David Demaree Banta (1833-1896) wrote often and well on subjects of local history, and his “Historical Sketch of Johnson County” (1881) shines amid the dreary waste of Indiana County histories. It contains a rare fund of information touching pioneer life in general, and reflects in some degree the personality of the accomplished and versatile author, who was a fine type of the native Hoosier.

III. Miscellaneous

The press of Indiana has aided greatly in the State’s intellectual advance. In the larger towns the newspapers have usually been well-written, and many of them have extended sympathetic encouragement to beginners in authorship. Many Western writers found their first friendly editors at the offices of the Herald or Journal at Indianapolis. John H. Holliday, G. C. Matthews, Anna Nicholas, Elijah W. Halford, Charles Richard Williams, A. H. Dooley, Lewis D. Hayes, Morris Ross and Louis Howland are among those who, in the hurried labors of daily newspaper-making, have found time to preach the gospel of “sweetness and light” through the Indianapolis press. High on the roll of Indiana journalists whose talents are especially deserving of remembrance is Berry R. Sulgrove (1827-1890), who was born at Indianapolis, attended local schools, learned the saddler’s trade, and worked for a short time as a journeyman. His aptness and love of learning had attracted attention, and in 1847 he was enabled to enter Bethany College, West Virginia, then under the presidency of the famous Alexander Campbell. His preparatory studies at the “Old Seminary” of Indianapolis had been so thorough that he was graduated at the end of one year with all the honors of the college, and delivered his commencement oration in Greek. He studied law and practised for a few years, but became connected with the Journal in 1854, and was thereafter identified with the press of Indianapolis. He possessed an extraordinary memory that was a source of constant amazement to his friends and associates. His information in many departments of knowledge was both extensive and exact, and he retained, to the end of his life, his interest in public matters, foreign and domestic. He wrote with precision and grace, and his use of homely, local illustrations added to the interest and force of what he had to say. Now and then a Macaulay-like roll would sound in his sentences; and he would frequently imitate Macaulay’s rhetorical tricks, as by declaring, with conscious humor, that some local event had “never been equalled between the old bridge and the bayou”; but he wrote usually without affectation, and his prodigious memory made possible a variety of suggestion and illustration that never failed to distinguish his work. During many years he was at different times a contributor of editorial matter to all of the Indianapolis newspapers, extending his field at intervals to the Chicago and Cincinnati dailies. He wrote usually at his home, and latterly had no desk in any newspaper office, though a member of the News staff to the end of his life. His manuscript was famous among Western printers, who encountered it at Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago, and in the day of Mr. Sulgrove’s greatest activity seemed unable to escape from it. He wrote habitually on the backs of old election tickets, on scraps of programmes, on bits of paper picked up on his country walks, but never by any chance on a clean new sheet designed for the purpose. His handwriting was microscopic, but perfectly legible, carefully punctuated, and free from erasure. A slip the length and breadth of the hand might contain half a column. No more interesting figure than he ever appeared in Indiana journalism; but his ambitions were not equal to his talents, and he was long an obscure figure in the city of his birth, whose intimate history he knew familiarly. His “History of Indianapolis and Marion County” (1884) contains only slight hints of his superior abilities.

His contemporary, George C. Harding (1829-1881), was a native of Tennessee, but gave the best years of his life to journalism at Indianapolis. He was a student of human nature rather than of books, but his literary instincts were true, and in the two weekly newspapers, the Herald and the Review, which he conducted, he was at once the inspiration and the terror of his contributors. Some of the sketches in a volume of his “Miscellaneous Writings” (1882) show an agreeably humorous turn. He had the trained journalist’s appreciation of condensed wisdom. It was his habit to repeat, week after week, a satirical paragraph in which some individual was pilloried until the victim’s name became a by-word and a hissing in the community. Sometimes this served a moral purpose; again the intention was purely humorous. Years ago a candidate for constable, who was also a delegate to the nominating convention held at Indianapolis, received therein exactly one vote. The question, “Who voted for Daubenspeck?” was thereupon reiterated weekly in the Herald, until it passed permanently into a phrase of local speech.

