Christmas Every Day

Shooting and killing and such on this date

1813 Fort Mims Massacre

In 1813 a war broke out in present-day Alabama between white settlers and an anti-white faction of the Creek tribe, known as the Red Sticks. Vowing revenge for a white militia attack on a Creek pack train at the Battle of Burnt Corn, a 1,000-man force of Red Sticks attacked Fort Mims, which sheltered hundreds of whites, their black slaves, and mixed-race farmers.  After storming the gates, a bloody massacre ensued in which about 500 settlers were killed. (The slaves were spared but taken captive). The battle prompted initial panic and an armed response. The climactic Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 resulted in an American victory over the Creeks and gained fame for the victorious general, Andrew Jackson.

1914 Battle of Tannenberg 

The German master plan for World War I envisioned first using most of its forces in fighting an offensive war against France on the Western Front, and maintaining a smaller army in the East for a defensive war against the Russian Empire. Once France had been conquered, the German army would then turn on the Russians who, it was believed, would be slower to mobilize. The Russians launched an attack on East Prussia in August 1914 and, at first, succeeded in driving the Germans back. The High Command in Berlin then sacked its military leadership in the East and replaced it with two new generals, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. With a more aggressive attitude, the two succeeded in smashing the Russians and forcing them out of East Prussia. The fame that this accrued the two led to their achieving a sort of military dictatorship over German from 1916-18. After the war both generals became involved in ultra-nationalist politics; Hindenburg was elected president of the Weimar Republic from 1925-34.

1918 Attempted Assassination of Vladimir Lenin

The Russian Revolution was a battle of coalitions. The Bolshevik wing of the Communist Party, led by Lenin, initially counted on the support of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries but the two factions fell out early in 1918. One Left SR, Fanny Kaplan, who had been jailed under the Tsarist regime for a terrorist plot, approached Lenin as he emerged from a speech and shot at him three times with a pistol. Two bullets struck him in the neck and lung and he was rushed away for treatment. Kaplan told her captors: “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution.” She was soon executed by the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. This attempt, though a failure, had grave consequences: it prompted the Red Terror and probably hastened the death of Lenin who never quite recovered, leaving the Soviet project in the hands of Joseph Stalin.

1916 Birth of an under-rated author

Reputation is a fickle goddess; she attaches herself to the most undeserving of characters while those who truly merit fame often go unrecognized. This is certainly true for authors of fiction. Prolific drones like Margaret Atwood or Gore Vidal are lauded, while superior writers are condemned to ignominy because they are classified as “genre” writers. I will today, in a small way, make up for that by bringing to your attention the writing of Jack Vance.

The career of John Holbrook “Jack” Vance spanned a seventy-year period in which he won plaudits for his works of fantasy, science fiction and crime under his own name and pseudonyms including “Ellery Queen”. 

Vance was a master of plotting, dry wit, and, best of all, strange possible cultures. He might be termed the greatest sociologist of speculative fiction. To read a Vance novel is to be plunged into worlds where all communication might be sung, or where automation has been banned, or where the choice of the mask you wear determines your social status.

For fantasy fans I recommend the Lyonesse trilogy, for lovers of picaresque derring-do there are the Demon Princes novels and the Planet of Adventure series. You can find humour in the detections of Magnus Rudolph or Space Opera. The Pleasant Grove and Fox Valley Murders and the Cadwal Chronicles will tax your powers of deduction. My personal favourites are “The Moon Moth”, Emphyrio, and The Face. Give Vance a try; he will not disappoint.

1883 Krakatoa blows its top

The volcano on the island of Krakatoa in the Dutch East Indies had been unusually active for months in 1883, with numerous earthquakes and eruptions of ash and smoke. On the morning of August 27, 1883, these activities reached an astonishing and deadly climax. In four enormous explosions, the island self-destructed with consequences felt around the planet.

