Turnbo Story about Caleb Langston, kin to Kevin Costner through Moses Amariah Costner's wife, Maude Langston

HOW THE CALEB SPRING TOOK ITS NAME
By S. C. Turnbo
In the early settlement of Ozark County, Mo. a man of the name of Caleb Langston settled in the creek bottom on Little North Fork known years ago as the Elias Keesee Place. This farm is on the west side of the creek and is where John Graham sold goods in 1869, 70 and 71. Mr. Langston built his cabin on a high spot of land and cleared a few acres of land near the mouth of the hollow in which the Big spring is in. Soon after he had cleared this land and scratched it over with a very small plow he planted the ground in water melons and musk melons and raised a fine crop of them. Langston was from Calico Rock in Izard County Ark. and his father lived on White River near Calico Rock. He lived here only one year when he returned back to his father. After he left this bottom a black walnut tree growed up from among the rocks that Langston and his family had used for a fire place and when Elias Keesee was clearing this land this walnut was a pretty tree and Keesee cut it down and made an ox yoke out of a part of it. Caleb Langston was the first settler in this bottom and the hollow and the fine spring of cold sparkling water in this hollow which pours off of a ledge of rocks ½ a mile or more above the mouth took their names from him. Peter Keesee who furnished me this account said that Mr. Langston lived here in 1833.

Remembering the Pryor, Oklahoma, Tornado of 27 April 1942

What I remember from across from the DuPont Powder Plant, five miles from Pryor, was a muddy green sky with black blotches. Later, in town, I saw the schoolhouse with broken windows. Then two or three years after the war Collier's had a story on the "Seventy-odd Oklahomans killed at Pryor." I did not know the idiom and assumed the national magazine was having its little Okie joke.

The tornado was late April 1942. We had spent the winter, starting a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, in a tent, raised off the ground, which had an little ill-joined annex into which snow sometimes fell on my face. There was a faucet near the steps at the north side of the tent.

The DuPont plant was making smokeless gunpowder. The leader at DuPont's smokeless gunpowder research had been an in-law, H. Fletcher Brown. In 1979 I became an H. Fletcher Brown Professor at the University of Delaware, one of something like seventy-odd professors in Memorial Hall.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE AND HARLEQUIN GOTHIC BIOGRAPHY

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Revisiting THE LURID GOTHIC IMAGE OF HERMAN MELVILLE

Wineapple's vision of Melville is far more dramatic than anything I could have written, but it comes from Gothic fiction, not from the known documents.

In Wineapple you see the failure to employ a responsible, attentively visualizing imagination coupled with reckless indulgence of an irresponsible imagination. As I have pointed out in other postings here, Brenda Wineapple’s Herman Melville (but not the real Melville) is a “bushy-bearded young man, a “daredevil who sprints from rock to jutting rock” after “striding off the gangplank into a garret” and before “lying on the new-mown clover near the barn” (not in it) and before picturing “Hawthorne as a mate bobbing like him on the troubled seas of publishing, recognition, and posterity” and before telling “the Hawthornes a story about a man and a large oak cudgel” (it wasn’t just any story about a man—it was a thrilling story about a South Sea adventure) and before he “bellowed after reading THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES,” and before “Julian was especially thrilled when Melville, galloping down the road, stopped, bent down, and scooped him up into the saddle.”

Has Wineapple been reading a chapter or two of WUTHERING HEIGHTS (or, heaven forfend, THE MONK) as a preparatory exercise before writing her book about Hawthorne? Does she carry in her mind images of “large jutting stones” in WUTHERING HEIGHTS and does she hear the beat of horses’ feet galloping down “t’ broad road,” galloping out of sight? For the “bushy-bearded” Melville is NOT galloping along the road when he spies Hawthorne and his son sitting off the road in Love Grove and he does NOT bend down and scoop Julian up into the saddle before him. The lurid figure, nominally Melville, has more to do with Heathcliff than the real Herman Melville.

Wineapple displays remarkable inattention to what the documents actually say and displays a mind stuffed to overflowing with the clichés of Gothic novels. In hours when I need the force of dramatic narrative I read the best of John Buchan and the best of Zane Grey and the best of Erskine Childers. In a public library does Wineapple gravitate to books with garish pink covers, the ones guaranteed to be the best modern equivalents of the old “romantic fiction” which Donoghue saw pervading much of HAWTHORNE: A LlFE? Or did Donoghue include modern “romantic fiction” in his analysis?

Sprinting, striding, galloping, bobbing, scooping up a child like a Mongolian horseman! No wonder the comments on HAWTHORNE: A LIFE in Amazon.com are ecstatic! Exciting stuff! Not good biography at all, but exciting stuff. Bellow on, bushy-bearded sprinter, strider, bobber, galloper and scooper! Off into the sunset!
Posted by Hershel Parker at 9:51 AM

3 comments:

Hershel Parker said...

I believe she thought I was like a smooth and
bare precipice, which offered neither jutting stone nor tree-root, nor tuft
of grass to aid the climber.

Charlotte Bronte's THE PROFESSOR. Those damned jutting stones!
April 28, 2011 3:22 PM


. . . few things say hero and heroine of a romantic novel more than galloping on horseback along the water’s edge,
from WEDDING CONCEPTS
April 28, 2011 3:26 PM


Yvonne Whittal vintage Harlequin Romances
Bernard has a bushy beard that Olivia does not like. .... Betty Neels was a nurse who when she retired starting writing romance novels. ...
www.squidoo.com › ... › Books, Poetry & Writing › Books › Romance - Cached

In the Hands of Erskine Childers Again!

Having put aside COMING OUT UNDER FIRE, with its absolutely terrifying final chapter, I take up in the little room Erskine Childers's THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS.

I know the feeling does not last all the way through the book, but oh the joy of reading the section called "The Letter." Buchan was yet to come, and the late James was just emerging, and here are dazzling paragraphs about being stuck at Whitehall during the dog-days, introductory paragraphs as good as anything Buchan or James ever wrote.

How Richard H. Brodhead stiffed Naomi Wolf when she complained of sexual harassment at Yale

http://s1.zetaboards.com/Liestoppers_meeting/topic/5141040/1/#new

Garrison in the LIBERATOR belatedly takes note of Cousin John Coker's stabbing of Cousin Abigail's husband, James L. Churchman

Allan Berube's COMING OUT UNDER FIRE--a recommendation

Recently I have had Allan Berube's COMING OUT UNDER FIRE: THE HISTORY OF GAY MEN AND WOMEN IN WORLD WAR TWO in the nearby room where I keep John Buchan, Zane Grey, and other friends and an occasional stranger. Berube (3 December 1946 to 11 December 2007) died early from complications from stomach ulcers. His COMING OUT UNDER FIRE had been out since 1990.

In this time of roiling hatred from the Tea Party and other groups, no longer just fringe groups, I recommend that everyone read Berube's heartbreaking Chapter 10, "The Legacy of the War," on the ferocity of the hatred and persecution of homosexuals in Congress, in the Military, and even in the Executive Branch of government.

How far we have come, how close we are--Berube's book needs to be read, or read again. You can pick up hardback copies on Amazon for under $6 right now.