I just realized that my jaw is down and my mouth open. I am half through reviewing the chapter on how we were denied our Choctaw rights. My great aunts never knew. I of course, being a crusty and dogged and dour and insistent Melville scholar, an obsessive, possessive crank (characterizations from reviews of DAYSWORK) kept digging until I found out. Absolutely shocking: my folks were for the Union and actually were in an Arkansas regiment. The Choctaw governors for fifty years were ferocious Confederates during the war and long after the war. They and their lawyers and other politicians were being bribed on a massive scale--enough money nowadays to bribe a Silicone Valley CEO. We never knew, we never knew. Now I am closing my mouth and raising my jaw but I have to deal with Theodore Roosevelt appointees who slit their own throats, choked to death on alcohol, and had a leg amputated and died because he wanted to stay on the stand defending his fellows as long as he could. If we were not living in the present time we would say UNBELIEVABLE CORRUPTION.
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