Money Talks
When, at the General Peace of 1814, Prussia absorbed a portion of Saxony, the king issued a new coinage of rix dollars, with their German name, EIN REICHSTAHLER, impressed on them. The Saxons, by dividing the word, EIN REICH STAHL ER, made a sentence of which the meaning is, 'He stole a kingdom!'
– William T. Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
A Premonition
A queer dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times through the winter [of 1860]. On the evening of his election he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas at home, just after the first telegrams of November 6 had told him he was elected President, and looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with two faces. … A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces again registered to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back, he told his wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't live through his second term.
– Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 1926
Checkmate
When in France, Benjamin Franklin used to play chess with the elderly Duchess of Bourbon.
In one game Franklin captured her king.
"We do not take kings so," the duchess objected.
"We do in America," Franklin said.
Unrecorded
No one knows how Henry Hudson died.
A mutinous crew set the explorer adrift in Hudson Bay in 1611, and he was never seen again.
Hunger Is the Best Sauce
During the siege of Paris, the city's starving populace ate its horses, dogs, and cats, and eventually even turned to rats and zoo animals. In Paris in Its Splendor (1900), Eustace Reynolds-Ball gives the menu of a popular restaurant in the Latin Quarter at the beginning of January 1871, "which gives a good idea of the gastronomic straits to which the light-hearted Parisians were reduced":
- Consommé de Cheval au millet.
- Brochettes de foie de Chien à la maître d'hôtel.
- Emincé de rable de Chat. Sauce mayonnaise.
- Epaules et filets de Chien braisés. Sauce aux tomates.
- Civet de Chat aux Champignons.
- Côtelettes de Chien aux petits pois.
- Salmis de Rats. Sauce Robert.
- Gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Sauce poivrade.
- Begonias au jus.
- Plum-pudding au rhum et à la Moelle de Cheval.
See also Balloon Mail.
"If the Indians Hadn't Spent the $24″
In 1626 Peter Minuit, first governor of New Netherland, purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for about $24. … Assume for simplicity a uniform rate of 7% from 1626 to the present, and suppose that the Indians had put their $24 at interest at that rate … and had added the interest to the principal yearly. What would be the amount now, after 280 years? 24 × (1.07)280 = more than 4,042,000,000. [The current value of Manhattan is] a little more than $4,898,400,000. … The Indians could have bought back most of the property now, with improvements; from which one might point the moral of saving money and putting it at interest!
– W.F. White, A Scrap-Book of Elementary Mathematics, 1908
How the West Was Won
Some scalping victims survived. At left is Robert McGee, who was scalped as a teenager by Sioux chief Little Turtle in 1864.
Texas settler Josiah P. Wilbarger was scalped by Comanches in August 1833. He later recalled that "while no pain was perceptible, the removing of his scalp sounded like the ominous roar and peal of distant thunder," recounts James De Shields in Border Wars of Texas.
"Rapidly Wilbarger recovered his usual health, and lived for eleven years, prospering, and accumulating a handsome estate. But his skull, bereft of the inner membrane and so long exposed to the sun, never entirely covered over, necessitating artificial covering, and eventually caused his death, hastened, as his physician, Dr. Anderson, thought, by accidentally striking his head against the upper portion of a low door frame of his gin house, causing the bone to exfoliate, exposing the brain and producing delirium." He died in 1845.
Thinking Ahead
In 1936, angered by early bonuses being paid to World War I veterans, a group of Princeton students formed the Veterans of Future Wars. They said it was inevitable that the country would go to war within 30 years, and that young men would serve, so they demanded payment of $1,000 each in advance.
By June the group had 50,000 members in 584 chapters nationwide, all of whom adopted the group's salute, "hand outstretched, palm up and expectant." But it all blew over by April.
Ironically, nearly all the founding Princetonians did serve in World War II.
Oh
Croesus asked the oracle at Delphi whether he should attack the Persians. She replied that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire.
Croesus attacked, but the Persians beat him back, invaded his kingdom, and threw him into chains. He sent another message to the oracle: "Why did you deceive me?"
She replied that she had not deceived him — he had indeed destroyed a great empire.
"The Spectre Leaguers"
Arriving home late one summer night in 1692, Ebenezer Babson surprised two men leaving his house in Cape Ann, Mass. As they fled, he heard one say to the other, "The man of the house is now come, else we might have taken the house."
Babson removed his family to a nearby garrison, which by several bizarre accounts was then besieged for two weeks by phantoms dressed as gentlemen, in white waistcoats and breeches. Appearing in groups as large as 11, the "unaccountable troublers" reportedly spoke in a strange tongue, performed incantations, threw stones, beat upon barns with clubs, and made their way through a nearby swamp without leaving tracks. On each sortie from the garrison, they melted into the wilderness, sometimes arising after felled by gunfire.
The siege ended after a fortnight, apparently when the demons tired of their sport. This was the year of the Salem witch hysteria, and it's likely that pranksters were involved in the later events. But Babson's curiously specific account does leave questions about his own experience.
