A Zombie's History of the United States

by Worm Miller

  Probably the best remembered hybrid of the Old West was mountain man John “Liver-Eating” Johnson (the basis for the fictional character, Jeremiah Johnson). Johnson supposedly got his nickname after his Native American wife was killed by Crow Indians, which sent Johnson on a decades-long vendetta against the Crow tribe. According to legend, Johnson would pull out and eat the liver of each Crow he killed. Another story tells of Johnson’s capture by Blackfoot Indians. The Indians had Johnson tied up and left with a single guard. Johnson supposedly chewed through the ropes binding him, knocked out his guard, then took the guard’s knife and cut off the guard’s leg. Johnson lived off of the Indian’s leg while he made his journey back to safety. What is interesting is that despite the popularity of these flesh-eating stories at the time, none suspected Johnson of being a hybrid. Today we can know more conclusively, as Johnson confessed his hybridity to a friend while serving as deputy sheriff in Coulson, Montana, in the 1880s. After Johnson’s death, the friend told the truth to a Los Angeles reporter who was compiling stories on Johnson.

  Then there was Daniel “Dead Dan” Balgoyen. Not much is known of Balgoyen’s origins. Some say he was an Irish immigrant working on the Union Pacific portion of the Transcontinental Railroad; others date his arrival in America back to the 1849 gold rush and claim he was Dutch. Whatever the case, Balgoyen wound up a hybrid, and by the 1880s had carved out a name for himself as a gunslinger and outlaw. Balgoyen was not the fastest draw, and his opponents knew it. Unlike most hybrids at the time, Balgoyen openly boasted of being a Carrie. This made few willing to fight him, as challengers knew they would need to guarantee a headshot to win. Balgoyen was known to wait until his opponents had drawn before even touching his pistol, often dueling without wearing a shirt so opponents could see his bullet-riddled torso.

  Wanted poster for the hybrid outlaw popularly known as “Dead Dan,” 1886.

  Balgoyen met an anticlimactic end in 1887, when he and human outlaw “Red” Jensen decided to spend the night in a barn in Madelia, Minnesota, after a successful robbery. Jensen later told the police that an animal in the barn kicked over their lantern and started the barn on fire. Jensen was able to escape, but Balgoyen became trapped and terminated by the flames.

  Red Jensen and many other outlaws and gunslingers were given a second chance at legitimate work during the Second Cleanse by a U.S. Army that needed all the able-bodied sharpshooters it could find.

  The War of the Dead

  The only good zombie is a dead zombie.

  —Gen. Philip Sheridan, 1869

  Zombies had been proving an increasing nuisance to westward expansion. The more humans that entered the West, the more zombie problems there were. In 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or Custer’s Last Stand as it is popularly known, had proven calamitous and embarrassing for the U.S. Army when it was discovered that the enemy Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians had lured George Armstrong Custer and his men into a trap that was laden with zombies. Zombies were dangerous, and there was also a rising sentiment that the United States could never be taken seriously as a nation as long as it was overrun with monsters. As James Garfield succinctly put it when running for President, “Europe has no undead.” The fledgling country was simply not big enough for humans and zombies, it would seem.

  The Zombie Removal Act of 1883 provided the funds needed to de-animate zombies from all United States cities. There would be no Fire Hooks this time, no pushing the zombies somewhere else. This was all-out extermination. The movement was to last almost fifteen years, and eventually expanding from U.S. cities to all the territories within the contiguous American landmass, regardless of whether a territory had applied for statehood yet or not. Today officially known as the Second Cleanse, or the Great Cleanse II, at the time many aptly dubbed it the “War of the Dead.”

  There were many so-called heroes of the Second Cleanse, but none stood quite as tall as Boone Martin. During his tenure with the U.S. Cavalry, Martin personally killed more zombies than any other human in history. Initially, he had made a mark on the butt of his rifle for each kill he got, but later said he “had to stop with that ’round 200 or there weren’t gonna be no butt left.”

  The moment that cemented Martin’s fame came on May 18, 1889. Martin was on a scouting mission in the Dakota Territory accompanied by two other men, Jeremiah Coy and Wallace Reede, when they stumbled upon a vast horde of zombies lurching across a basin. “Biggest mess o dead I ever seen,” Martin later recalled. As Coy and Reede readied to turn around and report their find to the rest of the company, Martin stopped them. He had other ideas. Likely already hot on his growing legend, Martin wanted to see how many zombies he could pick off. Martin rode into the horde and emptied his rifle with lightning speed. Coy and Reede followed close by, ready to take his spent rifle and hand him a reloaded one. Martin succeeded in de-animating the entire horde in roughly ten minutes, according to Martin himself, as well as Coy and Reede. Only after the last zombie was down did they notify their company. The dead count put Martin’s score for the day at eighty-seven. How accurate the ten-minute claim is, we cannot be sure. By most estimates, Martin probably de-animated more than a thousand zombies over a period of nine years before he retired from the army to join a traveling road show that offered him good money to show off his marksman prowess.

