Talk:Selim E. Woodworth

Opinions of those in the Donner Party
Let's stop the edit wars. Nothing in the cited reference says anything about "letting anyone down". Either find another reference, or rephrase what you're saying. Jinian 23:02, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Please reexamine the cited source -- "let them down" is a direct quote: "Although a severe blizzard may have given him an excuse..., the Donner Party survivors and rescuers who suffered through the storm without food or shelter remembered him as a braggart who let them down."


 * So nine years later I added quotation marks. Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 10:10, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Sexuality
Fairhead in The Captain and "the Cannibal" (2015) writes: "Selim Woodworth and Tom Jacobs, though, were more than just friends. As their lives unfolded it became apparent that these two were men who loved men—in particular, each other, in an attachment that would last until death." (p. 164) Until other historians comment I don't think we can rely on Fairhead as a single source for such a characterization: his evidence is sketchy.

In brief: the pair ran away together in 1827 at age 12 and got 100 miles before being hauled back by their families. They spent 22 months together on a trading expedition in 1834-6. Back in NY they collaborated (or Jacobs just used Woodworth's notes) on a report of that journey. They corresponded a bit through the years. Fairhead provides some context: At some point Woodworth's parents entertained Fitz-Greene Halleck, a poet whose work explored homosexual themes, but we don't know when or how often, what they thought of him, or what their son made of him, if anything. Jacobs, according to a news story after he died in 1889, had traveled in Russia in 1856-7 with Bayard Taylor, who in 1870 published a novel based on a male-male relationship, Joseph and His Friend. The same news stories speak of Tom's wife dying two years earlier, but Fairhead says that Tom "may have" married. Fairhead also quotes a source that in 1856 ascribes possible effeminacy to Woodworth (p. 162), but trims the quote so the reader doesn't get the last words that say that in Selim as a military officer "strength and courage came in all the glorious perfections of developed manhood". And there's one not-very-dramatic moment when Selim returns to NY after having been reported dead: "we grasped hands and eyed each other". (p 276) Fairhead when describing this reunion says the two had "shed tears" when they last separated, but his doesn't source that detail and I'm not sure how much can be made of it. He has a way of telling us what must have happened, what one must have realized, etc. There's just a touch of the romance novelist at times.

Perhaps that suffices to demonstrate how little we know. An interesting pair, to be sure, close friends until their careers take them in different directions and they spend most of their lives far apart. Really not much to go on, I don't think. Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 19:52, 22 April 2015 (UTC)