Fitz Hugh Ludlow

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So when we did
our episode on Albert Beerstott a little while back, not

(00:21):
that long ago, I mentioned that Fitzhugh Ludlow, whose wife
Beerstott fell in love with and ultimately stole away, you
could say, was going to be his own episode, and
today's the day. So Fitzhugh Ludlow's fame as a writer
came very quickly when he was very young, and it
was directly tied to his drug use initially. So no

(00:44):
upfront that a lot of this episode is going to
talk about that, because he was a writer and a
highly productive one. We have a lot of examples of
that writing included, and some of it does kind of
wax rahapsodic about that drug use, not all of it.
Some of it is on the other side of that equation.
So if you listen, though with younger history buffs, you

(01:05):
might want to pre screen this or even skip it entirely.
I would not say that this is a particularly happy topic.
Ludlow lived a lot in a very short life, but
he's really really interesting to me, and the reason I
wanted to give him his own episode is because in
his final years his advocacy for true compassionate treatment and

(01:27):
destigmatization of the illness of addiction was so far ahead
of its time and used language that has really only
become the accepted or preferred way to discuss those things
in like the last decade, and he was writing about
it in the eighteen sixties. So that is why I

(01:49):
think he merits a little discussion. When I was reading
through this that it reminded me a little bit of
when we were reading about all the self experimentation with
nitrous oxs, yeah, and like reading people's accounts of what
it felt like to be on that, And there's some
of this in this episode too, although about other substances

(02:11):
not nitrous oxide. Fitz Hugh Ludlow was born in New
York on September eleventh, eighteen thirty six, and born into
a deeply abolitionist family. His father, the Reverend Henry Gilbert Ludlow,
was known for making impassioned speeches about the issue of
slavery and was an early advocate for the acceptance of

(02:33):
interracial marriage. Fitz Hugh later wrote as a journalist about
how his family was treated by people who opposed these views.
He relayed the story of a night before he was
born when quote, my father, mother, and sister were driven
from their house in New York by a furious mob.

(02:53):
When they came cautiously back, their home was quiet as
a fortress the day after it has been blown up.
The front parlor was full of paving stones, the carpets
were cut to pieces. The furniture and the chandelier lay
in one common wreck, and the walls were covered with
inscriptions of mingled insult and glory over the mantelpiece had

(03:16):
been charcoaled, Rascal over the pier table. Abolitionist Henry Ludlow
was also sometimes attacked on the street and pelted with eggs. Yeah,
this was not the only time the home was attacked.
At one point a rumor had gotten out that he
had performed a marriage ceremony for an interracial couple, and
it sparked like this huge attack on the family. And

(03:38):
this is what he grew up in. That sister that
Fitzhugh mentioned in that account was his older sister Mary.
She had actually died several months before he was born.
The Ludlows had another daughter, Helen, who was born three
years after fitz Hugh, and their father, Henry Ludlow, was
so deeply affected by his first daughter's death that he

(03:59):
actually wrote about not being able to love his other
children as deeply as he had loved Mary. Per his
own account, Fitzhugh was told stories about abolitionists from his
earliest days. He noted that quote, I was four years
old when I learned that my father combined the two
functions of preaching in a New England college town and

(04:22):
ticket agency on the underground railroad. Although he took that
literally as a lot of kids do, to mean that
there was an actual railroad that had a station in
the family's basement. Yeah, there are stories of him as
a little kid trying to go down and see where
the trains came in, which is quite charming. He was

(04:43):
a very smart kid. His father boasted that Fitzhugh had
taught himself to read by the age of five, but
he was also sickly as a child. He described himself
in his writings as having quote a feeble childhood, and
he notes that this feebleness led him to explore the
world from the comfort of a couch, becoming engrossed in

(05:03):
books and his thoughts. The one exception to this was
in venturing out on the water, which he clearly loved
and described in his writing quote. The only exception to
this state of imaginative indolence were the hours spent in
rowing or sailing upon the most glorious river of the world.
And the consciousness that the Hudson rolled at my own

