I don’t know why they call it the “Pig War”. The pig wasn’t mad at anybody. From the sketchy description we have it seems likely he was a Large Black, a breed “…known for its very docile nature, and …unaggressive temperament…”, according to Wikipedia. It would seem more logical then to call it “Lyman Cutlar’s War”, since he was the one with the musket, and he was pretty worked up on the morning of June 15, 1859, when he said he discovered the "scrofa domesticus" rooting in his potato patch. An unidentified male human was, according to Lyman, leaning on Lyman’s fence and laughing at the pig’s efforts. So outraged was Lyman that he immediately fetched his musket and dispatched the offending porker, whereupon the human ran into the woods.
Okay, it wasn’t charging Cossacks, and the pig wasn’t Napoleon from Animal Farm. But Lyman was an American and the two-toed ungulant was the property of the English owned Hudson’s Bay Company - and you get the feeling that somebody was looking for an excuse to start a shooting war.
In 1846 the United States and Great Britain thought they had avoided just this kind of trouble by agreeing to a Canadian border along the 49th parallel westward from the Rocky Mountains to the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The border line on the map then made a jog to the south to allow the already settled Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island to remain on the British side of the border.
The problem was that right in the middle of the strait were the San Juan Islands, the largest of which was the 54 square miles of the island of San Juan. When the original border was drawn nobody in London or Washington knew the islands were there. But as soon as London realized the truth, The Hudson Bay Company opened a sheep ranch, Belle Vue Farm, on the south coast of San Juan island, and notified the Americans that they now considered all of the San Juan islands to be English property.
The Americans countered, in 1853, by creating Washington Territory, and incorporating the islands into its Whatcom County. Washington Territory even dispatched a sheriff to San Juan to collect taxes, and arrest the scofflaws, i.e. English citizens. But Charles Griffin, the Belle Vue Farm manager, (and owner of the aforementioned pig) treated the warrent as if it were a joke. The sheriff returned home, dragging 30 kidnapped and bleating sheep as compensation.
And there the situation probably would have remained, except that in March of 1858 gold was discovered in British Columbia. This drew an instant wave of American prospectors, the vast majority of whom did not find any gold. But, over the winter of 1858/59, about 30 of the ambitious, restless but thin-blooded Americans, including one Lyman Cutlar, escaped the brutal Canadian winter along the Fraser River by moving to the more temperate coastal climate. Once aboard San Juan island, and being belivers in "Manifest Destiny", they immediately started behaving as if they were the landlords, including executing English pigs for eating American potatoes.
This might be the place to point out that I think Layman Cutlar’s story is too convenient. He claims the pig invaded his potato patch on the very anniversary of the signing of the 1846 treaty, June 15th. Secondly, he mentions a human witness and a fence, both important proof of ownership under American homesteader law. And then there was his behavior post his pork-a-cide.
Lyman offer to pay ten dollars for the deceased little ham hock, a fair price back east. But this being the wilds of British Columbia Mr. Griffin (above) demanded one hundred dollars, a more accurate if slightly inflated quotation. When Lyman refused to even counter that offer, an arrest warrant was issued for Lyman Cutlar.
And even though the warrant was never executed the Americans appealed to their local governor for a redress of grievances. That request eventually went to Brigadier General William Selby Harney (above), a native Tennesaen who had inherited Andrew Jacksons hatred of the British and the command of Washington Territory. Harney immediately dispatched 66 soldiers to San Juan, under the command of the mecurial Captain George Picket.
Being a hopeless romantic George Picket arrived on San Juan and announced, “We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it”, even though his orders were to avoid shooting (and evidently not remembering that Bunker Hill was a defeat). Picket encouraged his men to taunt the British sailors and marines dispatched to keep an eye on the Americans. It seems he was hoping they would shoot first. 
Pickett's provocative behavior led to British and then American and then to British reinforcements, until there were five British warships with 2,000 men and 70 cannons anchored off San Juan island, facing less than 500 Americans with 14 cannons. The island was a powder keg guarded by children playing with matches.
