Category: History

From the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this by Meriwether Lewis for May 14, 1805. They were in what is now Fort Peck Lake in northeastern Montana:

   Some fog on the river this morning, which is a very rare occurrence; the country much as it was yesterday with this difference that the bottoms are somewhat wider; passed some high black bluffs. saw immence herds of buffaloe today also Elk deer wolves and Antelopes. passed three large creeks one on the Stard. and two others on the Lard. side, neither of which had any runing water. Capt Clark walked on shore and killed a very fine buffaloe cow. I felt an inclination to eat some veal and walked on shore and killed a very fine buffaloe calf and a large woolf, much the whitest I had seen, it was quite as white as the wool of the common sheep. one of the party wounded a brown bear very badly, but being alone did not think proper to pursue him. In the evening the men in two of the rear canoes discovered a large brown bear lying in the open grounds about 300 paces from the river, and six of them went out to attack him, all good hunters; they took the advantage of a small eminence which concealed them and got within 40 paces of him unperceived, two of them reserved their fires as had been previously conscerted, the four others fired nearly at the same time and put each his bullet through him, two of the balls passed through the bulk of both lobes of his lungs, in an instant this monster ran at them with open mouth, the two who had reserved their fires discharged their pieces at him as he came towards them, boath of them struck him, one only slightly and the other fortunately broke his shoulder, this however only retarded his motion for a moment only, the men unable to reload their guns took to flight, the bear pursued and had very nearly overtaken them before they reached the river; two of the party betook themselves to a canoe and the others seperated an concealed themselves among the willows, reloaded their pieces, each discharged his piece at him as they had an opportunity they struck him several times again but the guns served only to direct the bear to them, in this manner he pursued two of them seperately so close that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and pouches and throw themselves into the river altho’ the bank was nearly twenty feet perpendicular; so enraged was this anamal that he plunged into the river only a few feet behind the second man he had compelled take refuge in the water, when one of those who still remained on shore shot him through the head and finally killed him; they then took him on shore and butched him when they found eight balls had passed through him in different directions; the bear being old the flesh was indifferent, they therefore only took the skin and fleece …

There’s more.

It was on this day in 1796, that Edward Jenner, a doctor, inoculated an eight-year-old boy with a vaccine for smallpox. It was the first safe vaccine ever developed, and it was the first time anyone had successfully prevented the infection of any contagious disease. What made it so remarkable was that it was accomplished before the causes of disease were even understood, decades before anyone even knew about the existence of germs.

Jenner was a country doctor. He studied for a few years in a hospital in London, and learned something about the scientific method. Smallpox at the time was the most devastating disease in the world. It caused boils to break out all over the body, and killed about one in four adults who caught it, and one in every three children. It was so contagious, most people who lived in populous areas caught it at some point in their lives.

From The Writer’s Almanac, which has more.

Update May 15: There’s another story on the origins of smallpox vaccination at hedgeblog.

The first lasting English settlement in North America was established on this date in 1607 at Jamestown [Virginia]. From aboard the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, 104 men landed to remain behind when the ships left for England.

The United States Congress declared war on Mexico on this date in 1846. (Open hostilities had begun in April.)

Two days earlier, in a message to Congress, President Polk had claimed:

The cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before the recent information from the frontier of the Del Norte [Rio Grande]. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.

(Of course, Mexico did not recognize the Rio Grande as the border.)

Within a few hours the House passed a resolution authorizing war 173-14. The Senate interrupted its debate about whether to abolish West Point and discussed the matter of war for a day before agreeing 42-2.

At a cabinet meeting on the 13th, Polk corrected Secretary of State Buchanan of the notion that the U.S. did not intend to acquire New Mexico or California. Such acquisition might be necessary to indemnify us Polk said, and he would accept war with “either England or France or all the Powers of Christendom” rather than pledge “that we would not if we could fairly and honourably acquire California or any other part of Mexican territory which we desired.”

The very first burial at Arlington was on this date in 1864. There have been 240,000 since.

A week ago NewMexiKen posted a quotation from Dwight Eisenhower. Here is the (slightly) corrected quotation, which is from a November 8, 1954, letter to his brother Edgar:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Read the whole letter from among The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower.

The last spike was driven to complete the American transcontinental railroad on this date in 1869.

Last year on May 10, NewMexiKen posted two entries on the subject:
And the Continent was spanned with iron and Promontory Summit.

The American Experience has a biographical essay on the abolitionist John Brown, who was born on this date in 1800. I recommend it.

He has been called a saint, a fanatic, and a cold-blooded murderer. The debate over his memory, his motives, about the true nature of the man, continues to stir passionate debate. It is said that John Brown was the spark that started the Civil War. Truly, he marked the end of compromise over the issue of slavery, and it was not long after his death that John Brown’s war became the nation’s war.