(05:23):
door only contributed to settle the conviction that there was
no need of going abroad to find beauties in which
the soul might wrap itself as in a garment of delight.
Even at these seasons, exercise was not so much the
aim as musing. Many a time, with the handles of
my skulls thrust under the side girders and the blades
turned full to the wind, have I sat and drifted

(05:46):
for hours through mountain shadows and passed glimpses of light
that flooded the woody gorges with a sense of dreamy
ecstasy which all the novelties of a new world could
never have supplied. When Fitzhugh Henry moved the family to Poughkeepsie,
New York, the family was living there when Fitzhugh's mother,
Abigail Woolsey Wells died, her son was twelve years old

(06:10):
at that time. It was also there in Poughkeepsie where
Fitzhugh often found himself at the pharmacy picking up medications
for his various ailments, and that also became a place
where the boy, as he grew into a young man,
really liked to hang out. He later wrote quote about
the shop of my friend Anderson, the Apothecary, There always

(06:32):
existed a peculiar fascination which early marked it out as
my favorite lounging place. In the very atmosphere of the establishment,
Loaded as it was with a composite smell of all
things curative and preventive, there was an aromatic invitation to
scientific musing. A little sanctum at the inner end of

(06:54):
the shop, walled off with red curtains from the profane
gaze of the unsanitive, contained two chairs for the doctor
and myself, and a library where all the masters of
physic were grouped through their sheep and paper representatives, in
more friendliness of contact than has ever been known to
characterize a consultation of like spirits under any other circumstances. Yep,

(07:19):
I didn't include it really in this outline, but I
will say, as something of an autodidact in the sciences,
he really did know a lot. In a lot of
his papers, he talks about science in extremely clear terms
and with an obvious deep grasp and understanding of what
he's talking about. This pharmacy is also where Fitzhugh began

(07:44):
his recreational drug use, and it started with experimenting with
various things that were just available to him. There he wrote,
quote here, especially with a disregard to my own safety,
have I made upon myself the trial of the effects
of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce. Now,
with the chloroform bottle beneath my nose, have I set

(08:05):
myself careering upon the wings of a thrilling and accelerating life,
until I had just enough power remaining to restore the
liquid to its place upon the shelf and sink back
into the enjoyment of the delicious apathy, which lasted through
the few succeeding moments. Now ether was substituted for chloroform,
and the difference of their phenomena noted, And now some

(08:27):
other exhilarant in the form of an opiate or stimulant
was the instrument of my experience until I had run
through the whole gamut of queer agents within my reach. Clearly,
there was not a lot of tracking going on at
this time. Like if you tried to do this, if
you were at a pharmacy today, there would be counts

(08:48):
done of the medications and people would realize someone had
their hand in it. But the US wouldn't get its
first federal law regarding drugs until the nineteen oh six
Food and Drug Act, So it wasn't as though his
friend at the fire he had to account for any
of these missing substances. And it also appears that his
friend was pretty comfortable letting Ludlow experiment there. Yeah. There

(09:08):
were also a lot of things at the time that
you could just go buy that today would be either
like tightly controlled substance, yeah yeah, or like illegal for
use of any type. Yeah. That's the thing in talking
about all of this, Even though there were some stigmas
attached to some of them, none of the things he

(09:29):
did were illegal, which is a little mind blowing to consider. Yeah.
So uh. Fitzhugh's account states that he didn't use these
drugs repeatedly. He would try each of them only once
and note its effects. And then when he had tried
everything that was available, he thought he was done. But

(09:49):
then one day the pharmacist mentioned that he had a
new acquisition that was being used in India to treat lockjaw.
He told Ludlow that it was quote deadly poison, which
stopped the young man from using it. Ludlow spent the
rest of the morning researching this new substance, which was
labeled Cannabis indica. So we're going to get into Ludlow's

(10:12):
fascination with this new substance after we first pause for
a sponsor break. Ludlow would in his first book write
an explainer for his readers of what hashish is quote.
In northern latitudes, the hemp plant grows almost entirely to fiber,

