It was a classic nineteenth-century frontier city. Located on a major river, it exploded from a handful of native huts to a vital center of trade by channeling to the world an abundant local resource that filled hungry needs thousands of miles away. Men on the make organized new methods of tapping the hinterland, first dominating and then exploiting the indigenous population. Local wages were high, but so were prices: staples like coffee and beans cost four times what they did in New York City. Outsiders considered this city wild and woolly, but as money poured in it took on respectable trappings—handsome public buildings (it soon was the capital of a new state), large and ostentatious private homes, and its greatest pride, a fabulous opera house with a baroque interior featuring lots of Italian marble, red velvet, and gold leaf. Before long, it boasted one of its nation’s first electrical lighting systems and a bit later telephone service.
But then, trouble. The world market began to draw on other regions for the local resource, and competition drove the price disastrously downward. As so often on the frontier, the dizzying boom was followed by a painful bust.
The city might have been one of many in the Far West during the latter nineteenth-century, but it was in another country, in fact on another continent. It was Manaus, on Brazil’s Negro River, just above where it joins the Amazon—nine hundred miles upstream from the Atlantic. Many thousands of wild rubber trees in the surrounding rain forest enabled the great boom. (In a variation of the metaphor of streets paved with gold, one of Manaus’s thoroughfares was paved with rubber.) Its bust followed the development of rubber plantations in Asia. The opera house was the dazzling Amazonas Theater, which survives as a reminder of the years when Manaus was flush with wealth and confident of an even greater future.1
Manaus can remind us that frontier cities have been a global phenomenon, and have played important roles in world history since the earliest years of colonial empires. Manaus also helps us draw distinctions among frontier cities: specifically how nineteenth-century cities, in the closing phases of world frontiers, differed from frontier cities before them. This volume shows what distinguished the frontier cities of the United States from Goa, Manila, and Montreal. There are plenty of possibilities: a lot happened in the centuries between the rise of urban centers in India, the Philippines, and New France and those in California, Montana, and Oregon. The trick is to sort through those changes and to ask which had more influence than others.
For nineteenth-century America, one obvious point stands out. The United States acquired the Far West, and its far western frontier cities sprouted and grew at precisely the same time as the full blossom of the nation’s transportation and communications revolutions.
American railroads were first laid out in the 1830s, but they really took off only after the easing of the 1837 depression, spreading first across the eastern United States. Then, from 1865 to 1880, the miles of trackage rose from thirty-five thousand to nearly a hundred thousand.2 It was during those years, from 1840 to 1880, that the United States annexed or conquered the 1,200,000 square miles of the Far West, defeated its resistant Indians, organized these lands politically, and laid down their bureaucratic structures. It was then, too, that most of the West’s cities appeared—or, if they had already been there, it was when these cities took on their modern shapes.
Then there was the telegraph. If we gauge communication by the obvious measures, speed and extent, the telegraph was the greatest achievement in human history.3 It separated the man from the message. Previously, information moved only as fast as people did, with the limited exceptions of methods like semaphore and carrier pigeons. For the first time, messages moved electronically across wires, essentially at the speed of light. The scale of change was enormous: railroads moved physical objects ten to fifteen times faster than freight wagons; the telegraph moved information more than forty million times faster than a man on a galloping horse.
Samuel F. B. Morse sent Albert Vail his famous message “What hath God wrought?” in May of 1844, six months before James Polk was elected president, a year and a half before Texas was annexed, two years before the Oregon Treaty, and only four years before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—at the precise moment of territorial expansion for a newly continental United States. The telegraph spread even more rapidly than the railroads. Morse’s first line ran about forty miles from the national capital to Baltimore. By 1880 the United States alone had about two hundred thousand miles of wire strung across it, and in that year nearly thirty-two million messages crackled through the system.4 Western cities like Phoenix, Butte, and Virginia City now were potentially in direct communication with London, Tokyo, and Calcutta.
Building an infrastructure of rails and wires and birthing the West as a distinct region, the two developments grew up together. They were historical twins, and like most twins they played off one another. The enormous distances and the varied geography of the new West stimulated new methods of railroad construction and the development of new equipment. The distances, when combined with the reality of far-scattered settlements and little direct access to markets, encouraged a partnership between the federal government and corporations to set out the networks of rails and wires across the West. And just as the challenges of the newly acquired West inspired innovations in transportation and communication, the revolution in the movement of things and information profoundly affected the emergence of the West as a distinctive region.5 Certainly it shaped its emergent cities.