  Artist’s rendering of settlers circling their wagons to act as a barrier against an approaching zombie horde.

  There was not always so much glory and success during the Second Cleanse. Many encounters went in the favor of the zombies, such as the Defeat at Dubuque, Iowa, in 1887, where a horde overwhelmed the U.S. Calvary regiment, killing twenty-four. Another problem was that as the cleanse movement grew, it moved beyond the reach and control of the U.S. Army. Western towns often raised their own militias or posses to aid the cause, and groups of young men antsy for action would band together, looking to receive the cash rewards that were sometimes given for proof of a zombie de-animation (i.e., a severed head).

  On August 29, 1892, a group of five men from Denver, Colorado, on a zombie hunt, stopped at the Hollenhuck family farm. The Denver group had been unsuccessful in their search for zombies—a testament to how thorough the Second Cleanse was proving to be—and had thus been out in the country much longer than they had planned. They hoped they might buy some supplies from the Hollenhucks, maybe get a hot meal, and hopefully a few leads on some zombies. Much to the group’s disappointment, the Hollenhucks informed them that there had not been any zombie sightings in the area for months. The Hollenhucks invited the group to spend the night, though regretted that they would have to spend the night in their barn. The matriarch of the family was ill and bedridden and the family did not want to risk the woman catching anything from the Denver men.

  One of the Denver men, K. C. Bryant, later told the Denver Post:Young Tom, son of my friend Bill, apparently had been getting eyes from one of the daughters there at the farm and had gone off to see to her after we had all gone to sleep. In the morn Young Tom were gone. The farmers said they had not seen him. Even the daughter had said so at the time. We waited, wondering where he had gone off to, but halfday pass he were still gone. Then Paddy found Young Tom’s boots and we knew something were up.

  As it turned out, something “were” indeed up. Grabbing their guns, the Denver men forcibly searched the Hollenhuck house and made the grim discovery that the Hollenhuck matriarch was a zombie, zombinated quite a while ago from the looks of her. The family kept her chained up in her bedroom, as though she were still leading the farm. They found what was left of Young Tom in the room too. When Young Tom’s father, Bill, went to shoot the matriarch, the Hollenhuck family went mad and attacked the Denver men, even without weapons. During the skirmish, Patrick “Paddy” McKay, was bitten by the matriarch. This sent him into a rage. The Denver men, in their anger, ended up killing all but one of the six Hollenhucks. Linus, the surviving child, later confessed that the Hollenhucks had spent years abducting wayward travelers
and feeding them to their mother.

  Despite fiascoes like the Hollenhuck farm episode, the U.S. government never discouraged citizens from taking up arms to unofficially join the cleanse. The minor accidents and lives lost were well worth the greater goal of a zombie-free America.

  End of an Era

  Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the undead following the trail of the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between… the West is now closed.

  —Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1893

  The War of the Dead had no finale. There was no zombie surrender or Treaty of the Living Dead to be signed. Officially, the Second Cleanse ended in 1897 when the U.S. military started ramping up for the Spanish-American War, but the last “battle” of any significance had occurred all the way back in 1892. Zombies were not extinct, but they were certainly endangered. One could ride for miles in the wild and never see one. In most cities, zombie attacks were now rare enough to warrant front-page news when they occurred. Canada had also followed suit in the recent decades, ridding themselves of their minor zombie population. After thriving for thousands of years on North America, the age of the zombie seemed at a close.

  For most humans this meant nothing but a good thing. How could it not? But some saw it as a double-edged sword. While America gained a degree of newfound peace, it had lost an intrinsic part of itself as well. None solidified this feeling better than historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner was not a prolific writer, but he was nonetheless regarded as one of the greatest minds in American history during his lifetime. Today he is best remembered for his Frontier Thesis. The thesis was first announced in Turner’s seminal essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which he delivered to the American Historical Association at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair.

  Turner’s argument was that the root of the distinctive American character had always been the moving frontier line—which “created freedom by breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities”—and the constant threat of zombie violence:To the undead the American intellect owes its striking characteristics: that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes from devising means which to fight and to protect against the walking dead.

  During his landmark speech at the Chicago World’s Fair, Turner set up an evolutionary model: the first settlers who arrived in America were European, and thus acted and thought like Europeans. They were faced with environmental challenges different from those in Europe and most importantly, the presence of the zombies. They found themselves caught between the sophistication of settlement and the savagery of the dark wilderness, and it was the dynamic of these two conditions that forged the American being. Americans, as Turner saw it, overcame the zombies, while taking on their strength and wild natures in the process. Then generation after generation moved further inland, pushing yet chasing the zombies, and shifting the lines of settlement and wilderness, thereby preserving the necessary friction between the two. Every generation moved farther west, fought more zombies, and became more American.

  The U.S. Census of 1890 had proclaimed that the American frontier was no more. The land had been tamed and the zombies were gone. Turner wondered what this meant for the character of American society. There were always new frontiers abroad to satiate America’s thirst for expansion, but there were no zombies. Zombies were an American exclusive. Though few mourned their passing.

