The Old Leather Man: controversy over digging up a legend

by Sean McLachlan on

Investigators in Connecticut are planning to uncover a local legend, but they’re facing a backlash of public sentiment.

An archaeological team will open the grave of The Old Leather Man, a mysterious wanderer who from 1883 to 1889 walked a 365 mile loop from the lower Hudson River Valley into Connecticut and back. It took him 34 days to make the journey and he was so punctual that well-wishers used to to have meals ready for him when he showed up. He spoke French but little English, slept only in caves and rock shelters, and never revealed information about himself. He got his name from his homemade, 60 lb. suit of leather.

His grave in Ossining’s Sparta Cemetery brings a regular flow of the curious, but local officials are afraid it’s too close to the street and is a safety hazard. They plan to dig up The Old Leather Man and move him to a different part of the cemetery. They also want to take a DNA sample. Legend claims he was a heartbroken Frenchman named Jules Bourglay, but Leather Man biographer Dan W. DeLuca says this is an invention of a newspaper of the time.

The DNA might prove a clue to who he really was and that’s where the controversy starts. History teacher Don Johnson has set up a website called Leave the Leatherman Alone, saying that his privacy should be respected. Judging from all the comments on his site, he seems to have a fair amount of backing.

As a former archaeologist I love unraveling a good mystery but I have to agree with Mr. Johnson on this one. The Old Leather Man obviously wanted his identity to remain unknown, and just because he was a homeless man why should his wishes be ignored? He never committed any crime besides vagrancy, he died of natural causes, and there are no known inheritance issues, so what’s the need?

As a teenager growing up in the Hudson Valley, I loved the mysteries of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states–the strange rock constructions, the Revolutionary War ghosts, Mystery Hill, and, of course, The Old Leather Man. Most of this is the stuff of imagination, but The Old Leather Man was real, living person.

And because of that, we should let his mystery remain buried.

[Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

The unquiet grave of Jesse James

by Sean McLachlan on


Jesse James never got any peace. He grew up in western Missouri in the 1850s, where a bitter border war with Kansas was the background to his childhood. He was a teenager when the Civil War started and got beaten up by a Union militia. Eventually he joined a group of Confederate guerrillas, and when the war was lost he was unable or unwilling to return to civilian life. His years as an outlaw were ones of constant struggle, and even after he got assassinated by Robert Ford in St. Joseph, Missouri, he didn’t rest easy.

After his death rumors started circulating that he wasn’t really dead. Some claimed he had murdered someone so he could get away from the police, but Jesse craved publicity and often sent boasting letters to the press. Giving all that up for a life of anonymity doesn’t fit with his character. Some say Robert Ford had in fact killed Wood Hite, Jesse’s cousin. There’s good evidence that he did, but this was a year before he shot Jesse James. In fact, fear over Jesse’s finding out who killed his cousin became one of the main reasons Ford betrayed him.

Other stories claim Ford killed a different man. Both versions would have us believe that Ford was part of a conspiracy to hide Jesse from the law, something Jesse had been doing successfully for almost twenty years. They would also have us believe that all of Jesse’s friends, family, and associates were in on the conspiracy and took the truth to their graves. Jesse’s body was on display in an open casket both in St. Joseph and Kearney and nobody at the time voiced any doubt that the dead man was Jesse.

This didn’t stop a steady string of impostors from hitting the carnival trail looking to make a quick buck. This infuriated Jesse’s surviving relatives and if any of the impostors dared come through Missouri they’d end up face to face with a real member of the James family, and an angry one at that.

%Gallery-108698%Over time these impostors reduced in number, but even as late as the 1930s old men were puttering around telling anyone who’d listen that they were Jesse James. In 1931 a fellow named John James claimed to be Jesse, but when questioned by family members couldn’t answer basic questions about the family, such as the name of Archie, the half-brother killed in the Pinkerton raid on the James farm. Frank James’ wife Annie brought him Jesse’s boots and challenged him to try them on. Jesse had had unusually small feet, and like O.J.’s gloves, the boots didn’t fit.

But John James continued to claim he was Jesse. It only ended when his brother signed an affidavit that John was lying and put him in a mental institution. It turns out John James really had been a an outlaw. Back in 1926, at the age of 79, he’d killed a man who tried to collect a loan of 50 cents!

Then another impersonator appeared. J. Frank Dalton was first brought to the public’s attention in the 1940s by Ray Palmer, editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and perpetrator of the famous Shaver Mystery, which got thousands of Americans believing that malevolent underground robots were zapping people with mind control rays and sleeping with Earth women. Compared with that, Dalton’s story is almost believable. Well, not really. Dalton played the rodeo circuit claiming to be Jesse and told wild tales of how he was a fighter pilot in World War One at the age of 69. Stretching credibility even further, two of his gang members toured with him. All three claimed to be over 100 years old. Dalton spent his last years doing promotional work for Meramec Caverns in Missouri, celebrating his (alleged) 103rd birthday there along with a Billy the Kid impostor.

In 1950 Dalton went to court to change his name back to Jesse James. The judge made the wise ruling that: “There is no evidence here to show that this gentleman, if he ever was Jesse James, has ever changed his name. If his name has never been changed, he is still Jesse James in name and there is nothing for this court to pass on. . .If he isn’t what he professes to be, then he is trying to perpetrate a fraud upon this court.” Dalton died the next year.

