On this day in 1846, President James K. Polk sends a war message to Congress, charging that “Mexico has invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil”. He is asking that the United States go to war against Mexico. At stake was President Polk’s vision of what became known as “Manifest Destiny”. Essentially this meant that the US was destined to take Mexico’s land in order to expand from “sea to shining sea”. This war would put a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico up against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk. It started with a border skirmish along the Rio Grande and eventually ended with Mexico losing about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.
Texas had gained its independence from Mexico in 1836. Initially, the United States declined to incorporate it into the union, largely because northern political interests were against the addition of a new slave state. The Mexican government was also encouraging border raids and warning that any attempt at annexation would lead to war. In 1844 James K. Polk, the newly-elected president, campaigned that Texas
President James K. Polk, Defender of “Manifest Destiny” and instigator of the Mexican-American War
should be “re-annexed” and the Oregon Territory should be “re-occupied,” and he quickly initiated annexation procedures. He also had his eyes on California, New Mexico and the rest of what is today the U.S. Southwest. He tried to buy the land in question, but Mexico refused to sell. Polk decided to just take the land he wanted, and he instigated a fight by moving troops into a disputed zone between the Rio Grande and Nueces River that both countries had previously recognized as part of the Mexican state of Coahuila. This would become the model for US expansion into land held by Native Americans for the next hundred years.
Not everyone was in favor of this military expansion at the expense of another country. A brand new Whig congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, had contested the causes for the war and demanded to know exactly where Americans had been attacked and American blood had been shed. “Show me the spot”, he demanded.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President
Ex-slave Frederick Douglass opposed the war and was dismayed by the weakness of the anti-war movement. “The determination of our slave holding president, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people, men and money to carry it on, is made evident by the puny opposition arrayed against him. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks.”
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He was born a slave, but became an Abolitionist, Suffragist, Author, Editor, and Diplomat
Most of the opposition came from the Northern politicians and abolitionists, who saw this war as a very thinly veiled attempt to expand slavery. They lost, we went to war, and our country’s borders moved farther west.
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William Clarke Quantrill is given the wound that will eventually (June 6) kill him in a barn by soldiers in Bloomfield, Kentucky.
William Clarke Quantrill, Confederate guerrilla, responsible for the Lawrence, Kansas massacre
Although it may be hard to believe, given how history remembers him, Quantrill was actually well-educated and even followed in his father’s footsteps, as he become a schoolteacher at the age of six-teen. In 1854, his abusive father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with a huge financial debt. Quantrill’s mother had to turn her home into a boarding house in order to survive. Quantrill helped support the family by working as a schoolteacher but left home a year later and headed to Mendota, Illinois, where he took a job in the lumberyards, unloading timber from rail cars. One night while working the late shift, he killed a man. He was arrested, but as he claimed self-defense and there were no eyewitnesses and the victim was a stranger in town, William was set free. Despite being cleared, or at least not found guilty, police strongly urged him to leave Mendota. Quantrill continued his career as a teacher, moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana in February 1856. Even though the district was impressed with Quantrill’s teaching abilities, the wages remained meager and he journeyed back home to Canal Dover that fall, with no more money in his pockets than when he had left.
In 1861, William joined a group of brigands who roamed Missouri and Kansas, kidnapping runaway slaves in exchange for reward money. There he met Joel B. Mayes, a Confederate sympathizer and war chief of the Cherokee Nations, in Texas and he joined the Cherokee Nations. This association re-inforced his pro-slavery views, and his group became Confederate ‘bushwhackers’, feared for their guerrilla tactics, which used effective Native American field skills.
Missouri rebel, and outlaw, the one and only Jesse Woodson James
They included Jesse James and his brother, Frank. It was Mayes who taught Quantrill guerrilla warfare tactics. He would learn the ambush fighting tactics used by the Native Americans as well as sneak attacks and camouflage.
Frank James, outlaw, and older brother to Jesse
Quantrill, in the company of Mayes and the Cherokee Nations, had originally joined up with General Sterling Price and fought at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek and Lexington in August and September 1861, but he deserted General Price’s army and went to Blue Springs, Missouri to
Confederate General Sterling Price
form his own “Army” of loyal men who believed in him and the Confederate cause. By Christmas of 1861, he had ten men who would follow him full-time into his pro-Confederate guerrilla organization. These men were: William Haller, George Todd, Joseph Gilcrist, Perry Hoy, John Little, James Little, Joseph Baughan, William H. Gregg, James A. Hendricks, and John W. Koger. Later in 1862, John Jarrett, John Brown (not the abolitionist), Cole Younger, as well as William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson and the James brothers joined Quantrill’s army.
