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Overview
Dr. Albert Shelton was a medical missionary and explorer who spent nearly twenty years in the Tibetan borderlands at the start of the last century. During the Great Game era, the Sheltons' sprawling station in Kham was the most remote and dangerous mission on earth. Raising his family in a land of banditry and civil war, caught between a weak Chinese government and the British Raj, Shelton proved to be a resourceful frontiersman. One of the West's first interpreters of Tibetan culture, during the course of his work in Tibet, he was praised by the Western press as a family man, revered doctor, respected diplomat, and fearless adventurer. To the American public, Dr. Albert Shelton was Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, and the apostle Paul on a new frontier. Driven by his goal of setting up a medical mission within Lhasa, the seat of the Dalai Lama and a city off-limits to Westerners for hundreds of years, Shelton acted as a valued go-between for the Tibetans and Chinese. Recognizing his work, the Dalai Lama issued Shelton an invitation to Lhasa. Tragically, while finalizing his entry, Shelton was shot to death on a remote mountain trail in the Himalayas. Set against the exciting history of early twentieth century Tibet and China, Pioneer in Tibet offers a window into the life of a dying breed of adventurer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466892248 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Douglas Wissing is an independent scholar and freelance journalist. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, travel magazines, and Salon.com. Wissing lives in Bloomington, IN.
Douglas Wissing is an independent scholar and freelance journalist. His books include Pioneer in Tibet and IN Writing. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, travel magazines, and Salon.com. Wissing lives in Bloomington, IN.
Read an Excerpt
Pioneer in Tibet
By Douglas A. Wissing
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2004 Douglas A. WissingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9224-8
CHAPTER 1
BLOOD OR BREAD
The Early Life of Albert Shelton, 1875–1880
There are lots of features about it that are lovely, but the racket and the rattle of it all is positively awful.
—James Whitcomb Riley
On June 9, 1875, a young wife, Emma Shelton, gave birth to her first child, Albert, in an Indianapolis, Indiana working-class neighborhood. Her husband, Joseph O. Shelton, was a carpenter. In his first years, Albert Leroy Shelton experienced the forces that dominated his life: the collusions and collisions of ethnicity, the turbulence of economic struggle, and the imperatives and compensations of frontier culture.
Indianapolis at the time was a taut little city on the prairie. Though dozens of smokestacks and church steeples picketed the skyline, the city gave way to farmland within a few miles of the downtown. The population had swelled well past sixty thousand as European immigrants and displaced Indiana farmers migrated to the industrial city. The town was an amalgam of gracious neighborhoods and crowded worker's districts. On downtown Washington Street, slump-shouldered workmen passed silk-hatted nabobs. In the primrosed North-side households, domestics from Irish Hill cleaned as the fancy ladies sashayed out with their parasols and kid gloves.
The city had struggled through a rough winter with heavy snowfalls and plunging temperatures. Spring brought torrential rains and heavy flooding. It was a hot, dry, dusty summer, but Albert's mother had the good fortune to endure the last days of her pregnancy during a spate of mild weather. About a week after Albert was born, a sharp earthquake rattled the town
In 1875, Indianapolis was mired in the deep depression that followed the Panic of 1873, an economic paralysis that was thoroughly tarnishing the Gilded Age. The panic commenced a six-year depression that deflated prices and wages, the burden falling disproportionately on the working classes. In spite of the best efforts of national leaders, the panic rippled through the country including Indianapolis. It was a shock to a city grown accustomed to growth and prosperity.
The Civil War had irrevocably transformed Indianapolis from a sleepy agrarian state capital to a city intertwined with the fortunes of a rapidly industrializing nation. Indianapolis' central location and good railroad connections made it an essential hub of operation for the Union Army. Indianapolis was a web of tracks, most heading east to civility and west toward the raw frontier. In 1869, archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, later the discoverer of ancient Troy, wrote, "12 great railroads come through this little town of 40,000 inhabitants and their number will increase to 15 before the end of the year. Three railroads go right by my house and the clanging of the trains arriving and departing continuously from early morning till late at night give evidence of the really colossal traffic on these."
