A Donkey in the Chapel and a Pig on the Train

No one knew how the donkey had gotten into the chapel. But there it was, standing near the center of the platform, tied securely.

This storied incident took place one afternoon in the spring of 1888. In those days, the Dartmouth chapel was reserved on Wednesdays for a mandatory, school-wide meeting to hear the seniors perform their original oratories. This particular Wednesday, a live donkey had joined in on the presentations.

 Students could tell something was afoot even before they reached the chapel: as W. A. Charles, class of 1890, recounted, “cheers and loud laughter,” emanated from the hall. By the time W. A. Charles entered, the speakers and the English professor were seated on the platform, next to the animal. The only one missing was President Bartlett, who usually arrived at the last chime of the bell.

Word spread that the president was approaching the building, and the cheers died down. Bartlett entered, and the students stood, watching him ascend toward the podium. Then he caught sight of the donkey. There was a pause; a moment of hesitation. William A. Bartlett, class of 1882 (no obvious relation to the Dartmouth president), wrote, “The president and the animal regarded each other amicably.” Then, reports W. A. Charles, “the students broke into tumultuous yells and cheers.”

What happened next has been blurred by history. One version claims that the president said calmly, “Gentlemen, excuse me for disturbing your class meeting,” and then departed. As William Bartlett chronicles it, the president took the list of speakers in his hand and remarked, “As I call the names you may come up and stand beside your brother and declaim.” W. A. Charles’ remembers an entirely different version: in his account, the president held his hand for silence and then told the crowd, “I perceive one of the classes has lost a brother.” This, of course, provoked a “burst of applause” from the students.

Charles claimed that the speeches went on as usual, the seniors standing right next to the donkey: “whenever a hand was extended as a gesture, the donkey would stretch forth his head, apparently thinking he was to receive some food from the outstretched hand. The student would quickly withdraw his hand and sidestep a little, not knowing what the donkey would do, and of course at every opportunity the student body burst into wild laughter.” The speaker struggled through his oration, the donkey occasionally swished his tail or moved his head, the English professor sat quiet and sour, the audience eagerly awaited an occasion to erupt into giggles, and President Bartlett, by all accounts, never stopped smiling.

Over the next several decades, other animals would be roped into student pranks. According to The Dartmouth, a flock of turkeys was led into the chapel; horses, donkeys, and cows were left in Dartmouth hall; one skunk was hidden in an instructor’s desk; and another skunk–dubbed “Stinky”–was paraded around town, the pet of a student in the class of 1942.

The cleverest of animal “pranks” came in October of 1915. A group of Dartmouth students had been trying to find a cheap way to attend the upcoming away football game between Dartmouth and Amherst. According to the Washington Evening Star, the Interstate Commerce Commission “refused to allow students to ship themselves as livestock on freight trains,” which would have been cheaper than travel by passenger train.

But there was an exception for people caring for livestock. The students devised a plan to ship a small pig on a “special car” to Amherst, with “as many students as possible as caretakers.” If there was enough interest, wrote the Washington Evening Star, another pig would be bought and shipped in a second car.

No word on what happened to the pig when it reached Amherst, but I’d like to imagine it enjoyed the football game and was not part of the celebratory post-game feast: Dartmouth won, 26-0.

To read more, ask for the “Student Episodes, Pranks, and Diversions” vertical file.

Posted for Kira Parrish-Penny '24

White Sheiks and Flappers

Preparing for a visit from a delegation of the Osage Nation, we made a stunning discovery in our collection: a letter written in November, 1924, from the Osage reservation by Charles Eastman, Class of 1887, to Carl Washburn, Class of 1925. Eastman was a Dakota Sioux who became a physician after he left Dartmouth. He was a life-long advocate for Indigenous rights, and frequently acted as an intermediary between the U.S. Government and various tribal nations. In 1924, the Department of the Interior sent him to Oklahoma to report on the conditions of the Osage at the height of the oil boom.

His description mirrors the opening scenes of Killers of the Flower Moon. He describes the sudden influx of phenomenal wealth and its impact on the community. He is obsessed with the cars--limos everywhere and a car for every member of the family!

He also visits Rosa Hoots, the Osage woman who owned and cared for that year's Kentucky Derby winner, the aptly named "Black Gold." Then there is his concern with the predatory behavior he sees: dope dealers and bootleggers everywhere, and "white sheiks and flappers" trying to marry into Osage families for their wealth.

Part of what makes the letter so great is its informal nature. Eastman was writing to a young friend who he had helped to get into Dartmouth. This is not his official government report, but an opportunity for Eastman to express his own amazement and concerns. If you have seen the movie or read the book, you have to take a look at this letter.

To see it, ask for MS 924110.1.

A Medieval "Book of Roots"

The Kimḥi family of Provence was a celebrated medieval Jewish family of biblical commentators and Hebrew grammarians. Rabbi Joseph Kimḥi and his two sons Moses and David were each renowned scholars in their own right, but Rabbi David Kimḥi (1160-1235 C.E., commonly known by his Hebrew acronym "Radak") was the most celebrated of all.

Rauner recently acquired a manuscript of Kimḥi's Hebrew lexicon, Sefer ha-Shorashim (literally translated as "book of roots.") First composed in the late 12th-early 13th century, the Radak's Sefer was one of the most influential Hebrew dictionaries in the medieval period. The entries are arranged alphabetically around the three-letter shorashim, or "roots," common to most Hebrew words, with quotes from religious texts and explorations of etymology.