Coleman Younger, after the epically disastrous Northfield, Minnesota raid.
The most significant event in Quantrill’s guerrilla career took place on August 21, 1863. Lawrence was the home of James H. Lane, a senator infamous in Missouri for his staunch anti-slavery views and also a leader of the Jayhawkers (actually, just outlaws masquerading as Union soldiers). For years, Lawrence had been seen as the heart of anti-slavery forces in Kansas and as a base of operation for incursions into Missouri by Jayhawkers and pro-Union forces. Just a few weeks prior to the raid, Union General Thomas Ewing, Jr. (who is a foster brother
General Thomas Ewing Jr,, foster brother to General William Tecumseh Sherman
to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman) had ordered the detention of any civilians giving aid to Quantrill’s Raiders. Several female relatives of the guerrillas had been imprisoned in a makeshift jail in Kansas City, Missouri. On August 14, the building collapsed, killing four young women and seriously injuring others. Among the casualties was Josephine Anderson, sister of one of Quantrill’s key guerrilla allies, “Bloody Bill” Anderson. Another of Anderson’s sisters, Mary, was permanently crippled in the collapse. Quantrill’s men believed the collapse was deliberate, and the event fanned them into a fury.
William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, the worst Confederate guerrilla of the war
Early on the morning of August 21, 1863, William rode down on Lawrence, Kansas at the head of a combined force of as many as 450 guerrillas. Senator Lane, who was a prime target of the raid, had managed to escape through a cornfield in his nightshirt, but the guerrillas, on Quantrill’s orders, killed 183 men and boys “old enough to carry a rifle”. Quantrill, known to be armed with several French pinfire revolvers, his weapon of choice, carried out several of the killings personally, dragging many from their homes to execute them before their families. The ages of those killed ranged from as young as 14 all the way up to 90. When Quantrill’s men rode out at 9 a.m., most of Lawrence’s buildings were burning, including all but two businesses.
On August 25, 1863, General Ewing authorized General Order No. 11 (not to be confused with General Ulysses S. Grant’s order of the same name) in retaliation for the raid. The Order called for the depopulation of three and a half Missouri counties along the Kansas border (with the exception of a few designated towns), forcing tens of thousands of civilians to abandon their homes. Union troops marched through behind them, burning buildings, torching planted fields and shooting down livestock to deprive the guerrillas of food, fodder, and support. The area was so thoroughly devastated that it became known thereafter as the “Burnt District”. Quantrill and his men rode south to Texas, where they passed the winter with the Confederate forces.
Almost two years later, on May 10, Quantrill and his band were caught in a Union ambush at Wakefield Farm. Unable to escape on account of a skittish horse, he was shot in the back and paralyzed from the chest down. He was brought by wagon to Louisville, Kentucky and taken to the military prison hospital, located on the north side of Broadway at 10th Street. He died from his wounds on June 6, 1865, at the age of 27.
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Today in 1800, the man credited with providing the spark that lit the powder keg known as the Civil War was born in Torrington, Connecticut. The fourth of the eight children, John was born to Owen and Ruth, and he could trace his ancestry all the way back to 17th-century English Puritans. The family moved west to Hudson, Ohio, in 1805, where Owen opened a tannery. Owen soon hired an apprentice, Jesse R. Grant, father of future general and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.
Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War hero and 18th President of the United States
Owen became a supporter of the Oberlin Institute (the original name of Oberlin College) in its early stage, although he was ultimately critical of the school’s “Perfectionist” leanings, especially renowned in the preaching and teaching of Charles Finney and Asa Mahan. John withdrew his membership from the Congregational church in the 1840s and he never officially joined another church, but both he and his father Owen were fairly conventional evangelicals for the period with its focus on the pursuit of personal righteousness. John’s personal religion is fairly well documented in the papers of the Rev Clarence Gee, a family expert, now held in the Hudson [Ohio] Library and Historical Society.