It was at this point that President of the United States James Buchanan first learned about the dead pig on San Juan…from the newspapers. He ordered 77 year old General-in-chief Winfield Scott to get out there and get things under control. The President would probably have agreed with the British Admiral who said the players on the scene seemed determined to “…involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig”.
It took the ancient Scott (above) eight months to travel from Washington, D.C. across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the coast to Washington Territory. But once there he quickly negotiated a truce. Both sides agreed to reduce their forces to 100 men each, and, at British insistance, Picket was replaced. Immediately a sensible calm was restored.
Tourists boated out from Vancouver to observe the dueling artillery practices and stare at the soldiers , while officers from both sides shared whiskey and cigars in manager Charles Griffin’s home. I'm willing to bet that they also shared an occasional ham. Certain that an eventual compromise would be reached, and having the distraction of a civil war looming back on the East Coast, Scott wasted no time in returning.
But almost the minute General Scott left Washington Territory, General Harney ordered Picket back to San Juan Island to resume his command. Clearly Harney’s intent was to stir up more trouble. But when word of Pickett’s reinstatement reached Washington, D.C., Harney was immediately relieved of his command. And that was pretty much the end of General Harney’s career. He was allowed to quietly retire in 1863, just about the time that his former junior officer, George Pickett, was directing a charge of 15,000 rebels across the battlefield at Gettysburg.
If Pickett had succeeded in starting a war with England over San Juan Island in 1860, I have to wonder if he would have still resigned his commission that year and joined the Confederacy. Or perhaps his and Harney’s plan had been all along to distract Washington with a war against England, making it easier for the South to seccede. There were plenty of Americans in 1860, including Abraham Lincoln’s new Secretary of State, William Seward, who thought a war with England would rally the south back to defense of the American Union. All such ideas were pipe dreams.
It is not an accident that Lyman Cutlar disappeared from history when no war was fought in defense of his potato patch. He also disappeared from San Juan island. The border dispute was finally settled in 1871, when America and England submitted to “binding arbitration”, overseen by Kaiser William I of Germany. And in 1872 The Kaiser awarded the San Juan Islands to America. So America won the islands without anybody else being killed, not even another pig.
Every morning on San Juan Island, Washington state, U.S. Park Service Rangers raise the stars and stripes over the "American Camp" on the south coast of the island, and the Union Jack over the north coast; this is the only spot on American soil where the U.S. government affords honors to a foriegn flag, in memory of two nations too sensible to fight a war, and of a pig who gave his life that others might live.
http://www.nps.gov/sajh/historyculture/the-pig-war.htm
Okay, it wasn’t charging Cossacks, and the pig wasn’t Napoleon from Animal Farm. But Lyman was an American and the two-toed ungulant was the property of the English owned Hudson’s Bay Company - and you get the feeling that somebody was looking for an excuse to start a shooting war.In 1846 the United States and Great Britain thought they had avoided just this kind of trouble by agreeing to a Canadian border along the 49th parallel westward from the Rocky Mountains to the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The border line on the map then made a jog to the south to allow the already settled Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island to remain on the British side of the border.The problem was that right in the middle of the strait were the San Juan Islands, the largest of which was the 54 square miles of the island of San Juan. When the original border was drawn nobody in London or Washington knew the islands were there. But as soon as London realized the truth, The Hudson Bay Company opened a sheep ranch, Belle Vue Farm, on the south coast of San Juan island, and notified the Americans that they now considered all of the San Juan islands to be English property. The Americans countered, in 1853, by creating Washington Territory, and incorporating the islands into its Whatcom County. Washington Territory even dispatched a sheriff to San Juan to collect taxes, and arrest the scofflaws, i.e. English citizens. But Charles Griffin, the Belle Vue Farm manager, (and owner of the aforementioned pig) treated the warrent as if it were a joke. The sheriff returned home, dragging 30 kidnapped and bleating sheep as compensation.And there the situation probably would have remained, except that in March of 1858 gold was discovered in British Columbia. This drew an instant wave of American prospectors, the vast majority of whom did not find any gold. But, over the winter of 1858/59, about 30 of the ambitious, restless but thin-blooded Americans, including one Lyman Cutlar, escaped the brutal Canadian winter along the Fraser River by moving to the more temperate coastal climate. Once aboard San Juan island, and being belivers in "Manifest Destiny", they immediately started behaving as if they were the landlords, including executing