Ɛpsilon

From C. C. Graham   17 April 1880

Louisville,

April 17th., 1880.

No answer requested

Dear Sir,

My letter was published without my knowledge or consent and I send you the paper to show you our backwoods style of Journalism on the “Dark & Bloody Ground” now called Kentucky; which in my early days was a howling wilderness of Savages and wild beasts.1 There is a fire proof gallery in our State House at Frankfort now being finished where your handsomely framed letter may hang for ages after you are gone.2 I am now near ninety six (96) but can and do walk my twenty miles a day.

Christopher Columbus Graham, M.D.

written by granddaugh.3

pc

1
The newspaper in which Graham’s letter appeared has not been identified and no clipping has been found in the Darwin Archive–CUL. Graham probably refers to his letter to CD of 28 March 1880. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Ohio River was often called ‘that dark and bloody river’ and the territory of the Ohio River Valley ‘that dark and bloody land’, an allusion to conflicts between settlers and indigenous people of the area (see Eckert 1995).
2
CD’s letter has not been found.
3
Graham’s granddaughter has not been identified.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12581,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12581