Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

There is no evidence, however, that George Wright ever attended a meeting of the Mills Commission. For that matter, there is no evidence that the Mills Commission ever held a meeting of all its members. Wright had become interested in golf, laying out the first course in Boston, and one of the first in the U.S. He had publicly declared that tennis was a better sport than baseball; two of his sons were national champions. He was an elegant, worldly traveler, interested in music and the theater and a golf-playing crony of millionaires at Palm Beach. Perhaps he was never consulted by Mills; perhaps he declined to participate.

In any case, whatever historical material the Mills Commission had assembled was destroyed in a fire that burned the office of the American Sports Publicity Company. Mills issued the report personally in 1907, and he was the only person to sign it. The report concluded that baseball was a purely American sport, not derived from rounders, and that the method of playing it had been devised by General Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown in 1839.

This document was a classic example of manufactured history. The report incorporated the uncorroborated ramblings of an octogenarian, Abner Graves, whose dubious claim to baseball fame was that at one time he lived in Cooperstown. Graves claimed that some 68 years earlier " Doubleday improved Town Ball to limit the number of players, as many were hurt in collisions."

General Doubleday, who had died in 1893, made an almost perfect figurehead, apart from the fact that there was no record that he ever had anything to do with baseball. Handsome, distinguished, he was the holder of a heroic Civil War record that dated from Fort Sumter, where he was credited with firing the first Union shot. He was also an excellent writer and a commanding public figure. It is unlikely that even the Mills Commission would have made up the story of his part in baseball out of whole cloth, but at most he could be credited with a youthful interest in the game and with having encouraged sports among the troops. In all General Doubleday's extensive writings, including his memoirs, there is not a single reference to baseball.

Why did Cartwright disappear so quickly from the annals of baseball? The answer lies in American folk history. To rediscover the historical Cartwright one must go back to January 1848, when gold was found in California. Within the space of one turn of John Sutter's mill wheel, the placid post-revolutionary society of 19th century America was churned by greed into a great lunge westward for gold and glory. By fall rumors were spreading in New York, and in December of that year President James K. Polk made the news official in his State of the Union message. "The supply is very large," he said.

Cartwright, who had gone into the stationery business with his brother Alfred De Forest Cartwright and by this time was the father of a son and two daughters, was doing well, but he got caught up in the fever, too, and soon was making plans. The brothers sold their business. Alfred would sail for San Francisco via Cape Horn; Alexander would go by land with a party of 11. While others were mesmerized by thoughts of instant wealth, Alexander Cartwright went as a man with capital to invest. By all accounts, he was the reverse of calculating. He was sociable, hearty, devoted to his old friends, ingenious and inventive, but without ambition to profit from the things he devised. He started west for adventure and became, along the way, a Johnny Appleseed of baseball, proselytizing recruits to the game all the way from Hoboken to Honolulu.

"It took him 163 days to travel from Newark, N.J. to San Francisco," Bruce Cartwright Jr. wrote in 1938 in an attempt to restore recognition to his grandfather, a project that gained inadequate notice, partly because of Bruce Jr.'s own death soon after. "He walked the whole distance [from Pittsburgh west]. Whenever they rested and had enough people to form two baseball nines, they played 'baseball,' according to his letters to old Knickerbockers."

There had existed in Honolulu a diary along with notes kept by Cartwright of his journey and even an original ball used by the Knickerbockers, brought west by Alick as a memento. Bruce Jr. noted that his grandfather "told people in Honolulu that he taught people to play baseball at nearly every stop of his journey across the plains" and that "it was comical to see mountain men and Indians playing the game."

Scattered old sources can be found in Hawaii that refer to Alexander Cartwright having taught the game to "enthusiastic saloonkeepers and miners, to Indians and white settlers along the way" and "at nearly every frontier town and Army post where his wagon train visited." A secondary source mentions the New Yorkers "laughing as they watched the converts to the game attempt to imitate their own grace and skill with the bat and ball, such as catching the ball with the hands cupped and allowing the hands to 'give' with the catch." Another source declares, perhaps apocryphally, that one such match was interrupted by Indian attack.

Unfortunately, Bruce Cartwright Sr., Cartwright's son, burned the diary because it contained information "potentially damaging to prominent people in California and Hawaii." Before he set match to the manuscript, however, another son, Alexander Cartwright III, did copy out of the diary those parts that he considered of historical interest. But, more unfortunate still, few of these concern baseball, despite the fact that Alexander III was a lover of the game.