History Friday – Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After

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Lately I have been refreshing my memory and knowledge of Gold-Rush era California. Relevant volumes are already fringed with small Post-it notes, making it easier for me to come back to a particularly vivid description of a place, a curious character, the presence of someone later-well-known, or an interesting yet little known turn of events. For example, William Tecumseh Sherman was in California in 1848, as the aide to the American military governor, perhaps – or maybe not – afire with impatient envy of his fellow West Point classmates who were serving in the active theater of the war with Mexico. I had wanted to work him in as a walk-on character in The Golden Road, but my main character’s adventures never intersected with WT Sherman, except for delivering a newspaper to his house in San Francisco.

Anyway, an interesting sidelight to the history of the Gold Rush happened towards the end of that first year, 1849. It seemed as if half the world rushed into California, by land, sea or a combination thereof, eager to start collecting gold nuggets as big as peas and beans (or even bigger) off the ground. Some intrepid gold-seekers came through Mexico, or across Texas and New Mexico Territory, but a substantial number came by the established route; starting from the various jumping-off places along the Mississippi-Missouri. Such adventurers surged along the Platte River to Ft. Laramie, over South Pass, to Fort Hall, the Humboldt River, then up and over the last hurdle of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At a point in present-day Nevada, the route deviated into several branches.

Those travelers – worn-down by the last few hundred miles through desert, low on supplies, having lost draft animals to hard-use, near-starvation and low-grade harassment by Indians – looked for an easier passage through the high mountains than the difficult Truckee route. They also hoped to avoid the ghastly experience of the Donner-Reed company of three years previous; caught in deep snow, with cannibalism the only alternative to death by starvation. Many chose a slightly easier passage toward the south called the Carson pass. But a portion of the late-season ‘49ers were diverted north, on a cutoff advertised as a short-cut to the northern gold fields – a short-cut talked up by rancher and entrepreneur Peter Lassen. Which it was, sort of … but it led through the Black Rock Desert and equally hard, waterless country, which demolished morale, supplies, and physical endurance of ‘49ers who were close to the end of all those. (A smaller, very misguided and disjointed company went even further south and blundered into – and out of the Death Valley – rescuing themselves by pluck, luck and the courage of several able members of it.)

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A Conversation With Grok

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In my review of The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine from 1884, I mentioned a Civil War story about a Union locomotive crew that was being pursued by a faster Confederate locomotive–but escaped via a clever trick. I was curious about whether or not an LLM model would be able to come up with the same solution if it was presented with a description of the situation.  Here’s the prompt that I gave Grok:

It is the time of the American Civil War. You are aboard a locomotive which is hurrying to deliver a vital message to Union forces. But this locomotive is being pursued by a Confederate locomotive, which is a little fast. You are now on an upgrade and it looks like they will catch you. How can you avoid this fate? All you have on board the locomotive is: a six-shot revolver…a supply of wood for the boiler fire…a crowbar…some cotton waste for starting the fire…and a large jug of lubricating oil. How, if at all, can you avoid being caught? The fate of the Union depends on you!

Grok’s response and the ensuing conversation can be found here.

The entity on the other end of the conversation did seem rather human-like, to the extent that it seemed almost rude to discontinue the conversation with a Grok question still outstanding.

(On the other hand, Grok seemed less brilliant the next day, when I tried out the new Mind Map feature and it gave me captions in Chinese in response to a prompt in English)

The Long Haul of Woke

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I came across this essay by N.S. Lyons and it took me a minute to realize that it was a reprint from three years ago on his Substack. Yet after all that time and all that has happened (and is happening) it remains as timely as ever.

Why?

As Lyons writes in his editor’s note to the reprint:

Today, with the second Trump administration in power, we have seen a sledgehammer taken to those DEI programs, as well as other manifestations of wokeness such as transgender mania. Again, many observers are pronouncing the demise of the revolution. It is always dangerous to declare victory prematurely, while the enemy can yet strike back.

 

Much, it is true, has changed; but much remains the same. The original essay lists twenty different reasons to be skeptical of the sudden demise of wokeness. Of those, several, including the observation that woke racial bookkeeping was effectively required by law (#15), that it maintained control of all the levers of power within government (#19), and that government was intent on leveraging the ideology to expand its bureaucratic power (#20), have perhaps now been largely overturned. But others, such as the observation that wokeness functions as a pseudo-religion that fills a spiritual and communal void in our culture, or that the “overproduction” of college-educated elites makes our society particularly susceptible to radicalization, seem as relevant as ever.