… in 1937 the zeppelin Hindenburg exploded and crashed at the Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirteen of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew were killed, as well as one ground crew member.

Listen to Herbert Morrison’s famous broadcast [RealAudio] from Old Time Radio.

Here’s the video, albeit rather tiny.

And here’s The New York Times report on the disaster.

… in 1864, Confederate General James E. Longstreet was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness. Many of his troops thought him dead, but he recovered. The Library of Congress tells us more:

Although his right arm was paralyzed by the injury at the bloody Battle of the Wilderness, Longstreet resumed his command in November 1864, but, by that time, Lee’s army was embroiled in the siege of Petersburg. Longstreet remained by Lee’s side to the end, surrendering with him at Appomattox.

General Longstreet, who remained the friend and admirer of both his West Point classmates General Ulysses Grant and General Robert E. Lee, became an active member of the Republican Party after the end of the war.

As a supporter of the Reconstruction Acts and of Grant’s Administration, Longstreet was appointed surveyor of customs for the Port of New Orleans, and later served as U.S. Marshal in Georgia and, for a brief time, as the U.S. Minister to Turkey. His reconciliation to the Union, along with his open criticism of General Lee’s handling of the Battle of Gettysburg, offended many Southerners and made him a controversial figure for the rest of his life.

In retelling the story of his war wounds in his memoirs From Manassas to Appomattox, published in 1896, Longstreet indicated that the post-war controversies had been more personally painful to him than the flesh wound he had suffered:

Bad as was being shot by some of our own troops in the battle of the Wilderness,—that was an honest mistake, one of the accidents of war,—being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.

The Haymarket meeting and bombing, the subsequent riot, arrests, trial, and executions, and related events of the period form one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Chicago, the United States, and of working people everywhere. On the evening of May 4, 1886, a few thousand people assembled in the Haymarket area at the intersection of Randolph and Desplaines Streets, across the South Branch of the Chicago River about eight blocks west of City Hall. The purpose of the rally was to protest the killing of two workers the previous day by the police when they broke up an angry confrontation between locked-out union members and their replacements at the McCormick reaper factory on the city’s Southwest Side. This confrontation was one of many outbreaks of violence at the time due to labor and class tensions. Central among labor’s demands was the eight-hour workday.

As the protest meeting in the Haymarket was nearing a close, about 180 police marched from the nearby Desplaines Street station to the makeshift speakers’ stand. Immediately after a police commander ordered the rally to disperse, someone threw a dynamite bomb into the ranks of the officers. One officer was killed almost instantly, and six more would die in the next few days and weeks of wounds either caused by the bomb or sustained in the riot that followed. Acting with overwhelming public support, the police arrested dozens of political radicals. In the trial that followed, eight anarchists were found guilty of murder. After appeals to the Illinois and United States Supreme Courts failed, four of the defendants were executed on November 11, 1887. One day before the hangings, another defendant committed suicide. Illinois Governor Richard Oglesby commuted the capital sentence of two other defendants to life in prison. The jury had sentenced the eighth defendant to fifteen years at hard labor.

Scholars have long considered the Haymarket trial one of the most notorious miscarriages of law in American history. At this time of cultural crisis, the defendants were convicted by a prejudiced judge and jury because of their political views, rather than on the basis of solid evidence that linked them to the bombing. Although most middle-class Americans and even many working people at the time cheered this action and praised the police as defenders of public order, the executions transformed the anarchists into martyrs of labor in this country and throughout the world. The cultural memory of Haymarket has echoed ever since through many other events.

The above excerpted from the excellent The Dramas of Haymarket, an online project produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.

Today, May 4, is an excellent day to listen to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio.

It’s been 35 years.

Good Housekeeping — the magazine not the behavior — made its debut 120 years ago today, May 2, 1885. It was founded in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

The Hearst Corporation purchased Good Housekeeping in 1911.

Joel Achenbach asks how Europeans might approach settlement if it were 1492, the Americas hadn’t been “discovered,” but the Europeans had today’s sensibilities and ethical considerations.

Good discussion among the comments.

For NewMexiKen’s part, I think the question assumes that global-strategic ethics have improved over the past 500 years. That, I believe, is doubtful.

This is the study, or “scribble den,” where John Muir worked from 1890 until his death in 1914, producing some of the classics of American nature writing.

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
 
 
 

The metal cup on the desk, easily hung on a belt, was a badge of membership in the Sierra Club, which Muir co-founded in 1892.

In the bowl on the mantle were balls of dried bread; Muir’s snack food.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it …

Martha Jane Canary was born on this date in 1851 or 1852 or 1856.