But the locomotives' shrill whistles also blew a dirge for Indiana's pioneer agrarian way of life. With the railroads tying together the disparate markets of the United States, the market price for agricultural commodities was set hundreds, even thousands of miles away, subjecting independent farmers to the whims of a national market. When farm produce prices rapidly declined and debt and interest rates mounted, many farmers abandoned the countryside and made their way to the cities. Albert Shelton's parents were among them, joining a patchwork of diverse immigrants in Indianapolis. The streets of baby Albert Shelton's modest neighborhood were alive with a babel of brogues, drawls, and outlander accents. Over 70 percent of his neighborhood's population was foreign born, including Germans, Irish, English, Canadians, Scots, French, and Swiss.
Something Close to Penury: The Panic of 1873
The Panic of 1873 began with a financial crisis in the money centers of the East and rapidly spread through the country. On September 25, 1873, The Indianapolis Sentinel headline read, "The Panic: The Wave Reaches Indianapolis." Eventually a number of Indianapolis banks restricted withdrawals or closed. In the Sheltons' working-class neighborhood a few miles to the south, it was a hardscrabble world of mean labor and miserly wages, devolving circumstances and hard choices. Families were evicted, reduced to eating cornmeal bought from feed mills and served without milk because there was none. By November a thousand men stood in the cold to apply for Indianapolis jobs, and throngs gathered to purchase cheap meat from the slaughterhouses, even refuse from the cutting tables. Workingmen's wages had doubled since the Civil War, but the panic quickly deflated them.
The Keynote of Courage: The Disciples of Christ and Borderland Culture
A year prior to the crash, Albert's father, twenty-four-year-old Joseph O. Shelton, married sixteen-year-old Emma Rosabelles Belles in Morgan County, Indiana, where his family owned a farm. They said their vows before Minister John Phillips on March 14, 1872.
Morgan County was an isolated region of rugged hills about thirty miles south of Indianapolis, a haven for yeoman farmers. It was just the latest stop for the peripatetic Sheltons, one of the westering families of the American experience. Starting in the East, the Sheltons, like Abraham Lincoln's family and thousands of other pioneer families, had steadily moved west generation after generation, crossing the Appalachians into the broad valleys and uplands of Kentucky and Tennessee. Joseph Shelton himself was born in Kentucky, as were his parents, before the family moved north to the rumpled hills of Morgan County in 1857.
The Sheltons were devout Disciples of Christ, a denomination that rose out of the New Light Movement. It was a great revival of primitive evangelical Christian experience that ignited the central Ohio Valley around 1800. Disciples of Christ congregations had reached Morgan County by the late 1830s, becoming the leading church in some sections of the county. The congregations were followers of evangelists Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell. Barton Stone was a Kentucky man with a slender face and prominent chin, a tousle of curly blond hair on his head. The Ohio Valley New Light revivals deeply influenced Stone. He promulgated a Christian ethos that was persistently primitivist, opposed to the corrupting influence of the contemporary world. Alexander Campbell was an anti-establishment Scotsman with deeply set, hooded eyes, sparse hair, and a patriarchal white beard framing a dour set of mouth. He incorporated a more rationalist viewpoint into his theology, mingling his Christian primitivism with a progressive outlook.
The Disciples of Christ's antecedent, the New Light Movement, arose in the bloody borderlands of eighteenth-century Britain and Scotland. For almost seven hundred years, there was never fifty consecutive years of peace in the borderlands. The centuries of warfare and violence shaped the culture, ethos, and social organization of the border folk.
Called Scotch-Irish when they came to pioneer the backwoods of America, the border folk of northern Ireland, the Scottish lowlands, and the barren hills and deep valleys of the British north country developed a warrior culture, buttressed by an agrarian economy and strong familial ties. Given to an indulgent parenting and games of physical domination, the border people raised their male children with the aim of fostering a fierce pride, adamantine independence, and a warrior's determination.
