Category Archives: migration

by | 13 May 2026 · 8:07 am

Arctic Rivalry in the 1800s

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

To be sure, nationalism also drove the obsession. Americans, slowly emerging from the devastation of the Civil War, yearned to prove themselves on the international stage. Polar exploration, some suggested, could help unify the divided country—it was an endeavor that everyone, North and South, could agree on. An ambitious expedition of discovery provided a way for the still-mending republic to flex her power in a quasi-military, but ultimately peaceful, way.

It was a British naval officer, William [Edward] Parry, who in 1827 led what is widely regarded as the first serious expedition specifically aiming to reach the North Pole. Ever since then, the British Admiralty had led most of the cutting-edge polar explorations. This was largely due to the nearly evangelical zeal of Second Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow for all things Arctic, and to the fact that after the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy had had few major wars to fight throughout much of the 1800s. The great ships of the world’s mightiest navy were rotting away largely unused, and many officers had been relegated to half wages with little to do, yet with ambitions still burning in their breasts. The British primarily focused their efforts on finding a navigable sea route across the top of Canada—and on searching for previous English expeditions that had disappeared while looking for this elusive Northwest Passage.

But now, in the 1870s, attention was shifting away from finding the Northwest Passage and more toward the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, as an object of pure, abstract exploration. Not only England but France, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had mounted, or were now proposing, expeditions to reach the pole first. The United States considered herself a viable contender in this grand chase, and many Americans fervently wished to see the Stars and Stripes planted at the top of the world.

America’s desire to push north could be considered, in some ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny, the country’s pioneering surge toward the west. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the western frontier was closing—or at least its conquest was reaching a different phase, one that consisted less of adventurous exploration and more of the messy backfill work of occupation and settlement. But in 1867, the United States had purchased Alaska from the czar for the paltry sum of $7.2 million, and this enormous new frontier lay untapped and largely unknown. Thus the national movement west, having reached California, had taken a right turn and become a movement north.

In 1873, the country was still digesting this acquisition, was still trying to learn about the immensity of what America owned in her Far North and why she owned it. The money spent on Russian America remained controversial—Alaska was still widely referred to as “Seward’s Icebox” and “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Polar Bear Garden,” in derision of former secretary of state William Seward, who had championed and then negotiated the purchase. Yet the American people also wanted to know what might lie beyond the country’s new northern borders—and they were hungry for a hero to personify the country’s northern tilt.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, migration, military, nationalism, U.S.

by | 9 May 2026 · 12:10 am

Nabbed at Heathrow, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 365-366:

“Passport please,” a young immigration officer named Kenneth Human said when Sneyd approached the window.

Sneyd fished his wallet out of a coat pocket. From an inside fold, he retrieved a dark blue Canadian passport, which the officer opened and studied. Officer Human glanced at Sneyd, and then back at the passport photo. Nothing seemed untoward: the same man, the same glasses, everything matched.

Then Human saw another passport, peeking from Sneyd’s billfold. “May I see that other one?” he asked.

Sneyd handed the officer the second passport, which was clearly stamped “Canceled.”

“Why are the names different?” Human asked, noting that one said “Sneyd” and the other said “Sneya.”

Sneyd explained that his original passport, issued in Ottawa, had contained the misspelling—simply a clerical error—but that he’d had it corrected as soon as possible while in Portugal.

Officer Human appeared to be buying Sneyd’s explanation. But at this point, a Scotland Yard detective materialized—a slender, fastidious man with blue eyes and a trim mustache named Philip Birch. While Sneyd and the customs officer continued talking about the passport, Birch studied the Canadian’s face and movements. He had an “absent-minded professorial air” about him, Birch thought, but something about the traveler looked familiar. He seemed to recall seeing the man’s photograph in the pages of the Police Gazette.

Birch ran his finger down a list of names typed on an official Scotland Yard document that was labeled “Watch For and Detain.” Under the heading “All Ports Warning,” the Canadian’s name jumped off the page: Ramon George Sneyd.

Detective Birch tapped Sneyd on the shoulder. “I say, old fellow,” he later recalled telling the subject. “Would you mind stepping over here for a moment? I’d like to have a word with you.”

Seemingly more annoyed than alarmed, Sneyd glanced at his watch. “But my plane’s leaving soon.”

“Oh, this will only take a moment,” Birch assured him in a chipper tone. “May I see those passports, please?”

Two policemen joined Birch, and the three men escorted Sneyd across the busy terminal toward a police administrative office. Sneyd believed this was all just a routine passport mix-up, and so he remained grudgingly cooperative. Should things turn dicey, there was always the loaded revolver in his pocket. As far as he could see, this friendly trio of officers did not carry weapons.

