EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part II of a series that began last week at this link.
Speaking to a reporter in Boston after Sergeant David Columbus Ralston’s death in 1884, his indigent widow, Matilda Ralston, claimed that he had written her just before leaving on the Arctic expedition that was to prove fatal to him.
“I received a letter from my husband, written a few days before his departure for the North with the Greely party,” Matilda was quoted as saying. “He did not say much about his voyage, but believed that we should surely meet again. This was the last I ever heard from him alive. He was a good husband and as brave a man as there was in the party.”
As we saw in last week’s column, there’s no great reason to take Matilda’s word at face value. She was a chronic alcoholic whose muddled stories may either be outright lies or confusions of early-onset dementia.
If David Ralston was a good husband to her, it was only in her fantasies, considering that he had left her five years before the expedition by joining the U.S. Signal Corps, which is where he met polar expedition leader, Lt. Adolphus Greely.
Greely’s expedition was part of the U.S. participation in a multi-national scientific project known as The Polar Year. The plan was for several nations to send expeditions north to make scientific observations which could be united in one giant set of data, improving weather forecasters’ knowledge of global conditions.
This was important because as weather forecasting was being invented in the 19th century, it became obvious that the world’s weather was an interconnected system, and that the best way to improve forecasts was to learn more about weather worldwide.
While this was a noble project, the Greely Expedition struggled to get funding from a lame-duck Congress embroiled in domestic issues. The plan featured some highly questionable features: the expedition was to push north by ship up the western coast of Greenland to Lady Franklin Bay, only 500 miles south of the North Pole.
The expedition members would be dropped off there for a year, when the ship would return to pick them up or resupply them if they opted to stay longer. If ice prevented the return ship from reaching the expedition, the explorers were to make their way south on Ellesmere Island to meet up with the ship.
The planners did not realize that they had doubly doomed the expedition.
The expedition of 21 men set off from New York on the USS Proteus, reaching St. James Bay in Newfoundland in July. As they headed north, they stopped in Greenland where they picked up two Inuit dogsled drivers and two more researchers, for a total of 25.
The Proteus proceeded north up Baffin Bay and into the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and northern Greenland without difficulty, dropping the men off at Lady Franklin Bay on Aug. 11, 1881, and leaving.
Unfortunately, being the first scientific explorers of this region, the leaders did not realize that they had just experienced an unusually warm and easy summer season. Never again during their misadventure would the weather be so kind. They built a base, Fort Conger, which would house them for the winter.
Their food rations would be abetted by hunting caribou and musk ox, which were plentiful. Sergeant Ralston was in charge of making weather observations, and he set up a rotation of team members to take up to 600 readings and measurements per day, all around the clock, all faithfully recorded by hand in log books brought along for the purpose.
It was the first collection of weather data in the Arctic. In a secret side-project, a team of men was sent to push north, establishing a new record for northward progress that was to last for a decade and a half.
The men bunked down for the winter. Ralston and associates were kept busy with their measurements, while the general members of the team grew restless in the long polar winter night, leading to tensions with Lt. Greely, who displayed a heavy hand as commander.
Good spirits returned with spring, turning to anticipation as summer approached. But as summer wore on, anticipation turned to concern which became desperation as the explorers realized their relief ship wasn’t coming.
It turns out that the summer of 1882 was a much more typical season, and the route up to Lady Franklin Bay was jammed with floating ice. The relief ship had come, but had not been able to get close enough to drop supplies because of foul weather.
The second winter found the men even more restless, and the group physician announced that he intended to leave the expedition as soon as possible, despite Lt. Greely’s threat of a court martial. Greely also threatened at one point to shoot any man who did not follow his orders.
The summer of 1883 saw yet another lack of rescue. Unbeknownst to the expedition, the Proteus actually sank when it tried to push through pack ice to reach them, losing most of the supplies brought to save the explorers. A small amount was saved and left on Cape Sabine, the planned rendezvous point.
Greely had been ordered in the original plan to make his way south to Cape Sabine to get these backup supplies in the event of a second failed attempt to get a relief ship up to Lady Franklin Bay, and he ordered the men to do so.
There was great dissension in the ranks. Many thought that they were better off to stay at Fort Conger, where they could hunt for caribou and musk ox throughout the winter. Assistant commander, Sgt. Brainerd wrote in his diary that it was madness to head south with winter coming on and that he’d gladly give his opinion if Lt. Greely asked.
Greely didn’t ask.
The expedition made it part of the way south by boat, suffering from a lack of daily leadership as Lt. Greely became depressed and spent most of his day in his sleeping bag. When ice made it impossible to continue by boat, they left the boats and began marching down the ice pack that covered the Nares Strait, leading down to Cape Sabine.
At one point, they were frustrated when their measurements revealed that while they were walking south, the ice pack had been drifting north, negating their forward progress.
The crew finally made it to Cape Sabine, only to discover a tiny cache of supplies that would not last them the winter. It was already too late in the season to return to Fort Conger, and Cape Sabine was rocky and inhospitable, with virtually no game animals present.
A rough shelter was built, and Lt. Greely started making calculations on how to ration the food enough to last the winter.
As the horrid season wore on, men weakened from hunger. When the biggest man on the expedition was repeatedly caught breaking into the rations and eating his fill, Lt. Greely gave him a short court martial, then executed him with a gunshot.
The survivors resorted to eating moss, candle wax, and the boiled soles of their boots. A walrus was shot, but it fell off the edge of the ice into the bay and sank as the men watched helplessly.
