Garfield Telegraph August 2023

A group of Flathead Indians in 1899.

Norman Forsyth

Congressman Garfield worked with Flathead Indians in 1872

In June 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Congressman James A. Garfield as commissioner to the Flathead Indians. Over the next few weeks, he and his wife and their two youngest children (Mollie and Irvin) traveled west to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There they were met by longtime friends David Swaim and his family. Swaim was to accompany Garfield to Montana.

Leaving their families in Kansas, Garfield and Swaim traveled across the Great Plains to Idaho and Montana. As his biographer Allan Peskin noted, this was the first time Garfield “had been beyond the Mississippi and he enjoyed every minute of it.” He saw natural wonders, ate well, and slept well.

During part of the journey by coach they were accompanied by a Salt Lake banker, a “portly doctor,” a “burly German woman” whose remarks often amused Garfield, and a “lank” Methodist preacher. Space within the coach was at a premium. Reflecting on the tight quarters in a letter to his wife, Crete, he evoked the image of “six pairs of legs interlock[ed] in the closest possible fit.”

In his diaries and in letters to his wife, Garfield mentioned sleeping on a buffalo robe with sage grass for his pillow. A hunting and fishing expedition resulted in a few grouse and “a broken rod and 5-pound trout lost off my hook.” Montana impressed him. It was “a country of wonderful beauty,” possessed of “varieties of mountain, valley, prairie, and woodland.”

Garfield’s purpose in Montana was to persuade the Flathead Indians to leave the Bitter Root Valley in the southwest part of the territory for a reservation in the Jocko Valley, about 100 miles north. During the negotiations, Garfield and Swaim spent the night of August 21 with the Flatheads. The next morning, he “held a solemn council with the Chief and headmen of the tribe.” It lasted five hours. The Flatheads refused to move.

Negotiations continued into August 23. Knowing that white settlers had organized and were requesting that arms and cavalry units be sent into the Bitter Root, Garfield met the Flatheads again. He was longing for home, but he also felt “bound to do all in my power to save these noble Indians from the mistake they will make if they refuse.”

Though often critical of the generous and often unfulfilled promises made to Native Americans by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Garfield promised the Flatheads that in the first year of the treaty, the federal government would build houses and provide ground wheat, vegetables and farming implements for them.

Documents relating to the Flathead negotiation in the Garfield Papers show the complexity of the situation. The Flathead tribe was peaceful. The Nez Perce, the Sioux, and the Blackfeet were not. Whites were fearful of attack and greedy for land. Construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad created tension between Native Americans and whites. Still, in the first year,

government agents made a genuine effort to carry out the terms of the agreement signed by some of the Flathead chiefs and Garfield.

In a letter to his mother, written shortly after he concluded his conferences with the Flatheads, Garfield wrote, “I held several councils with the Flathead tribe and, at last, with much difficulty succeeded in making a contract with them, by which they are to be moved to their reservation. … I think I have done the government and the country some service in this work."

J.P. Robison provided the Garfield family with hams, sausages and beef.

Library of Congress

What did the Garfields have for dinner in Mentor and in Washington?

This is a great question, but how can it be answered? James A. Garfield never mentioned meals in letters or diaries as a rule.

However, James R. Garfield, his second son, talked about food in his diary when he was a teenager.

Jim wrote about making orange pudding (“Very good!”) and lemonade at the family home in Washington. He frequently ate candy – for lunch. He and his friends went to Harvey’s, an “oyster saloon” in Washington.

A round-robin letter on Election Night 1880 from the family in Mentor to Jim and his older brother Hal, then at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, referred to the enjoyment of canvasback duck, ham in champagne and oysters.

But these are rare mentions of food. So, the original question remains. What did they eat?

Can the question be answered? Yes, at least partially. James and Lucretia Garfield were meticulous record keepers. They kept receipts for all kinds of purchases from furnishings to food.

There are receipts from J. P. Robison, a family friend who owned a packing house in Cleveland. He provided the Garfield family with hams, sausages, and beef. In Washington, Mme. Demonet & Sons, whose receipts appear many times in the Garfield papers, specialized in cakes and meringues.

From Hathaway & King, a Painesville, Ohio grocer, the Garfields bought cheese, tea, sugar, and lemons. Washington establishments like Brown Brothers, F.W. Crowley, and George Huntley & Company, at the Center Market in Washington, supplied the Garfields with apples, turnips, eggs, grapes, celery, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, kale, mushrooms, peppers and oranges.

These foods supplemented the corn, oats, beets, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, and chicken grown at the Mentor farm.

The Garfield family ate a wide variety of foods still available today. What they didn’t eat was -- with apologies to Garfield the cat -- lasagna.

FREE monthly events

Aug. 5 at 2 p.m.: The Lake Effect Concert Band performs an outdoor concert on the lawn. Bring your own lawn chairs and picnic. (Alcohol is not permitted.) Free. Rain date: Saturday, August 12, 2 p.m.

Aug. 9 at noon at Mentor Public Library: Leaders & Legacies of the Civil War Era: “The National Park Service’s Reconstruction Era National Historical Network.” Learn more about what the National Park Service is doing to preserve and the interpret Reconstruction Era including information about its new park in South Carolina. Call the library at [phone] for reservations.

Aug. 19 at 2 p.m.: Great Geauga County Fair Band presents an hour of music from President James A. Garfield’s era on the lawn. Bring your own lawn chairs and picnic. (Alcohol is not permitted.)