John led a relatively quiet life until he heard about the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, in 1837. In response to the murder, John publicly vowed: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery! From 1846 to 1850, when he left Springfield, John was a regular parishioner at the Free Church, where he attended frequent abolitionist lectures by the noted
and celebrated abolitionists Sojourner Truth and the dynamic Frederick Douglass. In 1847, after speaking at the “Free Church”, Frederick Douglass spent a night speaking with John, after which he wrote, “From this night spent with John in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He was born a slave, but became an Abolitionist, Suffragist, Author, Editor, and Diplomat
Over the next twelve years, all of America came to know John, although not all of America was happy to know him. In particular, the citizens of Pottawatomie, Kansas were not pleased to see him. Nor were the citizens of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, a few years later. Here John had
Robert E. Lee, General CSA, Hero of the Confederacy
the opportunity to meet two future Southern heroes, Col. Robert Edward Lee and Lt. James Ewell Brown Stuart, known to his friends as Jeb, when they came to arrest him for his failed insurrection.
James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, CSA General
John was hung for this, and his death sparked the War Between the States, and an anthem to victory for one side. Blow out the candles for John “Potowatamie” Brown.
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America has always represented a chance for the common man to remake his future. No matter how low he started, he always had a chance to make himself over into someone more and build his fortune. Some men did this, overcame their lowly start to rise to prominence. Some men started out low, committing crimes of all types and they just sank lower. It depended upon how motivated they were to rise above their flaws and how serious their crimes were.
Horse stealing was a big deal at this time. Stealing a man’s horse was, in some places, a hanging offense. There was many a man who found himself hanging around a local cottonwood tree over such a behavior. Proof of theft was, for many, just being in possession of the recognized stolen animal. Many a man had a promising career cut short because they were caught with a horse with the wrong brand and no bill of sale to account for it. One such man jumped his bail and lit out for new territory after being indicted for horse stealing. He had been charged with it in Arkansas, and knowing he was guilty, he made good his escape to Kansas and tried to start over. As was typical of many men making their way west at that time in our history, this man often found himself working both sides of the law, but generally he stayed on the right side. Of course, he never lost sight of the proverbial brass ring, and he always tried to find his fortune throughout his life, although it always seemed to be just out of the reach of his fingertips. His hunt for his fortune didn’t come cheap, and unfortunately it cost him one brother and another one suffering a life-long injury. But he is today remembered as a stalwart defender of the law, and a dangerous man to cross. At least, that is how history remembers him.
Thanks to the efforts of a name named Stuart Lake and the man’s widow, history remembers him because of his efforts to uphold the law after his false start. He is also remembered for a brief 30 second gunfight in a vacant lot in a silver mine fueled boomtown in southwest Arizona that became national news and is still remembered and celebrated every October. The celebration is called “Helldorado” and the man is named Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp. From horse thief to legendary lawman. That is certainly a successful reinvention.
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp, frontier marshal, gambler, gunfighter and legend.
Today, in 1880, Martha Ready petitions the city council for permission to build a carriage house at the rear of block 12, on what is now known as Market Street. Martha is well known in Denver, where she is known as a shrewd and successful businesswoman. She was often described as being a very good looking woman, with spirit and a highly competitive nature.
Martha Ready, also known as Mattie Silks, Denver’s most successful Madame
Martha had competition for the affections of Cortese D. Thomson, a local businessman and successful gambler (back then, this was a legitimate business), in the form of another competing businesswoman by the name of Kate Fulton. Legend has it that this conflict led to the only recorded duel between two women sometime in 1881, the legend doesn’t say what day it was.
Why is Martha Ready worthy of mention here? Because Marthy Ready isn’t the name history remembers her by. If tell anyone about Martha Ready, they will likely say, “Who?” But if you ask them if they ever heard of Mattie Silks, you are likely to get a smile and a nod of the head.
Matties Silks was Denver’s most famous and successful Madam from 1877 until 1912. Her well-known and well visited bordello was located at Block 12 on Holladay Street, Denver’s main avenue of prostitution. In 1898, Madam Jennie Rogers opened the House of Mirrors in Denver, and quickly became more successful than any of the competition. Jennie Rogers died in 1909, after which Silks purchased the House of Mirrors for $14,000. She continued to work as a madam, traveled, and invested in real estate, making her a very wealthy woman.