English pigs for eating American potatoes.This might be the place to point out that I think Layman Cutlar’s story is too convenient. He claims the pig invaded his potato patch on the very anniversary of the signing of the 1846 treaty, June 15th. Secondly, he mentions a human witness and a fence, both important proof of ownership under American homesteader law. And then there was his behavior post his pork-a-cide.Lyman offer to pay ten dollars for the deceased little ham hock, a fair price back east. But this being the wilds of British Columbia Mr. Griffin (above) demanded one hundred dollars, a more accurate if slightly inflated quotation. When Lyman refused to even counter that offer, an arrest warrant was issued for Lyman Cutlar.And even though the warrant was never executed the Americans appealed to their local governor for a redress of grievances. That request eventually went to Brigadier General William Selby Harney (above), a native Tennesaen who had inherited Andrew Jacksons hatred of the British and the command of Washington Territory. Harney immediately dispatched 66 soldiers to San Juan, under the command of the mecurial Captain George Picket.Being a hopeless romantic George Picket arrived on San Juan and announced, “We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it”, even though his orders were to avoid shooting (and evidently not remembering that Bunker Hill was a defeat). Picket encouraged his men to taunt the British sailors and marines dispatched to keep an eye on the Americans. It seems he was hoping they would shoot first. Pickett's provocative behavior led to British and then American and then to British reinforcements, until there were five British warships with 2,000 men and 70 cannons anchored off San Juan island, facing less than 500 Americans with 14 cannons. The island was a powder keg guarded by children playing with matches.It was at this point that President of the United States James Buchanan first learned about the dead pig on San Juan…from the newspapers. He ordered 77 year old General-in-chief Winfield Scott to get out there and get things under control. The President would probably have agreed with the British Admiral who said the players on the scene seemed determined to “…involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig”.It took the ancient Scott (above) eight months to travel from Washington, D.C. across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the coast to Washington Territory. But once there he quickly negotiated a truce. Both sides agreed to reduce their forces to 100 men each, and, at British insistance, Picket was replaced. Immediately a sensible calm was restored.Tourists boated out from Vancouver to observe the dueling artillery practices and stare at the soldiers , while officers from both sides shared whiskey and cigars in manager Charles Griffin’s home. I'm willing to bet that they also shared an occasional ham. Certain that an eventual compromise would be reached, and having the distraction of a civil war looming back on the East Coast, Scott wasted no time in returning.But almost the minute General Scott left Washington Territory, General Harney ordered Picket back to San Juan Island to resume his command. Clearly Harney’s intent was to stir up more trouble. But when word of Pickett’s reinstatement reached Washington, D.C., Harney was immediately relieved of his command. And that was pretty much the end of General Harney’s career. He was allowed to quietly retire in 1863, just about the time that his former junior officer, George Pickett, was directing a charge of 15,000 rebels across the battlefield at Gettysburg.If Pickett had succeeded in starting a war with England over San Juan Island in 1860, I have to wonder if he would have still resigned his commission that year and joined the Confederacy. Or perhaps his and Harney’s plan had been all along to distract Washington with a war against England, making it easier for the South to seccede. There were plenty of Americans in 1860, including Abraham Lincoln’s new Secretary of State, William Seward, who thought a war with England would rally the south back to defense of the American Union. All such ideas were pipe dreams.It is not an accident that Lyman Cutlar disappeared from history when no war was fought in defense of his potato patch. He also disappeared from San Juan island. The border dispute was finally settled in 1871, when America and England submitted to “binding arbitration”, overseen by Kaiser William I of Germany. And in 1872 The Kaiser awarded the San Juan Islands to America. So America won the islands without anybody else being killed, not even another pig.Every morning on San Juan Island, Washington state, U.S. Park Service Rangers raise the stars and stripes over the "American Camp" on the south coast of the island, and the Union Jack over the north coast; this is the only spot on American soil where the U.S. government affords honors to a foriegn flag, in memory of two nations too sensible to fight a war, and of a pig who gave his life that others might live.http://www.nps.gov/sajh/historyculture/the-pig-war.htm- 30 -
It was a few minutes after three-thirty on Monday afternoon, Halloween,October 31, 1864. And what George Lamb could not have known as he throttled his fourteen year old 4-4-0 steam engine (above), named the “Clinton”, which was pulling a nine car cattle train, back onto the main line track, was that his attempt to save fifteen minutes would cost the lives of thirty-two human beings. 