Our handwritten copy of the Sefer was likely produced by a Sephardic Jewish scribe in Southern France or Northern Italy ca. 1370-1430 C.E., more than a century after Kimḥi’s death. Most of the pages are written in a consistent Sephardic semicursive script, on laid paper common in parts of France and Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. It is possible that this scribe, like the Radak himself, was a descendant of Spanish Jews (Sephardim) who fled persecution and settled in the French region of Provence, which during the Kimḥis' time was a flourishing center of Torah scholarship known as Hachmei Provence.

By the 16th century, our copy had found its way from Provence to Yemen, where a Yemenite Jewish scribe painstakingly copied missing leaves and added some of his own marginal notes to the Radak’s text. Subsequent Yemenite owners of this Sefer also proudly scrawled their names and statements of ownership on the first and last leaves of the tome. After all, to own such an old copy of this famous work would have been quite the status symbol, testifying to the owner's material wealth, as well as his intellectual gravitas.

If you can read Hebrew but are still struggling to parse this 18th century inscription, there's a reason for that. It is partially written in Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Arabic historically spoken by Jews in Arab countries, written using the Hebrew alphabet. Luckily, the dealer provided a translation of the message, which includes a fabulous book curse:

"I merited to purchase this Sefer ha-mikhlol through the labors of my hands. May the blessed Omnipresent give me the privilege to immerse myself in it—I, my descendants, and my descendants' descendants until the last generation. Amen, so may it be [His] will. He who takes it and does not return it—may his name and memory be obliterated from the world, and may he be bitten by a snake. But may the nation of God dwell in peace. [Signed] the humble Joseph, son of our teacher Shuker al-Sarem, may his Rock and Redeemer keep him and may his end be good."

 

To see our copy of the Sefer ha-Shorashim, come in and ask for Codex 003515.

Winter 23 Exhibit: The Whirligig of Time

Last year marked the 400th anniversary of the printing of William Shakespeare’s First Folio. To commemorate the occasion, students in Professor Matthew Ritger’s F23 ENGL 15 Shakespeare course curated seven mini-exhibitions that look through a variety of lenses at the connections between Shakespeare and Dartmouth College.

Their collaborative effort, titled “The Whirligig of Time: Shakespeare in the College Archive, 1623-2023,” is on display in the Class of 1965 Galleries here at Rauner through March 15, 2024. For more information, including a handlist of materials, exhibit case text, and a downloadable version of the exhibition poster designed by Sam Milnes, visit the website. If you'd like to see Shakespeare's First Folio, which isn't in the exhibit, come into the Reading Room and ask anyone at the reference desk.

Catching a Break

On January 1, 1953, J. D. Salinger left New York City, where he was born and raised, and relocated to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire. Coincidentally, New Year's Day was also his birthday. Salinger was known to be a private person and the enormous success of his novel Catcher in the Rye (1951) had brought him too much attention in his hometown. So, he escaped the big city to live in a tiny cabin with no heat or running water. Cornish already had a positive reputation among creatives; it had been the residence of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the Cornish Artists' Colony before the collective's gradual dissolution in the early 20th century. Several months later, in April of 1953, a collection of his short stories, Nine Stories, was published. Salinger lived in Cornish until his death in 2010.

Here at Rauner, we have first editions of Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, both signed by Salinger in Hanover on December 17, 1953, nearly a year after he had made the switch to rural life. The circumstances surrounding the autographs are unclear, but we love to imagine this reclusive writer availing himself of our resources during his first year here in the Upper Valley. To see our copy of Catcher in the Rye, ask for Rare PS3537 .A426. Our first edition of Nine Stories is Rare PZ4 .S165 Ni 1953.

Yule and Misrule

With the holidays incoming, we're taking a moment to share some festive illustrations from the papers of J.J. Lankes. Lankes was a 20th century American artist who worked primarily in woodcuts like the ones shown here, and illustrated the writing of authors such as Robert Frost.

Both of the prints selected here refer to older folk customs associated with the end of the year. The first shows a costumed procession, including a man on a hobby horse, playing music and holding up greenery, accompanied by the words "Yule! Yule"!" This might be a representation of a mummer's play or a wassailing group, both raucous theatrical performances conducted in England around Christmastime.

The other print we've pulled out today is "My Lord of Missrule." This little jester would have appointed, likely from the lower clergy, as a sort of officiant for the Feast of Fools, a medieval celebration conducted on the 1st of January.

To check out these illustrations (and others!), ask for MS-1115 Box 7 Folder 6.

Captured!

We have lots of various captivity narratives in our collection. They are usually sensationalized stories set in New England--stories of terror designed to frighten and titillate. There is almost always a racially charged dichotomy set up between the "savage" and the "civilized" reflecting the pervading fears of the white settlers. We just acquired a new one that is both very different and still frighteningly similar. In this second edition of Bartolomej Georgijević's De afflictione tam captivorum quam etiam sub Turcae tributo viuentium Christianorum (Worms: excudebat Gregorius Comiander, 1545), the captive is a Croatian captured and enslaved by the Ottoman Empire. The same tropes appear: a good Christian is captured by a threatening non-Christian other and forced into servitude. 

Interestingly, Georgijević was also a talented linguist and the slender volume contains a basic Latin to Turkish lexicon and a short Croatian-Latin dictionary. The book took off, as so many captivity narratives did, and served as a highly biased account of Turkish culture at a time when Europe was both fascinated and terrified of that which lurked just to the East.

To take a look (it has seven wonderful woodcuts), ask for Rare DR481 .G46 1545.