(10:36):
becoming in virtue of this quality, the great resource for
matts and cordage. Under a southern sun, this same plant
loses its fibrous texture, but secretes in quantities equal to
one third of its bulk, and opaque and greenish resin.
The resin of the cannabis is hashish. The forms in
which it is employed are various. Sometimes it appears in

(10:59):
the state in which it exudes from the mature stalk
as a crude resin. Sometimes it is manufactured into a
conserve with clarified butter, honey and spices. Sometimes a decoction
is made of the flowering tops in water or eric.
Under either of these forms, the method of administration is
by swallowing. Again, the dried plant is smoked in pipes

(11:21):
or chewed as tobacco. So for clarity, this is different
from marijuana, which is the dried flowers, buds, and stems
of the cannabis plant. Hashish is much more potent and
causes more intense experiences, including hallucinations, panic, and motor ataxia.
So the hashish that Ludlow had encountered at the apothecary

(11:44):
was in that resin form, and after he had been
warned off of it by his friend, he decided to
try it anyway in secret. He started with a small
amount taken surreptitiously while at the pharmacy, but that did
not have any effects, so he repeated this experiment several times,
increasing the dose each time. He had come to the

(12:06):
conclusion that he was for some reason unsusceptible to it.
And then one evening, after taking thirty grains of it,
which was an amount he had worked up to by
adding five grains at a time to the dose, he
left the pharmacy and went to a friend's house, and then,
after three hours of nothing, he wrote that it began
to take effect, describing that first experience this way, quote, ha,

(12:30):
what means this sudden thrill? A shock as of some
unimagined vital force shoots without warning through my entire frame,
leaping to my fingers, ends, piercing my brain, startling me
till I almost spring from my chair. I could not
doubt it. I was in the power of the Hashish influence.

(12:51):
My first emotion was one of uncontrollable terror, a sense
of getting something which I had not bargained for that moment,
I would have given all I had or hoped to
have to be as I was three hours before, No
pain anywhere, not a twinge in my fiber. Yet a
cloud of unutterable strangeness was settling upon me and wrapping

(13:14):
me impenetrably in from all that was natural or familiar.
Endeared faces well known to me of old surrounded me,
yet they were not with me in my loneliness, I
had entered upon a tremendous life which they could not share.
He also describes in this account a lot of things

(13:35):
that have become common in accounts of drug use, so
the paranoid feeling that other people knew he was on drugs,
the sense of time and space expanding, et cetera. He had,
as that passage that Tracy read indicates a lot of anxiety.
And he also hallucinated in ways that he found both
pleasant and unpleasant. He in one of these hallucinations, had

(13:58):
an altercation with a bone supernatural figure that he kind
of hints might have been death, and at one point
he came to the conclusion that he was immortal. So
things you've probably heard in other accounts of drug use.
But unlike all of the other substances that Fitzhugh had
tried up to this point, he developed a substance use

(14:18):
disorder when it came to hashish. In eighteen fifty four,
Fitzhugh was enrolled at the College of New Jersey, which
is known today as Princeton. He stayed there less than
a year. In eighteen fifty five, a fire at the
school led Fitzhugh to leave and go to Schenectady's Union College.
He was an average student and socially descriptions of him

(14:42):
during this time very pretty wildly. Some of his classmates
thought very highly of him, while others seemed to think
he was awkward and weird. The one area where he
excelled was literature, and he was asked to write a
song for commencement the year he graduated, which was eighteen
fifty six. Later that year, he published an article titled

(15:04):
The Apocalypse of Hashish in Putnam's Monthly, and that article
opens with quote, in returning from the world of Hashish,
I bring with me many and diverse memories, the echoes
of a sublime rapture which thrilled and vibrated on the
very edge of pain, of Promethean agonies, which wrapped the
soul like a mantle of fire, a voluptuous delirium, which

(15:25):
suffused the body with a blush of exquisite languor all
our mind. But in value, far exceeding these, is the
remembrance of my spellbound life as an apocalyptic experience. The
value of this experience to me consists in its having
thrown open to my gaze many of those sublime avenues
in the spiritual life at whose gaits. The soul, in