Calling themselves "People of the New Light," the border folk began gathering in the ferment of the early eighteenth century. Preaching their belief in "free grace" and prayer societies in open field meetings, they avowed an abiding faith in reform Christianity and a deep hostility toward the established churches and their clergy. The New Lighters' conflict with authority engendered a martial Christianity among the believers. With a bible in one hand and a weapon in the other, they successfully fought off the armies sent to suppress them.
By the eighteenth century, the border regions emptied as exile and emigration delivered a new style of immigrant to the docks of the mid-Atlantic American colonies—a people distinctly different from the Puritans and Cavaliers of earlier British migrations. Soon the border people were heading for the back-country frontiers, where they served as a buffer between the Indians and the genteel, coast-clinging Quakers and Tidewater Virginians.
In time, the Scotch-Irish border people became dominant in a vast hill and mountain area that stretched from western Pennsylvania south to Georgia and west across the Carolina piedmont to the banks of the Mississippi. The Scotch-Irish continued their traditions of truculent independence in the southern uplands, their subsistence farms nurturing an obdurate streak of self-reliance. The American backcountry was contested territory when the borderers arrived, defended by the warrior tribes of Shawnee, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. The Revolutionary War added tinder to the fire, as the British used the tribes against the colonial interlopers threading through the Cumberland Gap. To the Scotch-Irish, the American hinterland was just another chaotic environment, not unlike the lawless one they had known in Britain and Ireland.
The martial spirit extended to the upper South's religion. Orthodox ministers bemoaned the disruption caused by the New Light believers. In their frontier evangelical camp meetings, the Scotch-Irish of the Appalachian hills interspersed prayers for vengeance and the conquest of enemies with sermons on the loving Nazarene. "Courage seems to me the keynote of our whole system of religious thought," one southern mountain woman stated.
The Disciples of Christ in the upper South and lower Midwest eventually combined Barton Stone's and Alexander Campbell's two disparate streams of thought into an expansive world-affirming view. In 1832, the Disciples of Christ organized with the tenets of congregational governance, weekly observance of the Lord's Supper, and adult immersion baptism. There was a particular emphasis put on the liberty of the Christian individual and the autonomy of each congregation. The denomination called for preaching God's unconditional love for sinners as revealed in the teachings of Jesus Christ, unfettered by teachings outside the Bible such as Calvinist teachings of election and predestination. The Disciples believed that teachings received through faith ended the sinner's mutiny against God, which in time would result in Christian union, the worldwide conversion of unbelievers, and the beginning of Christ's millennial reign.
In the course of commingling Campbell's and Stone's viewpoints, the denomination evolved distinctly ecumenical outlooks. Its members prized freedom and had a high forbearance for diversity and nonconformity. "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity" was a characteristic Disciples phrase. Alexander Campbell's father, another Christian iconoclast, stated, "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent." Alexander Campbell once described his own work as a Disciples minister and editor as being part of "a species of non-descripts, oddities, and incongruities." Ultimately the sect paid the price of tolerance with an exceptional amount of intradenominational strife over issues such as slavery, but the legacy of open-mindedness stood the Disciples in good stead as they encountered new and disparate groups.
It was also a denomination that prized debate. In the early days of the denomination, the Disciples continually challenged their ecclesiastic counterparts—Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, Quakers, and Spiritualists—to engage in debate over a great number of theological questions. It was said Disciples converts carried as standard equipment a New Testament in their pocket and a chip on their shoulder. One Kentucky convert emerged from his baptismal immersion sputtering, "Now I'se ready for 'sputing.'"
The lower Midwest, including the Ohio Valley regions of Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, formed the core region for the Disciples of Christ. By the 1870s there were five Disciples congregations in Indianapolis, including the Third Christian Church attached to one of the denomination's colleges, which became Butler University in 1877. The university displayed the Disciples' increasing power and intellectual action, which included education, chautauquas, and an expanding Sunday school organization.
