In the very recent past I was assigned a paper for which I had to find a contemporaneous review of Buster Keaton’s 1928 film Steamboat Bill, Jr. After some consideration I ventured down into the silent, impeccably organized annals of Wesleyan’s microfilm collection, where I wrestled my viewing device into submission and set about finding the article in question.
As I perused an inch-wide coil of Variety magazine, I was surprised to find an immense volume of fascinating, entertaining, and arresting articles on a great number of people who, unlike Buster Keaton, were bound for little more fame and historical consideration than I was giving them even then as I sat stooped in my swivel chair, reading.
It struck me that these unsung episodes of history are as important to our understanding of people as those that do fill the pages of textbooks, if not more so; after all, most of the actions and emotions that comprise our lives will go unrecorded, even by local newspapers and mid-range periodicals. For me, this similar impermanence affords both a sense of interest and of empathy. Life was evidently as busy and strange then as it is now, even if much of it remains undocumented.
I believe there is an importance to the essentially insignificant, and so I intend to share with you in this column episodes in the lives of men and women who were never celebrated – except by those who knew them, and by us.
Compared to present day, the nineteenth century may seem fairly tame. But to hear Hartford’s American Mercury newspaper tell it, the early 1800s has their fair share of villainy and vagabondage. Those days of yore were evidently fraught with enough Connecticut-area dastardliness to presently shock the most benumbed of modern-day readers. The December 5th, 1805 issue of the American Mercury (which I retrieved from Wesleyan’s microfilm collection) recounts the events surrounding a gruesome murder that took place in Wilbraham, Connecticut.
Two men were “espied by an intelligent lad of 13” after having robbed and murdered a Marcus Lyon of Woodstock, Connecticut, “a stout athletic man 23 years of age.” The act, which a jury of inquest unanimously determined to be “Willfull murder by two persons whose names are unknown,” took place on a road that runs along the bank of the Chickopee river, where the unfortunate sufferer was shot with a horse pistol, bludgeoned to death, and thrown in the river with “a stone of fifty weight placed upon [him].”
A later search of the scene turned up the pistols in question, “both bloody” with “the guards and locks broken by the blows.” Evidence suggested “that the perpetrators were predetermined to murder and rob the first man they should meet on the road, who from his dress and appearance, was probably possessed of money, whatever might be the quantity, great or small.” The two men fled the scene after hiding Lyons’ horse, but by the next afternoon a Mr. Josiah Bardwell and a Mr. Jeremy Bliss (of Hartford and Wilbraham, respectively) were hot in pursuit, Bardwell avowing his “zeal and perseverance” in that he was “not accustomed to quit any lawful undertaking in an unfinished state.”
The two pursuers followed the murderers and overtook them at a landing in Cos Cob, CT, where their boat bound for New York was stalled, waiting for the tide. The murderers were brought back to Hartford and identified as Dominic Daley and James Hallighan, aged 40 and 27, respectively, and “natives of Ireland.” They were confined in a Northampton jail the following evening, after their trial.
The writer (who is uncredited) points out, “In New-England, high way robberies have been rare, and these almost exclusively limited to the large seaport towns or vicinities – in but few instances have they been accompanied with bloodshed.” As such, this brutal and wanton murder “excited uncommon emotion” among Connecticut citizens, most of whom had been “heretofore exempt from outrages of this nature.”