(15:47):
its ordinary state is forever blindly groping, mystified, perplexed, yet
earnest to the last, in its search for that secret
spring which, being touched, shall swing back the colossal barrier.
In a single instant, I have seen the vexed question
of a lifetime settled, the mystery of some grand, recondite
process of mind laid bare, the last grimmed doubt that

(16:10):
hung persistently on the sky of a sublime truth blown away.
That writing was very well received. Remember that was right
in the middle of the spiritualist movement in the US,
so this idea of using drugs to have kind of
a supernatural experience had a lot of a llure. It
inspired the young Fitzhugh to publish a long form account

(16:33):
of his drug use in eighteen fifty seven that was
titled The Hashish Eater Being Passages from the Life of
a Pythagorean. That book starts with a quote from Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan quote, weave a circle around
him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread, for

(16:54):
he on honeydew, hath fed and drunk. The Milk of
Paradise Kubla Kai was written by Coleridge in seventeen ninety
seven and it was left unfinished. The text of the
poem blames an interruption that Coleridge had while writing, and
it was never intended for publication. But after Coleridge died,
Lord Byron published the work in eighteen sixteen. And this

(17:17):
particular piece of poetry is invoked by Ludlow, probably because
in the original manuscript of the work, Coleridge noted that
the dream he had that inspired it was brought on
while he was drugged writing quote this fragment with a
good deal more not recoverable, composed in a sort of reverie,
brought on by two grains of opium taken to check

(17:41):
a dysentery. The introduction of Ludlow's book also invokes another
account of drug use, the eighteen twenty one book by
Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In
Ludlow's preface, he writes, quote, I like prefaces as little
as my readers can. If this so proverbially unnoticed part

(18:01):
of the book catch any eye, the glance that it gives. Will,
of course, travel no farther to find my apology for
making this preface a short one. There is but one
thought for which I wish to find place here. I
am deeply aware that if the succeeding pages are read
at all, it will be by those who have already
learned to love d Quincy. Not that I dare for

(18:22):
a moment to compare the manner of my narrative with
that most wondrous, most inspired dreamers. But in the experience
of his life and my own, there is a single
common characteristic which happens to be the very one for
whose sake men open any such book. The path of
d Quincy led beyond all the boundaries of the ordinary
life into a world of intense lights and shadows, a

(18:45):
realm in which all the range of average thought found
its conditions surpassed, if not violated. My own career, however
far its recital may fall short of the opium eaters,
And notwithstanding it was not coincidence, and but seldom parallel
with his, still ran through Lance's glorious, as unfrequented, as
weird as his own, and takes those who would follow

(19:07):
it out of the trodden highways of mind. He also
refers to his own book as a quote resume of
experiences and talks of them as being quote my cup
of awakening, and he notes that there are some commonalities
between his experiences and the ones relayed by de Quincy
in his book, and specifically regarding perception and memory, Ludlow writes,

(19:31):
quote acknowledging the resemblance, I only say that we both
saw the same thing. The state of insight which he
attained through opium, I reached by the way of hashish.
The rest of the book includes accounts of several of
his experiences with hashish, including the first, which we've shared
excerpts from. It's not all complimentary, though. He continued to

(19:54):
have both good and bad experiences with the drug, and
he's pretty open about that, sometimes describing it as a
terrible thing. But he was also clearly addicted to it,
even as he referred to it as quote an accursed drug.
By the end of the book, he concludes that hashish
is not the proper means to attain enlightenment and gives

(20:15):
an account of how unpleasant withdrawal was for him when
he gave it up. This book was a hit both
critically and in terms of sales numbers. It went through
several editions right away, and it gave Fitzhugh the confidence
to pursue a writing career and leave the teaching job
that he had taken after he finished school. He wanted

(20:36):
a life of what he called quote entire self sustenance.
He didn't really get along with his father, They had
a lot of conflict, and he wanted to have the
financial standing to have no dependence whatsoever on his family,
to make his way as a writer, and to get
a little distance from that family. Fitzhugh moved to New
York City and he became a regular at Faft's Tavern,

