4 Summer 2018 Applegater
BOOK REVIEWS
One Nation
Under Gold
James Ledbetter (2017)
Back around 1980,
an acquaintance of mine
received a fortune from a
wrongful-death settlement
involving the deaths of
his parents. That person
decided that the best place
in which to invest the
settlement funds was gold.
The price of gold at
that time had risen to more than $800 an
ounce, which would be somewhere around
$2,400 an ounce at today’s value.
After his investment, the nightmare
began. Gold prices rose like a sizzling
Sahara Desert heat wave, then dropped like
an arctic blizzard, from which they have
never recovered. I don’t know whatever
happened to this person—like an old
prospector, he vanished from town.
I do know that the value of gold
plummeted to around $250 an ounce.
Now, 38 years after my friend’s investment,
an ounce of gold is worth around $1,350.
On talk radio, one hears a never-ending
onslaught of ads to “Buy gold now. The
world is ending soon. Maybe the day after
tomorrow.” Or something like that. So One
Nation Under Gold, by James Ledbetter,
whetted my curiosity because of the above-
mentioned B-movie story line.
Ledbetter lays out a great narrative
about the history of gold in America. With
the exception of slavery, no other issue
tormented the country in the nineteenth
century more than the question of what
form our money should be. Paper money
was hated by most people, but gold is a
bulky metal and, as Ledbetter says, must
be mined, refined, measured, stamped for
purity, and heavily guarded against theft.
An especially limiting factor is that there
is only so much gold.
Even George Washington wished
that “states would adopt some vigorous
measures for the purpose of giving credit
to the paper currency and punishment of
speculators, forestallers, and others who
are preying upon the vitals of this great
country and putting everything to the
utmost hazard.”
According to Ledbetter,
silver coins were issued,
but they were worth more
melted down than as
currency at the start of the
Civil War. Between 1837
and 1863, hundreds of
banks were launched that
printed their own paper
money. That didn’t fare well
because if the bank went
bust, paper money from
that bank was worthless.
But I do love some of its
names: “red dogs,” “stump
tails,” and my favorite, “smooth monkeys.”
The first gold rush in America happened
in 1799 when a 17-pound gold nugget
was found in Cabarrus County, North
Carolina. Gold then fueled great expansion
in America with the 1848 California Gold
Rush, 1859 Comstock Lode in Nevada,
and the 1898 Alaska Klondike Gold Rush.
In 1890, European investors started a
run on gold in the US Treasury by cashing
in dollar investments for gold. This was
followed by a crash in the international
commodity prices, leading to the panic
of 1893, which would become the worst
and longest depression the US had seen.
By 1895, the country’s gold reserves were
well below the $100 million required by
law. Things had gotten so bad that it took
the most powerful man on Wall Street, J.P.
Morgan, to come up with a plan to save
the government from complete meltdown.
Morgan couldn’t help when the next
depression came in 1929.
Ledbetter covers the pros and cons of
(1) being on a gold standard (whereby the
US government backs paper money with
gold), (2) President Franklin Roosevelt’s
move to outlaw Americans’ right to own
gold, (3) President Nixon’s act of taking
the dollar off the gold standard, and (4)
the current debate of going back to the
gold standard.
Whether you’re a “gold bug” (pro gold)
or not, this book is worth picking up to
learn about the historical watershed events
related to America’s fascination with gold.
If history books were written even half
as interestingly as One Nation Under Gold,
a lot more people would be fans of history.
A superb read.
J.D. Rogers • 541-846-7736
— NOT TO MISS: ONLINE ARTICLES —
• Cantrall Buckley Park by Tom Carstens. Complete history,
more photos and memories.
• Stories on the Land, excerpt 4, by Diana Coogle.
• And the Community Calendar.
www.applegater.org
The Bounty
Huntress
John Riha (2017)
A spunky girl brings
outlaws to justice in this
historical novel of Wild
West Applegate.
