K E L LY ’ S I N D U S T R I A L A R M Y
516
KELLY’S INDUSTRIAL ARMY was one of a num-ber of “industrial armies,” born of the panic of 1893, that pressed the federal government to help the unemployed. During the 1890s, Californian Charles T. Kelly rallied fifteen hundred men, many out of work, to this cause. In the spring of 1894, Kelly’s followers boarded railroad box-cars bound for Washington, D.C. They planned to join Jacob S. Coxey’s army, which had recently captured na-tional headlines by marching from Ohio to the nation’s capital. At Council Bluffs, Iowa, the railroad ejected Kelly’s army. Many of Kelly’s supporters, however, con-tinued their journey on foot and eventually joined Coxey’s army in Washington.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McMurry, Donald Le Crone. Coxey’s Army: A Study of the In-dustrial Army Movement of 1894. 1929. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.
Schwantes, Carlos A. Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey. Lin-coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Carl L. Cannon /e. m.
See also Coxey’s Army; Financial Panics.
KENESAW MOUNTAIN, BATTLE OF (27 June 1864). As Union general William Tecumseh Sherman ad-vanced southward from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in his campaign to Atlanta, he used flanking movements to avoid a protracted confrontation with his opponent, Gen-eral J. E. Johnston. As he neared Atlanta, Sherman came upon the Confederate army, drawn up with its center oc-cupying the crest of Kenesaw Mountain. His frontal at-tack was repulsed with heavy losses. Several days later, he resumed his flanking movements, forcing Johnston south-ward to the line of the Chattahoochee River. The unnec-essary assault on Kenesaw Mountain was one of Sher-man’s few serious errors in the campaign.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fellman, Michael. Citizen Sherman: ALife of William Tecumseh Sherman. New York: Random House, 1995.
McDonough, James L. “War So Terrible”: Sherman and Atlanta. New York: Norton, 1987.
Royster, Charles. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sher-man, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans. New York: Knopf, 1991.
Thomas Robson Hay /a. r.
See also Atlanta Campaign; Sherman’s March to the Sea.
KENNEBEC RIVER SETTLEMENTS of Maine were the focus of colonial competition among English investors, the Crown, Puritans, and French Acadians dur-ing the seventeenth century. Sir John Popham, the lord chief justice of England, was one of the first British spon-sors to attempt settlement in North America, establishing
a colony called Sagadahoc in 1607. Sagadahoc was aban-doned in 1608 upon the death of its president, George Popham. In 1622 King James I granted land for the “Province of Maine” to Sir Fernando Gorges. By 1639 the province had pressed claims against Acadia, the French colony to the north, as far as the St. Croix River, the modern U.S.-Canadian boundary. In 1643 the proprie-tary governor of Maine, Thomas Gorges, returned to England to fight in the Civil War. Soon the Puritans of Massachusetts annexed Maine and its Kennebec River settlements, transforming them from the domain of an ineffectual proprietor into the frontier of Puritan society for the next century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reid, John G. Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.
Timothy M. Roberts
KENNEDY ASSASSINATION. See Assassinations,
Presidential.
KENSINGTON STONE is either an important fourteenth-century relic or an impressive hoax. It pur-ports to be the inscribed account of a pre-Columbian Scandinavian exploration into the Great Lakes territory of North America. The stone was supposedly discovered in Kensington, Minnesota, in 1898 by a Swedish immigrant and farmer, Olof Ohman, who claimed to have unearthed the stone on his property. The stone is an irregularly shaped rectangular slab of graywacke, a sedimentary rock, and is about two and a half feet high, three to six inches thick, and fifteen inches wide. After the stone was discov-ered, it was kept in a bank in Kensington until early 1899, when its existence was publicized in newspapers. The stone’s symbols were then discovered to be runic and were translated into several languages. When translated into English, the inscription reads:
Eight Swedes and Twenty-two Norwegians on an ex-ploration journey from Vinland westward. We had our camp by 2 rocky islets one day’s journey north of this stone. We were out fishing one day. When we came home we found ten men red with blood and dead. AVM save us from evil. We have ten men by the sea to look after our ships, fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.
When news of the inscription was released, it was quickly dismissed by academics at American and Scandi-navian universities as a hoax or a forgery. The stone was then returned to Ohman, who claimed to use it as a door-stop until 1907, when the writer Hjalmar Rued Holand acquired the stone with the intent to prove its authentic-ity. Holand spent the rest of his life arguing for the legit-imacy of the stone. He believed that Vikings had reached Minnesota territory in the fourteenth century and that an