(20:58):
where the American Bohemian group tended together. It was also
during this time that Fitzhugh met and fell in love
with an heiress named Rosalie Osbourne. He proposed, and after
Rosalie's mother conducted a background check on Ludlow, the pair
of them got married in eighteen fifty nine. They went
to Florida for an extended honeymoon. It was during that

(21:21):
honeymoon that Ludlow made the assessment of Florida and Jacksonville,
specifically as having quote the climate of utopia, the scenery
of paradise, and the social system of hell. We're going
to talk more about Ludlow's thoughts on the South after
we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed
in history class going. Ludlow later wrote in his Observations

(21:52):
of Southern culture that he was not really surprised by
the fact that white men routinely had sexual relations with
enslaved black women, but he was surprised that it was
accepted by everyone as just kind of a normal part
of life, and he illustrated this with an example quote.
The particular friend of one family belonging to the cream
of Florida society was a gentleman in thriving business who

(22:16):
had for his mistress the waiting maid of the daughters.
He used to sit composedly with the young ladies of
an evening, one of them playing on the piano to him,
the other smiling upon him over a bouquet, while the
woman he had afflicted with the burdens without giving her
the blessings of marriage, came in curtseying humbly with a
tea tray. Everybody understood the relation perfectly, but not even

(22:40):
the pious shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care. I
will say, in all of his writings about this, he
doesn't really bring up the issue of consent, which is
obviously another problem, but he's just kind of befuddled by
how everybody accepts this as normal. In an article for
The Atlantic written in April eighteen sixty five, Ludlow writes
a rather scathing cataloging of this incident, as well as

(23:03):
many other aspects of Southern culture and it's inconsistencies as
it related to the issue, specifically of slavery. One of
those is the way that he found he would talk
with Southern enslavers who threatened that they would arm their
slaves to fight for them, but that he also knew
that those same men would be utterly stricken with fear
if they thought for even a second that one of

(23:25):
the black people they enslaved had a gun. It's a
pretty interesting look at the whole thing. But I do
want to tell people, as a side note, if you
go looking for this or any other articles are writing
that Ludlow wrote, they are very full of problematic language.
And this is not just because of the time. Ludlow

(23:45):
may have been an abolitionist but he was also still
racist in a lot of ways. In addition to the
way he sometimes characterizes black people and he tries to
write in their vernacular in a way that is very unflattering,
he also wrote some really racist things about other people,
particularly Native Americans and Mexicans. So forewarned if you want

(24:06):
to read Fitzhugh Ludlow. That was also really not unique
among abolitionists. No, not at all. His he is. I
find him to be a very good writer. He's very florid,
but he paints a really interesting picture. But then when
you're like, oh, and then he said something horrible in
the midst of this, yuh yeh, yuh yeh, yuck oh
and yikes. FITZI was very busy as a writer in

(24:27):
his early marriage, and he and Rosalie were really active
in New York's literary social scene. But once the US
Civil War began, it was increasingly difficult to make a
living as a writer. He had to take a job
at the New York City Customs House to bring in
a little extra money. So when Albert Bierstatt mentioned that
he wanted to return to western North America, Ludlow was

(24:51):
eager to go with him, he saw an opportunity to
write journalistic accounts of the lands that they passed through.
Ludlow was a huge supporter Oftt's work, and had used
his journalism jobs to praise the artist's paintings publicly. Ludlow's
descriptions of the places they traveled are colorful and a
little hilarious. For example, he described an area they reached

(25:13):
after their stagecoach had passed through the Rocky Mountains as
quote the secret spot where the world clasps her girdle
that tickled me. Encountering Mormons in Salt Lake City was
something of a surprise to Ludlow, who wrote regarding an
incident where he encountered a polygamous home for the first time. Quote,
a cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not

(25:37):
distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so
taken off his feet as I was by my first
view of Mormonism in its practical workings. I stared, I believe,
I blushed a little. I tried to stutter a reply.
His biggest confusion is pretty sexist. Here. It was how
the multiple wives of one man weren't terribly jealous of