The first two explosions set off tsunamis that raced, as tall as 90 feet high, toward neighbouring islands. The third and fourth explosions may have made more noise than anything else in recorded history; they were heard in Australia and India, causing listeners 3,000 miles away to think they were hearing gunfire; they ruptured the ear drums of sailors on ships 40 miles away. The energy released in the final explosion tore the mountain apart; it has been estimated to have been many times more powerful than the largest hydrogen bomb exploded by humans. The air waves ripped around the globe several times and were still being felt days later.

The damage was breath-taking; the tsunamis and lava eruptions killed tens of thousands of inhabitants in the Indies. The clouds of ash that poured forth caused the sky to darken for years and produced sunsets so red and vivid that fire departments in North America were summoned to put out what were thought to be local fires. For months, the moon seemed to be blue or green and a ring was observed around the sun. The ash spewed into the skies reflected more sunlight than usual, causing global temperatures to drop and altering weather patterns for years.

Despite the title of the 1968 disaster movie Krakatoa, East of Java, the island is, in fact, west of Java.

1823 Kindness is rewarded

This site often marks the great, the horrible, and the momentous, but today we pause to consider the actions of six kind people, five of them poor, and undistinguished except by virtue, and the rich man who posthumously recompensed them.

On the 25^th of August 1823, took place one of those distributions of the Montyon prizes which form so pleasant a feature in the social condition of France. The Baron de Montyon, or Monthyon, was a wealthy man, who, during the second half of the last century, occupied a distinguished place in the estimation of his countrymen; chiefly in various judicial capacities, in which his probity and honour were universally admitted. He established, at various periods of his life, no less than eight prizes, to be awarded to worthy recipients by the Académie des Sciences, the Académie Française, and the Faculté de Medicine. They were briefly as follows: In 1780, he invested 12,000 francs, the interest to be spent as an annual prize for inventions and discoveries useful in the arts. In 1782, he invested an equal sum, for an annual prize for any literary work likely to be most useful to society; and a similar one for lessening the unhealthiness of trades and manufactures. In 1783, another of equal amount for the benefit of the poor of Poitou and Berri; one for assisting poor men of letters; one for simplifying certain special mechanical arts; and one for rewarding acts of virtue among the poor. In 1787, and subsequent years, he established other prizes—all for good and worthy objects. The revolution drove him to Switzerland, and then to England, whence he did not return to France till 1815. His prize for virtue had been suppressed by the revolutionists; but he took care, by his will, to remodel it on a permanent and enlarged basis. This good man died in 1820, at the advanced age of eighty-seven.

The distribution in 1823 will serve as well as any other, to show the mode in which the Montyon prize for virtue is awarded. Five prizes were given to five persons—four women and one man. One of the women, although her husband earned but sixteenpence a day, had taken into her house and supported a poor destitute female neighbour. Another, a milliner, had for twelve years supported the mistress under whom she had served as an apprentice, and who was afflicted with an incurable malady. A third had, in a similar way, supported for seventeen years a mistress under whom she had acted as a servant, and who had fallen into abject poverty. A fourth, who was a portress, had shewn her charity in a somewhat similar way. These four persons received one thousand francs each. But the chief prize was awarded to an old clothesman, Joseph Bécard.

During the French Revolution, one M. Chaviffiac, of Arras, had first been imprisoned, and then put to death. Many years afterwards, in 1812, his widow came to Paris, to obtain, if possible, some property which had belonged to her husband. In this she failed, and she was reduced to the lowest pitch of want. Bécard, when a servant to the Marquis de Steinfort, at Arras, had known the Chavilliacs as persons of some consideration in the place; and happening now to meet the poor lady in her adversity, he resolved to struggle for her as well as for himself, for grief had made her blind and helpless. He begged coarse food for himself, in order that he might buy better food for her out of his small incomings as an old clothesman. She became ill, and occupied the only bed he possessed; and he slept on a chair for three months—or rather kept resolutely awake during the greater part of the night, in order that he might attend upon the sick lady. Pain and suffering made her peevish and sour of temper; but he bore it all patiently, never once departing from his custom of treating her as a lady—higher in birth and natural condition than himself. This life continued for eleven years, she being the whole of the time entirely dependent on that noble-spirited but humble man. The lady died in May 1823. Bécard gave a small sum to a curé, to offer up prayers for her soul; he carved with his own hands a small wooden cross; and he placed it, together with an inscription, on her grave. Such was the man to whom the Académie Française, acting under the provisions of the Montyon bequest, awarded a prize of fifteen hundred francs, a gold medal, and honourable commendation in presence of the assembled academicians.

