There's nothing like a massacre to sell newspapers.  In August 1891 word came to San Francisco from the Arctic that the crews of the whalers Grampus and the Mary D. Hume while wintering on the McKenzie River had been massacred.  The initial report was doubted by William H. Williams, the Special Agent for the U.S. Treasury Department in the Pribilof Islands.   On October 5, 1891 the Mary D. Hume returned to port with its catch from three years at sea.  It seemed that Mr. Williams was right to be skeptical.   

In late October (27th) Louis Duffy, purported to be a crew member of the Grampus  arrived on the Mohican with a tale of vengeance and murder.  According to Duffy the crew of the Grampus had misused the local women and the Eskimo men repaid them by killing almost all of them.  The tale spread like wildfire and newspapers across the nation repeated the tale of abuse and revenge.  Duffy added details of his own tribulations and escape from the evil captain, who beat him severely and starved the crew.  Local newspapers had a field day embellishing the whole story.  Yet rumors persisted that there were problems with the tale.

On Halloween of that year the ghosts of the Grampus made their presence felt in earnest.  The fully-crewed Grampus arrived in San Francisco, with its holds containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of whale oil.  It was no ghost ship.  The two-year voyage of the ship was a financial success and the ship had suffered the loss of a single sailor by disease.  Despite the fact that the massacre tale was a pure fabrication, newspapers continued to spread the initial story, with the news of the survival of the crew following weeks to months later.  As an example, on November 5, 1891 the readers of the Newton Kansan were reading Duffy's initial lies about the massacre.   With the Grampus safe in port, Duffy had long since faded into obscurity in San Francisco.

The Grampus and other whaling ships wintering on the McKenzie that winter had shown the bounty of the the northern whaling groups of Alaska.  The captain and crew had good things to say about their native hosts during the voyage.  The newspapers subsequently published accounts of mistreatment of the crew by the captain, starving them and hooking them along with dogs to dogsleds.  The crew claimed to be fed dog food and that they were beaten like dogs.  When several attempted to desert they were hunted down, abused, and returned to service on the ship. The Grampus​ had over a decade of whaling ahead of it, but none of the later expeditions matched the 1890-1891 voyage.

Source Left: San Francisco Chronicle ​November 1, 1891

Immediately prior to the Civil War the inhabitants of the United States had a period of several months in which to debate the issues that eventually led to the war itself.  With our own distant lens on the history there has been a tendency to simplify or soften the debates made as the nation stood at the edge of the abyss.  America was a nation of negotiators and it should surprise no one that there was a lot of horse-trading proposed in those dark days.  Sugar farmers worried about what would happen when protective tariffs were removed.  Free navigation of the Mississippi was debated.  Ownership of railroads and national property  created great concerns.  Underneath it all was the festering sore of human bondage.  Many have attempted to soften the perception of causes of the split under the rubric of "States' Rights".  Indeed there are many mentions of States' Rights in the debates of the period.  However, when the discussion drills down into the details, time and time again the rights alluded to almost exclusively relate to that peculiar institution, slavery.  The nation had progressed through decades of a balancing act to equalize the power of slave states and free states.  Mr. Lincoln's election was seen as a fundamental upset of that delicate balance maintained by some of the wildest mental gymnastics in American history.

Prior to Mr. Lincoln's inauguration the politicians in congress held a peace conference, intended to propose measures that would serve to keep the slave-holding states in the Union.  The Peace Conference was held in the Willard Hotel and was attended by 131 of America's leading politicians.  It was convened at a time when seven states had already approved articles of secession.  The conference clearly was aimed at keeping further desertions from the Union.   Not surprisingly almost every section of the report deals with aspects of a single issue, that of involuntary servitude (slavery).  The report was submitted to Congress by former President Tyler.  The House never voted on the recommendations but they were approved by the Senate in a 28 to 7 vote.  The recommendations were never passed and the nation continued on its path to civil war.

Here is a summary of the recommendations:

Section 1- Set up a freedom line across the continent at 36 degrees 30 minutes North latitude.  North of that line territories would be admitted to the Union as Free States.  South of the line new states would be slave states.