When they arrived at the office, Birch turned and faced Sneyd. “Would you mind if I searched you?” he asked. Sneyd raised his arms and offered no protest.

Carefully patting him down, Birch quickly discovered the revolver: a Japanese-made .38-caliber Liberty Chief—its checkered walnut stock wrapped with black electrical tape. Birch spun the revolver and found five rounds of ammunition.

“Why are you carrying this gun?” Birch asked in an even tone.

“Well,” Sneyd replied. “I’m going to Africa. I thought I might need it. You know how things are there.” For the first time, a note of alarm had edged into his voice.

Birch handed the revolver to one of the other policemen and continued frisking the suspect. In Sneyd’s pockets, Birch found a little booklet on rifle silencers and a blank key, of the sort that a locksmith might carry. Sneyd had a small amount of money—less than sixty pounds—on his person.

“I have reason to believe you have committed an arrestable offense,” Birch said, and told Sneyd he was being detained. Now he would be missing his flight. Sneyd slumped in his chair.

The officer got on the phone and tried to have Sneyd’s bag pulled from the plane—but it was too late, the jet was already easing back from the gate. Then Birch called Scotland Yard headquarters and informed his superiors that just two days after being placed on the “All Ports Warning,” Ramon George Sneyd was now in police custody.

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by | 8 May 2026 · 7:33 am

Robbing a Bank in London, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 356-357:

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place—especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. “He was nervous, pathetically shy, and unsure of himself,” the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. “But he was so incoherent,” she said, “that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward—trying to chat him up.”

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn’t know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

“Put all £5 notes in this bag,” the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man’s eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations—in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. “Give me all your small notes!” he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor’s shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag—upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

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by | 5 May 2026 · 1:11 am

Finding Eric Galt’s Real Name

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 319-323:

THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they’d issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren’t sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.

To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine—an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.

Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even before the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. “All the signs were there,” DeLoach said. “The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection.”

Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake’s boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI’s Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. “Les, we have pretty good evidence that Galt is an escapee,” DeLoach said. “How many ‘Wanted’ notices do we currently have in our files?”

“About 53,000,” Trotter said.

DeLoach grimaced. “Well,” he said, “at least that’s better than three million.”

The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake’s men to compare the “Galt” prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. “You’ve got to put all your people on this,” DeLoach said.

“When do you want us to begin?” Trotter asked.

“How about today?”

The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn’t need to remind them that “we’re under tremendous pressure, and that our cities are powder kegs.”

Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt’s left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake’s project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt’s thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.

At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. “We’re getting there,” Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn’t slept a wink and that they’d already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. “Give us just a little more time.”

“OK,” DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth—that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.

Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. “Deke,” he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a “note of triumph” in Trotter’s voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: “Tell the Director. We’ve got your man!”

“Are you sure?”

“No doubt about it. Bonebrake’s experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card.”

“I take it he’s not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard.”

“Nope,” Trotter said. “His card number is 405,942G. The guy’s a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray.”

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by | 4 May 2026 · 4:38 am

Getting a Canadian Passport, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 281-282, 293-294, 308-309:

Then Galt did something truly brazen, something that illustrated the extent of his desperation: he called Bridgman and Sneyd on the telephone, probably from the same phone booth Mrs. Szpakowski saw him talking on. One night, Paul Bridgman, who worked as the director of the Toronto Board of Education’s Language Study Centre, picked up his home telephone, shortly after finishing his supper.

“Yes, hello,” Bridgman later recalled hearing the caller say. “I’m a registrar with the Passport Office in Ottawa. We’re checking on some irregularities in our files here and we need to know if you’ve recently applied for a passport.”

Bridgman was naturally a little suspicious. He didn’t understand why some bureaucrat in Ottawa would call on official business during the evening. “Are you sure you have the right person?”

“Bridgman,” Galt assured him, spelling out the surname. “Paul Edward Bridgman. Born 10 November, 1932. Mother’s maiden name—Evelyn Godden.”

“Well yes, that’s correct,” Bridgman replied, deciding the caller must be on the level after all. Soon Bridgman freely told Galt the information he needed to know: Yes, he once had a passport, about ten years ago, but it had expired, and he had not bothered renewing it. “Thank you very much,” Galt said, and hung up.

Galt was concerned that Bridgman might pose a problem—his old passport might still be on file in Ottawa and might set off alarm bells if Galt applied for a new one. So he got back on the phone and reached Ramon Sneyd. Going through the same routine, Galt was relieved to learn from Sneyd that the man had never applied for a passport in his life.

