The Psychologically Damaged Hillbilly And The Prissy Manic Depressive

If you’ve ever picked up an American history book you’ve probably read about the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition.  You know, the one where they spent two and a half years going across the country to find the Pacific Ocean, a trip any modern day idiot can do in about six days in their Toyota Tercel.  The one that kicked off America’s epic quest of Manifest Destiny.   Yeah, that one.   What the hell was up with those guys?

Meriwether Lewis grew up in Georgia where he spent most of his youth hanging out with his dog and getting beaten by his step-father.  These two activities took up most of his time, meaning he didn’t really have an opportunity for any book learning until he was thirteen years old.  As a result, much like a kid who never got to eat candy, once Merry got a chance to sink his teeth into that sweet sweet book learning, he went hog wild with it.  Merry read every book he could find, which back then was all you needed to go to university.  Unsure of what to do with all his fancy book learning, Merry joined the Army and fought in the Whiskey Rebellion, a revolt by a bunch of drunks who weren’t happy about a new tax on whiskey.  After his time in the Army, Merry became an aide to President Thomas Jefferson, who pretty much just kept Merry around because he wanted somebody to talk to about books.  Thanks to his friendship with Jefferson, Merry became quite the dandy gent around town, going to all the best parties.  This of course qualified him to lead an expedition across the country.  

William Clark was born in Virginia to a middle class slave owning family that decided to move to the frontier and live as hillbillies for some reason.  This is probably why Willy had the spelling skills of a drunken third grader.  While all of Willy’s brothers became famous for fighting in the Revolutionary War, he was too young to fight, and as a result had a crippling inferiority complex.  This explains why he joined the militia to fight in the Northwest Indian War.  It does not explain why he was part of a unit mostly famous for wantonly slaughtering women and children.  At age 26, Willy retired from the military due to his poor health and returned to his family’s plantation.  There he spent most of his time beating his slaves and pretending to be too sick to work, though apparently, he wasn’t too sick to lead an expedition across the continent.  He was asked by President Jefferson to co-lead the expedition because somehow killing a bunch of natives made him an expert at dealing with them.    

What actually happened on the expedition isn’t all that important.  Read a book or something.  Merry spent most of the trip telling the natives they were all now Americans, collecting and attempting to smoke various plant species, making flowery journal entries with far too many adjectives, and secretly crying every night for no good reason.  Willy spent most of his time drawing maps, making sure nobody ate too much hardtack, beating a slave he brought along, shooting any animal he saw, and knocking up every native woman he could, leaving a trail of blonde haired babies in his wake. 

When the expedition returned, Willy was rewarded with a cushy government job that mostly involved him figuring out new and ingenious ways of tricking the natives into giving up their land in return for jack shit.  However, he also worked to preserve native culture, though only by having portraits painted of them in all their finery and stealing all their shit to put in museums.  Willy eventually got married, but his wife died.  As people often did back in those days, he then married his dead wife’s first cousin.  He had several children, all of which he named after his brothers, because he still totally didn’t have an inferiority complex.  Willy just up and died randomly at the age of 68.  No one is really sure why, probably because medical science just kind of sucked back then.  

Merry’s post-expedition life wasn’t as glamorous as Willy’s.  When he returned, President Jefferson decided that Merry was annoying as hell, so he was given a job way out on the frontier to keep him as far away as possible.  This did little to help Merry’s overall disposition.  Miserable, he became an alcoholic and heavy opiate user.  He tried to cheer himself up by finding a wife, but surprisingly nobody wanted to marry a depressed drug addict.  The people who worked under Merry all hated his guts, doing their best to undermine him every chance they got.  Finally fed up with it all, Merry headed out towards Washington D.C. to ask President Jefferson for more money.  On the way he became so depressed that he tried to shoot himself, but was restrained by his traveling companions.  After that Merry started staying up all night, spending his time endlessly pacing and talking to himself.  Creeped out, Merry’s companions took him to an inn, where he locked himself in a room and shot himself in the head and gut.  He was 35 years old.  Today some people believe Merry was assassinated, because what reason would a manic-depressive broke opiate addict have to commit suicide? 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail_Lewis_%26_Clark_at_Three_Forks.jpg

Joseph Palmer - Bearded Man Extraordinaire

Once upon a time there was a pretty good guy named Joe who was considered a pillar of his community in Massachusetts.  A farmer who had fought in the War of 1812, Joe was a deeply religious man who wanted to do whatever he could to be closer to god.  For whatever reason in his mid-30's, Joe decided that this meant growing a big greasy hobo beard.  After all, every picture of Jesus showed him wearing a beard, so for a god fearing man, beards were obviously where it was at.  Now at this point you’re probably thinking to yourself, “so what, it's just a damn beard”.  Well, for whatever reason at that time in American history nobody wore beards.  In fact, nobody of any respectability had worn a beard in over a century.  To the good people of Massachusetts, the sudden appearance of Joe's bearded visage amongst them came as quite a shock, and this being before the time one could just post angry Facebook rants, they of course dealt with it by being as shitty as possible directly to his face.  People harassed Joe on the street, ministers refused to serve him the holy communion, and children threw rocks at him.  The town even gave him a nickname, "The Old Jew", because of course people who treat a man like shit just for wearing a beard aren't that accepting of other religions.  Despite the abuse, Joe steadfastly refused to shave.

