One hundred years ago, future etiquette guru Emily Post was given a challenging writing assignment by Collier’s Weekly: travel from New York to San Francisco by automobile in as much style as humanly possible. It was a challenge Emily was enthusiastic to accept, so on April 25th, 1915, Emily Post (riding shotgun), her son Ned (behind the wheel) and her cousin Alice Beadleston (crammed into the back seat with a troubling amount of baggage) set out on a grand adventure in a custom car entirely unsuited to the task.

In 1915 cross-country motoring was a new trend, the offshoot of a decade of publicity that aimed to lure travelers out west. Railroads, politicians and assorted other commercial interests in the western states had been exhorting Americans to “See Europe if you will, but see America first” since 1906. Keen to get a piece of the $500 million Americans were spending each year in travel to the Old World, they promoted the unique natural wonders of the American west from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean in contrast to the inconveniences and expense of travel to Europe. Traveling towards the Pacific rather than across the Atlantic was advertised as a patriotic duty, a means to commune with the “Great Architect” through his greatest works.

Don’t be hypnotized by weird tales of European travel. There is not an attraction in the Old World that cannot be duplicated and discounted by the phenomena of America. Facilities for travel are superior and cheaper at home than anything you may expect in foreign lands. Accommodations for the affluent, and others in more moderate circumstances, await the tourist at every turn of the road. You get what you want, and pay for what you get, and are not hounded to death by a horde of mendicants. You encounter the frank-faced business-like American who intuitively knows your wants and sees that they are supplied. […]

Come by rail, come in your auto-car, come afoot if you like, but come!

The railroads vigorously embraced the “See America First” slogan, encouraging people to enjoy rail voyages to the majestic vistas of the expanding National Park system, the pioneer experience without the pain of pioneering, all of the splendor, none of the survival cannibalism. The Great Northern Railway, whose owner Louis Hill had been instrumental in the creation and funding of Glacier National Park, marketed the park as “America’s Switzerland.” The Northern Pacific Railroad offered summer deals from Chicago to Puget Sound through the “Wonderland” of Yellowstone National Park.

The most coveted target of the campaign were wealthy Easterners who toured the opulent capitals and resorts of Europe, but they weren’t persuaded that a log cabin stay in Yellowstone was comparable to the en suite bathrooms and Escoffier dinners of the Paris Ritz. It wasn’t until war broke out in 1914 making travel to Europe potentially fatal that the elite turned their eyes west. The next year even more eyes turned west as the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and the Panama–California Exposition in San Diego, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal, drew huge crowds.

The railroads appealed to people looking for ease and comfort, but automobile travel offered the promise of entirely private, self-directed journeys in the most exciting (and expensive) technology of the day. Enter Mrs. Emily Post. Born Emily Price, she was the daughter of prominent Baltimore architect Bruce Price and mining heiress Josephine Lee Price. Emily was educated by governesses and in private schools before graduating from Miss Graham’s Finishing School in New York City and making her debut in society in 1892. She was the talk of the season and before the year was out, she married wealthy businessman Edwin Post. They went to Europe, of course, for the de rigeur luxurious honeymoon.

Their marriage fell apart in 1905 when Edwin Post testified in a sensational trial against Col. William D. Mann, a gossip columnist who had attempted to blackmail Post over his showgirl mistress. The distance between them and the public humiliation of the trial drove Emily to divorce him in 1906. With no alimony forthcoming (Edwin had lost much of his fortune in bad investments), she had to work to support herself and her two sons at their fancy private boarding school in Pomfret, Connecticut. Emily took commissions as a decorator and architectural model-builder from her late father’s architect friends and she wrote. She had already had some success as a novelist during the later years of her marriage — her name was spoken in the same breath as Edith Wharton’s in a Washington Post article about working society women — and in 1909 was able to parlay the public’s avid interest in the flood of American heiresses trawling Europe for noble marriage prospects into a popular novel, The Title Market.

Later that year Emily’s mother died in a car accident leaving her daughter a large enough fortune that she wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again. She kept on writing, though, mainly fiction of the “write what you know” variety. It was her background as a wealthy, cultured, widely traveled woman of refined tastes that made her the ideal author for the Collier’s Weekly assignment. Her goal was to see if she could cross the country in the kind of comfort to which her peers were very much accustomed, or at least how far she could get, and to write about the journey in a series of articles.

The opening of the first article underscores what a cockamamie scheme people thought it was.

