The American Review of Reviews printed this picture of Theodore Roosevelt and his family in a 1904 article titled "Theodore Roosevelt As A Presidential Candidate." It's a great and seldom seen look at Roosevelt that we normally don't see. It also had full page pictures of the President and First Lady. (Maybe I'll add them to another post).
Cattle Annie and Little Britches were just
teenagers. Didn’t matter. They sold whiskey to the Osage, stole what they
could, and kept the Doolin-Dalton Gang one step ahead by warning them every
time the law got close.
Eventually, the deputies figured it out.
Bill Tilghman and Steve Burke tracked them to a
farmhouse near Pawnee.
Little Britches spotted the deputies, bolted out
the back door, and hit the saddle at a dead run. Tilghman took off after her.
Burke stayed behind for Cattle Annie.
Little Britches wheeled in the saddle and opened
fire. Tilghman hesitated. He’d never shot at a woman or a kid.
But the kid was trying to kill him.
He brought up his Winchester and dropped her
horse. The animal crashed to the ground, pinning her leg beneath it.
When Tilghman rode up, she was “screeching like a
wild cat,” clawing at the dirt and reaching for a pistol just inches away.
Tilghman heaved the horse off her, and she came up fighting.
Burke had an easier time with Cattle Annie. She
had a Winchester and a pistol, but he stripped both away before she could use
them.
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| The San Jacinto stopping the Trent at sea. John Slidell (right), James Mason (left) |
Early in the war, the Confederate States pinned their
hopes on attracting military and financial assistance from the European powers,
but securing their help was not that easy. Jefferson Davis was one of the
biggest stumbling blocks to recognition. Rather than develop a consistent
foreign policy aligned with the needs of his potential allies, Davis believed
the commissioners should stress the importance of cotton to the prosperity of
the British economy. He also wanted the commissioners to make a play for
sympathy and emphasize the moral issues the South was fighting for (while also
downplaying slavery). Vice President
Alexander Stephens favored exchanging cotton for arms and ammunition.
R. B. Rhett, a
South Carolina politician, suggested a more balanced approach. He wanted to
form a treaty of a commercial alliance with England and France that created
offensive and defensive obligations. He favored
imposing a ten percent tariff on countries that did not accept the treaty, and he
wanted to give the commissioners liberal powers to form alliances.
In the end,
Jefferson Davis won out. He sent a three-person delegation comprising William
Lowndes Yancey, Ambrose Dudley Mann, and Pierre Rost to Europe in February
1861.
In London, the
commissioners had an informal meeting with Lord John Russell, the British
Foreign Secretary, in early May before word of the attack on Fort Sumter
reached England. Not long after that, Mr.
Gregory introduced a motion in the House of Commons to recognize the
Confederate States as an independent nation. The house did not act on
it.
The gunboat St. Louis, launched on October 12, 1861, was one of seven Cairo-class
gunboats built to carry the war onto the western rivers.
With 13 guns and a draft of just six feet, it
brought heavy firepower into waterways that larger warships couldn’t reach. It
initially operated under Army control, with naval officers commanding it.
In February 1862, the St. Louis helped capture
Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Days later, it carried Flag Officer Andrew
H. Foote into the attack on Fort Donelson. Confederate gunners hit it 59 times
and disabled it. Its armor offered protection, but it wasn’t invincible.
The gunboats had an advantage at Fort Henry. It
stood on low ground, and rising river water had flooded part of it. Foote’s
vessels could fire straight into the defenses. The bombardment forced the
fort’s surrender before General Grant’s infantry arrived.
Fort Donelson was a different fight. Its batteries
stood high above the Cumberland River, giving Confederate gunners a commanding
view of the approaching boats. On February 14, they battered Foote’s squadron
during a ninety-minute exchange. Foote was wounded, and the gunboats withdrew.
Grant’s army continued the fight ashore and captured the fort on February 16.
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| Edith Janny (The Evening World. August 23, 1918) |
August 22, 1918, was supposed to
be a fun day for Edith Janny and her friend Genevieve Hendrickson. They enjoyed
a leisurely day at Seidler’s Beach, frolicking in the sand. Later that night,
around 9:30 p.m., Arthur Kupfer and Isaac Saxe picked the girls up and drove
them back to Perth Amboy.
Kupfer dropped Saxe and
Hendrickson off at their homes around 10:30 p.m. and headed to the Highland
Park Hotel. Kupfer and Janny stayed there from 11 p.m. until shortly after
midnight, possibly as late as 12:30 a.m.
Rudolph Osterwald, the
hotel proprietor, refused to let them spend the night because “it would look
bad for the hotel.” Mrs. Osterwald told the girl, “It would be better for her
to go home—no matter what her mother might say—than to wait until morning and
then appear, showing plainly to the neighbors that she had been out all night.”
Somewhere
along the way home, bandits hijacked the car and killed Kupfer and Janny.
I found this great image showing the 1913 University of California (Berkeley) and Stanford University Rugby Teams. They were to meet on the turf at Palo Alto on November 8, 1913. The San Francisco Chronicle said the teams were evenly matched.
Stanford had the "better balanced fifteen, but whetther the Cardinal can succeed in playing its own style of game is what gives Stanford no more than an even break after the initial whistle."
Therefore, it was anyone's guess who would win.
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| Alfred Morrison (The Evening World. April 6, 1900) |
A sneak thief stole an overcoat from
Alfred Morrison’s back porch Thursday evening. When he went to bed that night,
he fell asleep with a big cavalry revolver under his pillow.
His younger daughter, Josephine, slept in
the bed with him. His wife and youngest child slept in a smaller bed on the
other side of the room.
Alfred Morrison woke up at 2:30 a.m.,
standing beside his wife’s bed, holding his pistol. “Run for a doctor, quick,”
she screamed, “you’ve hit me.”
Much like Walter Mitty, Morrison was an
excitable guy who lived in a vague, dreamlike state. For example, that night,
he pictured himself fighting off a hoard of burglars, not his wife.