Railroads were still new technology in 1864. The Broad Street work shops of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, where the “Clinton” had been assembled in 1850, was the Boeing Aircraft of their day; employing 1,700 highly skilled workers producing 2,000 locomotives every year. But the history of American railroads is in large part a series of abject lessons in how not to run a railroad.
Most of the lines were single track, meaning there were many more collisions in America than in Europe. The valid justification for this was that America’s railroads had to cover hundreds of miles between large cities, which made dual track lines outrageously expensive to build and maintain. But worse still, in terms of bloodletting, was America’s addiction to unfettered capitalism.
While producing many centers of growth and innovation, this horror of regulation also produced extraordinary waste, death and dismemberment. One example was at Lafayette, which during the middle of the 19th. century became a railroad crossroads. It was astride the shortest north-south route between Chicago and Cincinatti, and the shortest east-west route between Pittsburg and St. Louis. In Lafayette the two routes crossed, as the Chicago and Cincinnati Railroad (later called the Big 4)and the Toledo and Wabash Railway.
Since every rail line was a competitor, although the maps present the image of an integrated network, each comany did its best to restrict its competitors access to its customers. Rail lines did not physically cross without inentse and protractred negotiations. Even Lafayette, a town of less then 10,000 people in 1864, had three seperate passanger and frieght stations, thus adding intense buisness competition and duplication to the pressures for profit. Did this impact safety?
In the intervening thirty years literally tens of thousands of passengers would be killed or injured and thousands of workers would die or suffer crushed fingers, mangled arms or severed legs, and untold fortunes would be lost or destroyed in damaged freight, because of obsolete and needlessly dangerous equipment.
The problem of communication was paramount. It was not until the advent of steam engines that humans were able to move faster than biology could carry them. No human or horse could maintain twenty-five miles an hour over thirty or forty miles. A civil war era steam locomotive, like the “Clinton”, had no trouble maintaining that pace. Still, humans could know what was speeding down the track toward them only as far as they could see, which is why junctions and sidings often had elevated towers to keep watch and provide some limited warning.
And even though the telegraph allowed George Lamb to know that the “Cincinnati Express” had left Lebanon, Indiana almost sixty minutes before, there was no way for George to know exactly where that train was in the 37 miles between Lebanon and Lafayette. That was why the company rules required George’s “special” to wait until the Express was 35 minutes late before moving past “3 mile siding”. 
And that is when the safety rules ran up against the opportunitism of capitalism. On a normal day George Lamb worked in the machine shops of the Lafayette Rail Car Company on the north side of Lafayette. (Purdue University students, who often found part time work in the shop, are still known as “Boilermakers”.) And the local ticket agent undoubtedly charged extra for the “special” delivery of those nine car loads of cattle, bound to feed the Federal armies blocking old John Bell Hood’s attempt to re-capture Nashville.
The trick for George Lamb was to smoothly slip his “special” in between the already heavily scheduled traffic between Chicago and Cincinnati and beyond to the war front in Tennessee, without gumming up the regugular service. For doing that he would earn a bonus. And so, when George Lamb heard a distant whistle, he assumed it was the regular southbound train bound for Indianapolis which he was to follow, south.