That settled it in Galt’s mind: while he might develop the Bridgman alias for sideline purposes, he would become Ramon George Sneyd.

…

IN TORONTO THAT same morning, Eric Galt was walking down Yonge Street, intent on an errand of disguise. He turned in to Brown’s Theatrical Supply Company and bought a makeup kit. Playing with the cosmetics later that day, he applied a little foundation and powder and eyebrow liner. He parted his hair in a different way and was a bit more conservative with his hair cream. Then he donned a dark suit, a narrow tie with a discreet waffle weave, and his best white dress shirt. As a final touch, he put on a recently purchased pair of dark horn-rimmed glasses, which, sitting on his surgery-sharpened nose, gave him a vaguely professorial cast.

Looking in a mirror, Galt was happy with the transformation: Ramon Sneyd was now ready for his close-up.

Sometime in the afternoon of April 11, he walked into the Arcade Photo Studio, also on Yonge Street, and met the manager, Mrs. Mabel Agnew. He told her he needed some passport photos.

Mrs. Agnew was happy to oblige. She led him to the rear of the studio, which was decorated with a vanity mirror and travel poster of Holland, and sat him on a revolving piano stool before a gray-white screen. Galt doubtless hated the whole ritual, as always, but this time he peered just off camera and kept his eyes wide open, throwing everything he had into playacting his new role. Mrs. Agnew couldn’t get her subject to smile, but she finally managed to snap off a decent shot. He left while the pictures developed and returned a few hours later. For two dollars, he retrieved three passport-sized prints.

The image turned out well. His countenance bore a discerning quality, a certain cosmopolitan panache. He could pass for a lawyer, or an engineer, or an international businessman. He almost looked handsome.

…

Sneyd first inquired about tickets to Johannesburg, South Africa, but recoiled at the price—$820 Canadian round-trip. Instead, he asked Spencer to look into the cheapest available fares to London. She soon found a flight on British Overseas Airways that departed Toronto on May 6. It was a twenty-one-day economy excursion, the cheapest flight available, and came with a fare of only $345 Canadian. Sneyd liked the sound of it and asked her to go ahead and make a reservation.

Do you have your passport with you? she asked.

He didn’t have one yet, he said, but he was working on it. Here Spencer must have sensed his hesitation, his awkward uncertainty over how to proceed. Sneyd was under the mistaken impression that to secure a passport, he would have to provide a “guarantor”—a Canadian citizen in good standing who could vouchsafe that he’d known the applicant for more than two years. Meeting this requirement was the main reason he’d been developing two identities and two addresses; according to his rather convoluted and risky plan, the bespectacled Sneyd would be the traveler, and Bridgman (wearing an altogether different getup and possibly a toupee) would be the guarantor.

Sneyd wasn’t going to explain any of this to her, of course, but Spencer graciously intervened before he had to conjure up a story. “I can get you a passport,” she said. “Do you have a birth certificate?”

“Well, no,” he said. She told him that was okay, he didn’t need a birth certificate.

What about the guarantor? he asked. “I don’t know anyone who could serve as my guarantor.”

“Not necessary, either,” Spencer replied. There was a loophole in the passport rules, she said. From her files, she fished out a government form called “Statutory Declaration in Lieu of Guarantor.” Sneyd was simply required to sign the form in the presence of a notary. “As it happens,” she said sunnily, “we have a notary right here in the office.”

Sneyd couldn’t believe his good fortune. He’d had no idea how easy it was in wholesome, trusting Canada to acquire travel papers and inhabit another person’s identity: no birth certificate required, no proof of residence, no character witnesses. He’d wasted his time fabricating a web of interlocking aliases, disguises, and residences, when all he had to do was swear before a notary that he was who he said he was. Welcome to Canada, the expression went, we believe you.

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by | 3 May 2026 · 6:34 am

Finding the Assassin’s Car, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 294-296:

AT EXACTLY THE same hour that Galt’s passport photos were ripening in a darkroom vat [in Canada], FBI agents in Atlanta were about to enjoy the week’s greatest breakthrough. At four minutes past four o’clock that afternoon, a convoy of bureau sedans converged on the Capitol Homes project. In a ruckus of slamming doors and squawking radios, a dozen FBI agents crawled from the cars and swarmed around the abandoned vehicle.

It was no mistake—this was without a doubt Eric S. Galt’s car: a white two-door V-8 1966 Mustang hardtop with whitewall tires and a red interior, VIN 6TO7C190647, bearing Alabama license plate number 1-38993.