Consider San Francisco: The sleepy California port was transformed by the greatest coincidence in American history: the discovery of gold on the state’s American River, roughly two hundred hours before Alta California was acquired in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. California’s first great export, gold, was a classic frontier export—an item low in volume relative to its market value. For the far-flung cities of early modern frontiers, such luxury goods as gold, silver, silk, and spices were the only feasible commerce.
Not so with California, however. Remarkably soon it began exporting a product from the other extreme, something of much greater volume, bulky and hard to handle, yet low in value per pound. California started shipping out wheat, by the thousands of bushels.6 By the mid-1850s, after grain production in the Central Valley had satisfied the local mining towns and the local market of San Francisco, businessmen began looking outward. Wheat was shipped to Australia, Peru, Chile, Hawaii, and China, but the great boon proved to be shipments to England. In 1860, nearly half of all wheat and flour exported from California was to the British Isles, a portion that rose to eighty percent by 1867. In the following year, a bit more than one-third of all wheat exported from the United States left through San Francisco. In 1869, two hundred forty ships passed through the Golden Gate carrying wheat or flour, an average of two ships every three days; by 1882, it was five hundred fifty ships, or three every two days.
This seemingly unusual trading pattern was powered by the low cost of producing wheat in California, because from the start production there was well mechanized and accomplished on large units of land. Even more critical, however, was the revolution in movement that pushed down transportation costs. In 1869, New England shipbuilders launched the first medium clipper, or “Down Easter.” It carried more than previous clipper ships and sailed faster, reducing passage from San Francisco to Liverpool from no less than four months down to as few as a hundred days. As a result, English grain production plummeted and imports increased, shifting from the relatively close-by fields of Eastern Europe to ports in India, on the Black Sea, and along the Pacific coast. Meanwhile, back in California, rapid rail construction allowed San Francisco more efficient access into the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Salinas Valleys.
The communication revolution was just as important for California’s success. The essential figure here was an under-recognized pioneer in the new economy of frontier cities, a burly, six-foot-seven-inch-tall German immigrant named Isaac Friedlander, who became known as San Francisco’s “Grain King.” Friedlander’s genius was to realize that profits came to the mid-nineteenth-century frontier city through the coordination of information over great spaces. Shippers were not going to send vessels to some newly emerging economy without some assurance that they would find a cargo to carry; Californians were not going to keep growing wheat unless they were reasonably sure they could sell it. Friedlander developed a sophisticated system to gather estimates of local grain production and then utilized the continental telegraph and the newly completed transatlantic cable to see where commercial carriers were available around the globe. Friedlander then found the credit to bring it all together. Thus, grain grown along the San Joaquin River chugged by rail to the coast to be carried around Cape Horn on Down Easters built in New England, then delivered fourteen thousand nautical miles from San Francisco to Liverpool, where it meshed seamlessly with other shipments from India and elsewhere, satisfying the English grain market.
What distinguished San Francisco’s experience as that of a frontier city was how the revolutions that were transforming the world at large were brought to bear on a place that still bore the marks that had defined frontiers for five centuries: unusually unsettled conditions and fluid possibilities, the ready availability of unexploited land and the lack of well-established legal and political systems. (As elsewhere, San Francisco was a city where displaced native peoples had been using the land in their own ways and living by their own systems for millennia—only to change with shocking speed.) In a frontier city, thoroughly modern arrangements like Friedlander’s could emerge with a speed and an ease of innovation incomprehensible in more settled cities where older ways were firmly in place. In a metaphor local boosters would enjoy, San Francisco was born like Athena, springing onto the map of the United States fully formed. Through these technologies, San Francisco leapfrogged into an economy of modern production and international connectedness, becoming a hub with a speed unknown in world history.
Figure 6.1. With the help of revolutions in communication and transportation, California agriculture was born modern, as suggested in this illustration from The Graphic, 1883. Author’s collection.