So he felt confident in heading south twenty minutes early. Engineer Lamb accelerated across the Wea Creek Bridge, and slipped along the rails onto the flat prairie beyond.
Twenty minutes later, as he slowed for the graceful curve north of Culver’s Station (now Clarks Hill), George Lamb abruptly realized he had made a horrible mistake. For he was staring into the terrible Cyclopes eye of the “Cincinnati Express”, barreling toward him at over thirty miles an hour. There were five hundred and eight souls aboard the Express, mostly Union soldiers on leave. Engineer Lamb said there was no time to even apply the brakes. He and fireman McClory threw them selves from the cab just before...
...the two boilers slammed into each other with a closing speed of over seventy miles an hour, exploding in screams of steam and souls. Everyone aboard the first wooden passenger car of the “Express” was killed as the wooden cars splintered and telescoped into the rear of the engine,
...slamming its human cargo into a mass of bent iron and brass and broken bone and splattered blood. Long after the collission had ceased, after the last bit of wood had snapped and the last passenger car had cartwheeled in the farm fields to the right and left of tracks, the injured cattle began to scream. 
It was well after dark before the first of the 35 injured reached Lafayette, and were sheltered at the “Bramble House” hotel at 3rd and South Street, and katty-cornered, in a billiard room at the Lafayette House Hotel. The thirty-two deceased were left in a freight house at the bottom of South Street along the tracks. Ten were later buried in St. Mary’s cemetery.
Twenty-two Union soldiers who were either too injured to be identified or whose bodies were unclaimed were buried in Greenbush cemetery in Lafayette, their tombstones lined up in rank.
The Grand Jury blamed Engineer Lamb for “…reprehensible carelessness and disobedience of rules and regulations”, but at least they also mentioned that the Lafayette and Indianapolis Railroad had employed him, despite knowing that Lamb had caused an accident at Culver’s Station the year before, which had caused property damage but no injuries. It seems likely after this latest disaster the L&I would not continue to make that mistake. After the Grand Jury verdict Engineer Lamb disappears from history. But his is a conundrum that sounds far too familiar.
There are always working stiffs willing to take Engineer Lamb’s job, desperate for a paycheck or a promotion, who would violate the written rules and risk their own and other’s lives to secure a job. (The Jury didn’t even mentioned the ticket agent who sold the “Special”.) Engineer Lamb understood the unwritten rules.
Most people who survive paycheck to paycheck understand the unwritten rules. But, like the members of the Coroner’s Grand Jury, they are torn between the reality they know and what they have been taught, between how they know the game is played and their faith in the sanctity of the rules. 
As I said, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Each of the “Air Ships” that left their sheds on that Sunday afternoon were floating contradictions. Almost ten city blocks long and more than 200 feet in diameter, and weighing 32 tons, they bobbed mystically, gently suspended four feet above the ground, steered by tugs on their guide ropes from the 100 plus ground crewmen who walked each monster out as if it were a well trained dog. For all of 1915 the Zeppelins had invaded England with impunity, undetected on moonless nights, untouchable even when in full view, unreachable at 10,000 feet.
The new “Super Zeppelin”, L-31, was the lead ship in this eleven ship mission. It had been commissioned just 3 months earlier. It carried 5 tons of bombs and a crew of 20. It’s six, 240 horsepower Maybach engines propelled the giant through the thin air above 15, 000 feet at over 60 miles an hour.
But like all of her comrades, old and new, within the aluminum ribs and buttresses of the L-31 were confined great bags of buoyant hydrogen gas. These ‘ships of war’ sailed into battle separated from becoming an instant inferno by only a casual spark.
At the age of 33 years, Capitanleutnant Henruch Mathy, commander of the L-31, was at the peak of his profession. He had been picked for Zeppelin command straight out of the Naval Academy. This was his 15th combat mission and he was personally responsible for more than two/thirds of all the damage the Zeppelins had done over Britain in the war. On one raid alone, on September 8th, 1915, Mathy’s bombs had killed 22 Londoners and caused a million and a half pounds of damage. It was an achievement that earned him in England the infamous title of “Zeppelin Scourge”.