Born in 1846, Mattie Silks was a petite girl with blue eyes. By the age of 18, Mattie Silks was already running a brothel or “maisons de joie” in Springfield, Illinois. From there, Mattie Silks made her way west through Missouri to Colorado opening several brothels and settling in Georgetown, Colorado in 1875. Mattie Silks had several businesses lining Holladay Street (present day Market Street), including Mattie Silks House of Mirrors located at 2009 Market Street. A keen businesswoman, Mattie Silks operated a genteel and well organized establishment. She had a dozen beautiful, well dressed girls. Mattie Silks’ girls were provided a room and 2 meals a day plus full laundry services. The girls purchased their own clothing and they split their profits with Mattie Silks 50/50. Mattie Silks did not tolerate swearing or smoking and all customers were to be treated with the utmost respect.
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Today is the beginning of the end for the Sioux leader, Crazy Horse. He was an Oglala Sioux Indian chief who fought against removal to a reservation in the Black Hills. Crazy Horse was an uncom-promising and fearless Lakota leader who was committed to protecting his people’s way of life. He comes into the White River Valley, with his entire band of 800 to 1200 warriors, women and children. Once he surrenders, the army will confiscate the band’s entire herd of 1,700 ponies and their entire supply of weapons – some 117 rifles and what little ammunition they have left.
Crazy Horse never allowed anyone to take his picture, because he believed it would steal his spirit, so no one knows exactly what he looked like.
Crazy Horse was an Ogala Sioux, and it is generally believed that he was born somewhere near what is now Rapid City in South Dakota, around 1840, and given the Native American name of Tashunka Witco. Even as a young boy, Crazy Horse stood out from the other boys. He was fair-skinned and had brown, curly hair, giving him an appearance that was noticeably different from other boys his age. There is no concrete proof of how he got his name Crazy Horse, but he was known as Curly for most of his youth. One story states his father, who was also named Crazy Horse, passed the name on to him after his son had demonstrated his skills as a warrior. These physical differences may have laid the groundwork for a personality that even among his own people made him a loner and a bit distant.
Historian Mike Sajna wrote that say Curly had a vision one day of a man riding up out of a lake on a horse, changing colors as he rode toward him. Although the man did not speak, Curly could still hear him talking to him. The man told Curly he was to never wear a war bonnet, never tie up his horse’s tail, and rub dust all over himself and in his hair before a battle and he would be immune to injury. He was also told to wear only war paint in the form of a lightning bolt down the side of his face, and a to put a white stone with a hole in it on a thong and wear it under his left arm. Beyond his seemingly mystical ability to avoid injury or death on the battlefield, Crazy Horse also showed himself to be uncompromising with his white foes. He refused to be photographed and never committed his signature to any document. The aim of his fight was to retake the Lakota life he’d known as a child, when his people had full run of the Great Plains. But there was little hope that would ever happen.
Crazy Horse’s birth had come during the peak of the Native American Culture, and it was a great time for the Lakota people. A division of the Sioux, the Lakota represented the largest band of the tribe. Their contact with whites was minimal, and they were the kings of their domain, which included a giant swath of land that ran from the Missouri River to the Big Horn Mountains in the west. In the 1850s, however, life for the Lakota began to change considerably, and not in a good way. As more white settlers began pushing west in search of gold and a new life out on the frontier, competition for resources between these new immigrants and the Lakota created tension. Military forts were established in parts of the Great Plains, bringing in even more white settlers and introducing diseases that took their toll on the native Indian populations.
In August 1854 everything boiled over in what became known as the Grattan Massacre. It started when a group of white men, led by Lieutenant John Grattan, entered a Sioux camp to take prisoner the men who had killed a migrant’s cow. After Chief Conquering Bear refused to give in to their demands, violence erupted. After one of the white soldiers shot and killed the chief, the camp’s warriors fought back and killed Grattan and his 30 men. The Grattan Massacre is widely considered the conflict that kicked off the First Sioux War between the United States and the Lakota. For the still young Crazy Horse, it also helped establish what would be a lifetime of distrust for whites.
As conflicts escalated between the Lakota and the U.S., Crazy Horse was at the center of many key battles. In one important victory for his people, on December 21, 1866, Crazy Horse led an attack on Captain William J. Fetterman and his brigade of 80 men. The Fetterman Massacre, as it came to be known, proved to be a huge embarrassment for the U.S. military. Even after the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed the Lakota important land, including the coveted Black Hills territory, Crazy Horse continued his fight.