“Of course you are sending your servants ahead by train with your luggage and all that sort of thing,” said an Englishman.
A New York banker answered for me: “Not at all! The best thing is to put them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. Then if you break down the man in the rear and your chauffeur can get to rights in no time. How about your chauffeur? You are sure he is a good one?”
“We are not taking one — nor servants, nor mechanic either.”
“Surely you and your son are not thinking of going alone! Probably he could drive, but who is going to take care of the car?”
“Why, he is!”

Even the nice young man at the Automobile Club recommended she stick to the eastern roads.

“Unfortunately,” he said suavely, “we have not all our information yet, and we seem to be out of our Western maps! But I can recommend some very delightful tours through New England and the Berkshires.”
“That is very interesting, but I am going to San Francisco.”
“Oh, I couldn’t advise that, madam; the New England roads are very much better.”
“But, you see, San Francisco is where I am going. Do you know which route is, if you prefer it, the least bad?”
“Oh, I see.” He looked sorry. “If you must cross the continent, there is the Lincoln Highway!”
“Can you tell me how much work has been done on it?”
“No, I really couldn’t. But it is the best known route.”

The Lincoln Highway, the first road to cross the continental United States from Times Square in New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, had been inaugurated less than two years before that conversation and was very much a work in progress. Unbridged rivers had to be forded and there were significant stretches in the desert west where the car would be the only sleeping facility. Not to mention the difficulty in finding gasoline stations even in towns and cities, never mind once the stretches between developed areas got long.

Undeterred, Emily and her team hit the road. The search for luxury quickly became desultory as they left the crowded east for the wider open spaces of the midwest and west, but even though Collier’s had told her to turn around the minute she hit discomfort of any kind, Emily kept on trucking through crappy hotels and crappier food and the car getting stuck in the mud outside Chicago (on the Lincoln Highway, no less). The heavy silver picnic set they set out with was shipped back and replaced with a modest ceramic bread basket filled with paper plates. In New Mexico they were mired in a whole new kind of mud on its “natural roads.” The car’s extra long chassis, imported English motor and skinny wheels were no help in handling the challenges of the terrain. Eventually the car broke down altogether in the Arizona desert. They had to get the car to Los Angeles by freight train before picking up the drive again up the Pacific coast. After 27 days and close to $1,800 spent, they finally made it to San Francisco.

It was far from luxurious, but it was a great adventure and Emily Post lived to tell the tale. The story was published in three parts on September 4th, September 11th and September 18th and was well-received. In 1916, a revised version of the series was published in a book entitled By Motor to the Golden Gate.

Archaeologists in Sitka, southeast Alaska, have found the camp made by survivors of the wreck of the Russian ship Neva in January of 1813 while they awaited rescue.

The Neva was a famous ship in its day. The three-masted 200-foot vessel began life in 1801 as the British merchant ship Thames but was acquired by Russia in 1802 and renamed Neva after the river that flows through Saint Petersburg. The Neva and another formerly English ship (the Leander, renamed Nadezhda) that had been purchased at the same time set sail together in 1803 from Kronstadt on a three-year voyage that would be the first Russian circumnavigation of the Earth.

In October of 1804, the Neva, now separated from the Nadezhda, was in Sitka where the Russian-American Company deployed it against the Tlingit nation. The Tlingit had been fighting to get the Russians out of their territory for years, culminating in the destruction of the Russian outpost of Redoubt Saint Michael in 1802. It took a couple of years, but Russia got its revenge when the Neva and three other smaller ships bombarded the Tlingit fort for three days, ultimately forcing the tribespeople to retreat north to Chichagof Island.

After their victory in the Battle of Sitka, the Russians founded the permanent settlement of New Archangel which in 1808 became the capital of Russian America. A flourishing commercial center when Seattle, Portland and San Francisco were but a twinkle in Manifest Destiny’s eye, New Archangel is where Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl and Secretary of State William Seward signed the agreement selling Russian America to the United States for $7.2 million in April of 1867. The official transfer of the territory from Russia to the United States took place at New Archangel on October 18th, 1867. The city’s name was changed to Sitka when Russian America became the U.S. Department of Alaska after the transfer.

A month after the battle, the Neva continued on its long, slow trip around the world, carrying fur seal pelts from Alaska to China and in 1807 becoming the first Russian ship to visit mainland Australia. In 1812, the Neva headed back to Sitka but was damaged in treacherous weather on the three-month journey from Siberia. With a stop in Prince William Sound, the ship almost made it only to wreck less than 10 miles from Sitka off Kruzof Island on January 9th, 1813. Of the 75 souls on board when the Neva departed Okhotsk, Siberia, in August, 32 died in the wreck. Another 15 had died on the way leaving 28 men to make it to dry land. The survivors had to make do on their own in the depths of an Alaskan winter for 24 days until they were rescued. Two men didn’t make it.