Newspaper readers in Germany were thrilled at his accounts of action over London. “A sudden flash and a narrow band of brilliant light reached out from below; then a second, third, fourth and fifth, and soon more than a score of crisscrossing ribbons ascended. From the Zeppelin it looked as if the city had come to life and was waving its arms about the sky, reaching out feelers for the danger that threatened it, but our deeper impression was that they were tentacles seeking to drag us to our destruction…
"When the first searchlights pick you up, and you see the first flashes of the guns below, your nerves get a little shock, but then you steady down and put your mind on it, what you are there for….When we are above the Bank of England, I shouted through the speaking tube…”Fire slowly!”…I soon observed flames bursting forth in several places. I tried to hit London Bridge and believe I was successful, - to what extent in damage I could not determine…Having dropped all bombs, I made a dash for home. We had not been hit.”
But on the second of September, 1916, a British fighter plane using new incendiary ammunition brought down the German Army Zeppelin SL-11 over London. And from that moment every Zeppelin was doomed.
Henry Tuttle was just ten years old, but he remembered the reaction of the citizens of London when one of the tormenting giants was finally brought down. “It was a fantastic sight, like a big silver cigar, and it seemed to be going very slowly by this time. A lot of people came out of their houses and then all of a sudden flames started to come from the Zeppelin and then it broke in half and was one mass of flames. 
It was an incredible sight: people were cheering, dancing, singing and somebody started playing the bagpipes. This went on well into the night.”
The view was different on the German side of the lines, of course. Pitt Klein, an engineer aboard the L-31 wrote, “...you know that I'm no coward… But I dream constantly of falling zeppelins. There is something in me that I can't describe. It's as if I saw a strange darkness before me, into which I must go." And privately even the commander of the L-31, Henruch Mathy had admitted to his wife, “If anyone should say that he was not haunted by visions of burning airships, then he would be a braggart.”
As darkness fell on Sunday October 1st, 1916, eleven German airships struggled through a cold rain to cross the English Channel. Some were forced to return when too much ice formed on their canvas hides. Some were blown off course.
But by 8:00 PM the L-31 was approaching London from the northwest, alone. Gliding silently, using his engines only when needed to maintain headway, Mathy tired to creep onto his target. 
Then, at about 11:45 PM, the L-31 broke through clouds over the Thames and was immediately caught in the shafts of a handful of searchlights. Desperate to quickly escape, he dropped most of his bomb load and struggled to seek the safety of the high clouds. 
An American reporter was there below, and described the scene. “Among the autumn stars floats a long gaunt zeppelin. It is dull yellow – the color of the harvest moon. The long fingers of searchlights, reaching up from the roofs of the city, are touching all sides of the death messenger with their white tips. Great booming sounds shake the city. They are zeppelin bombs – falling – killing – burning. Lesser noises - of shooting – are nearer at hand, the noise of areal guns sending shrapnel into the sky.
"A streak of fire was shooting straight down at me, it seemed, and I stared at it hardly comprehending. The bomb struck the coping of a restaurant a few yards away, then fell into London Wall and lay burning in the roadway. I looked up and at the last moment the searchlight caught the ‘zepp’ full and clear. It was a beautiful but terrifying sight.” 
In the Chestnut neighborhood of London, the windows of 300 homes were shattered by the German high explosives, but only one woman was injured. High above, Mathy tried to turn his massive ship back to the west. As he did a single tiny British fighter pulled up unseen behind the L-31 and fired one long burst of tracer and incendiary rounds.
The Canadian pilot, Wulstan Tempest, saw the huge ship begin to glow from within like “a giant chinese-lantern”. Two million cubic feet of hydrogen sucked in the oxygen. The flames broiled through the canvas skin, and quickly consumed the vessel. The monster began fall apart and to plummet.
