The One and Only Mexican Independence is Defiantly Back in the US

 

Revolution and religion mix in this homage to Padre Miguel Hidalgo with the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe and an angel bending to kiss his brow. 

Note:  Last year most of the Diez y Seis de Septiembre Mexican Independence Day parades and celebrations across the U.S. were curtailed and canceled as Mexican/Chicano/Latinx folks hunkered down in fear of ICE sweeps, kidnappings, and detentions.  Chicago was at the center of the storm as the "Midway Blitz" rampaged across the city and clashed repeatedly with residents and protesters.  Gatherings expected to draw ICE were canceled.  Then days before what would have been the great holiday festival an ICE agent shot and killed 38‑year‑old Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop in Franklin Park.  Even greater protests erupted.  With too much video documentation refuting claims of being attacked and self-defense and after ignoring too many judicial orders to stop the most flagrant abuse, the Trump Administration scapegoated the mini would-be Nazi in charged and dispersed most of the occupying Federal forces to other targets around the country.  But they have never gone away and pick off targets as discreetly as possible across the city and surrounding communities as far as McHenry County.  There are still confrontations between agents and the community.  But people by and large have resumed living their lives despite the risks.  The big Grito Festival is on this year as is the parade in Little Village, one of the largest ethnic processions in the city. Organizers and participants of both make clear it is in bold defiance of both domestic repression in the US and threats to Mexican national sovereignty such as Trump's recently posted star-spangled map of all North America and Greenland as the United States of America.

Donald Trump's recent post of this map is a threat to the independence of Mexico and every other country in a quarter of the globe.

Quick, what’s Mexican Independence Day?  If you answered Cinco de Mayo, you’d be wrong.  That is a minor provincial holiday in Mexico that has become a celebration of Mexican pride in the United States.  It celebrates the victory of the Mexican Army over the French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, during the French invasion of Mexico.  The correct answer is Diez y Seis de Septiembre—September 16—which commemorates El Grito de Delores, the rallying cry which set off a Mexican revolution against Spanish colonial rule and the caste of native-born Spaniards who ran roughshod over the people in 1810. 

Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was a respected priest and champion of the Mestizos—mixed Spanish and Indian—and the Indios.  Both classes were held in virtual serfdom by a system in which native-born Spaniards—Gachupines—held ruthless sway.  Hidalgo had for some time been part of a plot by Criollos to stage a coup d’état by Mexican born Spaniards who were the middling level officers and administers of the system. 

The Criollo plot was to take advantage of resentment of the imposition of Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne by Napoleon to declare Mexican independence within a Spanish Empire under Ferdinand VII who was considered by the Spanish people to be the legitimate heir to the throne. But Ferdinand was held in France by the Emperor, so if it had succeeded the plot would have created a de-facto republic.  The Gachupines, who had accepted Bonaparte, would be driven out of Mexico. 

Plotters decided on a date in December to stage their coup.  In the meantime, they were quietly trying to line up the support of Criollo officers and by extension the Army.  But the plot was betrayed, and orders were sent out to arrest the leaders, including Hidalgo.

The wife of Miguel Domínguez, Corregidor of Queretaro (chief administrative official of the city of Queretaro) and a leader of the plot, learned of the pending arrests and sent a warning to Hidalgo in the village of Delores near the city of Guanajuato, about 230 miles northwest of the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Mexico City. The late in the evening of September 15, Hidalgo asked Ignacio Allende, the Criollo officer who had brought the warning, to arrest all the Gachupines in the city.

It was apparent to Hidalgo and Allende that the Criollos had not had time to solidify their support in the army, and indeed that many Criollo officers refused to join.  The revolution would inevitably be crushed.  Sometime in the early morning hours of September 16, Hidalgo made a fateful decision—he would call on the mestizo and Indio masses to rise up.  

 

Indios, Meztizos, and Criollos on the march in this mural by Juan O'Gorman. 

At about 6 A.M.  Hidalgo assembled the people of the pueblo by tolling the church bell.  When they were together he made this hastily drafted appeal:

My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen by three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once… Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government! Death to the Gachupines!