Angelina Teal’s “John Thorne’s Folks” (1884), and “Muriel Howe” (1892); Margaret Holmes’s “Chamber Over the Gate” (1886); Martha Livingstone Moody’s “Alan Thorne” (1889); Harriet Newell Lodge’s “A Bit of Finesse” (1894); many excellent short stories by Helen Rockwood Edson, literary essays by Harriet Noble and Kate Milner Rabb, and Ida Husted Harper’s “Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,” emphasize the part that women have played in the State’s literary achievement. The Rev. Charles R. Henderson, of Lafayette, a member of the faculty of Chicago University, has been a prolific writer on sociological subjects. John Augustine Wilstach, also of Lafayette, has busied himself with philological studies. He translated Virgil (1884) and Dante (1888), and coincidently with the publication of these versions issued critical reviews of the literature touching his subjects. The text of Lucian was edited for school use (1882) by Charles Richard Williams, who became an Indianapolis journalist; and Demarchus C. Brown translated selections of Lucian into English (1896). George Ade, who discovered fresh subjects for materialistic fiction in Chicago, was born in Indiana and educated at Purdue, as was also his illustrator, John T. McCutcheon. Mr. Ade has a touch all his own, and his character studies are thoroughly original. He and Hector Fuller, another Hoosier writer of short fiction, show how the journalist may successfully turn his hand to book-making. William P. Fishback, one of the founders of the Indianapolis Literary Club, has published (1895) his “Recollections of Lord Coleridge,” with whom he enjoyed a delightful acquaintance; and another member of the club, Augustus Lynch Mason, wrote “Romance and Tragedy of Pioneer Life” (1883). Benjamin Harrison’s public services cannot obscure the fact of his authorship of “This Country of Ours” (1899), a capital account of the functions of the several departments of the Federal government.

That form of humorous writing which has become a feature of American journalism, and which is, moreover, a sharply critical commentary on contemporaneous American life, not to be rejected lightly, is also produced in great volume in Indiana. This goes to the public anonymously, but Emma Carleton, R. D. Stevenson (“Wickwire”), and Wood Levette Wilson are among those whose dialogues, paragraphs, and jingles constantly appear in many publications. S. W. Gillilan, who wrote “Finnigan to Flannigan,” the verses in Irish dialect which have become a kind of American railway classic, is an Indianian.

CHAPTER VIII
AN INDIANA CHOIR

I. Early Writers

The specific talent necessary to the expression of local life is much rarer than the ability to write of life in the abstract. If the knack of writing accompanied a sensibility to the life that lay nearest, we should long ago have had an abundant American literature descriptive of conditions that have passed and will not, in the very nature of things, recur. But the line of impressionability may not be controlled; and though many protests have been launched against minor American poets for looking beyond the robin to the nightingale, the rejection of the near continues, though in a diminishing degree. The early poets of the Ohio Valley did not often approach closely to the Western soil; they lacked insight and courage and their work was usually not interesting. When they occasionally essayed a Western subject, they were unable to bring to bear upon it any novelty of treatment; it was all “icily regular, splendidly null.” William T. Coggeshall states in the preface to his “Poets and Poetry of the West” (1864) that in the early years of the nineteenth century “soldiers, hunters, and boatmen had among them many songs descriptive of adventures incident to backwoods life, some of which were not destitute of poetic merit; but they were known only around campfires, or on ‘broadhorns’” (flat-boats), and tradition, he adds, preserved none worthy to be included in his anthology. But these racy songs would have been of greater value than much of the verse that he has preserved in his pages, though as a part of the history of development this, too, is not to be spurned. Coggeshall’s work includes notices of ninety-seven men and fifty-five women. Twenty-three of the total he attributes to Indiana by reason of residence, and thirteen of the number were natives of the State. Only a small proportion of the poets named by Coggeshall survived, though the writers of the biographical notes accompanying his selections were cordial and anxious to confer immortality. William D. Howells and John J. Piatt are included, and Mr. Howells wrote several of the sketches. It is diverting to read the opinion of Mr. Howells’s biographer that “some of his prose sketches are quite equal in grace of conception and individuality of treatment to any of his poems.” He was then twenty-seven.

Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, were early rivals for literary prominence at the West: one was the seat of Cincinnati College, the other of Transylvania University. Many books were published at Lexington before 1825, and The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, which appeared there in 1803, is believed to have been the first magazine published west of the Alleghanies. Hunt’s Western Review, which was formerly regarded as the pioneer, dated from 1819, and was also a Lexington publication. Lexington dropped out, and Louisville fell into place as a defender of the literary faith with the advent of George D. Prentice, who became the ardent champion of the muses in the Ohio Valley. The headquarters of poets for this region was the office of the Louisville Journal during Prentice’s reign, and all of the Coggeshall poets laid the tribute of their song before him. To paraphrase Bishop Butler’s remark about the strawberry, quoted by Walton, doubtless Prentice might have declined a poem or discouraged a poet, but doubtless he never did. He was not an exacting critic, and he encouraged many who were without talent; but he took away the reproach of the neglected and unappreciated, and now and then he found a few grains in the chaff to pay him for his trouble.