A minor scrape at Wounded Knee

The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, was a major and inglorious episode in US history that effectively put an end to Indian armed resistance. Given that it took place in 1890, I was puzzled to read in Val Fitch’s obituary in the September Physics Today (page 63 ) that “Val ‘was born … on March 10, 1923 … just 20 years after the battle of Wounded Knee.’“ That the misinformation is in quotes indicates it comes from something Fitch himself wrote.

The improperly truncated quote, it turns out, can be found in Fitch’s autobiographical sketch on the Nobel Prize website. It reads, in part, “my father, Fred Fitch, had acquired a ranch of more than 4 square miles and had persuaded a local school teacher, Frances Logsdon, to marry and join him in living there. They moved to the ranch just 20 years after the battle of Wounded Knee, which occurred about 40 miles northwest.” So his parents moved there in 1910, and he was born in 1923.

Purely anecdotally, there seems to be something about the hardy souls who grew up in that time and region that bred outstanding physicists. In addition to Fitch, Ernest Lawrence and Merle Tuve came from Canton, South Dakota, and Robert R. Wilson was born in Frontier, Wyoming. There are probably others, maybe of not quite the same level of renown.