One day, an expedition member killed a fox with his bare hands. When extra food couldn’t be found, the men were down to just a few ounces of food per day. plus the occasional lemon to prevent scurvy. Talk of good food became the main subject of conversation. Expedition members began dropping off from hunger and cold.
Through it all, Sgt. David C. Ralston had been keeping a diary as part of his observations. Much of it is low-key and scientific. After all, he was a man on a mission, and most of his comments refer to that. He never once mentioned the wife and child he had left behind in the United States.
His personal views did sneak through one day when the starving men caught a seal and started gulping the animal’s blood as they butchered it.
“The vampires are turning out for a drink of blood,” Ralston wrote.
By January 1884, Ralston’s entries have become terse, often illegible, usually about food. Then at the end of January, he gave up keeping the diary. Four months later, on May 22, 1884, Sgt. David Columbus Ralston died.
The surviving men barely had the strength to drag his body up to the hill where they had started burying bodies.
Just over a month later, relief ships arrived at Cape Sabine. Only seven of the original group had survived, including Lt. Greely. The examining physician estimated that the final seven would have died within 48 hours. One of the survivors expired aboard ship when they attempted to operate on him to remove rotting, frostbitten flesh from his extremities.
The rescuers announced their intention to collect the corpses buried on the hill. Lieutenant Greely and the other survivors urged them not to, saying that it was more important to return to the United States as quickly as possible. When they dug up the bodies, the rescuers suddenly understood the survivors’ reluctance: strips of flesh were cut off six of the bodies, including Sergeant Ralston’s.
Greely adamantly denied that cannibalism had taken place, claiming the flesh was only used as bait for fish. But when word was leaked to the press, Greely’s reputation was ruined, and the entire expedition grew to the stature of legendary Arctic nightmare.
For that reason, most of the data and samples that had been collected weren’t even used, as if it were tainted by association. Recent scientists, however, have realized that David C. Ralston’s Arctic weather data from the early 1880s allows us to measure how much temperatures, precipitation, wind, and humidity have changed in the Arctic over the last 140 years.
The data is now being eagerly studied by researchers, belatedly proving the worth of the ill-fated expedition after all.
David’s brother, William Henry Ralston, postmaster for the village of Howard and soon to be elected Knox County Commissioner, made the trek to New York City to supervise the shipment of his brother’s body to Knox County for burial in the Disciples Church graveyard, on the hillside overlooking Little Jelloway Creek.
The body was placed in a steel, welded coffin. Visiting hours were held at the Ralstons’ home in Howard, with guests entering the front door of the house and exiting the back door for five hours. The C. A. & C. Railroad chartered special trains to bring people to Howard, and newspaper reports estimated that 6000 people attended the funeral.
The procession, which included G.A.R. groups, bands, and dignitaries, formed in Howard, then marched toward the Disciples Church, presumably along Magers Road, turning at an intersection now covered by Apple Valley Lake, the body of water put in when developers created a huge resort community in the 1970s.
The procession would then have headed up Cornish Road to the church, which sat approximately where the grove above the beach is now, directly in front of the Old Jelloway/Drake Cemetery. The procession was so long, it’s said that when it arrived at the church, the back end hadn’t yet left Howard.
Reverend George W. Musson gave a sermon outside the church in the grove so that as many mourners as possible could hear it.
Ralston was interred with dignity and honor near the southwest corner of the graveyard. His loss broke his mother’s heart, and she followed less than two years later. The father, Lewis Ralston, was eventually buried there, too.
Little dignity nor honor remained for Matilda Fisher/Ralston. She was soon placed in a state mental hospital in Boston, where she lived until 1904. Her death certificate cites “senility” as her cause of death and says the duration was “years.” That falls right in line with the idea of Korsakov’s syndrome brought on by chronic alcoholism. As the years went by, she likely became further and further out of touch with reality.
And what of David and Matilda’s daughter?
In September of 1895, a news story from San Francisco was picked up by wire services and run across the country. It involved a Mrs. Charles Reynor, of Los Angeles, California, whose husband was helping her try to find her mother. The woman said that when she was a toddler at age three in 1878, her mother, whose name was Matilda, had given her up to the Home for the Friendless in Chicago.
Soon the girl was taken out of the home, entering the family of a Danish immigrant named Lars Johnson. An 1880 census report shows Lars Johnson having a 5-year old daughter named Cora at that time.
Is this our young woman? The article frustratingly never states her first name.
It merely says that after she left home age of 18, the young woman moved to California for her health. There she met Charles Reynor, the third officer on a steamer that ran between Los Angeles and San Francisco. At different times, they had lived in both cities since then. Reynor hired a lawyer to help his wife search for her mother.
The lawyer convinced the Home for the Friendless to open up their records and reveal that the girl’s mother was known as Matilda Ralston, alias Nellie Fisher, of Boston, and that she had been sent to Bridewell Prison after her inability to pay a $100 fine for drunkenness. She had not been seen or heard from in Chicago since then.
So, did Mrs. Reynor ever find her mother in the asylum in Boston?
We don’t know. One “Cora Johnson Raynor” can be found on census reports in the Chicago area in 1920. The woman later moved south and died in Alabama in 1942. There is nothing to indicate, if that’s her, that she ever found her mother, or if she did, whether her mother was even capable of recognizing her by that point.
She had no children of her own.
And if she never found her mother, she may well never have learned that her father, though perhaps a flawed man, was nonetheless a scientific hero who gave his life on a doomed expedition, nor that he is buried on a quiet hillside overlooking a lake in Knox County, Ohio.
