1898 — War With Spain

The papers were hollering so loud you could hardly hear yourself think. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst clawed at each other for readers, and not just with war stories. They even fought over a comic-strip child—a bald little slum urchin in a yellow nightshirt, bruises and all. They called him the Yellow Kid, and soon enough the whole racket of sensational news became known as “yellow journalism.” It meant headlines tall as a church door, rumors passed off as fact, and scandal enough to sell a million copies before breakfast.

That battered cartoon boy had become a symbol for the news itself—loud, bruised, and grinning as the county became excited about having themselves a war. The press was pushing us into Cuba; it certainly wasn’t President McKinley.

But war cries weren’t the only sound in 1898. The price of silver had long since collapsed, leaving men broke and claims abandoned. Gold still drew a fever northward and copper was keeping Butte alive with the wires that carried voices and light. You could almost measure a family’s fortune by which metal they hitched their hopes to—silver was ruin, gold was gamble, copper was bread on the table and more mansions for the Copper Kings on Rodney Street.

Investment had gone north, chasing Klondike gold and the copper in Butte. What was left for Shoup was sweat and stubbornness. Men still staked claims but a claim without a backer wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Out here, a mine prospered if neighbors swung picks and hauled rock together, or it didn’t prosper at all.

While the papers screamed ‘Cuba Libre!’ we lived the quieter story of sheriff’s sales, idle claims and miners disappearing down the road until the Ulysses mines found investment to go with the gold long since discovered. The camp at Ulysses began to hum with the prospect of saws, hammers and road work ahead.

Then came the editorials calling President McKinley a coward, and finally the Maine blew up in Havana’s harbor.[1] A new battle cry replaced the tired one and “Remember the Maine!” appeared on the headlines of the newspapers I collected at the post office. By April of ’98, the United States was at war with Spain. Nothing like a war to pull a country out of its doldrums. They said it was sabotage. They said it was Spain. They kept saying, “Remember the Maine!”—and the rest of us hardly had time to wonder what exactly we were supposed to remember. That war is easiest to start when someone lights a match?

On April 23, before Congress had even declared anything, President McKinley called for volunteers—125,000 of them. He didn’t need to ask twice. Boys came running from every corner of the country. Even our own Idaho boys, not long off the plow or pushing an ore cart, were suddenly soldiers. The fever was on.

It took Congress two days to make it official: we were at war with Spain. But truth be told, the fighting had already begun. The real declaration was written in the ink of the daily papers and shouted in every saloon, where men slammed their fists on the bar and swore they’d fight if given the chance. Furthermore, any astute student of history could see it wasn’t patriotism alone at work—the flames were fanned by gentlemen of capital eager to warm their hands at the blaze: sugar and tobacco planters, shipping magnates, steel barons—the whole crowd that prospered as handsomely in war as in peace.

I heard rumor that my former husband enlisted in the volunteer Army and was part of Company K. Certainly he was too old to soldier but the rumor held fast, then read of it myself after finding the Anaconda Standard floating around town.

No sooner did I get to the truth of Jimmy Callahan’s folly than I heard, through a letter, that my brother Samuel had given up his job at the Rockland Daily Star. He enlisted in the spring and was sent with the 1st Maine Marines to Camp Thomas, Chickamaunga Park, Georgia for training. Samuel, ever the writer, became the historian for the 1st Marines.

When school got out we moved back to Shoup, to a house not so far from Tom Wend’s place, or Shoup for that matter. By July, the major papers were reporting on the dire situation at Camp Thomas. Over 10,000 cases of typhoid fever, with more than 750 deaths—more, by far, than were being killed in Cuba’s campaigns. In San Francisco, at Camp Merritt, the Idaho and Montana regiments joined other Western units bound for the Philippines. Those sudden-soldiers suffered from poor sanitation, damp fog, and disease—measles, typhoid, dysentery. The war might be brief, but sickness marched ahead of it.

In early August, the New York Times reported on the scandal at Camp Thomas, quoting Captain William F. Morris, who compared the scene to a modern Andersonville prison. Letters flew between family—Maine to Idaho, Idaho to California. When that captain’s words reached print, it sent shivers through us. The papers painted the picture: tents sunk in marsh, filthy latrines, men dying for want of a cot or even a buggy to carry them off.[2]

Some relief came when I read that the 1st Maine Volunteers were evacuated from Camp Thomas before August was over. I could only hope my brother Samuel had survived the ill-preparedness that sent them south with hardly a plan to house, much less train and equip them.

Jimmy likely thought it would be a short war—we all had—some marching, a steamer, a medal, and home again. He had no idea he’d be sent across the Pacific. The Idaho boys didn’t either. And Alta and Eddy had no idea that their father was a soldier, headed to the Philippines.

By the time the Volunteers made it to Manila, they found the fighting over. But I read the headlines and knew what was coming. The war with Spain might be finished on paper, but another was already waiting in the ink.

When the peace commissioners met in Paris in September, the Journal and the World had already found a new cry. It was not enough, they said, to free Cuba. America must keep the Philippines—civilize the inhabitants, govern them, make an empire across the sea. Editors printed warnings of chaos if we pulled out and mocked any voice of caution as cowardly, unpatriotic. The war with Spain was nearly over but the headlines—loud as that Yellow Kid’s grin—were already marching toward another.

NOTES

[1] On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, killing 266 American sailors. Although the cause was never definitively determined, sensationalist press coverage widely blamed Spain, fueling public outrage and cries for war; U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “USS Maine (ACR-1),”

[2] New York Times, August 9 and 11, 1898: “Camp Thomas Scandal; Medical Care Compared to Andersonville,” reporting on unsanitary conditions and typhoid epidemic at Chickamauga Park. The Chicago Times-Herald War Pictures series (1898) provided photographic coverage, captioning squalor as “sanitary service being perfected.” Military and public health investigations later confirmed Camp Thomas hosted more deaths from disease than combat during the entire war.