Sitting at the wooden table in the hushed museum archives, I fought to keep my eyes open. Closing my eyelids would help, I thought. Just a little rest for the weary. Grinning, relaxing, I stepped onto a rowboat and slid into a blissful stream.
My dreams sometimes start like that. This time I woke and read a vivid diary.
Josephus Eastman was a persnickety bachelor lawyer who moved to Grinnell in 1863. There was no Independence Day celebration that year in the dry town of Grinnell. Lest someone have the “wrong” kind of fun, teetotaler Eastman had written out a warrant the previous Saturday to arrest anyone drinking liquor.
On the big day, Eastman saw an Irishman with “a heavy load on his back in the shape of a ten-gallon cask.” He told the constable who entered the Irishman’s house to confiscate the whiskey. The Irishman was enraged. Grabbing an axe, he smashed the cask.
Eastman crowed in his diary, “Ten gallons of whiskey gone! … The temperance folks had a good laugh over it.” Adding insult to injury, Eastman ordered the Irishman arrested for “preventing the officer from taking away the liquor.”
Four days later, Constable Whitney struck again and destroyed a jug of whiskey in the street. Eastman writes, “I saved a piece of the notorious jug.”
When not battling Demon Rum, Eastman rode a buggy around town. Sharing a ride with Jason Sherman, Eastman noticed the young stallion speed up. Unnerved, Eastman jumped out of the moving buggy. The stallion veered to the left side of the road, dumped out Sherman, turned around and ran straight at Eastman. He writes:
I could not get away from him but with great effort, and though I escaped being run over by the horse, the buggy which was attached to him still, swung round and went over me. And all was done in less time than I have taken writing of it.
I got a few bruises and a big bunch up on my head, and my coat and my shirt were torn. The horse was caught unhurt, and I am saved alive, but I was in great danger – And Oh! I did feel so grateful to God for his goodness to me!
Eastman’s diary ends abruptly, leaving me a picture of a unique individual.
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