Also underneath the Zeppelin was English reporter Michael MacDonagh. He wrote later that night, “I saw high in the sky a concentrated blaze of searchlights, and in its centre, a ruddy glow, which rapidly spread into the outline of a blazing airship. Then the searchlights were turned off and the Zeppelin drifted perpendicularly in the darkened sky, a gigantic pyramid of flames, red and orange, like a ruined star falling slowly to earth. Its glare lit up the streets and gave a ruddy tint, even to the waters of the Thames. The spectacle lasted two or three minutes. It was so horribly fascinating that I felt spellbound - almost suffocated with emotion, ready hysterically to laugh or cry. When, at last, the doomed airship vanished from sight, there arose a shout the like of which I never heard in London before - a swelling shout, that appeared to be rising from all parts of the metropolis, ever increasing in force and intensity.”
Just at midnight, the second of October, the great dying ship crumpled into a ball of brilliant light. 
The doomed craft crossed Cotton Road in the village of Potters Bar at 30 feet, and a final guest of wind carried the ship into the open space of Oakmere Park (below). 
An explosion threw the gondola from the ship and the frame broke in two. The skeletal bow smashed onto a 700 year old 120 foot high English Oak tree. A bobby, rushing to scene of the crash, had to dodge a spinning propeller.
The aluminum frame bent and screamed on impact, and collapsed and melted in the white hot flames. The diesel fuel and ammunition exploded. The crew either burned alive before impact, or jumped into the darkness to their deaths. Henruch Mathy leapt to his death. He left behind his impression in the soft soil of England. 
Seventy miles to the south, over Norfolk, the crew of the L-21 saw their fellow zeppelin caught in the searchlights and falling to earth in flames. They would report back to Gemany that another mighty zeppelin had fallen to the English innovation. 
At first light a “thick clammy mist” shielded Potters Bar, and the young reporter, Michael MacDonagh, stepped into the barn just beyond the still smoldering “Zeppelin Oak”.
Inside he found a row of blanketed bodies. He stooped and lifted the edge of the first and found himself staring into the blank face of a clean shaven man wearing a thick muffler. MacDonagh recognized the face instantly from German propaganda photos, Henruch Mathy.
It is hard not to think that Mathy's life, and the lives of his crew, were wasted by the German leadership. There were 115 Zeppelins which flew 150 raids over England during World War One. Each of those ships cost over one hundred thousand pounds apiece.
Seventy-seven of those ships were destroyed either by the Allies or in accidents on the ground. The crews suffered a 40 % casualty rate. All told the raids killed only 557 civilians (no soldiers or sailors) The cost of building those seventy-seven ships was five times the damaged the Zeppelin raids had inflicted upon the English.
The idea of using zeppelins filled with explosive hydrogen gas as weapons was insane, and had more to do with the investment of egos than in practicalities. But in every war you find such insanity. It is buisness as usual. It is war. 
In 1926 Frau Mathy quietly visited her husband’s grave in Potters Bar. She came back in 1976, shortly before she died. And I find myself wondering what she tried to tell her husband about his sacrifice. 
She was the official “Vin Fiz” girl, and at the age of 36. And if that were her only claim to fame, hers’ would be a mundane tale indeed. But she was so much more than just a girl on a poster. She was Harriet Quimby, theatre critic, photojournalist, screenwriter, film actor, first licensed female pilot in America, the first woman to fly across the English Channel. And yes, she was even sexier in person than the girl on the poster. But who was she really?
The sexy leather outfit was born out of necessity. The Wright Brothers were Midwestern stick-in-the-muds who did not approve of teaching women to fly and who strongly disapproved of anybody who did. And there were darn few people in the flying business in 1911 who did not pay attention to what the Wright brothers disapproved of. 
So when Harriet Quimby convinced John Moisant to give her flight lessons, he insisted on secrecy. Whenever they took off she wore a hooded leather suit to hide her femininity.