Following the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, ironically on an expedition led by Gen. George Custer, and the U.S. government’s backing of white explorers in the territory, the War Department ordered all Lakota onto reservations. Crazy Horse and Chief Sitting Bull refused. On June 17, 1876,
Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull Architect of the Little Bighorn Fight
Crazy Horse led a force of 1,200 Oglala and Cheyenne warriors against General George Crook and his brigade, successfully turning back the soldiers as they attempted to advance toward Sitting Bull’s encampment on the Little Bighorn River.
General George Crook, Civil War soldier and Indian fighter
A week later Crazy Horse teamed up with Sitting Bull to decimate Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his esteemed Seventh Cavalry in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, perhaps the greatest victory ever by Native Americans over U.S. troops. Lakota were at the peak of their power.
Gen. George Armstrong Custer, hero in the Civil War and failure in the Indian Wars
Following the defeat of Custer, the U.S. Army struck back hard against the Lakota, pursuing a scorched-earth policy whose aim was to extract total surrender. While Sitting Bull led his followers into Canada to escape the wrath of the Army, Crazy Horse continued to fight. But as the winter of 1877 set in and food supplies began to shorten, Crazy Horse’s followers started to abandon him. On May 6, 1877, he rode to Fort Robinson in Nebraska and surrendered. Instructed to remain on the reservation, he defied orders that summer to put his sick wife in the care of his parents.
After his arrest, Crazy Horse was returned to Fort Robinson, where, in a struggle with the officers, he was bayoneted in the kidneys. He passed away with his father at his side on September 5, 1877. One hundred and thirty nine years after his death, Crazy Horse is still revered for being a visionary leader who fought hard to preserve his people’s traditions and way of life.
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On this day in 1871, the U. S. Army is caught napping and Lt. Howard B. Cushing and 10 of his men are killed when a band of Chiricahua Apaches, surprises the 3rd Calvary at Bear Springs, in the Arizona Whetstone Mountains. The Apaches were led by either Juh, or maybe his better known associate, Cochise.
Cochise, legendary Apache leader and eventual peace advocate
Cochise (or “Cheis”) was one of the most noted Apache leaders (along with Geronimo and Mangas Coloradas) to resist intrusions by European Americans during the 19th century. He was described as a large man (for the time), with a muscular frame, classical features, and long black hair, which he wore in traditional Apache style. He was about 6′ tall and weighed about 175 lbs. In his own language, his name Cheis meant “having the quality or strength of oak.
Following years of conflict beginning in 1861, Cochise and his men were eventually driven into the Dragoon Mountains, where they used the mountains for cover and as a base operate from in order to continue attacks against the white settlements. Cochise continually evaded capture and continued his raids against white settlements and travelers until 1872. In 1871, General Oliver O. Howard had been ordered to
Union General Oliver Otis Howard, he was surprised at Chancellorsville, but negotiated a peace with Cochise
been ordered to find and treat with Cochise and in 1872, accompanied by 1st Lt Joseph Alton Sladen, who served as his aide, Howard came to Arizona to negotiate a peace treaty, and with the help of Tom Jeffords, who was the only white man that Cochise had learned to trust, a treaty was negotiated on October 12, 1872.
After making peace, Cochise retired to his new reservation, with his friend Jeffords as agent, where he died of natural causes (most likely, it would have been diagnosed today as abdominal cancer) in 1874. He was buried in the rocks above one of his favorite camps in Arizona’s Dragoon Mountains, now called Cochise Stronghold. Only his people and Tom Jeffords knew the exact location of his rest-ing place, and they took the secret to their graves.
Geronimo, legendary Apache warrior, he was considered the most scary of all.
Geronimo was never considered to be a chief among the Apache, and seldom had any more than 50 warriors in his band of followers. On the other hand, however, he was an acknowledged exceptional leader in strategy regarding warfare or revenge raids, At any one time, only about 30 to 50 Apaches would be numbered among his personal following. However, since he was a superb leader in raiding and revenge warfare he frequently led combined bands with numbers larger than his own band. Among Geronimo’s own Chiricahua tribe, however, he wasn’t a people person. Many had mixed feelings about him—although he was respected as a skilled and effective leader of raids or warfare, his personality made him hard to get close to. The Apache people stood in awe of Geronimo’s apparent supernatural “powers” which he consistently demonstrated to them. These powers indicated to other Apaches that Geronimo had super-natural gifts that he could use for good or ill. In eye-witness accounts by other Apaches Geronimo was able to become aware of events, as they happened, though they were at a far distant place, and he was able to anticipate events that were in the future. He also demonstrated powers to heal other Apaches.