California provided an extreme case of what could be seen elsewhere in the new American West, as suggested by an intriguing map from the 1870 census. In an effort to gauge “the relative power” of different areas in agricultural production, government statisticians ranked wheat-producing regions by efficiency on a scale of one to four; places producing the most bushels with the fewest workers and the least improved acreage received the highest ranking.7 Most of the Midwest—the most productive region in terms of total output—ranked only one or two. A slice of Minnesota earned a top grade of four, and parts of Michigan and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys ranked three. Out West, where wheat production was barely under way, four areas earned a ranking of three: Montana’s Yellowstone and Gallatin River Valleys, the South Platte Valley along the Colorado Front Range, the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and part of the farmland around the Great Salt Lake. California’s Central Valley received the top grade as well.
And just as the Central Valley channeled its wheat through San Francisco, the other high-scoring farming areas had their own funnel cities. Bozeman, Denver, and Salt Lake City supplied large regional markets that soon would expand as rail connections improved. Portland, Oregon, was already exporting wheat, increasing dramatically when the railroad to the inland Palouse country was completed. The nation’s youngest farming regions were among its most advanced, and the cities they served capitalized on their successes.
The transportation and communication advantages also enabled the growth of frontier cities in other economic zones as well. Mining centers that were plugged into the continental transportation network could quickly acquire the necessary equipment and labor, creating what were, in effect, sophisticated underground factories in an astonishingly short span of time. From its founding, Leadville, Colorado, possessed a more comprehensive industrial culture than many manufacturing centers of the East. Virginia City, Nevada, sitting over the Comstock Lode, was another obvious example. In 1861, just two years after silver was discovered there, the city had forty-six mills with more than twelve hundred stamps to process ore from the nearly fifty miles of tunnels beneath it.8 As the mines were dug deeper, engineers devised the world’s most advanced methods. In extent and size alone the operation was astounding: One pump built to suck water out of a mine ran off a flywheel forty feet in diameter and weighing 220,000 pounds.9
Virginia City’s sprawling plant and its wormwood of mechanized tunnels was conceivable only in terms of the same combination of communication and transportation advantages that produced northern California’s wheat empire. On the Sierra Nevada’s eastern slope, another frontier region had suddenly opened, with the traditional lack of structure and unforeseen difficulties. Yet this frontier was different because of national infrastructure: Rails and modern shipping allowed engineers to bring in whatever they needed to exploit its suddenly revealed resources.
These connections allowed mid-nineteenth-century frontier cities to produce a far wider range of materials. The effect, once again, was to telescope their development. San Francisco quickly emerged as a manufacturing hub supplying a large portion of the Pacific coast and the interior. It produced slaughtered beef, glassware, blue jeans, and, especially, mining equipment. From south of Market Street came hoses and huge nozzles for mining, pumps and stamps, ore cleaners and amalgamating pans, retorts and boilers bound for the Comstock. Farther south along the bay were heavier industries manufacturing steel, building ships, and processing whale oil. In a remarkably short span of time San Francisco’s industry was supplying a market second in size only to Chicago’s.10
The transportation and communication revolutions set these frontier cities apart from those of the past. Like the clipper ships and the railroad, the telegraph shrank the gap between the frontier and its traditionally distinctive conditions and the rest of the world. This exchange worked both ways: as on past frontiers, new exploration and the potential for new wealth created a burst of new local knowledge. (Typically, of course, these discoveries were also grossly exaggerated and lied about.) So too could the telegraph spread what is summed up by that elusive term, the “frontier mentality.” This term covers the intense excitement inspired by that burst of fresh local knowledge that found expression in an individual’s compulsion to be first upon the spoor of some big chance to profit from the frontier’s developing wealth.11
When new local knowledge spurred the frontier mentality, people went into motion. Men and women got word of some new frontier, and, like Huck Finn, they lit out for the territories. Earlier in the nineteenth century, ambitious farmers in the Carolinas heard about great farmland in Texas, and they went there. Word arrived of gold on the American River, and people rushed to California. But long before, as they descended on what Walter Prescott Webb called “The Great Frontier,” others had acted out that mentality long distance.12 Early modern frontiers opened in concert with the emergence of modern commercial life and fostered the creation of prototypes of the modern corporation. People could invest in distant booms, taking the frontier plunge alongside those who were riding or walking or sailing to some distant place. Instead of actually going there to exploit the newly available resources, they plunged vicariously by putting down their money. If these frontier investors made a profit, they succeeded not by seeking out the most valuable resources but by taking advantage of the most lucrative information. They were cultivators and prospectors, not of mining claims or fertile land, but of local knowledge.