While some agents inspected the vehicle, taking measurements, notes, and photographs, others soon fanned out and began interviewing Capitol Homes tenants. Did you see the individual who parked this car? Can you give a physical description? Had you ever seen the man before? Kids teetered on bicycles, spellbound by all the commotion, but it was more excitement than most of the tenants had bargained for. “There must have been a billion of ’em out here,” one lady said. Complained another: “I had to go to bed. It made me sick, so many of them asking me the same thing over and over and over.”

Soon a tow truck appeared in the parking lot. Guarded by a police escort, the wrecker hauled the Mustang off to a federal building at the corner of Peachtree and Baker streets. There, deep inside a large locked garage, a detail of agents in latex gloves worked the car over, systematically emptying all its contents and dusting its surfaces for fingerprints.

Every inch of the impounded car was examined. Agents took soil samples from the tire wells, fluid samples from the engine, sweepings from the carpets, seats, and trunk. Fibers, hairs, and several high-quality latent palm prints were teased from the Mustang’s recesses and contours. From the glove compartment, inspectors found a pair of sunglasses and a case. From the trunk, they retrieved, among other objects, a pair of men’s shorts, a pillow, a fitted sheet, various tools, a container for a Polaroid camera, and a small contraption that appeared to be an air-release cable for a camera shutter. On the right window, a prominent sticker said, “Dirección General de Registro Federal de Automóviles, 1967 Octubre Turista, Aduana de Nuevo Laredo, Tam.”

All these contents and samplings were inventoried, wrapped in plastic, and boxed up to be personally sent by air courier to the crime lab in Washington. But one item found on the Mustang urgently spoke for itself and required not a second of lab analysis. Affixed to the inside of its left door, a small sticker showed that Eric Galt had had the oil changed in his Mustang at 34,289 miles. The sticker said, “Cort Fox Ford, 4531 Hollywood Boulevard.”

WITHIN AN HOUR of the Mustang’s discovery in Atlanta, Special Agent Theodore A’Hearn of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office arrived at the service desk of the Cort Fox Ford dealership in Hollywood, California, and met a man named Budd Cook Jr. One of the garage’s service specialists, Cook dug into his records and soon found the work order, which he himself had taken down only a month and a half earlier. The paperwork was made out to Eric S. Galt and dated February 22, 1968.

He brought the car in at 8:00 that morning, Cook noted. It was a 1966 Mustang.

Do you remember what Galt looked like? A’Hearn asked.

Cook searched his memory and came up short. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of customers had passed through this garage over the previous months. Regrettably, he could not furnish a description of any sort.

“But,” Cook said, “Galt’s address is right here on the work order.”

THE NEXT MORNING, April 12, Agent Thomas Mansfield made his way to the large and slightly down-at-the-heels St. Francis Hotel at 5533 Hollywood Boulevard. He asked to speak with the proprietor, and presently a man named Allan Thompson appeared at the front desk. As the resident manager, Thompson had lived at the St. Francis for nearly two years and knew the history of the place, all its various denizens and comings and goings.

Yes, Thompson said. He recalled a man named Eric Galt. Thompson found a registration card that showed Galt had lived at the St. Francis for about two months, checking out on March 17. He resided in room 403 and paid eighty-five dollars a month in rent. “He had dark hair, combed back,” Thompson remembered. “Slender to medium build. Quiet, wore conservative business suits. Kept irregular hours. Far as I could tell, he was not employed.” Thompson said another tenant now occupied 403, and that Galt had not left any belongings in the room.

“Did he give any indication where he was going next?” Agent Mansfield asked.

“Well, yes,” Thompson said, producing a change-of-address card that said, “General Delivery, Main Post Office, Atlanta, Georgia.” The card was dated March 17, 1968, and signed “Eric S. Galt.”

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by | 23 April 2026 · 12:06 am

Assassin’s Lair, Memphis, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 145-147:

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 422½ Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry’s Wink soda—THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house would later describe the place as “a half-step up from homelessness.” Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim’s Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim’s kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer’s tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer’s office admonished, “No Curseing or Foul Talk.”

AT AROUND THREE o’clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer’s shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim’s Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 422½ Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer’s office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

“Got any vacancies?” he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man’s checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he’d gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place—and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. “We got six rooms available,” she said. “You stayin’ just the night?”

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. “Our nicest one,” she said. “It’s $10.50 a week. You can cook in there.” Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn’t do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River. “No, see, I won’t be doing any cooking,” he mumbled. “You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping.”