The rescued crew members were taken to safety in Sitka, but despite the importance of the wrecked ship, their experience was barely documented at the time. There are no known official records extant today relating to the wreck, the rescue of the survivors and their month of hardship. The location of the camp was lost.

In 2012, the U.S. Forest Service, the Alaska Office of History and Archaeology and the Sitka Historical Society sponsored a survey of a site they had reason to believe might be the survivors’ camp. They dug a few test pits and found two caches of Russian axes. Using archival research, Tlingit oral histories, and analysis of the landscape, the team also found an area near the shore they think may be the site of shipwreck.

This year an international team of Russian and American researchers funded by the National Science Foundation returned to the site for a more extensive archaeological excavation.

In July, researchers discovered at the campsite a series of hearths with early 19th century artifacts such as gun flints, musket balls, pieces of modified sheet copper, iron and copper spikes, a Russian axe, and a fishhook fashioned from copper. Well-preserved food middens–or refuse heaps–will allow reconstruction of the foraging strategies the sailors used to survive.

Gun flints found at the site appeared to have been used by survivors to used start fires, by striking them against steel. Historical accounts credit a firearm used in this manner with helping save the crew from hypothermia. Physical evidence indicates the survivors tried to whittle down musket balls to fit a smaller caliber weapon, such as a flintlock–most likely the same firearm mentioned in the historical accounts. Some of the copper spikes recovered by archaeologists had been broken through shear stress, such as a wreck would produce. The researchers believe one copper or brass artifact is part of a set of a navigator’s dividers, saved by a crewman as the ship violently broke apart over rocks.

The nature of the artifacts seems to strongly indicate that survivors of the shipwreck were active in ensuring their own survival. They modified wreckage in desperation, but with ingenuity.

No artifacts indicative of settlement — ceramic, glass — were found, just the kind of cleverly improvised objects that shipwreck survivors would fashion to make it until the rescuers arrived.

Even though Russians had a hugely significant presence in Alaska for more than a century before 1867, very few Russian sites have been excavated. The Neva survivors’ camp and the shipwreck therefore have the potential to answer a great many questions about the history of Russian America, particularly because they are so narrowly focused in time. They are a snapshot of the Russian presence in Alaska as it was in January of 1813.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, served a total of 32 years in prisons and insane asylums for transgressions that by the standards of ancien régime aristocrats were comparatively modest. His first prison stay (two weeks in 1763) in the donjon of the Châteaux de Vincennes was the result of a prostitute complaining not that he had abused her, but that he had engaged in and forced her to engage in blasphemies like stomping on a cross and cursing God.

The second time he was arrested his victim was a destitute widow named Rose Keller who he had promised a job as a housekeeper. When she arrived at his home in Paris, there was no housekeeping job waiting. Instead, de Sade forced her to strip, whipped her and locked her in a room from which she escaped a few hours later. She also claim he cut her buttocks with a pen knife and poured sealing wax in the cuts, although when she was examined two days later the authorities found no cuts. For this crime he was imprisoned for seven months in 1768, before being banished to his family estate in La Coste, Provence.

The third incident ultimately sealed his fate, but only because it pissed off the one person he should have taken special care not to piss off: his mother-in-law, Madame la Présidente de Montreuil. On June 23rd, 1772, de Sade had his valet Latour hire five prostitutes in Marseilles. The seven of them spent the morning whipping each other and having sex in various configurations. None of that was in any way remarkable. What went wrong was that the marquis tried to persuade the women to eat aniseed candies coated in Spanish fly. Only one of them ate any, but a sixth prostitute he hired that evening ingested several. Both of them became ill, with the evening shift women who had eaten the most becoming so violently ill that the last rites were administered.

All six of the women were questioned by the police and a warrant was issued for the arrest of the Marquis de Sade and Latour for poisoning and for sodomy (with each other). The marquis was tipped off that the cops were after him again, so he fled to Italy taking his wife Renée-Pélagie’s sister Anne-Prospère de Launay with him. Sade was then 32; Anne-Prospère was just nineteen years old, 11 years younger than her sister, and was a secular canoness of the Benedictine community in Alix. La Présidente had fished her son-in-law’s overactive chestnuts out of the fire every time before this, but the seduction of her youngest daughter crossed a line that could not be uncrossed.