Section 2- This section requires a four-fifths of the Senate to ratify further land acquisitions.

Section 3- Nullified the ability of Congress to abolish or control slavery in the territories or states, even through Constitutional amendment.  Nor can States or Congress interfere with transport of  or tax  persons bound to labor.

Section 4- Allows slave state courts and officers to enforce delivery of fugitive slaves in free states.

Section 5- Foreign importation of slaves is prohibited.

Section 6- Set up a situation where modifications to major portions of the Constitution, including those dealing with slaves, could not be amended or abolished without the consent of ALL states.

Section 7- Permits the government to repay the owners of fugitive slaves for the value of their labor if the marshals attempting to return them were threatened or subject to violence.

On October 29, 1860 the citizens of New Orleans were enjoying a play called The Wolf at the German Theatre.  The play included a scene where actor John Kruger stabbed actor Emile Stener.  Unfortunately on the night in question Kruger was not given a stage dagger and borrowed a real one.  This dangerous substitution need not have ended in tragedy but Emile was drunk and leaned into the coming blade instead of avoiding it.  Emile was stabbed through the neck with the gash extending all the way to the  backbone.  A shower of blood sprayed the stage and Emile was hauled off to the hospital, where he perished.  John was hauled off by the police.  This left cast and crew with a dreadful decision, what to do with a house full of clients who expected a show?  The crew wiped the copious amount of blood from the stage and the cast performed an hour-long comedy.  Remind me never to get hurt in New Orleans. 

I cannot find what happened to Kruger.  The New Orleans papers apparently don't have a record of charges and a trial.  We do learn that Emile lingered for several weeks at Charity Hospital and that he was 26 years old and a native of Prussia.

Here we are over 150 years since the start of America's most costly war and contention over the causes of the war abounds.  In a world infected with "alternative facts" and "fake news" it seems appropriate that perhaps we return to directly listening to the words of those who lived through the conflict.  Period newspapers, broadsides, and books provide the best evidence of the actual causes of the conflict.  I have clipped two of the hundreds of articles from the period to provide illustrations.  The first is a speech from Parliament delivered in 1862 by P.A. Taylor.  Taylor has the benefit of being an informed member of a supposedly neutral government almost a full year into the war.  Of course, the British Empire's neutrality was tipped ever-so-slightly toward hoping the Confederacy would succeed in splitting from their trade competitor, the United States.  Taylor was quite clear that the perspective from across the ocean was that "slavery and slavery alone which inevitably caused the severance of the Union."  

What could a foreigner possibly know about such things?  There is little doubt that Taylor and others got that impression by reading any of the hundreds of speeches and opinions of people living in the Southern Confederacy.  I have included an example printed in late 1860 in a Mississippi newspaper.  That document reprints a speech in the Georgia legislature at a time when the slave-holding states were beginning to secede.   The Georgia speech and it's white supremacists assertions that "Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race... strips the mask off of the fantasy.

The fiction that the war was started over  "States' Rights" is more of a modern construct.  If you read Taylor's comments he lucidly presents the concept that the Fugitive Slave Act and similar laws infringed upon the State sovereignty of the free states by forcing taxpayers in those states to support a system illegal in their own states.  Southerners calling for secession constantly referred to rights related to the use, transport, and possession of property (slaves).  They did not feel that they wanted to establish their own currencies, postal systems, treaties with foreign nations, or relationships with Indian tribes.  The right they were worried about was the right to own people.   In future blogs I'll post more of these.

Much is made of the fact that many Union soldiers were adamant they were not fighting to free the slaves and that most Southerners did not own slaves.   This is a red herring.  The war was started by the Southern state governments explicitly to protect slavery.   This was done in several cases with the consent of the governed.  Why people fight in any conflict involves a variety of reasons, as complex as the populations involved.  If those in the North want to believe all their ancestors fought to set men free, that is a fantasy.  If those in the South want to believe that few on their ancestors cared one way or the other about slavery and fought to protect their state's rights, that is a fantasy as well.   Our ancestors deserve to remembered for what they were and did, not what we wish them to be.