This is the famous Grito de Delores which sparked the revolt.  Runners went out to nearby towns carrying the message.  The long-oppressed people flocked to the cause armed with knives, machetes, homemade spears, farm implements, and what few firearms that they could take from the Gachupines. 

With Hidalgo and Allende at their head, the peons began the march to Mexico City.  Along the way they acquired an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe—Mary depicted as a dark skinned Indian—which became the banner of the revolt.

A regular Army regiment under the command of Criollos joined the march, but the swelling ranks of peasants—soon to number up to 50,000, was out of control by any authority.  

 

The siege of the fortified granary during the Battle of Guanajuato.  

The first major battle of the war began at Guanajuato, a substantial provincial town, on September 28.  Local officials rounded up the Gachupines and loyal Criollos and their families and made a stand in the town’s fortified granary.  Hundreds of peasants were killed in wild frontal assaults on the position until rocks thrown from above caused the collapse of the granary roof, injuring many.  When a civil official ran up a white flag of surrender, the garrison commander countermanded the order and opened fire on the native forces coming forward to accept it.  Scores were killed.  After that there was no quarter.  With the exception of a few women and children, the 400 occupants of the granary were massacred.  Then the town was pillaged and looted, with Criollo homes faring no better than the native Spaniards.

Of course, Hidalgo had unleashed an unmanageable and ferocious anger among the people.  Along the march any Gachupines unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the rebels were brutally killed, as were any Criollos who sided with them—or were simply assumed to be European born.  The revolt was not just a national one—it was a virtual slave revolt with all the attendant horror that implied.

Word of the fate of Guanajuato mobilized forces in Mexico City and caused most wealthy Criollos to side with the government or try to remain neutral.

Hidalgo and his closest supporters later abandoned the army and returned to Delores.  He was frightened and disillusioned by what he had brought about.  A year later he was captured by Gachupine forces and hanged.

 

Hidalgo, Allende, and almost the entire revolutionary officer corps were trapped and arrested in March 1811 

It took 11 years of war to finally oust the Spaniards. A triumphant revolutionary army finally entered Mexico City on September 28, 1821, issued an official Declaration of the Independence of Mexican Empire, and established a government of imperial regency under Agustín de Iturbide.

But Mexicans mark the beginning of the struggle—the Grito de Delores—as the true anniversary of independence.

 

Last year for the first time, the first woman and the first Jewish president of Mexico, read El Grito de Dolores from the Presidential Palace balcony in Mexico City.   Sheinbaum has been noted for boldly standing up to Donald Trump on immigration, trade, and tariffs.  Symbolically El Grito is also a declaration of independence from U.S. imperialism and Neo-colonialism.

Eventually the church bell from Delores was brought to the capital.  Each year on the night of September 15, the President of Mexico rings the bell at the National Palace and repeats a Grito Mexicano based upon the Grito de Dolores from the balcony of the palace to the hundreds of thousands assembled in the Plaza de la Constitución.  At dawn on September 16 a military parade starts in the Plaza passes the Hidalgo Memorial and proceeds down the Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s main boulevard.  Similar celebrations are held in cities and towns across Mexico. 

The Overland Stage Delivered Passengers and Mail Saint Louis to San Francisco in 25 Days or Less

 A Butterfield Overland Stage departing San Francisco in 1858.

On September 15, 1858, two new Concord Coaches, one in Saint Louis, Missouri and one in San Francisco, California set off in opposite directions two cross more than 2/3s of the continent.  They were inaugurating a new contract with the Post Office for transcontinental mail service operated by the Butterfield Overland Mail.  It would take 23 days for the California service to arrive at its eastern terminal—two whole days before its projected time.  The west bound route would make similar time.  Both traveled the indirect Ox Bow route that dipped south to cross Indian Territory and kitty-angle across Texas before heading west along the Rio Grande River and through the rugged mountains and deserts of the New Mexico Territory.  It would actually clip a corner of Mexican Baja California before turning north traversing much of California via its central valley before finally reaching San Francisco Bay.

That route added almost 900 miles to a more northerly route via the Kansas and Nebraska Territories past Ft. Laramie, through the South Pass, into Mormon Utah, across the punishing Nevada deserts, and over the formidable Sierra Nevadas to California. 

