The town of Perry, Missouri, bills itself as the gateway to Mark Twain Lake, and it is in southwest Ralls County. Perry is just west of the intersection of Missouri Routes 19 and 154. It is the home of the Ralls County Historicial Society.
South from the intersection of 19 and 154, about 2.2 miles (on [...]
A July sun, in torrid clime, gleamed on exile band, who in suits of gray
Stood in mute array On the banks of the Rio Grande.
They were dusty and faint with their long, drear ride, And they paused when they
came to the river side;
For its wavelets divide
With their glowing tide
Their own [...]
Grant’s Memoirs contain a very famous passage, when he talks about his first near-encounter with a Civil War enemy. The enemy was Brig. Gen. Thomas Harris of the Missouri State Guard. The place was near Samuel Clemens’ birthplace, the town of Florida in Monroe County.
Here is what Grant said: “As we approached the brow of [...]
There is a cemetery in Lewis County, Missouri, once called the Liberty Methodist Cemetery (a map follows, courtesy Google Maps), and it is here we believe that Palmyra victim John McPheeters is buried. Someone in or around Quincy Illinois or LaGrange Missouri please see if this is true. Report of grave condition please!
Palmyra is a beautiful historic town in Marion County, Missouri. It is a bit northwest of Hannibal, and about the same distance southwest of Quincy, Illinois. In October 1862 a Union colonel charged with keeping order in northeast Missouri had 10 citizens shot by firing squad. The news raced around the world. The New York [...]
Ulysses Grant died in 1885. He labored through the end stages of throat cancer while he completed his great Memoirs, and one of the people at his side (some of the time) was his publisher. Mark Twain had become acquainted with Grant somehow – when Grant was President these were two of the most famous [...]
We won’t detour too far from Piedras Negras, but speaking of Shelby’s connections -
JO Shelby’s great-grandfather was a man by the name of Nathaniel Gist. Nathaniel Gist had two families, one of them Cherokee, and his son by his Cherokee marriage was Sequoyah, the man who invented the Cherokee alphabet. And how many men have [...]
Joseph Orville Shelby was born in Lexington, Kentucky and was raised by a stepfather, Benjamin Gratz, a hemp merchant and perhaps the richest man in Kentucky. One of Shelby’s neighbors in Lexington was John Hunt Morgan. His first cousins included Montgomery Blair (Lincoln’s Postmaster General) and Montgomery’s kid brother, Congressman and CW Major Genl. Frank [...]
Piedras Negras in Mexico is named after the coal deposits that are found there. This town of 135,000 people sits hard by the Rio Grande, opposite Eagle Pass, TX. It claims to be the birthplace of the Nacho, which the town commemorates in a festival every year.
Something more momentous than the nacho occurred on the [...]
Mark Twain said this of Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs:
“I had been comparing the [M]emoirs with Caesar’s Commentaries. . . I was able to say in all sincerity that the same high merits distinguished both books – clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike and avoidance of flowery speech. [...]
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