Starting in 1848, Europe experienced widespread revolutions and uprisings mostly to bring about liberal and sometimes radical changes to the framework of the ancient regimes that ruled the continent.  Caught off-guard authoritarian and conservative governments responded in a variety of ways, from acceptance of the will of the people to harsh suppression of the revolutionaries.  An example of this was seen as the legislative bodies in  the smaller Germanic states issued the Grundrechte (Fundamental Rights).  These included the abolishment of the titles and privileges of the aristocracy, equality under the law, habeas corpus, recognition of civil marriages, elimination of the death penalty, elimination of corporal punishment, freedom of religion, respect for languages, removal of the judiciary from politics, establishment of free trade, freedom of individuals to enter and profession they chose, freedom of travel, freedom to live where one chose, freedom of education, freedom of the press, freedom of opinion, and the removal of clerics from education.  Americans will readily recognize many of these same characteristics as being in the U.S. Constitution.  However, many in the list above clearly show how repressive and controlled life Central Europe was.

Prussia, Bavaria, and Austria refused to recognize the Grundrechte.  Clerics and Guilds alike fought the acceptance as they stood to lose their vast influence.

The Grundrechte was but one of the many steps taken by Europeans to shed the shackles of governments dominated by aristocracies, clerics, corporations, and guilds.  The German Constitution of 1849 expanded the franchise and established the secret ballot.  The Constitution established King Frederick William IV as the Emperor of the Germans.  The King of Prussia refused to accept what he called the "pig crown", "dog collar", and "sausage sandwich."  He promised to militarily assist and government which was against the new Constitution.  The forces of counter-revolution were about to make their play.

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.

The Know-Nothing Riots of 1854

Sometimes events from the distant past carry echoes of our modern world.  The year 1854 was an election year.  In St. Louis when the Missouri Republican called for the presentation and examination of naturalization papers at the polls the stage was set for violence.  As voters were turned back at the polls in the mostly Irish 5th Ward, tempers flared.  It started with the knifing of a boy by one of the rejected voters.  A Nativist crowd soon assembled and soon shots rang out from the Irish houses, creating a riot as the mob began to sack Irish homes.  It was then an Irish mob joined the fray. Two men were killed in the day's violence.  The police waited for matters to calm down before entering the ward.  The next day the Illinois State Militia was called out and patrolled the streets.  In the dark of night the violence flared anew, with three militiamen being wounded.  Among the dead that evening was an influential iron maker and a saloonkeeper who refused drink to rioters.  Citizen patrols leavened by mostly Irish policemen restored order.  This little experiment in preventing voter fraud had resulted in ten dead and roughly 30 wounded.  It must be remembered that both Nativists and recent emigrants used very similar tactics, that of challenging the authenticity of voters at the polls and backed up their attempts to affect the election with violence.  This was far more successful than participating directly in fraud as it slowed or stopped voting at certain polls.

It is little surprise that the current blend of Nativists reach back to the playbook of the Know-Nothings of the 19th century.  The ultimate goal in requiring an examination of the credentials of potential voters clocks itself in the garb of protecting the vote from fraud, but turns out to be a form of suppressing the vote of the opposition.  Saint Louis had a series of Know-Nothin Riots, going back to 1852,  E.Z.C. Judson (known to most as Ned Buntline) moved to St. Louis in 1852 to promote nativism among a city with large Irish and German populations.  He helped set the working-class natives against the foreign-born laborers.  How many times in history do we see elites such as Judson setting workers against each other.

The tragic events in St. Louis were repeated in many places that year.  Below is a segment of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of November 18, 1854.  It presents the testimony of Charles E. Silkworth who was a Nativist sent to challenge voters at a certain poll.  Before he started his duties he was handed a pistol.  Charles' own credentials became an issue and during a melee he pulled the pistol out of his pocket before being knocked unconscious.    Will such scenes re reenacted in 2016... stay tuned for the reality show is bound to have a big finish.