When President James Buchanan ordered Postmaster General Aaron Brown to establish an overland mail route to the West Coast in 1855 most people expected that the northern route would be picked.  It was already in use as the Oregon and California Trails by immigrant wagon trains and would later be followed by the Pony Express, the transcontinental telegraph, and eventually the transcendental railroad.  

                      

                                  John W. Butterfield was an upstate New York transportation tycoon when he bid on a transcontinental mail contract.

But John W. Butterfield, a 55-year-old Utica, New York businessman had other ideas.  He was already an experienced operator of various transportation companies including regional stagecoach lines in Upstate New York, plank roads, steamboats on Lake Ontario, ferries, and even his hometown street railroad. 

When Butterfield heard about the upcoming mail contract, he determined to win it despite having no personal experience in the West.  And he knew just how to go about it—by exploiting the rising sectional tensions that were already straining the Union.

Tying gold rich California to the East was a high-priority national objective.  Other than trusting a letter to an immigrant wagon train on a risky month’s long crawl across the continent, communications with the Golden State meant the long voyage all the way around Cape Horn by clipper ship.  Theoretically an overland mail service could drastically cut either time.  But Northern and Southern interests were at odds.  The South still had hopes of making California a slave state by referendum or failing that splitting the state and taking half.  It had similar objectives in expanding slavery into New Mexico Territory.  A northern route would tie San Francisco more tightly than ever to New York and New England banking and business interests who already dominated the ocean trade.

Butterfield proposed his southern route—more over a southern route that even avoided the well-established Santa Fe Trail which had its head in Bloody Kansas and was subject to the abolitionists who settled there.  He presented his bid to Postmaster General Brown, a Tennessean and ardent Southern partisan.  

A map showing the West as it was in 1858 and Butterfield's Ox Bow southern mail routes.

Butterfield knew his man.  Brown announced that he would not entertain bids using the northern route because it was subject to being closed by snows.  It was a plausible excuse.  Certainly, snow could and did close the immigrant trails on the high plains, the Rocky Mountains, and especially at Donner Pass over the Sierra Madres.  But as we will see the longer southern route posed its own dangers and even it could be closed by snow in the New Mexico mountains.  Since Butterfield was the only one to offer a bid on the Southern route, bingo, he was awarded the lucrative contract.

Although Butterfield was an experienced hand at stage lines, this was far bigger than anything he had ever attempted and required an enormous infusion of extra capital just to get off the ground.  He would need to supply 250 Concord Stagecoaches and 1800 horses and mules and find or build 139 relay stations.  In addition, he would have to employ 800—almost all men but including some women cooks at relay stations.

For the necessary capital, Butterfield tuned to a number of partners and investors including William B. Dinsmore, William G. Fargo, James V. P. Gardner, Marcus L. Kinyon, Alexander Holland, and Hamilton Spencer.  All were eager to share in the proceeds of the $600,000 annual mail contract plus income from express freight and passengers. 

It was a near miracle that most of the infrastructure could be put in place from the official bid requests in March of 1857 to the mid-September 1858 effective starting date of the contract.  And that included shipping some of those Concord coaches from their New Hampshire manufacturer to San Francisco by sea.

                                     

                                                     Reporter Waterman Ormsby.

New York Herald reporter Waterman L. Ormsby was the only passenger to ride the entire 2,812 mile journey from St. Louis to San Francisco.  Like other passengers who booked the entire trip, he paid a $200 fare—about $5,525 in today’s currency.  He described the experience succinctly, “Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back, but I now know what Hell is like. I’ve just had 24 days of it.” It was a bone jarring ride over rugged terrain exposing the passengers to blistering heat by day, sometimes freezing straw pallets on the floor or beds jammed with as many as six men. Food was often awful.  And passengers often had to help hitch and unhitch teams as well as switching luggage and freight between coaches.

The coach from the West Coast arrived at its destination with 6 passengers, some of whom were picked up along the way. 

Two coaches in each direction were scheduled each week of the contract.  There were actually two eastern terminals—St. Louis and Memphis, Tennessee with the two routes converging at Fort Smith, Arkansas on the border of Indian Territory.  On the eastern legs depending on the weather and the navigability of rivers, mail might go part way by river boat down the Mississippi and then up the Arkansas River and might use rail service across part of Arkansas.  In dry weather the entire rout in eastern Arkansas might be made by coach.  From Fort Smith west, it was all coach service.