The Bounty Huntress
doesn’t exactly open with
a murder. That doesn’t
happen till the third page
and, it turns out, is not
the point of the novel
but its background. The
person we’re interested in is Iris Greenlee,
the daughter of the man who died. She
was only five when her father was killed
but immediately becomes the center of the
action and psychology of this wonderful
novel of life in the Applegate in the early
twentieth century.
If the Applegate wasn’t exactly lawless
at the time, it also wasn’t exactly lawful.
There were those (men) who thought they
could do as they pleased, whatever the law.
Dexter Greenlee had only been fulfilling
his responsibilities as game warden when
he was shot for doing so. As Iris grows up in
the shadow of that murder, she nourishes a
passion for shooting on behalf of the law.
Schooled in hunting by her stepfather,
she eventually becomes a bounty hunter,
bringing in wanted criminals for the
reward, sorely needed in her family. She
becomes, in the language of the day, a
bounty huntress.
One of the fine things about this novel
is its depiction of attitudes toward women
in the West at the time. Iris doesn’t want
to work a “woman’s job.” She wants to
use her skills as a hunter. She wants to
ride (or drive) and shoot and pit herself
against dangerous men. She faces ridicule
and worse for being an unconventional
woman, as in the job she chooses to do,
the language she uses, and her unmarried
status. We admire her for her spunk, her
determination, her smarts, and her love
for and responsibility toward her family.
Iris’s mother, Emily, remarries after
Dexter Greenlee is murdered, but her
second husband dies in a mill accident. A
flood destroys the pear orchard on which
the family had pinned their fortunes,
and Emily struggles to raise her two
children, the irascible Iris and the younger
boy, Henry, who has what is
probably autism. Iris helps the
family by bringing in money
and by being Henry’s fierce
defender. When they are
children, she rescues him from
drowning when an older boy
throws him in the river (and
then she practically kills the
older boy with an axe handle
at recess). In their adulthood,
she rescues Henry from the
mental hospital where he
has been inappropriately
incarcerated.
Iris has to convince her
mother that being a bounty hunter
(huntress), in spite of its dangers, is what
she, Iris, should be doing. She has to
convince the county citizens to vote for her
as game warden. She has to convince the
sheriff that a girl (she is only 19) can do
the job she is seeking. She has to convince
the men she is hunting that they should
be taken to jail rather than resist her. The
first man wasn’t convinced, so the first
lesson Iris learns is to be more cunning in
her approach. It was a hard lesson to learn,
paid for with the loss of her arm.
She also has to convince the young man
who seems to like her that she wants him
to take her virginity. It doesn’t take much
persuading.
The idea of writing this novel occurred
to John Riha when, in December 2014, he
read an article in the Medford Mail Tribune
about the shooting of a game warden in
Jackson County in 1914. The murder and
the widow with two children are historical
facts. Riha created the rest of the story
from his imagination underpinned by
detailed research about the weapons, cars
and trucks, county jails, criminal justice,
and language of the era. Riha seems to
have gotten everything right, or at least
right enough that we fall into the spell of
the West at that time.
One of the best parts of the spell, for
Applegaters, is reading about places we
know—Mule Mountain, the Applegate
River, Medford, Grants Pass. Riha, who
lives in Ashland, puts us square in our own
neighborhood as it was a hundred years ago
and peoples our familiar landscape with
remarkable characters. Reading The Bounty
Huntress we are in familiar country in an
unfamiliar time.
Diana Coogle • dicoog@gmail.com
Poetry Corner
Summer Solstice
by David C. Shiah
Sun rides high, commands the day
Warmth holds the land
Nature in full bloom
Quiet forest streams birth new life
Monarch butterfly floats on the soft zephyr
The timid fawn gazes in wonder
While the red-tailed hawk soars on the warm thermals
Sluggish turtles napping in secluded ponds as
Merry forest gnomes gleefully gather mushrooms
Twilight lingers, the lunar smile fading
Night sky soft, Venus and Neptune dance
Sitting in the forest, I marvel at nature’s splendor
Welcome season of joy, hope
Ahh, the living is easy.
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