Doughty Ancestor Sirs:
Will you save a man from the wrath of his relatives? In your story under Business & Finance headed "Hart, Schaffner, Marx & Hillman" (TIME, April 19), you say regarding myself, "He is ashamed of one of his doughty ancestors who was tried for 'inhuman activities' in the form of scalping an Indian."
The ancestor referred to is Captain Michael Cresap. No one has an ancestor in whom he takes more pride than I take in Captain Michael. He was an Indian fighter of rare courage. He took part in Dunmore's War in 1774 and drove the Indians from the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania back into Ohio. At the treaty of peace, Cresap was accused of having murdered the family of a friendly Indian named Logan. He paid no attention to the charges and soon was summoned to raise a company of riflemen for the Revolutionary War. His company marched from Frederick, Maryland, to Boston in twenty-two days. In the fall of 1775, Captain Cresap died in New York City, was given a great funeral and buried in Trinity Churchyard.
Twenty-five years after Cresap's death, Thomas Jefferson published his Notes on Virginia. In them he criticized the white settlers for their inhuman treatment of Indians and he used as an illustration the alleged murder of a friendly Indian family by Captain Michael Cresap. That charge has been answered time and again. First by John Jacobs in 1820, second by Brantz Mayer, a Baltimore lawyer, in 1851, and finally by Professor James A. James, of Northwestern University, in his life of George Rogers Clark. Dr. James discovered that George Rogers Clark and Captain Cresap were together on the Ohio River many miles away from the scene of the tragedy on the day it occurred.
MARK W. CRESAP Chicago, Ill.
Essence of Woolfism
Sirs:
All credit to TIME's able book reviewer for writing the best statement on Virginia Woolf that this writer has ever seen (TIME, April 12). What many lecturers on the novel have endeavored to put across in a month's time, is set forth in TIME so concisely and yet so fully that the Woolf enthusiast is given at once the whole essence of Woolfism. And to crown the whole evaluation TIME takes the crux of Woolfism for its cover caption: "It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple Virginia Woolf has turned her back on the microscopic detail of Naturalism, and like the French painters of her own generation, turns to simplification and to the basic problems of Life. TIME expresses her ideas better than any other critic has done. Says TIME: "The lives of human beings are even less observable indications of the same pattern but serve to mark the wavelike motion of life's force." Doesn't this serve as the final and complete explanation of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith?
STANFORD M. MIRKIN New York City
Credit to Bazaar
Sirs:
I was horrified to see that the photograph of Virginia Woolf on the cover of TIME, April 12, credited the photographer, Man Ray, but did not credit Harper's Bazaar, who arranged to have Mrs. Woolf's picture taken and paid Man Ray a large sum for the exclusive rights to this beautiful picture.
CARMEL SNOW Editor Harper's Bazaar New York City