The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

difficult to find. Darkness descend- ed, but the moon shortly thereafter came up to light the way. Kurds at the landing assisted in housing Mrs. Packard and others. Muller reached the landing at 1 a.m.; the remainder of the procession did not arrive until after 2 o’clock in the morning. Day 13: When the day dawned, the steamer and barge were visible about a mile from shore. Ferguson was able to pick up Dodd and Packard and the whole party reassembled by noon. The cars were loaded on a barge with some diffi- culty because the Kurds had burned the pier. But for some unexplained reason, the captain of the steamer maneuvered around near the land- ing for two hours before heading for Sheriff Khana. Day 14: The steamer arrived at Sheriff Khana without incident. By 11 a.m., the cars had been loaded onto the train and it was making its way toward Tabriz. Muller describes the group’s arrival there: “Carts, wag- ons and carriages were waiting to receive the sick, wounded and weary, the women and the children (which included almost all). Provision had been made for one good meal for all and for a continuance of rations of daily bread as well as houses to sleep in. The crowd at the station was large and many of those awaiting the arrival of the train were waiting to get news of relatives or friends who had been in Urmia. Consequently, many of the greetings were smoth- ered in tears of joy, but not a few who hoped for a joyful reunion turned back from the train with tears of sorrow. “It was a great privilege to have had even a small share in so great and successful an undertaking, and now that it is all over I can say that I have never before seen so complex a plan and so large an undertaking put through in Persia with so little delay and so little ‘hitch’ as this one was. Not one of the whole party to leave Urmia with us — neither little child nor aged woman — failed to arrive in Tabriz, and the only accident of any kind was that one woman fell and broke her leg. Again I am glad to say that under God the credit for the success of this enterprise goes to the American consul, Mr. Paddock, and the American flag, and secondly to the Persian gentleman, my friend Sardar-i-Fateh. ” Dr. Dodd, in a letter to the mission headquarters in New York added his impressions: “It was a trip with a good many sensations and some vivid men- tal pictures. One of the latter was of Old Glory rippling out bravely over a swaying and jolting Ford touring car, surrounded by the tossing sea of a hundred-odd tasseled turbans of the wild Kurdish horsemen who were escorting the consul in state to their siege headquarters just outside of Urmia. Another is of six hundred huddled, terrified women and chil- dren filing out of the Urmia gover- nor’s yard in the face of a huge crowd of Muslim spectators swarming over the streets, walls, roofs, and trees … And a third is of the same Syrian [Assyrian] and Armenian people the next day, safe, happy and carefree on the big barge which Dr. W.P. Ellis [a fellow missionary] brought across the lake to meet us. ” No Good Deed Goes Unpunished At the time of the rescue, Paddock had been outside the United States for almost 20 years. In a memorandum written in Washing- ton and addressed to the Secretary of State on Dec. 18, 1922, Paddock noted that he had requested the State Department’s permission to return to the United States and been “granted leave of absence for 60 days with permission to visit the United States.” On the basis of this author- ity, he left for Washington, paying his own way. Missionaries had already brought Paddock’s assistance to the attention of the Secretary of State. On Sept. 18, 1919, Mrs. Mary Lewis Shedd, widow of W.A. Shedd, wrote to Secretary of State Robert Lansing and enclosed a petition of appreciation from the Assyrian community. Relief organi- zations were also aware of his role and the fact that he was returning to the U.S. A letter of Feb. 2, 1922, from Charles W. Fowle, the foreign secretary of Near East Relief, to Wilbur J. Carr, director of Consular Services, reads: “We understand that Mr. Gordon Paddock, who has been American consul at Tabriz, Persia, for such a long period, is on his way home and should arrive shortly in this country. Because of the close connection which Mr. Paddock has had with the work of Near East Relief and the very valuable assistance which he has rendered to us and other American interests in his district, we are extremely anxious to get in touch with him promptly on his arrival for conference, and also to express our 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 The missionaries informed Paddock at dinner that evening that while he had been patiently waiting all day, his guest had gone into an adjoining room and “had a nice nap.”