you.

We can only go on a weekend, as we cannot take much time off school. I think our teacher would allow us to leave somewhat early on Friday afternoon, so as to catch a train that will get us to Grand Central Station before too late at night. We would hope to impose on your hospitality, if we might, as we would have nowhere else to stay in New York.

Cora Sue is doing her project on Mr. P. Barnum, the circus man, so she won’t need to find out anything from you about him, as he lives in our town. But some of our other friends are doing projects on Sacagawea, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The boys are doing their projects on Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, so if you had anything newsworthy available on any of those, I am sure that they would be much obliged. But if you are very busy and cannot help us at all on our projects, we shall understand. We can’t come next weekend, as we plan to go to see Mr. Barnum then, but would appreciate it if we could come the weekend after, so that we have more time, once we have the information, to get on with our projects. We have to write 10,000 words which seems a very great many.

I hope you don’t think I am too forward in contacting you in this way, and inviting Cora Sue and myself to your house, but I couldn’t see any other way of getting the information that I need about the Indians. Our teacher is very anti-Indians anyway, and I have a feeling that Pa was too, but I think for all our sakes that it is necessary to know the full picture of why he died as he did.

Yours sincerely,

Mattie Kellogg

I showed Cora Sue my letter and she suggested that I leave out the bit about what our friends are researching, but I don’t want the job of writing it out all again, so I decided to leave it in. If he says no to that, it won’t really matter, and I can tell our friends that at least I asked.

I can leave my Introductory Chapter for another day, but since I am in the mood, I will write my outline now. But I have to remember to keep my real motive in writing as I intend to a secret, lest Miss Marble tells me that I must not continue in that vein.

GENERAL GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

I. Introduction

II. Basic details about General Custer

A. Where he was born

B. His education

C. His marriage and family

III. General Custer’s Military Career

IV. The Battle of the Little Bighorn

A. Preliminaries while living in Bismarck, North Dakota

B. The involvement of Mark Kellogg

C. The reason for the Battle

D. The Battle itself

E. The Aftermath for Mrs. Custer, the army and the Indians

V. Summary and Conclusions

Cora Sue and I plan on going to the library after school tomorrow to begin our basic research into the lives of our subjects, so that we can get the Introductions written in time for Monday’s deadline.

I just love going to our library. Not only are there many reference books like the Encyclopedia Americana, but also many reference books on all sorts of topics. And I check out at least a book each week just to read for my own pleasure. The one I got last week was Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native and Cora Sue is taking back The Americans by Henry James.

 

15^thJanuary, 1880

Cora Sue got a reply to her letter in the mail today, and we were so excited as we looked at the envelope. It was definitely from Mr. Barnum.

“Mr. Barnum says we can come on Saturday, at 10.30 and he and his wife would like us to stay to lunch, and he says we can ask him anything we like.”

“That's wonderful news,” I said while I perused it. “Remember what you found out about him when you were doing your research yesterday. He has a very young wife - only thirty while he is 69. I wonder if she will be there. And I have heard that he has four servants. Think of that!!

“We will need to be very organised about what questions we will ask him, as we must make the most of this opportunity. Perhaps we can both take notes, and then we are sure not to miss out anything that he says.”

“I won’t write my introduction until after we've seen him. Then I can make it so much more informative and interesting,” said Cora Sue.

“Well, I haven’t heard anything yet from Mr. Bennett, so I can’t wait to write mine until we go to visit him. I had best be getting on with it.”

So taking the notes I had gleaned from the books in the library, I sat down to start my essay.

Introduction.

General George Armstrong Custer is the subject of my essay on Which Famous Person I Would Most Like to Meet, and Why. I will take the Why part of the question first. My father, Mark Kellogg, was a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune and also the New York Herald in 1876, and he was sent as the papers’ representative to go along on the famous ride of the 7^thCavalry which started at Fort Abraham Lincoln, which is near Bismarck, Dakota Territory, and ended in a hole in the ground in the middle of Montana, where my father and General Custer and 197 of his men lie side by side in a common grave. My father thought the world of General Custer, and as they were about the same age, I thought it would be interesting to contrast their two lives, and tell the joint story about their deaths.

They came from very different backgrounds. George Custer was born on the 5^thof December, 1839 in New Rumley, Harrison County, Ohio. His father, Emanuel Custer, had been married to Matilda Viers, and had three children with her, but she died in 1832, and within a few months, Emanuel had remarried a widow, Maria Kirkpatrick who had three children of her own. George was the first child of the new marriage, and he had three full brothers and a sister. His nickname was “Autie” which came from him trying to pronounce his middle name, Armstrong.

George’s father was a hard working farmer and blacksmith, and came from a German background. His ancestors had emigrated to America from Germany in 1600 and had settled in Pennsylvania.

In contrast, Marcus Henry Kellogg was born on March 31, 1831, in Brighton, Ontario, Canada. He was the third of ten children. The Kellogg family moved a number of times around places in Illinois before they eventually settled in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1851. His father was post master, and also ran the Kellogg House Hotel, which burned down in 1853. Mark began as a reporter for the La Crosse Democrat, and also worked at a mill and feed store. He learned to operate a telegraph and was employed both the Northwestern Telegraph Company and the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company.

Mr. Custer married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon, from Monroe, Michigan, whose father was a widower and wealthy, Judge David B. Bacon. George moved to stay with one of his step sisters, Lydia Reed in Monroe, where he met Libbie. He was so smitten with her that he managed to get some jobs to do for her father so he could get to know her better. However, that was when they were still teenagers, and he moved back home after a few years, and it was only much later that he and Libbie got together officially on February 9^th, 1864.

Marcus Kellogg married Martha J. Robinson of La Crosse in 1861. They had two daughters, Cora Sue, born in 1862, and me, Martha Grace, born in 1863.

I hope through this essay to show the separate careers of each man, and how they finally merged in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, a few years before they were both killed.

That’s 491 words, and I hope it meets with Miss Marble’s expectations.