ammunition was in the hands of a small band of lunatics, the president, James Buchanan,
dispatched Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee (at that time still a loyal Union soldier, of course) to sort
things out. It took Lee and his men less than three minutes of fighting to overcome the
hapless rebellion. Brown was captured alive, swiftly tried, and sentenced to be hanged a
month hence.
One of the soldiers sent to oversee the hanging was Thomas J. Jackson--soon to
become famous as Stonewall Jackson--and one of the eager onlookers in the crowd was
John Wilkes Booth. So the capture of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry served as quite
a neat overture for all that followed. Meanwhile, in the wake of Brown's little adventure,
all hell was breaking loose. Northern abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson made Brown
a martyr, and Southern loyalists got up in arms, quite literally, at the idea that this might
be the start of a trend. Before you knew it, the nation was at war.
Harpers Ferry remained at the center of things throughout the exuberantly bloody
conflict that followed. Gettysburg was just thirty miles to the north, Manassas a similar
distance to the south, and Antietam (where, it is worth noting, twice as many men died in
one day as the total American losses in the War of 1812, Mexican War, and Spanish-
American War combined) was just ten miles away. Harpers Ferry itself changed hands
eight times during the war, though the record in this regard belongs to Winchester,
Virginia, a few miles south, which managed to be captured and recaptured seventy-five
times.
These days, Harpers Ferry passes its time accommodating tourists and cleaning up
after floods. With two temperamental rivers at its feet and a natural funnel of bluffs
before and behind, it is forever being inundated. There had been a bad flood in the town
six months before, and the park's staff was still busy mopping out, repainting, and
carrying furnishings, artifacts, and displays down from upstairs storage rooms. (Three
months after my visit, they would have to take everything back up again.) At one of the
houses, two of the rangers came out the door and down the walk and nodded smiles at
me as they passed. Both of them, I noticed, were packing sidearms. Goodness knows
what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.
I had a poke around the town, but nearly every building I went to had a locked door
and a notice saying "CLOSED FOR FLOOD REPAIRS." Then I went and looked at the spot
where the two rivers flow together. There was an Appalachian Trail notice board there.
Although it had been only about ten days since the two women were murdered in
Shenandoah National Park, there was already a small poster appealing for information. It
had color photographs of them both. They were clearly photos taken by the women
themselves along the trail, in hiking gear, looking happy and healthy, radiant even. It was
hard to look at them, knowing their doom. It occurred to me, with a small inward start,
that had the two women lived they would very probably be arriving in Harpers Ferry just
about now, that instead of standing here looking at a poster of them I could be chatting
with them--or indeed, given a slight alteration of luck and fate, that it could be them
looking at a poster of me and Katz looking trail-happy and confident.
In one of the few houses open I found a friendly, well-informed, happily unarmed
ranger named David Fox, who seemed surprised and pleased to have a visitor. He bobbed
up instantly from his stool when I came in and was clearly eager to answer any questions.
We got to talking about preservation, and he mentioned how hard it was for the Park
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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