By essentially eliminating distance, the telegraph brought the impulse and the information together instantaneously. Previously, information about frontier wealth in Macao or Goa, Jamestown or Texas, had traveled at the excruciatingly slow speed of ships and camels, horses and trains. Now it moved at light speed, at 670 million miles per hour. New local knowledge, including rumors and lies, was immediately accessible to anyone connected to the telegraphic grid. As on earlier frontiers, investors could bet on new possibilities—to take the frontier plunge without actually going there. With the telegraph, anyone along the wire could do so with virtually no lag time, as if they were there.
Seen in this way, the urban stock exchange becomes an emblematic site of the new western frontier, right up there with the placer claim and the home-steader’s soddy. San Francisco again offers a prime example. The San Francisco Mining and Stock Exchange opened in 1862 with a handful of members paying fifty dollars each for a seat.13 Not a dime of business was done during the first two days, but that soon changed. As more and more mining stocks were traded—thirteen hundred companies were on the exchange within a year—and as an ever-wider public became caught up in the shadow realities of rumors, speculations and lies, the result was a swirling blizzard of corporate paper. The quantity of a company’s shares traded in a single day might be double the number in circulation. When news of the Big Bonanza hit in 1874, the value of Comstock paper opened at $93 million. Two weeks later it was more than $300 million, roughly one and a half times the assessed value of all San Francisco real estate. “And from whence came our orders?” a founder of the exchange later asked. He wrote:
from San Francisco, and, literally, from the kitchen to the pulpit; from every shade in life, and from every nationality represented in San Francisco. Chinamen were large gamblers in mining stocks. Sacramento, Virginia City and Carson City were large traders; Virginia City in particular. Wherever the telegraph wire extended, our orders would roll in on us. The Eastern cities also, New York in particular . . . London, Paris, Berlin and Frankfort sent us orders.14
But if buy orders came from kitchens and pulpits, not much of the profit went to housewives and preachers. Robert Louis Stevenson, who had come to the city to court his future wife, put it well: the mining exchange was “the heart of San Francisco; a great pump we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the pockets of the millionaires. . . .”15 Those pockets were in the pants of the investors closest to the action and most skillful in manipulating information and riding the resulting soar and collapse of stock prices. Wealth was its raw material, wired in from across the world, but even rawer was the commodity of public hope and naïveté, gathered to yet another frontier. The prescient few could harvest it at just the right moment.
In a sense it was all invisible, the units of capital and abstract commitments riding on electricity, an economy of the ether. The material consequences, however, were enormous. Money gleaned from tens of thousands of exchanges paid for much of the development in a wide arc around San Francisco—hydraulic mining, including gargantuan water delivery systems; manufacturing; ranching; real estate; shipping; city water works; and, not least, even more railroads and telegraph lines. Thus the twin revolutions fed one another. The shrinking distances in the movement of information generated capital that was used in turn to construct economies newly possible because of the revolution in moving physical things.
The new West’s connectedness had other consequences, including in its human makeup. It would have been natural to expect that easier access to the frontier would mean that the settled society of the eastern United States would reproduce itself easily—that Ohio-like neighborhoods of families would quickly appear in towns and cities in Montana, Nevada, Colorado, and California. But not so. In fact new frontier cities were, if anything, more out-of-line demographically with the urban East than earlier ones had been, and the reason once again was the combination of the movement revolution and persisting frontier traits.16 Those heading west did so with ease, but they still found frontier conditions: physically crude, socially unsettled cities wanting for order and cultural amenities. That was unsurprising in itself, as social and cultural maturity is a subtle process. It takes time. But what is less obvious is how ease of movement slowed such maturity rather than speeding it up. The thinness of social and governmental basics—education, religion, reliable government and urban services—on past frontiers had discouraged families from moving west. It still did. Now, however, as families looked westward to the frontier promise, it was possible to consider pursuing that promise without going at all—that is, not going as a family unit.