Almost immediately the dangers and drawbacks of the southern route became apparent.  The trip across notoriously violent Indian Territory exposed the coaches to native attacks, stock raids at way stations, and prowling outlaw gangs.  Even more dangerous was the transit of Texas which was subject to raids by the Comanche, Southern Pawnee, and Kiowa, and the Apache in New Mexico.  On the long trip up central California there were more highwaymen.  The trips became so dangerous that Butterfield had to appeal for Army protection.

The tiny ante-bellum Regular Army was spread thinly across the West.  Much of it was stationed in Kansas trying to keep a lid on the virtual civil war between pro and anti-slavery forces. Shortly after taking office in 1860 the War Department assigned part of the 9th Cavalry based far to the north at Ft. Laramie under the command of Lt. Col. William O. Collins.  He detached troopers to escort coaches between Independence, Missouri and Sacramento, California.  This amounted to an effective subsidy of the service worth tens of thousands of dollars.

It was no surprise that the service was not profitable.  On top of that the newly formed Pony Express in 1860 offered faster service for the mails.  In March of that year Butterfeild’s partners foreclosed on him and ousted him from the business.  Eventually via William Fargo most of the company’s assets, like those of the short-lived Pony Express, ended up under the control of the Wells Fargo Company.

A year later in March of 1861 the Congress cancelled the Overland Mail contract in anticipation of war breaking out, which it shortly did with the attack on Fort Sumter in April.  The last runs were on June 30, 1861.  A new northern route known as the Central Overland Pacific Route began service between St. Joseph, Missouri and Placerville, California.

Meanwhile George Henry Giddings tried to keep the old route open for the Confederacy between Texas and California.  The Rebel government was particularly hopeful that the coaches could supply California gold to their cash strapped Treasury. But California was soon firmly in Union hands, and the Confederates destroyed stations west of Tucson.  Except for local service, the southern overland service ceased in early 1862.

In California Wells Fargo continued to operate coach service to gold camps and expanded service to the silver mines in Nevada until railroad service rendered it obsolete in the late 1860’s.

Old Overland Stage stations were the sites of four Civil War battles—The Battle of Stanwix Station, the Battle of Picacho Pass, the Second Battle of Mesilla, and the Battle of Pea Ridge. They were also the sites of Confederate battles with the Comanche in Texas and Union fights with the Apache in New Mexico.

This Concord stagecoach in service in the late 19th Century was pretty much identical to those operated on the Overland Mail route.

Stagecoaches continued to serve shrinking routes in the West into the early 20th Century until they were all replaced by either railroads or motor coach service.

Wells Fargo kept getting richer and more powerful expanding to a vast express service and, of course, a fat bank.

 

A 1958 Overland Mail centennial commemorative First Class U.S. Postage stamp.

As for John Butterfield…his son Daniel became a Union General in the Civil War most famous for supposedly composing Taps.  The elder retired to Utica, served a term as Mayor and died much honored locally in 1869.  He was honored by the United State Postal Service by having Utica’s Butterfield Station Post Office named for him.

 

Death on Riviera Roads Ties Isadora Duncan and Grace Kelly

 

                                                    Movie icon Grace Kelly became Princes Grace of Monaco. 

On September 14, 1982 the former Grace Kelly, Princes of Monaco, died of injuries sustained in an automobile crash in the Principality.  That was 55 years to the day that dancer Isadora Duncan died in a bizarre open car accident not far away on the Riviera in Nice.  They were nearly the same age at death—the Princes was 53, Duncan 50.  Both were cultural icons.

Aside from being American performing artists of striking personal beauty living in Europe, however, the two could hardly have been more different.

Princess Grace was raised in Philadelphia high society, into which her wealthy Irish Catholic family managed to crash.  She had a fabulously successful, if brief, movie career in which she was tagged as an “ice princess” for her cool blonde beauty.  She remained a devoted Catholic and consented to marry into one of the oldest royal families in Europe despite hardly having met the groom, Prince Rainier.