(25:57):
each other and didn't quote fly into each other there's
faces with their fingernails and tearing out each other's hair.
Ludlow wrote a lengthy description of the Mormon community as
he observed it for The Atlantic, including a lengthy discussion
he had with Brigham Young at a ball that he
had been invited to. It is pretty clear that Fitzhugh
is working very hard to understand his subject while also

(26:20):
finding this way of life just deeply inscrutable. Later, when
those writings were mentioned in Ludlow's obituary, it was noted
quote his statements about the Mormons were flatly denied and
his conclusions fiercely resented by the representatives of that sect.
When the journalist and artist got to San Francisco, they
had a more luxurious time than most of their trip

(26:42):
had afforded. They stayed at the Occidental Hotel. They met
Mark Twain while they were there. Mark Twain wasn't famous yet.
They also met Brett Hart. These and other formed a
little ad hoc group similar to the Bohemian circle that
Ludlow had been part of in his early days in Night,
New York. He participated with Twain, Hart and others in

(27:03):
the publication of the weekly paper the Golden Era. As
we mentioned in the Beerstatt episode, there were some hints
during this cross country travel that Albert Berstatt and Rosalie
Ludlow were actually having some sort of affair, and we
don't have any information on the specifics of what happened.
But two years after these two men returned to New York,

(27:25):
the Ludlows divorced, and Rosalie and Albert were married very
soon after that. Ludlow was already in rough shape by
the time he and Beerstatt returned to New York. The
trip had been really grueling, and Fitzhugh was enthusiastic, but
he was not exactly well suited for a cross country journey.
He'd lived a pretty leisurely life and had never been

(27:48):
in particularly robust health, and he also contracted tuberculosis while
he was on the West Coast. The breakup of his marriage,
combined with his physical depletion, led to a breakdown down.
Ludlow was in a lot of pain, and he started
using opium to deal with that pain. He continued to work, though,
including adapting the story of Cinderella for the stage for

(28:11):
a performance at the New York City Sanitary Fair the
year that he returned to the city from his Western travels.
His life spiraled. In eighteen sixty six, he married again.
Shortly after Rosalie married Albert Beerstott, he married an older
woman named Maria O'Brien. We don't know much about Maria.
During this time, he was really struggling with opium misuse

(28:34):
and consulted a number of doctors and his efforts to
get treatment for his addiction. He never fully managed to
get out from under it, and for the next several
years he continued a cycle of progress in his treatment
and then relapses. Throughout all this he started to advocate
for better treatments. In eighteen sixty seven, Ludlow pendon article

(28:58):
for Harper's Bazaarre titled what Shall They Do to Be Saved?
About the difficulty of overcoming opium addiction. This article was
later republished as part of Horace B. Day's book The
Opium Habit, and this writing shares Ludlow's observations of various
people in the throes of opium addiction and the ways
that it can really destroy a person, both mentally and physically,

(29:22):
and he describes in very unflinching detail what it is
like to go through with drawls when trying to get
off of it. He does not pull any punches or
spare the reader any of the truly awful things that happen.
He talks very openly about the physical and mental pain involved.
And then there's also a letter that he wrote to

(29:42):
Horace Day at the end of that reprinted article, in
which he describes his ideas for what he believes would
be effective treatment for opium addiction. This letter explains, quote
that experience having shown me how impracticable, in the large
majority of cases is any cure of a long established
opium habit while the patient continues his daily avocations and

(30:06):
remains at home. It arises from the fact that in
his own house a man cannot isolate himself from the
hourly hearing of matters for which he feels responsible, yet
to which he can give no adequate attention without his
accustomed stimulus, that his best friends are apt to upbraid
him for a weakness which is not crime but disease,

(30:29):
And that the control of him by those whom he
has habitually directed, however well judged, seems always a harassment.
This really struck Holli is ahead of its time because
it's the earliest instance she can think of where somebody
has correctly identified addiction as an illness rather than a
moral failing. He also talks through the most frequent origin

