When he was twenty-one years old, young Janairus was a reporter and
correspondent of a newspaper in Saint Louis. A few years later he went
East and secured a position on the New York Herald, where he quickly arose
to the front ranks among newspaper men. He was sent by the Herald to
Europe as correspondent for the duration of the Franco-Prussian war; there
he was with Bourbaki’s army, went to Lyons and Bordeaux, and attracted
much attention by his interviews with republican, monarchial and clerical
leaders.
He was the only newspaper correspondent in Paris during the whole period of the Commune, and he narrowly escaped death.
After the war he visited Russia as Herald correspondent, accompanied the expedition to Khiva, contrary to Russian orders, and later told of his experiences in "Campaigning on the Oxus" and "The Fall of Khiva." He had already reported the Alabama Conference at Geneva and accompanied General Sherman to the Caucasus. He reported the Carlist War in Spain and made a Polar voyage in 1875 which he described in “Under the Northern Lights.”
Soon after the polar expedition, accompanied by the United States Commissioner, Eugene Schuyler, he went to Bulgaria to investigate stories of Turkish atrocities. His articles telling of the sufferings of the people of Bulgaria at the hands of their oppressors stirred up so much feeling and resentment that the result was actually to help Bulgaria throw off the hateful yoke, and he came to be hailed as the deliverer of the land. When he visited the country afterward men, women and children smothered him with attentions, gathering around him so that he could scarcely make his way about, kissing the horse he rode; the spurs; the bridle, — anything that they could take hold of.
McGahan fell in love with and married a Russian lady of great rank. He continued to live abroad and was preparing to attend the International Congress at Berlin in 1878 when he fell ill in Constantinople, where he had been sojourning, and died there.
His remains were buried near the bank of the Bosphorus, but later in 1884, were brought back to this country and are buried in New Lexington, Ohio.
There on the same lot is buried his humble pioneer mother, Esther Dempsey McGahan.
Two years ago, when the late MRS. SUSAN TAYLOR of Marietta, Ohio was 99 years old and really did not expect to live much longer, she permitted her daughter to give to the newspapers the story of how during the Civil War, she had crossed a river near her then home, at Ellenboro, West Va. on the logs of a lumber jam.
Her exploit was not actuated by adventure. No—Susan was not like that. She had serious things to think of—for two years she had heard no word from her husband, a sharp-shooter in the Union Army. Finally there came a telegram to the post-office. It was the nearest post-office but it was
