I'm sure everyone has seen that current commercial series where an insurance agent walks people through his insurance company's hall of infamy, suggesting that they've seen it all.  Okay, Mr. paid fake insurance guy, here's one I want to see.  The New York Times of September 8, 1885 presents a sad tail of woe involving farmer John Bole of Hill's Mills, PA.

As the story goes, John was busily working in the barn one day and decided to remove his vest and place it on the barn floor.  When he left the barn on his dinner break he forgot the vest.  As he sat down to a fine repast with his family, two pigs entered the barn and began to tear up the vest.  The pockets contained several lucifers (friction matches).  The matches must have rubbed against one another and the vest burst into flame.  In the following conflagration the barn and all its contents burned.  Several horses died in the fire but the fate of the pyromaniac pigs was not disclosed.  I suspect that if they survived, which is highly likely that they were soon to be John's repast of revenge.  All in all the value of the barn and its contents was over $3,000 in 1885 dollars.  In 2016 dollars the value is roughly $66,523.  There is no mention that John carried  insurance to cover this devastating loss.

Matches have a long and checkered history, probably dating back to the 12 Century.  John Walker built upon centuries of previous fire starting solutions and invented the friction match in 1826.  It was a descendant of Walker's matches that the porky arsonists used to ruin John Bole.  So... safety first, don't give your livestock a chance to play with matches.

The Wild West We Never See
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The above is excerpted from the New York Times of September 16, 1885.  To the non-Chinese residents of San Francisco and New York City it appears to describe an unspeakably ghoulish enterprise that was robbing graves and shipping the remains to China.  Of course, China had no economic use for the bones of expatriots who had perished in North America. The San Francisco government had put a stop to the time-honored Chinese practise of taking the remains of Chinese whose families could afford it and returning them to their homeland and appropriate burial.  The boiling away of flesh allowed the bones to be packed discretely and shipped to China.  Had they been paying attention, readers of the New York Times in the Empire State might have been aware that the Chinese living in that state were engaged in the same activities.  Those who could not afford the return to China were placed in burial places in Greenwood, the Evergreens (Long Island), and New York Bay Cemetery.

The workers involved in preparing bodies for shipping clearly had a most difficult job.  Working conditions were hot, required physical strength and an iron constitution.  On top of that the workers clearly were treated as grave-robbing ghouls subject to the heavy hands of local law enforcement.   Below is a similar case from Chicago printed in the Public Ledger in November of 1893.   The sensational story was reprinted in over a dozen newspapers across the nation in late 1893 and early 1894.  Whenever you feel the urge to complain about your job think about the unheralded, berated, and ultimately forgotten faces of the Chinese funerary industry.  Then, think again.