The Disciples' activities reflected the Gospel of the Middle Class promulgated by men such as the popular Protestant minister, Henry Ward Beecher, who mixed cultural activities, accreditation, and the accoutrements of the good bourgeois life into a Christian ideal. In March 1876, Beecher presented his address, "The Ministry of Wealth," at the Indianapolis Opera House, trumpeting, "The whole tenor of the Old Testament pointed to the refining influence of wealth." Beecher declared that a man's wealth "should go first to benefit himself," to build a rich home, and to "bestow upon his wife and daughter and make a home of royalty. ..." Later, Beecher declared a laborer should be ashamed if after twenty years of work he didn't own an unmortgaged home with carpets, china plates, pictures on the walls, and "some books nestling on the shelf [in] the sweetest place upon the earth."
Blood or Bread: The Crisis of 1877
The aftermath of the Panic of 1873 proved to be an economic and social horror for Indianapolis. Through Albert Shelton's infancy and early childhood, class tension and strife were endemic, strikes and lockouts common. Wages, days worked, and living standards plummeted, particularly among the working classes. Between 1873 and 1879, the average union carpenter in Indianapolis saw his wages fall from $2.40 to $1.43 a day. Worse, laborers saw their work days drop dramatically as construction and industrial production declined.
Food and rent prices declined at a far slower rate than wage cuts, reducing the workers' already penurious standards of living. The situation was particularly tough for working-class families with children. Childless working-class couples could maintain a comfortable if precarious lifestyle, but children changed the equation. Each succeeding birth brought increased deprivation. Until their children reached working age, it was a rough existence. The Sheltons experienced firsthand the economic impact of a second child. Albert's younger brother, Fredrick, was born in 1879.
As baby Albert celebrated his first birthday in the summer of 1876, Americans prepared to celebrate the centennial of liberty. Instead, the nation suffered continued trauma. The number of unemployed had risen to as many as three million, and, for the first time, America saw armies of as many as a million tramps and vagabonds drifting across the country. As the Indianapolis Sentinel dourly noted, "It was hard times yesterday, and will be tomorrow, but to-day is the Centennial Fourth of July."
But even as the newspapers lauded the celebrations the next day, they also reported the shocking news of the campaigns against the Indians out on the High Plains. On July 5, 1876, the Indianapolis News had a telegraphed dispatch from Bismarck in the Dakotas headlined "Latest from Sioux Country," detailing the exploits of Generals Terry, Gibbons, and Custer on the trail of "about 3,000 Indians" in the Rosebud region. "The general impression prevails that the campaign will be a short, sharp, and hot one thereafter," the story read. "No serious casualties have occurred; the men and animals stand the march well, though the pack animals are badly chaffed."
But rather than leading another grand chase after bands of retreating Indians, General George Custer lay with his massacred and mutilated Seventh Cavalry on a sere hillside in Montana above the Little Bighorn, casualties of the immense body of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors assembled under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. On July 6, the paper reported "Custer's Disaster Confirmed."
Economically, Indianapolis ended 1876 as badly as it started, with numerous failures and further wage declines. Even the State Fair failed financially, unable to pay the promised premiums to the ribbon winners. But 1877 was even worse, proving to be the nadir of the depression. By 1877, eight railroads serving Indiana were in receivership. Suicides increased, and the township trustees handed out relief money for food at a record pace.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pioneer in Tibet by Douglas A. Wissing. Copyright © 2004 Douglas A. Wissing. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: The Trail to Tibet, 1922 * Blood or Bread: His Early Life, 1875-1880 * Strange Country: Kansas and His Frontier Education, 1880-1893 * The Incarnate Malignity: From the Midwest to Tibet * The Portal: Tachienlu and the Land of Kham * Bayonets to Kham: Chao Erh-Feng and the Christian Missionaries * The Doctor in Kham: 1908-1909 * Conquests, Curios, and Conversions: Batang, 1909-1910 * This Great Awful City: Furlough, 1910-1913 * Shattered Charms: Batang, 1914-1917 * The Next Livingstone: Shelton in Kham, 1918-1919 * The Devil's Own Cauldron: Yunnan, 1919-1920 * The Hero Returns: Furlough, 1920-1921 * Back to Batang, 1921 * The Thorn Bush, 1922 * Historical Epilogue and Contemporary Research Overview