 

Princess Grace's wrecked Land Rover at the bottom of a mountain hairpin turn. 

Duncan, on the other hand, was a wild bohemian and rejected every constraint of conventionality the Princess embraced.  She publicly took lovers of both sexes.  It must be noted, however, that despite Grace Kelly’s aloof reputation in Hollywood, she apparently took most of her leading men as lovers.  But she was chaste and discrete compared to the dancer. 

Of the two, however, Isadora Duncan was by far the more interesting.

 

Isadora Duncan in one of her Greek inspired dance costumes. 

On September 14, 1927 Isadora Duncan, the American-born mother of modern dance and an avant-garde icon died in Nice, France when her signature long flowing scarf became entangled in spokes of a wheel of the open automobile in which she was riding.  She broke her neck and died instantly.  She was only 50 years old.  Her legions of admirers thought her end fitting and symbolic.

Duncan was born on May 26, 1877 in San Francisco, the youngest of four children.  Her father, Joseph Charles Duncan, was a successful mining engineer turned banker and a local patron of the arts and her mother came from an influential California political family.  Despite the promising beginning, Joseph Duncan was disgraced in a banking scandal shortly after Isadora’s birth and her mother divorced him and relocated the family to Oakland where the family lived in dire, if genteel, poverty.  

 

Isadora--already a wild child. 

Isadora was wild and rebellious and dropped out of school.  She and her sisters were consumed with dance and they helped support the family by giving lessons in their home.  By the age of 18 in 1895 she found herself in Augustin Daly’s prestigious New York City theatrical troop as a dancer.  Daly fostered the careers of many stage notables including Sarah Orne Jewett, John Drew, Jr., Maurice Barrymore, Fanny Davenport, Maude Adams, and Tyrone Power, Sr. and was noted for his unorthodox settings of Shakespearian cannon such as casting a woman as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Despite the seemingly ideal situation for a young dancer, Duncan became disillusioned by the restrictions of conventional theatrical performance and went to London in 1899 in search of artistic purity.  Within a year she was in Paris, then the undisputed cultural capital of Europe and brimming with energy and innovation.  She tried immersing herself in the thriving bohemian life of the Montparnasse but found the poverty of the artist life depressing.  But she was young, extremely attractive, and entirely unconventional in her sexual life.  It was not too hard for her to find lovers and supporters who helped her move in 1909 to a large and comfortable apartment at 5 rue Danton where she also maintained a second floor dance studio.

 

Although they were never dance partners, Isadora was paired with Russian ballet super star Vaslav Nijinsky in a bas relief adorning a new Paris theater in 1913.

It was there that she and her adoring pupils began to discard the conventions of classical ballet, which she described as “ugly and against nature.”  Despite her contemptuous aversion to “commercial exhibition” in the pursuit of “pure art” the private recitals she put on with her students made her famous almost overnight.  Within a couple of years artists and sculptors were using her and her flowing movements as a model.  She was immortalized in a bas relief over the entrance to the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913 and painted as one of the Muses in an interior mural.

Duncan danced barefoot and her performances were loosely choreographed to allow her to capture the moment of the music.  She said that she used images from Grecian pottery she found in museums as an inspiration for both her on-stage look and the fluidity of her lines.

 

Isadora's grace and fluidity of line and motion were captured in this photograph. 

Despite her distaste for public performances, economic circumstances often made it essential that she tour, although she was often careless of dates and commitments.  She appeared across Europe, and Latin America, and returned to America for a controversial tour in 1916.

By that time, Duncan’s private life was attracting as much attention as her dance.  She was always open about her devotion to the idea of Free Love and was openly bi-sexual.  She had two children out of wedlock—Deirdre, born in 1906 and fathered by theater designer Gordon Craig, and Patrick, born May 1, 1910 by Paris Singer, a son of sewing machine magnate Isaac Singer.  The children and their nanny were killed in a freak accident in April of 1913 when the car in which they were riding rolled into the Seine when the chauffer got out to re-start the engine with a hand crank.  

 

Twenty years older than Isadora the great Italian actress Eleonara Duce offered her solace--and perhaps a love affair--when the dancer was grieving the death of her children.  