Things came to a head in 1830 when four men armed with scissors and razors attempted to forcefully shave off Joe's beard.  Joe managed to fight them off with his pocket knife, wounding two of the men, but was then arrested for assault.  Joe refused to pay the small fine levied by a judge, so was instead thrown in prison.  Life in jail wasn't easy for Joe, because even in prison a guy with a beard was just considered the lowest of the low.  The guards, being sadistic sons of bitches, beat him, starved him, and locked him in solitary confinement for long periods of time.  When not being harassed by the guards, Joe was attacked by his fellow inmates, who on several occasions tried to forcefully shave his beard.  Through it all Joe persevered by sneaking letters out of the prison describing his trials and tribulations which were then published in local newspapers because the editors thought the whole thing was rather funny.

After fifteen months of these shenanigans, the local politicians decided that they’d had enough of old crazy bearded Joe making everyone involved in the prison system look like assholes.  Joe's sentence, which again, was just because he was wearing a beard, was commuted, and he was told he was a free man.  However, Joe rather enjoyed his celebrity status and so refused to go.  The politicians tried several tricks to get him to leave, even bringing a letter from his 80 year old mother, but still Joe refused.  Finally, out of other options, the prison guards tied Joe to a chair and forced him to accept his freedom.  Joe and his beard spent the next several years lecturing across the country about prison reform and the abolition of slavery, reveling in his new found popularity.

In 1843, like many celebrities of the time, Joe joined a commune called Fruitlands, founded by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson and Amos Bronson Alcott (father of American author Louisa May Alcott).  The commune hoped to create a utopia where people subsisted on just fruit and water.  Fruitlands was not exactly the success that its founders hoped it would be, mostly because the men were all a bunch of poets who had no idea how to farm, and even if they did, they saw their role as debaters of philosophy while the women did all of the actual work.  Mysteriously a number of the women started to disappear.  Joe, being somewhat of a clever bastard, and one of the few who actually knew how to farm, spent all of his time out in the fields with the women, where he was free to sample the fruits of his labor as he would.  When the commune failed the following year, Joe bought the land and remained there the rest of his life, his popularity and fame declining rapidly in the 1860's when beards came back into fashion.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Palmer,_Fruitlands.jpg

Audrey Munson - The Living Statue

Hardly anyone remembers who Audrey is today, but there's a damn good chance that you've seen her face, not to mention all the rest of her.  Audrey wasn't born with much.  Her parents decidedly lacked in the financial department, a situation made worse by their divorce when Audrey was in her early teens.  Soon after the divorce, Audrey's mother took her daughter to New York City, where she hoped to capitalize on Audrey's assets, namely her daughter's exquisitely proportioned lithe body and perfectly symmetrical face.  The girl was pretty much the embodiment of a Greek statue.  When reading the last few sentences did your mind instantly go to prostitution?  If so, don't worry, in this case exploitation only meant forcing a 15 year old girl to lie about her age and audition as a chorus girl for low budget Broadway plays.  See?  Much better.  Audrey, though good looking, was not a very good dancer, but did manage to land enough roles to keep her and her mother off the street.

Things changed for the teenage Audrey in 1906 when a well known photographer noticed her walking down the street one day, and becoming totally enamored with her, begged for the opportunity to take pictures of her.  If that sounds creepy, another story claims that the photographer accidentally hit Audrey with his car, and then wanted to take her picture.  Either way, needing the money, Audrey (and her mother) agreed.  The photographer then showed the photographs, again pictures of a teenage girl, to a sculptor friend who also became enamored with her.  The sculptor then hired Audrey to model for a few statues he wanted to create.  This being the art world, he of course asked her to pose nude.  Again, needing the money, Audrey and her mother agreed.  The statues were such a big hit that it wasn’t long before other artists also began seeking Audrey out for her “talents”, and thus a career of standing around naked was born.  

Over the next decade Audrey was the model for hundreds of statues and monuments, most of them nude.  The majority of these could be found in New York City, but many others were spread across the country from one coast to the other.  The culmination of her career was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, a world's fair which celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915.  Three quarters of the statues and carvings at the exposition were graced by her image.  She gained international notoriety and thousands of love letters and marriage proposals poured in from around the world.  To capitalize on her success, Audrey moved to Hollywood to become an actress in the newly established silent film industry.  There was just one problem with this plan, Audrey couldn't act worth shit.  However, she was willing to take off all of her clothes, becoming the first woman to do so in a movie that wasn't a porn.  As an aside, the advent of the moving pornographic picture began pretty much the moment the movie camera was invented.  This sans clothes willingness got her parts in four movies, though she only did the nude bits, with stunt doubles doing all the acting.

Despite all the fame, Audrey was not so good with money.  It seemed to flow out as quickly as it flowed in.  Her Hollywood career fell apart after a few years, a fact she blamed on a jilted suitor who she reported to the government for being a German sympathizer.  She and her mother then moved into a boarding house run by a nice doctor.  However, the doctor fell in love with Audrey and soon murdered his wife to prove it.  The press coverage effectively ended her career at the age of 28.  Audrey and her mother moved to upstate New York where they made a living selling silverware door to door.  Over the next several years the decline in Audrey's fame and fortune led to a deterioration in her mental health.  After a failed attempt to commit suicide she became delusional and paranoid.  Finally, at age of 40, Audrey’s mother had her committed into an insane asylum.  She remained there for the rest of her life, forgotten, even by her family, until being re-discovered by a niece when she was in her nineties.  Audrey died in the asylum at the age of 105 in 1996.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Audrey_Munson_3.jpg