We're in the final stages of completing 'Dem Dry Bon'z, our sequel about serial murders in North Dakota and Montana.   Despite the fact that our story is an urban fantasy, Stoney and I have woven the story with substantial history regarding the beginnings of the age where serial killers were first recognized and studied.  Below is a clipping from the Decatur Herald of October 6, 1888.  The article was written during the Whitechapel Fiend's (a.k.a. Jack the Ripper's) murder spree.  Very rarely does one read about or see in movies the perception of the London police that the Ripper might have learned his deadly trade in Austin, Texas.  There were many similarities between Austin's Midnight Assassin, who killed eight women and wounded many other Austin residents, with the Ripper.  There clearly were many differences, such as the Midnight Assassin's penchant for leaving witnesses alive but with often with head wound so severe that they were unable to testify as to something so simple as the race of the killer.  However, the English at first could not conceive that a true Britain was capable of such savagery.  The Austin murders of 1885-1886 were touted as the training ground for an American fiend loose in London.  Cowboys and Indians who were still in country after working for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, were hauled in for interrogation.  One of the Indians was Black Elk, whose memoir Black Elk Speaks became a classic.  Foreigners and Jews figured highly on the list of police suspects.  This ham-handed approach to solving crimes matched what Austin tried just a few years earlier.  
The Austin authorities had a penchant for rounding up the "usual suspects" every time the Assassin struck.  In this case the "usual suspects" were exclusively black men and poor whites.   Interrogation consisted of being manacled to an iron ring attached to the floor and being beaten severely.  None of the black men who endured this torture ever admitted to the crimes.  Some were interrogated more than once and most were under almost constant surveillance.  Eventually an election year came along and charges were made.  Three men (all the husbands or boyfriends of victims) were tried.  Two of the men were severely wounded by axe blows to the head by the murderer and the state attempted to convince the juries that each had killed his companion and then wounded himself to cover the crime.  One man was convicted but the verdict was overturned on appeal as the prosecution presented no proof that the defendant actually did the crime.
The Assassin and the Ripper crimes never were solved.  In an age where criminology was in its infancy, law enforcement floundered in the darkness of its own incompetence.  These tragedies call out to us through the centuries.  What kinds of monsters do such things?  We still are trying to figure that out as the descendants of Jack the Ripper, the Midnight Assassin, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and too many others still walk among us,   They remind us that not all nightmares happen during sleep.

We are in the final stages of preparation for the release of a new novel, 'Dem Dry Bon'z, a sequel to our 2015 release 'Dem Bon'z.  The story lines for both books include historical information on such famous murder sprees as the Whitechapel Murders, the Thames Torso Murders, the Kingsbury Run Murders, the Columbian Exposition Murders, and the Austin Servant Assassinations.  We've been able to bring a number of the more infamous fiends from the Victorian Era , such as Jack the Ripper, Dr. Sweeney, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and the Midnight Assassin into our tales.

Below is a story that was all-too-common in the period.  A murderer could  do their evil deed, purchase a common trunk for very little money, and pack their victim off to the nearest railroad or freight depot.  The killer had only to provide a false addressee and address and they could be assured that, unless the trunk was dropped and opened it might be many months before the body was discovered.  In this example the trunk was mailed from Chicago to Pittsburg in early 1885.  Coincidently this is the period before Dr. H. H. Holmes (formerly H.W. Mudgettt and having many aliases), perhaps the most prolific serial killer of the period established his practice in Chicago.  A recent graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School, he had been discharged because he engaged in insurance fraud and used some of the cadavers from the medical school for his extracurricular activities.  He formally settled in Chicago in 1886 but clearly was wandering about the area in early 1885.  One of his favorite tricks was to employ the freight system to ship remains all over the world.  He was quite clever in this and often had his employees post the trunks, assuring that he could not be identified.  Without the complex tracking systems, dna analysis, and even the requirement for a return address this was an almost foolproof way to discard of a victim.  Trunks might languish in warehouses for years, or until they smelled sufficiently to draw attention.  Was this one of Holmes' early victims?  Who knows?  As a surgeon, Holmes most likely would have thought little of cutting up the corpse to make it fit into the trunk instead of tying it into a tight bundle.   Holmes was thought to have killed as many as 200 people, though one of his confessions only admits to 27.  Holmes later denied writing his autobiography and on the gallows claimed to be innocent of deliberately killing anyone but allowing for two killings through medical malpractice.