Devastated, Duncan spent months on the island of Corfu with her siblings recovering from an apparent break down.  Soon after she spent weeks at a seaside resort with another avant-garde icon, actress Eleonora Duse, nearly 20 years her senior and with whom she may—or may not—have had a lesbian relationship.

Duncan remained a committed teacher.  In cooperation with her sisters she founded a famous school in Grunewald, Germany, where the Isadorables, her most celebrated troupe of pupils, were formed.  They started training with her and her sister Elizabeth Duncan as children in 1909, but Duncan later adopted the six girls in New York in 1916. Thereafter they performed using her last name.  With Duncan frequently absent, however, Elizabeth took the troop in a direction from which Isadora disagreed and, worse, allowed them to perform in commercial venues.  Eventually this caused a rift with Elizabeth and with her brother, who arranged independent performances by the girls in the United States.  Five of the girls remained in the US and performed together as the Isadorables for some years rising to considerable fame despite their original mentor’s disdain.

 

Isadora with her students, adopted daughters, and performance troupe, the Isadorables. 

Duncan was an outspoken political radical as well as an artistic one.  In 1922 she went to the Soviet Union to establish a new, revolutionary school in the homeland of the classical ballet.  She was aided by the most loyal of the former Isadorbables, Irma Duncan.  While in Russia she met, fell in love with, and actually married poet Sergei Yesenin, eighteen years her junior despite her knowing only six or seven words of Russian and he no English at all.  Duncan soon became disillusioned when the elaborate promises of support for her school by the State failed to materialize.  By 1923 she was back in Paris with Yesenin in tow and Irma left in charge of the Moscow academy.

 

Isadora with her abusive and alcoholic husband, the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. 

Duncan resumed touring to support herself.  But Yesenin went into frequent alcoholic rages and destroyed the contents of several hotel rooms, although he was never known to harm Isadora herself.  The public scandal overshadowed her performances.  Within a year Yesenin went back to Russia, where he continued his dissolute ways, took another wife without divorcing Duncan, and died of drink in 1925 at the age of 30.

In 1925, her reputation as a performer damaged by her own drinking and sexual escapades, Duncan made a final tour of the United States.  In Boston, of all places, she came to the stage swathed only in a red banner.  She exposed her breasts and proclaimed. “This is red, and so am I.”  In Hollywood she became one of the many lovers of playwright Mercedes de Acosta, who reprinted passionate love letters in her scandalous autobiography Here Lies the Heart, published in 1960.

Duncan’s final years were plagued with financial woes as her erratic behavior and advancing age cut into her performance opportunities and her public drunkenness alienated many friends.  She split her time between Paris and the Riviera, often leaving un-paid hotel bills in her wake.  Friends, including F. Scott Fitzgerald who she met in Paris, tried to encourage her to finish the autobiography which she had been working on for some years in the hope that the income might bring her some stability.  The book, My Life was published in 1927.

 

An illustrated newspaper account of Isadora's death had all of the celebrity gossip of a breathless Access Hollywood Report. 

Unfortunately, Duncan did not live to earn an income from the book.  On September 14, 1927 she climbed into an open Amilcar roadster with handsome French-Italian mechanic Benoît Falchetto at the wheel.  Her friend Mary Desti later told the press that Duncan’s final words were “Good bye, friends, I’m off to glory!”  Much later she would admit that she censored Duncan’s actual words which were, “I’m off to love!” apparently for a night with Falchetto.  As they sped away, Duncan’s scarf became enmeshed in the rear wheel.  She was nearly decapitated by the force and yanked from the car.  She died instantly.

Duncan’s creative legacy lives on in almost all modern dance.  The last and most famous of the Isadorables, Maria-Theresa Duncan preserved much of Isadora’s most famous choreography which is still performed by troops around the world.  In 1977 Maria-Theresa co-founded the Isadora Duncan International Institute which continues to preserve her legacy.

 

Vanessa Redgrave as Isadora. 