In June of 1876 Calamity Jane returned to Laramie from the second Crook expedition. She celebrated with the soldiers and was jailed for drunkenness. Colorado Charlie Utter’s wagon train stopped at Laramie on the way to the Black Hills, and it was suggested they take Calamity Jane with them. Her most illustrious fellow traveler on the train was Wild Bill Hickok. It was perhaps their first meeting. It is likely that Wild Bill and Calamity Jane were acquainted but they were not romantically involved. Hickok was a recently married man, and Calamity Jane’s companion on the trip was Charlie’s brother, Steve Utter.

Upon arriving in Deadwood in July of 1876, Hickok and others set up camp, but Calamity Jane went downtown and became a dance hall celebrity, frequenting E.A. Swearengen’s Gem Theater. She worked as a prostitute and dance hall girl in Deadwood and briefly managed a house of her own. Despite the fact that she was a coarse woman, adept at profanity, and drunk a great deal of the time, Calamity Jane was also known for her kindness. Deadwood’s Dr. Babcock referred to her as “brave” because she helped nurse the ill during the 1878 smallpox epidemic. She was reported to donate food to the needy as well.

Calamity Jane stayed in the Black Hills for three years following Wild Bill’s death. After 1880 she spent most of her time in Wyoming and Montana, visiting the Black Hills again briefly in 1885-86 and finally returning in 1903. She died in Terry, a small mining town near Deadwood, from complications due to alcohol poisoning on August 1, 1903. She is buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery next to Wild Bill Hickok.

Adams Museum & House – Calamity Jane

Ah, the importance of worshipful friends or family in building a legend.

John Luther Jones from Cayce (pronounced Cay-see), Kentucky, famous to us through song as a brave engineer who romantically died trying to make up time. In truth, he crashed his locomotive at high speed into a freight train that was attempting to get out of the way on a siding. According to reports he failed to heed warning signals that were out. The accident took place early in the morning of April 30, 1900. Jones was the only fatality.

Jones was known for his affability and his skill in blowing a train whistle. His engine wiper, Wallace Saunders, reportedly idolized the engineer. Saunders wrote the original song.

All you might want to know can be found in this 1928 article.

George Washington took office as the first President of the United States on this date in 1789. Because neither the House nor Senate achieved a quorum until April, Washington’s unanimous election on February 4, wasn’t made official until April 14. Washington immediately departed Mount Vernon for New York to take the oath and was met along the way with parades and dinners in every little town.

As Madison noted, Washington was about the only aspect of the new government that really appealed to people.

Louisiana was admitted to the Union as the 18th state on April 30, 1812.

The Louisiana state tree is the bald cypress, the state flower the magnolia and the state bird the eastern brown pelican. It’s the only state without counties, having 64 parishes instead. It’s lowest point is 8 feet below sea level (only California has a lower point); the highest elevation is 535 feet (only two states have a lower high point, Delaware and Florida).

Leader of the Union forces, eighteenth President of the United States, and memoir writer par excellence, Ulysses S. Grant was born on this date in 1822.

The Library of Congress has a worthwhile profile of the person they call a “quiet, unassuming, and keenly intelligent man.”

The White House biography is here.

was born on this date in 1838. The following is from the autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt (1913) and was found at the Sierra Club’s online John Muir Exhibit.

When I first visited California, it was my good fortune to see the “big trees,” the Sequoias, and then to travel down into the Yosemite, with John Muir. Of course of all people in the world he was the one with whom it was best worth while thus to see the Yosemite. He told me that when Emerson came to California he tried to get him to come out and camp with him, for that was the only way in which to see at their best the majesty and charm of the Sierras. But at the time Emerson was getting old and could not go.

John Muir met me with a couple of packers and two mules to carry our tent, bedding, and food for a three days’ trip. The first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn.

I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them. The hermit-thrushes meant nothing to him, the trees and the flowers and the cliffs everything. The only birds he noticed or cared for were some that were very conspicuous, such as the water-ouzels always particular favorites of mine too. The second night we camped in a snow-storm, on the edge of the cañon walls, under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver fir; and next day we went down into the wonderland of the valley itself. I shall always be glad that I was in the Yosemite with John Muir and in the Yellowstone with John Burroughs.

The six children who survived the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were toddlers when the yellow rental truck exploded just beneath the windows of their second-floor day-care center. Some spent weeks in intensive care. Others required years of therapy. All will forever be scarred. But they are alive.

Photo from AP via The Seattle Times.

At Lexington Green, the British were met by 77 American Minute Men led by John Parker. At the North Bridge in Concord, the British were confronted again, this time by 300 to 400 armed colonists, and were forced to march back to Boston with the Americans firing on them all the way. By the end of the day, the colonists were singing “Yankee Doodle” and the American Revolution had begun.

The Library of Congress

Indeed, if actions spoke louder than words, today would be Independence Day.