From the category archives:

Across Our Wide Missouri

Mack

by Bob Priddy on December 31, 2007

in Across Our Wide Missouri

He was called "the chief," or simply, "Mack."  In his day he was one of the country’s top war correspondents.  In time he presided over his publishing world, never an empire, from a building he called The Temple of Truth.  He once said, "The great art of running a newspaper is the art of guessing where hell is liable to break loose next."  Here’s an example:

Commodore Andrew Foote was in charge of the Mississippi fleet the day Union gunboats assaulted Fort Donelson, one of the key Confederate installations on the river.   But Foote was ill and was lying on a couch in the pilot’s cabin of the fleet flagship.  Standing near the wheel was a young war correspondent describing the approach to the fort and watching the exchange of shells.  Suddenly a shell crashed into the pilot house, killing the pilot and shattering the wheel.  Foote and the other men were wounded.  But the young correspondent was unscathed.  Joseph McCullagh had again been where hell broke loose, and reported it graphically.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Whipping Post and Pillory

by Bob Priddy 12/30/07 9:21 AM

Frequently when Daniel Boone was a judge in the Femme Osage District in eastern Missouri, he held court under the "judgement elm" near his home at Defiance.  A man found guilty would be punished on the spot, often tied to a hickory tree in Boone’s yard and whipped.  That usually ended the trouble and the [...]

Read the full article →

The Bar

by Bob Priddy 12/29/07 9:20 AM

The famous minister Henry Ward Beecher said, "Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them who obeys them." 
President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1904, "No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it." 
And Chief Justice [...]

Read the full article →

First University

by Bob Priddy 12/28/07 9:18 AM

The St. Louis Academy was a small school founded by Bishop DuBourg in a stone building at the corner of Third and Market Streets three years before Missouri became a state.  It was expanded into a college in 1820.  Dubourg had trouble finding faculty members but finally convinced the Jesuit order to send a dozen [...]

Read the full article →

A. Ross Hill

by Bob Priddy 12/27/07 9:17 AM

When Richard Jesse announced he would have to resign as president of the University of Missouri late in 1907, the curators immediately looked to a former university faculty member to take over.  When they selected Albert Ross Hill, they picked a man who only eight months earlier had left his job as dean of the [...]

Read the full article →