Sade and Latour were tried in absentia, sentenced to death and burned in effigy. The marquis and his sister-in-law/lover traveled under assumed names to various cities in Italy for a month before Anne-Prospère left him and returned to her sister and mother. Because he was nothing if not reckless, Sade wrote to La Présidente mentioning that he was in Savoy. She promptly alerted the Savoyard authorities and the marquis and his valet were arrested and imprisoned in Fort Miolans. They escaped four months later and returned to La Coste where Sade’s unbelievably loyal wife protected him from her mother’s wrath and kept him just out of reach of the law’s long arm.

After five years on the lam, he was lured to Paris on a pretext and arrested. He was imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes in 1777. It was the beginning of 13 years of imprisonment because even though his sentence was overturned on appeal in 1778, his formidable mother-in-law had obtained a lettre de cachet, the controversial means by which the king could order someone jailed without charge or trial indefinitely with no possibility of appeal, against him. Even when the liberal reformist zeal of the 1780s freed hundreds of disgraced debauched nobles imprisoned by lettres de cachet, the marquis was not among them. The official in charge read his letters for signs of repentance and found the polar opposite. Sade never did know when to keep his mouth shut.

His first forays into prison literature were revisions of Italian travel notes, later published as Voyage d’Italie. He began to write verse plays a couple of years into his time in Vincennes. This was his original literary dream, to be a respected playwright. He wrote to his former teacher and lifelong friend Abbé Amblet in 1784: “It would doubtless be a great pleasure for me to see my works played in Paris and if they were successful, a reputation for being a man of intellect might perhaps lead people to forget my youthful trespasses and would in some way rehabilitate me.”

Sade was an incredibly prolific correspondent and wrote 20 plays during his imprisonment. When his long-suffering wife Pélagie and Amblet gave less than glowing critiques of most of them, the marquis eschewed verse and drama and turned his attentions to pornographic prose. He kicked off his new literary pursuit in high style and in a new location. On February 29th, 1784, he was dragged naked out of his cell in Vincennes and moved to another prison on the other side of Paris, a little place you might have heard of called the Bastille. It was there that he began to write what he would consider his masterpiece: The 120 Days of Sodom.

To ensure this vomit-inducing catalogue of violent horrors and sexual depravity (I couldn’t get past the 9th day and it’s a walk in the park compared to what comes after) was not confiscated by his jailers, Sade wrote it in the tiniest of handwritings on sheets of paper five inches wide. Once he’d filled in a page, he’d glue it to the next page so the whole manuscript could be rolled up tightly and hidden in a crack in the wall (one biographer says he hid it in a dildo). He wrote for three hours a night over 37 days, producing a working draft of 250,000 words. The scroll was 39 feet long.

He intended the finished work to be twice or three times longer, but for unknown reasons he never did complete it. He certainly had the time. The Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille for five years. He was abruptly transferred, naked again, from the Bastille to the insane asylum of Charenton on July 4th, 1789, 10 days before the fortress was so famously stormed. This too he brought on himself by yelling “They’re killing prisoners in here!” out of his window to the disgruntled crowds below on July 2nd. His precious scroll was left behind in the transfer and he assumed it was destroyed for good after the storming of the Bastille. In a 1790 letter to his steward Gaufridy, Sade said he shed “tears of blood” over the loss of of this manuscript and all his other writings (plus the expensive furniture, paintings and his library of 600 books) and blamed his poor wife for not recovering his belongings from his cell when she had 10 whole days to get it done.

His first transit in Charenton lasted only a year; he was freed in 1790 when the French Revolutionary legislature abolished the lettre de cachet. He was elected to the National Convention that same year and served until he was arrested in late 1793 during the Reign of Terror for “moderatism.” Sade was freed seven months later in July of 1794 after the execution of Robespierre. Then Napoleon came along and he wanted a piece of the marquis too. In 1801 de Sade was arrested and imprisoned. Two years later his family had him declared insane and got him transferred back to the Charenton asylum where he would live out the rest of his days until his death in 1814.

Many of his surviving papers and writings were destroyed by his son Donatien-Claude-Armand after his father’s death. He was the first in a long line of de Sades to repudiate their notorious ancestor’s writing and to erase all obvious signs of their family connection to him. They stopped using the Marquis de Sade title or even the first name Donatien for 300 years. (The current family has reversed the trend. They make significant bank off their notorious ancestor and the heir to the title is named Donatien.)