(30:53):
point for opium addiction, mentioning that for an average case quote,
his habit as in nine cases out of every ten,
dates from the medical prescription of opium for the relief
of violent pain or the cure of obstinate illness. He
was not aware of the drug then administered to him,
or at any rate of the peril attending its use,

(31:15):
and his malady was so long protracted that opium had
established itself as a necessary condition of comfortable existence before
he realized that it had possessed the slightest hold upon him.
Ludlow envisioned a place he called Lord's Island, a literal
island where people can be treated through a gradual decrease

(31:39):
of opium misuse under the care and administration of a
knowledgeable team. Like a true treatment center, this island would
have facilities specifically designed to ease patients through the various
painful stages of recovery, and he also writes that he
feels it's important to really establish a place where the
people who are being treated also have creature comforts. Writing quote,

(32:02):
I propose that our perfected scheme shall contain everything necessary
to make the social life indoors a delightful refuge to
all far advanced enough to take pleasure in society from
the dejection and introversion peculiarly characteristic of Opium's revenges. This
comprehends a suite of parlors where ladies and gentlemen can

(32:23):
meet in the evening on just the same refined and
pleasant terms that belong to an elegant home elsewhere, furnished
with a piano to dance, to play or sing, with
first class pictures as far as our own funds, aided
by donations and bequests, can procure them for us. Cozy
open fireplaces, unblemish taste in furniture and carpets, in fine

(32:45):
an air of the highest ideal of a private family's
handsomest assembling room. I propose a billiard room with a
couple of tables so neatly kept that both ladies and
gentlemen can meet there to enjoy the game. A reading
room with the best papers and magazines in a good library,
both to be enjoyed by guests of either sex, a
smoking in card room for the gentlemen. I propose to

(33:08):
have our engine before mentioned do the work of taking
our invalids up and down the stairs by a lift,
like those in use in some of our best hotels,
so that the highest rooms may be practically as near
the baths, the dining and social apartments, and as eligible
as any of the lower ones. And if feasible, I
suggest that some at least of the rooms be arranged

(33:30):
in small suites or pears, so as to admit of
a well daughter, son, sister, parent, wife, or brother coming
to stay with any invalid who needs their loving presence
and nursing. This all blew me away because he's advocating
for compassionate care and treatment more than one hundred and
fifty years ago. This writing really struck a chord with

(33:50):
a lot of people who, like Ludlow, were trying to
regain control of their lives than to stop using opium.
He started receiving letters from people who read his articles.
He had ongoing correspondences with a lot of them for
the remainder of his life. In eighteen seventy, Ludlow published
a long form account of his travels with Beerstadt titled

(34:13):
The Heart of the Continent, A Record of travel across
the Plains in an Oregon with an examination of the
Mormon Principle. And this was a project he had been
contracted to deliver much sooner, but his health and recovery
efforts had really derailed his schedule, and as a consequence,
a lot of the information that he included in the book,
about things like the potential of the western half of

(34:35):
the country and the expanding railroad, was just kind of outdated.
By the time the book went to market, it had
been six years and it flopped. After the book was published,
in the summer of eighteen seventy, Fitziu traveled to Europe
for the first time, hoping to improve his health. He
was really close to his sister Helen. She traveled with

(34:56):
him and his wife Maria. The group first went to London,
where they stayed more than a month, and then onto Geneva, Switzerland.
Ludlow died in Switzerland the morning after his thirty fourth birthday.
His obituary, which ran in New York World and then
was syndicated to many other papers, concluded the summary of
his life with this quote, mister Ludlow had many fine

(35:19):
gifts which would have made him a deserved distinction if
he had had the steadiness of character necessary to make
the best of them. His death at so early an
age of thirty three, that's incorrect by a day, put
a period to a life of which the actual results
are very evidently and sadly short of the promises and possibilities.

