THE ENGLISH WESTERNERS' SOCIETY
APRIL 2010 BOOK REVIEW
This review first appeared in the Tally Sheet (Autumn 2007, Volume 54, Number 1)
THE WHISKEY MERCHANT’S DIARY: AN URBAN LIFE IN THE EMERGING MIDWEST
By Joseph J. Mersman (Edited by Linda A. Fisher). Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 2007. Pp 370, Bibliography, Index, $49.95 hardcover; $24.95 paperback.
What, most Westerners might well ask, has a book about a whiskey merchant living in Cincinnati, Ohio, to do with the American West? Perhaps not much one might reply; but in this instance it proved to be the solution of a mystery that has bothered Western historians and buffs for more than a century. For it was while researching into yellow fever and the effect it had on communities in the mid West of the 19th century, that the editor, Linda Fisher, herself a Doctor of Medicine and former public health physician, learned that Mersman’s diary, covering the period of her research, was part of the collection of the Missouri Historical Society. It proved to be a remarkable document, written mostly in English but with German and French portions (translations are included in the text) which describes his family’s origin in Borringhausen, a hamlet of Damme, in the Kingdom of Oldenburg, Germany, and their emigration to the United States in 1833, where they settled in Cincinnati.
It is a fascinating story that covers a large area of social upheaval and the family’s efforts to succeed, and ends with Joseph’s death from syphilis in 1892. But it was his younger sister Agnes who left Dr. Fisher with a problem. The diary disclosed that she was born at Borringhausen on August 25, 1826. Unwittingly, Linda Fisher had solved the mystery of the woman who until now has been largely ignored or been the subject of speculation, much of it fiction. Agnes Mersman? The name will stir most Western buffs if not the general public. For she was the wife of a circus man named William Lake Thatcher who dropped his last name and achieved fame as Bill Lake, circus owner, clown and other forms of entertainment in the ring. Agnes, following Bill’s murder in 1869, continued to run Lake’s Olympiad Circus and, in 1871, at Abilene, Kansas, first met James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. In March 1876, they were married at Cheyenne, W. T., but five months later Hickok was murdered at Deadwood. Although Agnes remarried to a George Carson a year later, he soon disappeared, and she was known as Mrs. Hickok until her own death in 1907.
For Linda Fisher, the discovery of Agnes’s actual date of birth and origin (Agnes was always very reluctant to disclose her true age and place of birth) meant that the search for her real exploits was just beginning, and it would be a long and difficult task. Unfortunately, she died before she could complete it; but the book she started, has now been completed and will be published, hopefully, in 2008. Meantime, I would recommend Joseph Mersman’s diary to anyone even remotely interested in the social history of the time, as the story of a remarkable man who probably would have been amazed to learn that he possessed the clue that would help solve the mystery surrounding his younger sister.
Joseph G. Rosa
Copyright © 2010 English Westerners' Society