1. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performs for Queen Victoria, 1887.
In the 1870s, William Frederick Cody, a decorated Army scout and buffalo hunter, turned his post-Civil War exploits in the Plains States into a traveling open-air vaudeville show. Employing Native Americans, including Geronimo and Sitting Bull, and larger-than-life personalities such as Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickok, Cody’s show featured romanticized stereotypes of cowboys, Native Americans, Army scouts, outlaws and wild animals who acted in vignettes depicting adventures on America’s frontier — stagecoach robberies, Pony Express rides, and battles with Native Americans — along with sharpshooting, staged races and rodeo-styled events. The show usually ended with a melodramatic portrayal of Custer’s Last Stand with Cody portraying Custer. In 1887, Cody took his show to England to perform for Queen Victoria and other European royalty for her Golden Jubilee, performing for two million people across England. [Reports claim the Queen saw the show twice.] Other European tours followed, making Cody one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world.
2. Eugene Ely takes off and lands a plane on a ship, 1911.
Eugene Ely's succesful take-off and landing from a ship's deck in San Francisco Bay, while wearing a football helmet and bicycle inner tubes around his belly, was the start of naval aviation. But sadly, he never got to see its development. Like many early dare-devil exhibition pilots, Ely died in a Macon, GA, air show whien his plane failed to pull out of a dive. He was 24 years old.
3. Ernest Shackleton finds glory in failure, 1914.
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton intended to lead a team of six men across Antarctica in an 1,800 mile trek from the Weddell Sea, via the South Pole, to McMurdo Sound in what would be his third south polar expedition; and 5,000 men and “three sporty women,” offering to wear men’s clothing, applied to go with him. His plan called for the HMS Endurance to carry the main party to the Weddell Sea, making landfall in Vahsel Bay, where Shackleton and his crew, on dogsleds, would begin the march across the continent. The Aurora would carry a supporting party to McMurdo Sound on the opposite side of the continent and establish supply depots along the second half of the transpolar route, to provide the Shackleton crew with adequate supplies for the second leg of the journey. But the Endurance became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea and the ship and its 28-man crew drifted northward throughout the winter of 1915. And when the warming of springtime came, shifting ice crushed the ship’s hull and it sank, leaving Shackleton and his crew stranded on drift ice. As their situation grew perilous, they manned lifeboats and rowed to Elephant Island, an uninhabited place, where they established a makeshift camp. From there, Shackleton and five others traveled 800 miles in open ocean, in the largest of the lifeboats, to seek help for his remaining crew at whaling stations located on South Georgia Island. Once there, he made two rescue attempts using ships provided by British companies; but sea ice prevented the ships from reaching Elephant Island. Shackleton made a third attempt in a ship loaned by the government of Uruguay, but this attempt also failed. But in a fourth attempt, a tug boat provided by the Chilean government managed to sail through the ice and reach the men on Elephant Island in August 1916 — two years after the Endurance had set sail — carrying Shackleton and his rescued crewmen to safety in Punta Arenas, Chile. Six years later, Shackleton mounted a fourth south polar expedition; but he died of a heart attack on South Georgia Island, never having reached his destination.
4. Actor Tom Mix meets WWI veterans at the White House, 1925.
In May 1925, First Lady Grace Coolidge attempted to draw attention to the unmet healthcare needs of veterans injured in World War I by inviting 1,000 veterans from Washington, D.C., area hospitals to the White House for the season’s first garden party. Mrs. Coolidge’s special guest was Tom Mix, the nation’s first cowboy movie star. Mix was then at the peak of his 26-year film career in which he would appear in almost 300 movies, almost all of them silent films. Tom Mix films followed a proven recipe for success: lots of action among good guys and bad guys, with Mix, a clean-cut do-gooder, riding to the rescue on “Tony, the Wonder Boy,” while performing grueling stunts and displaying admirable horsemanship. The public, and these veterans, loved it.
5. Contraband camps for escaped slaves, 1862.
During the Civil War, about 500,000 enslaved people sought freedom by escaping to Union-held territory. At first, there was no policy for dealing with them and individual Union field commanders made their own decisions whether to put them to work for the Union troops or return them to their slave owners; but this changed thanks to Union Maj. General Benjamin Butler, a skilled lawyer in civilian life, who refused to send escaped slaves back to their masters. In an artful use of a widely understood military legal term, Butler classified the escaped slaves as “contraband of war.” As enemy property now in the hands of the Union, they could be retained by the Union; and, though an odious term, the classification gave the Union the authority to establish camps for the escaped slaves and admit them into the Union army. Life was hard in these contraband camps, but there the former slaves gained the protection of the Union army and met former slaves from other places for the first time. For these people, it was a first step on a very long road.
6. Today’s odd lot.
Thanks for taking a look. We’ll see you on Saturday.