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On this day in 1851, future female fire fighter Lillie Hitchcock Coit (born August 23, 1843 in West Point and died July 22, 1929 in San Francisco)
Lillie Hitchcock Coit, San Francisco’s First female firefighter
arrives in San Francisco via the Golden Gate. Lilly was a well-known patroness of San Francisco’s volunteer firefighters and the benefactor for the construction of the Coit Tower in San Francisco.
In 1851, she moved to California from West Point with her parents – Charles, an Army doctor, and Martha Hitchcock. ‘Firebelle Lil’ Coit was considered a true eccentric, as she was often seen smoking cigars and wearing pants long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so. She was an avid gambler and she would often dress like a man in order to gamble in the male-only establishments (a rule of the time) that dotted North Beach. As a young woman, she traveled to Europe with her mother. After her return, she married Howard Coit, the “caller” of the San Francisco Stock Exchange during an economic boom. They separated in 1880, and he died in 1885 at age 47.
Lilly was entranced by the sight of firefighters from a very young age. When she was just 15, in 1858, she is reported to have witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 respond to a fire call on Telegraph Hill when they were shorthanded, and she pitched in to help them get up the hill ahead of other competing engine companies. From this time forward, she was considered a official “mascot” of the fire-fighters, and when she returned from her travels in Europe (in October 1863) she was formally made an honorary member of the engine company. From that time on, she rode along with the firefighters whenever they went to a fire or they were in parades, and she always attended all of their annual banquets. She continued her relationship with firefighting throughout her life, and after her death her ashes were placed into a mausoleum with a variety of firefighting-related memorials.
Coit Tower, also known as the Lillian Coit Memorial Tower, is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in the city’s Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit’s bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco; at her death in 1929 Coit left one-third of her estate to the city for civic beautification. The tower was proposed in 1931 as an appropriate use of Coit’s gift. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008. The art-deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard, with fresco murals by 27 different on-site artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional paintings installed after creation off-site. Although an apocryphal story claims that the tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle due to Coit’s affinity with the San Francisco firefighters of the day, the resemblance is coincidental.
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I messed up. I approved the sequel and ran into a problem with the cover of the first half of the story. The first half of the story is “A Matter of Honor” and the conclusion of the story is “A Matter of Justice”. I have the story done, I need to get the cover replaced on the first half, I didn’t like the look of it after I saw it in print. I hope to have it up and done by this weekend. I am going to be able to reduce my prices by half when I get this cover completed.
I am working on an other mystery, called “Troll Bridge”, that I think will be a good one. I will keep you posted on this as it moves along. Also in the works is another story with the hero of the “Matter” story, but that is taking a little longer to do. Please be patient with me.
On this day in 1851, San Francisco suffers a fire that wipes out 75% of the town, while killing 30 people, at a cost of $3.5 million dollars (or $100,621,542.24 in 2015 dollars).
The fire began around 11pm in a paint and upholstery store above a hotel on the south side of Ports-mouth Square in San Francisco on the night of May 3, 1851. At the time, many believed it to be arson, but this was never proven and motive never established. Helped along and supported by high winds, the fire had initially burned down Kearny St. but as the winds shifted, in part due to the heat of the fire itself, it veered into the downtown area, where the fire fed on the elevated wood-plank sidewalks, The fire was so big, it could easily be seen for miles out to sea, and it continued to burn for about 10 hours, eventually consuming at least 18 blocks of the main business district, an area three-quarters of a mile long by a third of a mile wide. By the time the fire ran out of space to move, by reaching the waterfront, it burned down over 2000 buildings, and in the opinion of many residents, this was nearly three-quarters of the city. One 19th century account of the destruction observes: “Nothing remained of the city but the sparsely settled outskirts. The total damage has been estimated at around $10–12 million, a good deal of it uninsured as no insurance companies had yet been established in the city.
Among the properties destroyed that day were the Niantic whaling vessel, which had been grounded on the shore with the intention to turn it into a store (this was commonly done at the time to get new businesses up and running fast, and when the space was more valuable than the ship itself.) and would subsequently be rebuilt as a hotel; a general store founded by Domenico Ghirardelli, who would go on to found
Domenico Ghirardelli, Founder of the Ghiradelli Chocolate Company
At least nine lives were lost in the fire, some of them in new, supposedly fireproof iron buildings whose doors and shutters expanded with the heat, trapping people inside.
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Photo courtesy of wikipedia.com
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