Although de Sade died believing his magnum opus was gone forever, in fact The 120 Days of Sodom had been found in its hidey hole by one Arnoux de Saint-Maximin who took it home with him two days before the storming of the Bastille. Eventually it was acquired by the wealthy Villeneuve-Trans family and it remained in their hands for three generations until it was sold in the late 19th century to Berlin psychiatrist Dr. Iwan Bloch, who published the first edition in 1904, 119 years after it was written. Bloch used the pseudonym Eugène Dühren to keep the censors off his case and printed 180 copies replete with transcription errors. Bloch emphasized that he was publishing the book because of its “scientific importance … to doctors, jurists and anthropologists” and compared its anecdotes to those recorded by pioneering psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing who was the first to popularize the term “sadism” in his seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis.

The manuscript stayed in Berlin until 1929 when it was purchased by Maurice Heine at the behest of Viscount Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure who was a direct descendant of de Sade’s. Heine published a new version in three quarto volumes from 1931 to 1935 available to subscribers only. This is considered the authoritative version because it is free of Bloch’s transcription errors.

The original scroll remained in the possession of the Vicount and Marie-Laure’s daughter Natalie de Noailles until 1982 when she entrusted it to someone she thought was a trusted friend, publisher Jean Grouet. He turned out to be a con man who told her it had been stolen while he smuggled the manuscript out of the country to Switzerland where he sold it to erotica collector Gérard Nordmann for $60,000. Natalie sued and in June of 1990, a French court ruled that the manuscript was stolen and should be returned to the Noailles family. Nordmann just ignored the French judgment and since Switzerland at that point was not a signatory of the UNESCO convention, Noailles had to sue again in the Swiss courts. The dispute was ongoing when Nordmann died in 1992. In 1998 a Swiss federal court found that it was lawfully acquired because Nordmann had acted “in good faith.” I mean, the Noailles had reported the theft to Interpol and everything. Why even have laws against theft if legal title can be transferred based only on the buyer’s supposed state of mind? Absurd.

Anyway, it went on display for the first time in 2004 at the Martin Bodmer Foundation library and museum near Geneva. Nine years later, Nordmann’s heirs decided to sell the manuscript to a French collector. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France geared up for a fight, raising more than $5 million to purchase the scroll. The money would then be divided between the Noailles and Nordmann heirs, a necessary step because the manuscript would be confiscated as soon as it crossed the border into France unless the French courts declared the legal owners were part of the deal. Negotiations fell through and a year later, in April of 2014, it was bought by Gérard Lhéritier, founder of Aristophil, a company which owned the world’s largest private collection of manuscripts (including Napoleon and Josephine’s prenup), for seven million euros ($9.6 million).

Lhéritier put the unfurled scroll on display at his private Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris and proposed to donate it to the Bibliothèque Nationale after five years. The library didn’t respond immediately to his overtures. Seven months later, anti-fraud officers raided the Paris headquarters of Aristophil and froze all the company’s accounts forcing it into insolvency. The firm appears to have been a giant Ponzi scheme built around its historic document collection.

Lhéritier invented a new way to sell in his niche market. For the past 11 years, he has been actively purchasing valuable documents such as the manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton, Louis XVI’s will or Napoleon’s wedding certificate. He offered them for sale, divided into hundreds of shares. Clients were told that, after five years, Aristophil would buy back their share with at least a 40% interest payment. Here was the catch, claim the investigators: the clients thought the company was guaranteeing the payment; in fact, there was no obligation of the kind in the contract.

But in fact, the company has always done so, winning the confidence of 18,000 investors, who in the past year alone paid €160m for a share of the action. According to the judge’s order, of which The Art Newspaper has a copy, this was made possible only by launching new sales, so that new investors paid those selling their shares.

In March of this year, Gérard Lhéritier, his daughter, his accountant and a prominent Parisian bookseller were indicted on charges including fraud, money laundering, creating false accounts and embezzlement. In August, a court in Paris ruled that the vast Astrophil collection was to be sold as the company was completely insolvent.

And so it seems The 120 Days will be on the move again. Lhéritier denies all the charges and says the entire case is a government conspiracy to get its greedy mitts on his collection. Honestly, I hope it is, because otherwise those 135,000 documents will be scattered to the four winds unless the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s director Bruno Racine manages to get the whole lot of them declared national treasure, which I expect he’s working on right now. At least the iconic The 120 Days of Sodom manuscript is certain to qualify. Then for the first time it will belong to the country which imprisoned its author under two kings, one Committee of Public Safety and one Consulate, and which banned his books until 1957.