A while back I stumbled on the site genealogytrails.com and found a story from a newspaper in 1899. (You can see it here.) I tried to find this story on the Hoosier State Chronicles, but found another that I attached to the findagrave memorial for the main character of the story. (You can find it here.) (I should have checked the Library of Congress site of Chronicling America.) But I figured that they probably got the details from a local paper, so I went to the microfilm at the Rensselaer Library.
Back then Rensselaer had competing newspapers. The editor of the Rensselaer Republican was George Marshall, who in the early 20th century sold the paper and moved to Oregon to run an orchard. He is mostly remembered today as the father of Edison Tesla Marshall, a very successful writer in the first half of the twentieth century, though his books are rarely read today. Below is the column George Marshall wrote. Note that the "incident" is not mentioned until the very end and there is no name mentioned.
I was not familiar with the word "Zouaves". Here is an explanation.
The other paper was the Jasper County Democrat, edited by Frank E. Babcock. Mr. Babcock was often at odds with other local people, especially Republicans, and my guess the William Rhoades was a Republican. Here is his take on the incident.
It is always interesting to see different accounts of the same event. All news reports are filtered through a human brain and humans can have very different ways of seeing the world. What I like about the old newspapers is that they did not pretend that their reporting was objective but openly announced the positions from which they would report the news.
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Didn't you ever have to attend Fr. Gerlach's History of St. Joseph's College? He had lovely pictures of the Zoaves, but never explained them. They had very fancy uniforms and as I have an interest in turn of the (last) century women's clothes, I recognized the style, which was popular, then. Of course I had to videotape each lecture, so I saw it, again and again, until he retired ��
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