There were two reasons for this demographic change. First, on these mid-nineteenth-century frontiers, entire families were less necessary to some of the work, most obviously mining, than they had been on the earlier, overwhelmingly agricultural frontiers. In the trans-Appalachian region early in the nineteenth century, for instance, adult males on their own were highly unusual and single women almost unheard of.17 The family was the essential unit of production and support, which placed a premium as well on reproduction. For most men, heading west and living there for an extended time alone simply made no sense, and so there was nothing remotely resembling later frontier towns full of unattached men in the absence of women or children. Mechanized-agriculture frontiers also had far less need for families, and so made the gender balance of immigration dramatically more lopsided.
Second, the new transportation meant that the frontier could play a wholly different role in someone’s life trajectory. In the past the assumption always had been that those moving to some distant frontier would be gone for many years, with the strong possibility that they would never return. Accounts of families taking their leave are often heartrending: Grown daughters and sons and cling to parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends, everyone weeping, wrenched by the thought that every mutual touch and sight might be the last. Now, however, it was feasible, and in fact it was often presumed, that going west would be not the start of a new life but merely a sojourn. The overwhelmingly male itinerant population included not only bachelors but also family men meaning to make money quickly and to head home or to establish a firm base before sending for wives and children. Such life-plotting would have been unthinkable without the faith that families, using new systems of movement, could voluntarily fracture and reassemble far more easily than only a couple of generations earlier.
This pattern had its international dimension. Into new western cities flooded immigrants, by far most of them men. They moved along routes smoothed by the new means of travel, drawn to work in economies born of quickened links to a wider world. They came from across the continent and from around the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—gold-and silver-seekers from Australia, France, Peru, Germany, Sonora, and Chile, railroad workers from Ireland, Scandinavian lumbermen and fishermen, and tens of thousands of Chinese, even more heavily male than other groups, who labored in the diggings, on railroads, as domestics, and in the few businesses where they were permitted.18 Like their native-born neighbors, a great portion of these foreigners came planning to stay a few years before heading home or bringing families to join them.
Thus the nineteenth-century frontier city held a paradox: on earlier frontiers, far more difficult to reach, settled society reproduced itself demographically almost from the start, while afterward, when people could arrive much more easily, towns and cities were often wildly out-of-whack with the demographics of immigrants’ home communities. In addition, more and more women in the East were drawn to new opportunities and greater independence in places such as New York City and Boston. “The wilderness may have been the frontier for American men,” David Potter has written of these years, “but the city was the frontier for American women.”19 So as western cities grew with an abundance of males, those in the East tilted in the other direction.
And while the East Coast typically is regarded as the destination for Gilded Age America’s great influx of immigrants, parts of the West held a substantially higher portion of foreign-born persons. In 1870, New York had the highest percentage of immigrants of any state on the Atlantic coast (26 percent), but Montana’s percentage was half again that of New York’s (39 percent), Nevada’s even higher (44 percent), and Idaho’s double that of the Empire State (53 percent). The portion of aliens in a western town or city, furthermore, was typically substantially higher than in its state or territory as a whole. As late as 1880, thirty-one years after its boom, San Francisco still had more foreign-born persons than it had females.20 And if we admit larger towns into the category of city, the difference in urban demography is even more striking. The percentage of aliens in a place like Idaho City, Idaho, was greater than that of any census tract in New York City.21
The distinctive human profiles of newer urban frontiers hold important clues to the cultural and social patterns on those frontiers. Take, for instance, the perennial question of whether the West was more violent than the settled East and, if so, why. Begin with a few commonsensical points: men are much more prone to violence than women; people are more likely to act violently toward persons of different cultures they objectify as “the other”; and violence is more likely where there is physical, economic, and sexual stress. Now consider that, in part because of their connectedness, western towns and cities were dominated by men tossed together with strangers and living lives of discomfort, of hopes dashed, and of libidos denied. Perhaps far western cities were particularly violent partly because they were so easy to get to.22