In 1968 her life was celebrated in a dazzling wide screen color epic, Isadora starring Vanessa Redgrave for which she won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.  Both Duncan’s and Redgrave’s personal radicalism prevented similar honors from the Motion Picture Academy.  In fact, the whole production was so “drenched in Red” in the words of one critic that the cast included a rare screen appearance of Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers in a small role.  Despite being a hit and stirring a revival of Art Nouveau and modern dance that influenced the wider culture through the‘70s, the film almost vanished and has seldom been seen since.

The story of Duncan’s life and death has inspired writers and artists to this day.  Carl Sandburg in his poem Isadora Duncan wrote:

The wind? I am the wind.

The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon.

Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them.

I dance what I am.

Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea?

I dance what I am.

 

Boys Found Great Art and Holy Places Deep in a French Cavern

 

Horses in the Lascaux Cave complex.

On September 12, 1940 four teenage boys chasing their dog Robot into a partially obscured cave mouth came upon something extraordinary.  Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas stumbled upon a vast trove of paintings on the walls of the cave complex near the village of Montignac, in the Department of Dordogne, France.

The dog Robot who sniffed out the hidden entrance to Lascaux, with two of the human-co-discoverers

The Lascaux Cave complex was eventually found to include several rooms or galleries including those designated as the Great Hall of the Bulls, the Lateral Passage, the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, and the Chamber of Felines.  Together they contain more than 2,000 figurative pieces, mostly of animals, and abstract patterns of dots and geometric figures. 

The most commonly represented animals are horses, 364 images, and stags, 90 images.  Among the most impressive are aurochs or bulls, one of which is depicted in a painting 17 feet long.  Other animals shown include bison, bear, rhinoceros, cave cats, and a bird.  The animals were executed in color with, often with great skill.  They were presented in profile, but with heads turned so that features like two horns could be seen.  Many appear to be in motion.  There is only one depiction of a human, the so-called “dead man” who appears to be lying prone on his back.  This figure is rendered with considerably less skill than the animal images that surround it making scientists wonder if it was a standard stylization—or even graffiti from a Stone Age vandal.

A map of the cave complex and its galleries.

The paintings were made over an extended period of time, some images overlapping and obscuring earlier ones.  The earliest images have been carbon dated to about 17,000 BCE and images continued to be added over the next 2,000 years.  The artists were the modern humans who supplanted Neanderthals in Europe about 40,000 years ago.  The earliest images are already so well developed that scientists assume some form of painting—perhaps on perishable hides or bark—had been developed over a long period predating the work in the cave.  At any rate, the sophistication of the images completely revolutionized how scientists viewed Paleolithic humans and their culture.

Lascaux and similar discoveries in caves around southwestern France and northern Spain were apparently never used as habitations but were visited over millennia for ceremonial purposes.  Many caves are oriented so that a setting sun on or near the Winter Solstice would illuminate an inner wall.  This has led some scientists to conclude that dot patters, or even major points on some of the animal paintings, may depict the stars in the night sky as they would have been seen thousands of years ago.  Some have said that they have matched patterns to specific constellations or portions of the sky.

Others believe that the paintings are meant to summon game and that chambers where images have been painted over may represent rooms that the artists believed were successful.  Yet the most common food source for these people, as identified from fire pits in inhabited caves in the same area, was reindeer which are entirely missing from the walls.

No wonder some suspect stone age graffiti.  The Dead Man, the only human image in the cave complex.

After World War II as images of the cave paintings circulated, Lascaux became a tourist attraction with thousands of visitors a year.  By 1955 carbon dioxide produced by 1,200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. In 1963 the cave complex was closed to the public.  The paintings were restored to their original state and monitored daily.

In 1979, Lascaux and other prehistoric sites in the Vézère Valley became UNESCO World Heritage Sites.   Lascaux II, with reproductions of paintings in two of the main rooms, opened to the public in 1983 just a few hundred yards from the cave entrance.

Les lions de la Grotte Chauvet--the Lions of the Cave of the Cats.

Despite the precautions, and possibly even because of air conditioning installed in the cave for climate control, damaging black mold was found invading the site in January 2008 and the cave was closed for three months even to scientists and preservationists.  I was re-opened only on a very restrictive basis.  The mold has not yet been eliminated and attempts to remove it in some spots left a black smudge obscuring a few images.  The integrity of the whole complex and it priceless contents remain in jeopardy.