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The Great Unraveling

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For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collections of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.

And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

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Retro-Reading: The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine from 1884

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Leafing through a copy of the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine (published 1876-1907) at a used bookstore, I was struck by the high quality of the writing. I didn’t buy the magazine, but there are copies online and I recently downloaded the collection from 1884 and have been reading through some of the contents.

A locomotive fireman is quite different from a regular fireman–he doesn’t put out fires, rather,  he starts them and keeps them going. These are the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnaces, working on a swaying platform in a cab that was definitely not climate-controlled. The job required more brainwork than one might think but still, this was not one of the more intellectual jobs on the railroad. I doubt if there were many if any college graduates among the readership of this magazine, I’d guess that no more than half had gone all the way through high school.

So what kind of reading material was designed for them?

There are a lot of short stories, some of them centered around railroading but many on other topics entirely. Ichabod Turner’s Mission is about a mentally-disturbed man who believes it is his mission to save the world..his life will intersect with that of a young railwayman who has been assigned to run a train–although he knows that he has had inadequate rest.

All in a Fashion is about a girl who marries “an enterprising young man” and later visits her hometown wearing a a very fashionable hat…which everyone wants to borrow and some try to imitate…eventually, she is accused of being the one doing the copying.

His Mistake is a gripping story about a train dispatcher, Bob Norcross, and his telegrapher, Miss Louise Dale. Attempting to keep traffic moving following various mishaps, Norcross writes an order to change the usual meeting place of two trains running in opposite directions. He has finished writing the order but not yet signed it when he hears a whistle and, picking up what he thinks is the order he has just written…but is actually another loose message slip lying nearby… and walks out onto the platform.

Miss Dale turns from her instrument and picks up the message, noticing that it has not been not signed but remembering that the dispatcher had twice spoken about changing the meeting point of the trains.  “Bob is hurried and driven tonight,” she thought, “he forgot to sign it.” And then she remembered that the mail must be close up to Scotville..the intended new meeting point..already and that no time ought to be lost.  She looks for Bob, but doesn’t see him–he is speaking with the superintendent, in the baggage room.  What should she do?  What does she do?

There are philosophical thoughts and historical notes on various subjects. Consistency is a meditation on the concept of equality…which the author sees as being violated by two privileged classes of people: lawyers and liquor sellers. Stands Alone, reprinted from the London Times, says about this country:  “The history of the world has furnished no precedent for the condition of the United States…With the conscious power to carve its own destinies belonging to perfect national independence, it combines the Roman peace enjoyed privately and commercially by subject provinces of the ancient Roman empire.  No country in the world has any interest in molesting it…Their happy fortune has left it for the time with no more difficult problem to settle than how to avoid accumulating so enormous reserve of public wealth as not to know what to do with its taxes.”  (Well, we’ve solved that problem)  There’s a transcript of a fiery speech given by Patrick Henry in response to British threats toward signers of the Declaration of Independence.

There are many stories about then-current events and projects, including the prospects for what became the Suez Canal…the potential for solar power, involving what we would now call the solar-thermal method…the potential for what became Trans-Siberian Railway…and progress on automatic couplers for railcars, the lack of which was responsible for a large number of deaths and serious injuries every year.  There are a lot of pieces on scientific subjects, including the chemistry of life, such as photosynthesis. There’s a suggestion that ship collisions with icebergs could be prevented with a very sensitive thermometer that would sound an alarm if the temperature suddenly dropped (would this work?) and an article on ballooning which argues that it is pretty pointless.

There are a couple of articles about Kate Shelley, who, aged 15, had three years earlier saved a train from destruction by an incredible act of heroism. Her Iowa home overlooked the railroad tracks and a bridge over Honey Creek, and during a terrible storm, she observed that the bridge had gone down.  She knew that the Omaha express was due from the west in a short time.  The only way to save the train was to get a message to the station at which the express would stop briefly and to do this, she had to make her way across the high trestle bridge over the Des Moines river. The walkways on the bridge had been removed to discourage pedestrians, and the only way she could get across was by crawling from tie to tie, making her way by feel and by lightning flashes. (True story–more here)

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