Solomon Young’s brass telescope

Solomon Young’s brass telescope served first as a working instrument on the plains and later survived the destruction of the Young family home. Its two recorded appearances connect the scale of Solomon’s freight journeys to the family memory of the man Harry S. Truman would recall as a forceful presence in his background.

Use on the Plains

Solomon carried the telescope on his wagon-train expeditions to keep his bearings. These were immense undertakings: a customary train comprised forty to eighty canvas-covered freight wagons, each drawn by six yoke of oxen or mules and driven by two men. A wagon and team stretched ninety to one hundred feet, and with wagons spaced about one hundred feet apart, a train could extend across the prairie for as much as three miles. The comparison to a sea captain’s instrument captures the practical problem the telescope addressed: keeping direction amid a moving enterprise spread over a vast landscape.

Solomon made several journeys west before the Civil War, perhaps beginning as early as 1846. The freight he hauled could be worth $30,000 or more, and his recorded wealth rose from $5,000 in 1850 to nearly $50,000 by 1860. The telescope belonged to this period of his life as a freighter, when navigation and commercial risk were part of the same undertaking.

Survival of the Young Home

Solomon died in 1892. Less than a year later, a fire accidentally started while a servant girl was lighting a coal-oil lamp burned the Young house to the ground. Practically nothing was saved. A small temporary house was built on the same spot for Grandma Young, and Uncle Harrison returned to help manage things, but the old way of life at the homeplace had ended.

The telescope was the one personal possession of Solomon’s known to have survived. He had given it to Matt sometime before the fire. In a disaster that erased nearly everything else, the instrument remained as a particular object with a history of its own: carried across the plains, passed within the family, and preserved when the family home was lost.

Family Memory

The account leaves Harry’s feelings about his grandfather’s death unrecorded. In later years, however, Harry spoke of Solomon as the big man in his background: someone who made his own way through nerve and will, saw the West while it was still wild, played a part in history, and always came home to Missouri. The telescope’s survival gives that remembered life a material trace. It links Harry’s later image of Solomon to the journeys that had made him a freighter, while its endurance contrasts with the destruction of the house and the passing of the household’s former way of life.