Old Man's Medal

A month before President Garfield died of an assassin's shot in September 1881, a party of U. S. soldiers under a young lieutenant, up from Civil War ranks, arrived at Lady Franklin Bay on barren Ellesmere Island, some 600 mi. from the North Pole. This Army detachment's job was to set up one of an international chain of circumpolar stations for scientific observation. For two years the party collected data and specimens, sent out exploring expeditions of which one set a new "farthest North" by getting within 450 mi. of the Pole. A relief ship which the War Department had promised to send in the summer of 1882 failed to arrive. Next summer the relief ship cracked up in the ice, sank. Acting on his original orders, Lieut. Adolphus Washington Greely then led his party down the coast of Ellesmere Island from Lady Franklin Bay to bleak Cape Sabine. Expecting to find a relief party there, he found instead only a few supplies which earlier expeditions had left behind.

With enough food for 40 days, the Greely party put up a snow-block hut, settled down for its third winter in the North. From an old newspaper wrapped around some of the supplies cached at Cape Sabine they first learned of President Garfield's death more than two years before. But by that time the sullen, hungry, miserable men could think and talk of little except meals they had eaten, restaurant menus they had seen. Each soldier was limited to a few ounces of food per day, except for double rations to one whose hands and feet were frozen. The biggest and strongest private in the party, who later proved to have been an escaped murderer, pilfered food from his comrades. After the third offense Lieut. Greely had him shot. By spring all were reduced to eating shrimps and seaweed. Finally on June 22, 1884 Appeared a relief ship commanded by Captain Winfield Scott Schley, U. S. N. (who was to be a hero in the Spanish-American War 14 years later). Only one of Greely's men was strong enough to wave a feeble welcome before falling on his face. Of the original party of 25, Captain Schley found all but seven dead of starvation.

Last week the hero of that worst Arctic tragedy in U. S. history was informed that Congress had voted him its Medal of Honor. Thus to Major General Adolphus Washington Greely, a week before his gist birthday, went the recognition for which he had vainly waited half a century. Lieut. Greely returned from the Arctic to find a civilian upped to the captaincy which he had expected. Quietly plugging ahead, he distinguished himself by laying thousands of miles of telegraph and cable wire in the Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Alaska, directing Army relief work in San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906. He had risen to a major-generalcy when he was retired for age in 1908.

General Greely has long outlived the bitterness he once felt because, while geographic societies in France, England, Russia, Argentina, Scotland and Sweden were doing him honor, his own Government continued to ignore his Arctic ordeal. Far more interesting to him last week than the memories of 1884 were the New Deal and the exploits of Adolf Hitler. Receiving interviewers at his home in Georgetown, D. C., the old soldier fingered his white brush, remarked: "When you get to be 90, medals don't seem as important as they do when you are younger."

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