The revolutionary ease of movement reached deeper into the nature of frontier development as well. The two points raised so far—the early appearance of advanced economies and the flocking of so many men from so many different places—had especially doleful effects on native peoples. The environmental results of mining were bad for everybody—mountains denuded, choking clouds laced with arsenic, and hillsides washed into rivers thick with silt and poisoned with mercury. The consequences for Indians were disastrous. The boom of populations, the sudden appearance of towns and the scouring of the countryside for new strikes quickly depleted game populations, destroyed sources of plant food, and disrupted patterns of movement essential to hunting, gathering, and fishing economies. Large-scale agriculture and cattle ranching had the same deleterious effects.23
Nineteenth-century urban frontiers were also distinctive for how they did not develop: they did not facilitate local intercultural relations of the sort described by Allen Gallay, Brett Rushforth, and Daniel Usner elsewhere in this volume. Cities from Goa to Montreal to New Orleans relied on what Usner calls “back door economies,” where newcomers bought or bartered with natives for subsistence needs and for marketable goods, notably furs. With the exception of the American Southwest, which entered into the new transportation and communication networks later than settlements elsewhere, such relations seem to have operated on mid-nineteenth-century urban frontiers only very briefly, if they developed at all. If these frontier cities had any back doors, they were open only a crack and then they were slammed shut. Instead, American Indians were drafted to work in the diggings and the fields or to labor as domestics, or they lived as best they could on the margins. In conditions like those Matthew Klingle described for American Indians at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Indians in Virginia City squatted in a dump at the foot of Taylor Street, living in huts made of scrap lumber. The men earned a bit of money by splitting and carrying wood while women worked as servants for “cold grub they [could] carry home.” Their competition for these menial jobs were those immigrants similarly shoved to the edges of society and the workplace, the Chinese.24
Finally, it is worth wondering whether the distinctive traits of nineteenth-century frontier cities have in some ways persisted and continued to shape these urban centers. The combination of older frontier-city traits and a revolutionary connectedness allowed these cities to have a remarkable flexibility to make of themselves what seemed most opportune. Today cities like Los Angeles and Seattle somehow seem freer than most to reinvent themselves. Probably the prime example, as the late Hal Rothman memorably described, is Las Vegas.25 Jet travel, superhighways, and the instant information flow undergirding distant electronic betting permit an easy connection between the frontier mentality of plunge and grab with the perception of fabulous opportunities and anything-goes behavior. As Robert Louis Stevenson found in San Francisco, money in Las Vegas also flows from the pockets and purses of the middling masses into those of wealthy investors and the locally connected.
Such musings bring us back to Manaus, high up the Amazon, which crashed with the world rubber price in the 1920s and withered to a steamy backwater—until, that is, it was reborn. In 1966, the Brazilian government made Manaus a duty-free port, which granted the city significant economic advantages. Foreign businesses set up makeshift factories, flying in untaxed materials to be assembled with cheap local labor, and Manaus became a major electronics manufacturing center. Imported foreign goods were offered in stores and on the streets at astonishingly low prices.26 Nine hundred miles upriver, Manaus emerged as a major international port, thanks to the next movement revolution, the airplane. Air travel again changed the calculations, as a traveler leaving Miami will spend five and a quarter hours flying to Manaus, but more than six hours to reach San Francisco.
Today Manaus is a city of nearly two million people and a major destination for bargain-hunters from around the hemisphere. Its connections and opportunities make it a strikingly modern outpost in a vast hinterland, as the writer-adventurer Joe Kane discovered in 1985. Kane was part of the first team to float the entire length of the Amazon. After weeks in the world’s largest rain forest, disconnected from the networks of the twentieth century, he paddled his kayak into the port and found himself amid skyscrapers, slums, prefab factories, plush hotels, and street markets mobbed with shoppers buying German tennis rackets, Japanese motorcycles, and Italian espresso machines. A few days later Kane shoved off for several more weeks in a watery wilderness before reaching the Atlantic.27 Paddling out of the Amazon, Kane was passing out of an earlier mode, where frontier conditions were defined by isolation. Arriving in Manaus, he encountered the revolutionary changes begun in the mid-nineteenth-century frontier city, where distance suddenly shrank and global markets connected even remote places to international trends.
Perhaps the defining trait of the new frontiers is their ability to surprise us with startling juxtapositions. Joe Kane could have testified to that. Earlier he had stopped at a swampy village of six huts. Hauling his kayak up a bluff, he was met by a frail elderly woman, Flora, and her adolescent grandson. Physically isolated, the young man was tied to the wider world enough to develop fantasies. He dreamed of becoming a lawyer, drawing on connections he had experienced since birth. When Kane asked the boy’s name, and as her grandson shrugged and played a little air guitar, Flora answered, “Elvis Presley.”28