Jesse James wasn’t the only person who attracted impostors. His wife Zee and brother Frank had their share of impostors too. It didn’t take much to get a media frenzy going, and there was easy cash to be taken from the gullible. This is common with important historical figures. Everyone from Bloody Bill Anderson to Hitler have accumulated stories of their survival. It seems we don’t want to let these people go, even if we actually want them dead.

All these stories caused no end of headaches for the James family. At first Jesse was buried at the James Farm in order to keep the grave safe from relic hunters. Eventually he was moved to the family plot at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri. Doubts about who was really in the grave lingered, however, until in 1995 his remains were exhumed and subjected to DNA testing. When compared with the DNA living descendants, it was found that the body was, indeed, Jesse James. Descendants of some of the hoaxers were on hand for the results, and they insist the DNA tests don’t prove anything. Stories continue to circulate about how Jesse James survived his assassination.

The legend lives on. . .

Don’t miss the rest of my series: On the trail of Jesse James.

Archaeological discovery reveals China’s link to Africa

by Sean McLachlan on

A Chinese and Kenyan archaeological team has discovered evidence that Chinese traders visited Kenya in the 15th century. A coin minted between 1403 and 1424 and a sherd of porcelain dating to the early Ming dynasty were found in the remains of a village. The excavation by Peking University and local archaeologists was searching for clues to the voyages of Zheng He, who led a fleet of more than 200 ships on numerous trips across the Indian Ocean.

The coin was of a special make used by representatives of the emperor and the porcelain may have came from a kiln reserved for the use of the royal family, so these finds are evidence of an official visit.

An article on BBC gives further details, and adds that China is renewing its historic ties to Africa. In 2008 China had $107 billion in trade with the continent, a figure that’s been increasing dramatically every year. This trade outstrips every other nation including the United States. During my trip to Ethiopia I saw Chinese engineers with Ethiopian road crews building highways and bridges, and the Chinese are beginning to build factories too.

In the past few years there’s also been a dramatic increase in Chinese tourists. Ten years ago I never saw a Chinese tour group in Oxford or London; now I see them every day. The face of travel is changing.

While the discovery is big news to Western archaeologists, it only confirms what the Chinese and Africans knew all along–that there have been centuries of ties between the regions. Residents of Lamu, a port near the excavation site, have a tradition that they’re descended from one of Zheng He’s shipwrecked crews. Many have Chinese features. DNA tests show some of the residents do have Chinese ancestry. When I was in the medieval trading center of Harar in Ethiopia I noticed several people with vaguely Chinese features, and Harari coins have been found in China. Perhaps Chinese researchers should conduct some DNA tests in Harar.

[Photo courtesy user Hassan Saeed via Wikimedia Commons]

Visiting the past: Tracing your ancestry through DNA testing

by Neil Woodburn on

If your family is anything like mine, you’re not quite sure what part of the world your ancestors herald from. Sure, we have an idea stretching back to the late 1800’s but have never known beyond that – something fairly typical for many Americans whose ancestors came over on the boat sometime in the last 400 years.

And so, I remain jealous of those who journey across the world to their ancestral home to visit the village where long-dead relatives lived for generations before uprooting everything and moving to the New World. It must be a very wonderful feeling to stand in such a place and completely submerge oneself in family history and reconnect with the past.

I’ve thought often of hiring a genealogy specialist to help track down my family’s history so that one day I could knock on a door in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or God knows where and introduce myself to some distant relative whose ancestors never caught the boat. How cool would that be?

There is another option, however, to researching my family history–one, that explores the family tree all the way to the roots.

DNA testing is something that was prohibitively expense even just a few years ago. Today, however, one can pay just $1000 for a partial genetic decoding that will not only reveal all sorts of things about inherited traits and predisposition towards certain diseases, but it will also trace back your ancestry.

Although a wonderful article in Wired Magazine focuses mostly on the “dozen or so diseases and conditions, from type 2 diabetes to Crohn’s disease” that can be identified through genomics, journalist Thomas Goetz does briefly discuss the ancestry angle thanks Jimmy Buffett. One day when Goetz was doing researching for the article, the singer stopped by a genomics lab to figure out if he was related to investor Warren Buffett (he wasn’t). In the process, however, he peeked into his ancestral genome to learn that his “maternal lineage showed a strong connection to the British Isles.” He also discovered “a strong link to the Basque region of Spain.” Very cool!

Sure, there are no addresses or even cities provided with such research, but at least it will point wanderlust travels such as myself in the right direction home.

And it’s simple. Just fill up a 2.5-milliliter vial with spit and mail it off to 23andMe, a genomics company run by the wife of one of the Google billionaires. The information will be securely posted online 4-6 weeks later, at which point you will know more about yourself than perhaps you’d ever like to know.

Why give Africans IQ tests?

by Iva Skoch on

Call me crazy but I just don’t believe that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans or Americans. Yes, it seems like every once in a while a scientist tries to prove that Africans are somehow inferior to the rest of us. You would think there are more pressing issues out there that they could be focusing their studies on…but I guess this one gets a lot of press.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize-winner for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, is facing backlash in Britain after making this controversial statement: “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says, not really,” Watson told The Sunday Times. He recognized that the prevailing belief was that all human groups are equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” As a result of his comments, the British Science Museum has canceled the scientist’s scheduled speech, saying he has gone too far. He’s since retracted his statement and apologized, but he had to scrap his book tour.

That’s the funny thing about scientists, so brilliant in their fields and so narrow-minded in other areas. Has anyone ever told this poor fellow that giving Western-style IQ tests to people worldwide is not really a fair way to assess people’s true intelligence?