These prizes, often considered the forerunners of the Nobel Prizes, continue to be offered. One of them was awarded in 1879 to the French-Canadian writer Louis Fréchette.

410  Visigoths sack Rome

After decades of wandering through the Roman empire looking for a place to settle, battling other barbarians at times, at other times fighting Roman armies, the Visigothic horde under its king Alaric trudged down the Italian peninsula in the summer of 410. The bribes, diplomacy and military force that had kept Alaric at bay were now absent; he had besieged Rome twice before and now that his extortionate demands were being rebuffed by the Emperor Honorius (safe in Ravenna) he meant to take and loot Rome.

By  this time, Rome was no longer a politically important city; the capital of the West was in Ravenna, the East was governed from Constantinople. It had been bled dry of its wealth by earlier barbarian threats, but it was still a large and prosperous town that Alaric was intent on plundering. On August 24 his troops entered the city and subjected it to a thorough but not atrocious sack. The Visigoths were by this time Christians (though of the Arian variety, now out of fashion in Rome) and they allowed some churches to be used as sanctuary. Nevertheless, there was the usual murder, rape, pillaging and slave-taking before Alaric called a halt and his forces withdrew.

Rome, in physical terms, would undergo worse treatment by invaders. In 455, the Vandals would launch a much more harmful attack; in 846, 11,000 Arab raiders looted St Peter’s Basilica;  in 1527, German troops, many of them Lutherans, sacked Rome in what was probably the most destructive attack the city ever endured. But the psychological effect of the 410 Fall of Rome was enormous. It was, said St Jerome, as if “the whole world had died in one city.” It appalled the ancient world and led many to blame the adoption of Christianity for the destruction. This charge summoned forth St Augustine’s epic The City of God which not only rebutted such accusations but laid forth a Christian scheme for understanding all of history.

In the long run the 410 attack would be overshadowed by the fall of the entire Roman empire in the West. In 476, a barbarian general took the imperial crown from the last emperor and sent the boy home.

Firsts and Lasts

1485 Last of the Plantagenet kings

At the Battle of Bosworth usurper Henry Tudor defeats Richard III who is killed, ending the Plantagenet dynasty whose branches of York and Lancaster had been fighting the Wars of the Roses. Tudor becomes Henry VII.

1642 First day of the English Civil War

Charles I, involved in years of quarrelling with Parliament, raises his royal standard at Nottingham signifying that he was at war with his opponents. Seven years later he will be beheaded by his Parliamentary captors.

1831 Nat Turner’s first victim

Slave Nat Turner began his rebellion with an order to “kill the white people”. His rebels in Virgina murdered 60 whites before they were quelled after two days, leading to murderous reprisals against southern blacks. Turner was executed in November.

1953 Devil’s Island closes

The French government had operated a penal colony in their Guiana colony since 1852. Devil’s Island was known for its harsh conditions and tropical diseases; its most famous prisoner was the falsely-accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Few convicts ever returned to France; fewer escaped. The last prison was closed after severe public criticism. The island now houses part of the French space program.

1989 First pitcher to 5,000 K

Nolan Ryan, who played for the New York Mets, California Angels, Houston Astros and Texas Rangers, holds a number of baseball records: the only pitcher with 7 no-hitters, the only player to last 27 seasons, the fewest hits allowed per inning, and the leader in strikeouts. On this date in 1989 he struck out Ricky Henderson of the Oakland A’s to become the first pitcher to strike out 5,000 batters. He would go on to strike out another 714 before retiring in 1993.