  SEVEN

  Speak Softly and Carry a Severed Head THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND ZOMBIES

  And to lose the chance to see frigatebirds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad zombis shambling amongst the hazy wood—why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.

  —Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Hunter, 1893

  Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt still remains our youngest president and one of America’s most iconic individuals. A warrior and a poet, a hunter and a naturalist, an athlete and an intellectual, he had the wit of Benjamin Franklin, the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson, the hardiness of Jim Bowie, and the thirst for adventure of a cowboy. He embodied the American spirit and character at a crucial juncture in our nation’s history and announced America as a world power.

  Few Americans, let alone few American presidents, can lay claim to as many cultural achievements as Roosevelt: he was the first president to ride in an automobile; the first to host an African American in the White House; he inspired the teddy bear; popularized his favorite adjective “bully”; coined the phrases “square deal,” “throw my hat in the ring,” “speak softly and carry a big stick”; and adding to this long list of achievements…

  He also introduced the word “zombie” to the American vernacular.

  The Sickly Scholar

  The zombi is no more evil than the brown bear.

  —Theodore Roosevelt, The Natural History of Zombis, 1881

  Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, in what is today the Gramercy section of New York City, the second child of a wealthy family of Dutch origin. Young Teedie, as he was affectionately known (the nickname Teddy would later be bestowed by his first wife, Alice), was outwardly the polar opposite of the robust and athletic Roosevelt we think of today. Sickly and suffering from a variety of ailments, he was so severely asthmatic that he needed to be propped up in bed while he slept. These maladies, of course, did little to curb young Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the life.

  Unable to partake in much childhood play, Roosevelt became an avid reader and, not unlike Meriwether Lewis, developed an early fascination and love for the natural world, in particular zoology. At age nine, a lifelong interest in what he would later term zombology took form when Roosevelt saw the decapitated head of a de-animated zombie at a local market. After getting his father to purchase the head, Roosevelt and two of his cousins created what they called the Roosevelt Museum of UnNatural History. Teaching himself taxidermy from books, Roosevelt stocked his makeshift museum with as many zombie parts as he could acquire. Here, working from the family home, young Roosevelt dreamed of one day hunting and de-animating a fully mobile zombie himself.

  By age sixteen, Roosevelt had willed his once weak body up to the same level of fitness as his mind, becoming an adroit athlete. In 1876, he matriculated at Harvard College where he became active in boxing and rowing. He joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, was a member of Harvard’s private society, the Porcellian Club, and would eventually graduate magna cum laude. But Roosevelt would later recall that in the middle of his classes, his mind would inevitably “wander from my lessons to that of zombis.” While still in school, he undertook a methodical study of the undead, and began work on the book that would launch his public career.

  The Natural History of Zombis was published in 1881, just one year after Roosevelt’s graduation from Harvard. The word “zombi,” as Roosevelt spelled it, he found in a book about Caribbean cultures. Though America’s flesh-eaters were far more real than those supposedly resurrected by witchcraft in voodoo folklore, Roosevelt felt that superstition and ignorance had kept zombies from ever receiving a proper name for far too long, noting in his introduction:We may call the manatee “the sea cow,” but yet it remains a manatee. Walking dead, undead, or naught, the brutes should have themselves a name like any other creature.

  Since none preceding myself saw fit to affix one, it would seem I h
ave the due pleasure.

  Combing through existing literature on the undead, Roosevelt found that there had been no truly systematic study of the creatures. Unlike previous American, British, and Spanish books, which ignored quantifiable facts to push a religious agenda, Roosevelt’s carefully researched book concerned itself simply with history and observed science, complete with drawings depicting individual zombies, charts depicting living populations, and analyses of the differences between Colonial and Native American interaction with the undead. Roosevelt’s somewhat revolutionary approach was examining the history of zombies as one would examine that of the buffalo or any other animal species. The very title was a shift in attitude, as he called it the natural history of the zombie instead of unnatural.

  They are the most ferocious creature in the world. Even the most formidable beast, the lion or the crocodile, usually attack things smaller than themselves. And male lions will always run from another male of greater stature. But the zombis habitually attack humans much larger than themselves. A small child who became a zombi will zestfully attack even the largest of men. They will rend and devour alive any man they can get their hands on, never growing exhausted and never relenting. Their teeth are still the dull teeth of man, and the jaw muscles possess no great power. It is the rabid, furious snaps that drive the teeth through flesh and bone, and zombis may lose their teeth like any creature. I never witnessed an exhibition of such impotent, savage fury as when I first saw a cage full of zombis. They uttered an extraordinary guttural sound. As they thrashed about they bit with vicious eagerness at whatever presented itself. One of them bit one of its fellows accidentally; another snapped at a piece of wood, and left the teeth-marks deep therein. As man does not eat zombi, by all accounts that makes zombis the top predators of the land, and it is necessary to be exceedingly cautious around them. If they succeeded taking down a man, the blood brings up every member of the ravenous throng which is anywhere near.