America’s History Is Still So Close You Can Reach Out and . . .

My dad used to talk of having shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of George Washington. Or perhaps it was the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of George Washington. Such a concept was a bit abstract for a Wyoming ranch boy more interested in making the basketball team and trapping muskrats to earn a few bucks. I listened respectfully to the story each time, but probably was not appropriately impressed.

History is so relative, both in time and in geography. History in Big Horn, Wyo., started a century ago with the Indian wars and peaked in the 1890 battle between homesteaders and cattle ranchers. As a kid I heard history from people who almost saw it happen. The homesteader father of our neighbor, Floyd Bard, had been marked for death in the Johnson County war; of course, the cavalry arrived in time. And one spring day I remember escaping the stuffy classroom for a field trip up Little Goose Creek with an elderly woman who had seen Gen. George Crook camped there in 1876. Crook had planned to link up with Gen. George Custer for a combined attack on the Sioux and Cheyenne. But Crook was delayed by the Battle of the Rosebud, and we know what happened to Custer.

I’d forgotten how close we still are to much of our nation’s history until a few weeks ago, when several vignettes popped up in the news.

One concerned the death of a 109-year-old veteran of the Spanish-American War. NBC commentator John Chancellor observed that if, as a child, that man had met a person who had lived to the same ripe age, the elder man would have been born in the American colonies under the reign of King George III. And that young colonial, Chancellor added, would have been older than Beethoven and other historic figures who seem to us now to have inhabited the very distant past.

On the same day there was the auction (for $156,450) of a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafite, said to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson in 1790 when he was serving as secretary of state under George Washington. One expert said that the wine would taste wonderfully fresh and alive. Although no one would be crass enough to open the bottle, imagine being able to taste wine from the same lot that was drunk by Thomas Jefferson. Probably George Washington, too. Maybe even the man who shook the hand of George Washington.

And then there was the auction (for $4 million) of Rembrandt Peale’s 1801 portrait of his younger brother, Rubens Peale. “It is the first American portrait in a truly American style,” commented J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art, the winning bidder. In the painting, Rubens Peale, a horticulturist, is shown with a potted geranium. Peale family tradition has it that he planted the seeds that produced the first geraniums in America.

Who knows, the struggling potted geranium that I have at home may be a direct descendant of that historic plant. After all, I have shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of George Washington and perhaps drank wine with him. Or was it the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who . . . .