(35:40):
The obituary that ran in the New York Times was
a lot more sentimental, noting quote, A gentler, more loving
spirit never escaped from the conflicts of this world. That
rite up mentions how many people he helped through their
own battles with drug use, noting his ceaseless generosity with
anybody who asked him for help. The obituary also included

(36:01):
this line, which Pitt holly pretty hard quote, some persons
blamed him, but we doubt that he left an enemy
in this world. If he had one, that enemy died
with him. In nineteen seventy, one hundred years after his death,
the Fitzhugh Ludlow Memorial Library, which was a private collection,
was founded in San Francisco by Juliomirio Santa Domingo Junior.

(36:26):
It's a collection of materials focused on altered states of mind.
The collection became part of the library holdings at Harvard
University after the death of its originator, and at that
point it was renamed the Ludlow Santa Domingo Library. Yeah,
we can talk about it some on Friday, but there
have been a lot of efforts and moments of resurgence

(36:50):
and interest in his work, some of which I'll talk
about it on Friday, because some of it kind of
cherry picks his writings to make him kind of a
proponent of drug use, when really, if you look at
the whole of his work, that's not really what's going on.

(37:12):
But in the meantime, I have listener mail and it
ties to this episode and the Albert Beerstott one. This
is from our listener, Jennifer. Jennifer writes, Dear Holly and Tracy.
I've been catching up on episodes after some summer traveling,
and when I saw one titled Albert Beerstott, it immediately
caught my eye. I live in a small community in
the mountains of Colorado that's not far from Mount Beerstott,

(37:33):
which is one of Colorado's famous fourteen Ers i e.
One of fifty eight mountains in the state with elevations
that top out over fourteen thousand feet. Since Beerstott is
certainly not a common name, I wondered if the mountain
was named after him, and it turns out that it
is regardless. At the portion of the narrative where you
discussed his painting a storm in the Rocky Mountains Mount Rosalie,

(37:53):
Tracy made a statement that there is no Mount Rosalie,
to which my brain immediately interjected, yes, there is. I
was almost certain I'd heard of a Mount Rosalie in
our area, and after a little Google map searching cross
reference with my personal hiking notes, I confirmed that there
indeed is a Mount Rosalie, and it's located right next
to Mount Beerstadt. I have no idea if the naming
came before or after Albert's famous painting, but in any case,

(38:16):
although it's officially Rosalie Peak, locals usually refer to it
as Mount Rosalie, and it is a favorite local hiking area.
I've enjoyed your podcast for many years now, so it
was fun to come across something in an episode that
resonated in my personal lay as pet tax. I've attached
some piccks of my hiking buddy Sammy officially Sammy Hagar
and yes he is the successor to Eddie van Halen

(38:37):
who sadly died Young Sammy is a Bernadoodle that we
affectionately refer to as our duficus because he's a smart
dog who likes to do dumb things. If his haircut
looks like he got run over by a lawnmower, that's
because he's been kicked out of three dog groomers, so
we gave up and now he gets a home haircut.
He doesn't seem to mind, and we're saving money. Thanks
for all you do. Keep up the great work. Okay,

(38:58):
I don't care if it's a home haircut is so cute,
I can't quite deal with it. That's a cute dog.
I have Rosalie Mountain information. Yeah, so here's here's the scoop.
The Mount Rosalie in that picture was renamed later Mount
evans Uh and the Mount Beerstott was also named Mount

(39:25):
Rosalie briefly, and then now it's Beerstott, and they picked
a different one to keep a Rosalie in the mix,
and that is Rosalie Peak, which is its technical name,
and I was like, this is also confusing and many
renamings and switcheros of mountains that I'll just leave it
out of the episode, and it made for confusion, So
I apologize, But yeah, Rosalie Peak. There technically still is

(39:47):
no Mount Rosalie. There was, but there wasn't when he
found it and called it that, and there wasn't by
the time we recorded the episode because it's rosally Peak
and it's a different mountain entirely. I don't know if
that clears any That may be clearest mud, but in
any case, that's the scoop. I just want to look
at dog pictures again. If you would like to write
to us about this or anything else, you can Our

(40:09):
email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You
can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(40:32):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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