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a “smirk” and a “sneer,” as though he were “trying to smile for no reason.” She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. “This one’s $8.50 for the week,” she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it—a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, “No Smoking in Bed Allowed.” The ceiling’s wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt’s eye: the window wasn’t boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

“Yeah,” Galt abruptly said, “this’ll do just fine.”

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.

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by | 22 April 2026 · 12:13 am

Beale Street Blues, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 103-105:

THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. “Make the crowds stop pushing!” King yelled. “We’re going to be trampled!”

Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy’s death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy’s heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, “business never closes ’til somebody gets killed.”

For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale—a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South’s first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants “for coloreds only,” African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival—Beale was a place where the concept of “separate but equal” had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

“If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale, you’d never want to be white again,” the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters—the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee’s Saloon, Club Handy—were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy’s statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said—a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

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Filed under economics, education, migration, music, nationalism, U.S.

by | 18 April 2026 · 3:46 am

Galt Emigrating to Rhodesia?

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 62-63:

TO THE CORE of his angry soul, Eric Galt identified with Wallace’s rants against big government, his championing of the workingman, his jeremiads on the spread of Communism. He even identified with the governor’s Alabama roots—Galt had lived for a brief time in Birmingham in 1967, and his Mustang still bore Alabama plates, which sported the state nickname, HEART OF DIXIE.

What Galt found most appealing about Wallace, though, was the governor’s stance as an unapologetic segregationist. Wallace’s rhetoric powerfully articulated Galt’s own smoldering prejudices. Although Galt was not politically sophisticated, he was a newspaper reader and something of a radio and television news junkie. His politics were composed of many inchoate gripes and grievances. On most topics he might best be described as a reactionary—he was, for example, drawn to the positions of the John Birch Society, to which he wrote letters, though never formally joined.

By late 1967, Galt had begun to gravitate toward stark positions on racial politics. He became intrigued by Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. In Puerto Vallarta he had bought a copy of U.S. News & World Report in which he found an advertisement soliciting immigrants for Rhodesia. The idea appealed to him so much that on December 28, 1967, he wrote to the American–Southern Africa Council in Washington, D.C., to inquire about relocating to Salisbury.

“My reason for writing is that I am considering immigrating to Rhodesia,” Galt said in his letter, noting that representatives from the John Birch Society had referred him to the council. “I would appreciate any information you could give me.” Not only did Galt hope to gain citizenship in Rhodesia; he was such an ardent believer in the cause of white rule and racial apartheid that he planned, as he later put it, to “serve two or three years in one of them mercenary armies” in southern Africa. While living in Los Angeles, he wrote to the president of the California chapter of the Friends of Rhodesia—an organization dedicated to improving relations with the United States—raising still more questions about immigration and inquiring about how he might subscribe to a pro–Ian Smith journal titled Rhodesian Commentary.

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Filed under biography, democracy, migration, nationalism, U.S., Zimbabwe

by | 17 April 2026 · 4:02 am

Eric Galt at a Clinical Psychologist

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:

FOR SOME TIME since his arrival in Los Angeles, Eric Galt had been paying visits to a clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark O. Freeman. Their first appointment was on the late afternoon of Monday, November 27, 1967, and Galt, sharply dressed as usual, walked into Freeman’s Beverly Hills office at around five o’clock. Dr. Freeman wrote in his daybook that his new patient hoped to “overcome his shyness, gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so he could relax, sleep and remember things better.”

They began to talk, and Dr. Freeman got a sense of the man. Galt naïvely seemed to believe that hypnosis was a form of communication expressed directly eye to eye, through some mysterious medium of thought rays. “He had the old power idea of hypnotism,” Freeman said. “He actually thought you could go around looking people in the eye and hypnotize them and make them do whatever you wanted them to do.”

Galt placed great value on the touted health benefits of hypnosis—and especially hoped to learn how to put himself under. All told, he met with Dr. Freeman on six occasions, throughout the months of November and December 1967. Dr. Freeman later said that Galt “made a favorable impression” on him. The sessions were productive, he thought, and the two men got along well.

“He was a good pupil,” Freeman said. “This fellow really wanted to improve his mind. He had a bent for reading. He didn’t fight hypnosis. I’d show him how to go under, and pretty soon he’d be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him a lot of positive feelings of competence.” While Freeman said that Galt confessed to no “deep dark secrets,” he did note that in at least one of their sessions together, Galt disclosed a “deep antipathy to negroes.”

Then, for reasons not known, Galt severed his relationship with Freeman, saying only that the psychologist “didn’t know nothing about hypnosis.” He canceled his last appointment with Freeman, telling him that his brother had found a job for him as a merchant seaman in New Orleans. Freeman never heard from Eric S. Galt again.

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