It didn’t, of course. There was no way to hide that. But when the secret was out, instead of discarding the suit, the usually penurious Harriet turned it into a custom-made icon; “…thick wool-backed satin, without lining. It is all of one piece, including the hood”, as she described it. Or as a friend noted, “She had the most beautiful blue eyes, and when she wore that long cape over her satin, plum-colored flying suit, she was a real head-turner.”
Plumb colored, then; but who was Harriet Quimby, really?
Her family had owned a rock farm in upper Michigan in the 1870’s, and her mother, Ursula, had supplemented their income by selling “Quimby’s Liver Invigorator” by mail, complete with imaginary testimonials. In the 1880’s the farm went bust and the family moved to the central coast of California, and then in the 1890’s they had moved again to San Francisco. 
There her father, William, dispensed herbs and twenty-something Harriet invented herself as an “actress”, in the nineteenth century definition of that term, as a beautiful bobble on the arm of men who could afford her. 
People asked about her. Harriet's mother said she had been college educated "back east". But no college ever had a record of her attending. Still people wanted to know because she was famous. Her nude portrait even hung in the sophisticated “Bohemian Club”, until it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906.
But by then Harriet had reinvented her self again; writing articles for the “San Francisco Bulletin”, and, in 1903, moving east to New York City to become the theatre critic, feature writer and photojournalist for “Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly”. But who was Harriet Quimby, really?
She wrote the odd and off-beat stories; “A Woman’s Moose Hunt” and “Hints to Stage Struck Girls”, “Household Hints”, the habits of Chinatown, the life of acrobats and comics and the evils of childhood labor. In a decade she wrote more than 250 stories, many under nom de plumes. She even wrote screenplay melodrama shorts for D.W. Griffith’s “Biograph Studios” in New Jersey; “Sunshine Through the Dark” (a blind princess has her sight restored by a poet’s kiss), “His Mother’s Scarf” (Two brothers battle over a girl), “The Broken Cross” (boy finds girl, tramp tricks boy, boy goes back to girl) and “Fisher Folks” (a crippled girl marries a fisherman, and heartache ensues.)
None of these were cinema masterpieces, nor would make film history. But they paid the bills. And they gave Harriet a taste of the movie business. She even acted in one film for D.W. But who was Harriet Quimby, really?
She was vivacious, ambitious, alive and enchanting. Bonnie Ginger, a friend and fan wrote, “Miss Quimby has…a low voice and a brilliant smile and she runs strongly to overhung bonnets and antique ornaments…She probably wears this sort of thing because she can do it so well”. Harriet lived in a suite at the Victoria Hotel, and kept a suite for her parents there as well. She bought a powerful yellow sports car (her one ostentatious purchase) and sped around town in it.
When she completed her flight training, Harriet wrote that she “…walked over to one of the officials, looked him in the eye, and said ‘Well, I guess I get my license”. She did, Number 37. It was, she said, “Easier than voting”, which was quite a joke since women did not yet have the vote. “Was it worth the effort?”, she would write for Leslies, “Absolutely. I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, I just wanted to be first, that’s all, and I am honestly and frankly delighted.” Was this who Harriet Quimby really was? 
As for the romance of flight, Harriet was brutally honest in describing the experience to her Lesilie’s readers… “Not only the chassis of the machine, but all the fixtures are slippery with lubricating oil, and when the engine is speeded a shower of this oil is thrown back directly into the driver’s face.” 
She plotted carefully to be the first woman to fly the channel, but on the morning after her flight word of the sinking of the Titanic dove her achievment out of the headlines. So she came home to participate in an air show in Boston, and it was there she took a passenger for a ride in her new French built two seat monoplane.
Near the end of their flight for some reason the passenger stood up and leaned forward in his seat (seat belts being frowned upon as too restrictive). The plane hit an air pocket and he was pitched out of the plane.
Harriet, unaware of the tragidy as the passenger had been sitting behind her, suddenly found the planes’ center of gravity had been drastically altered. She fought for control for a few seconds before she too was pitched out of the plane. The horrified crowd watched as the two bodies tumbled into the mudflats of Dorchester Bay, one in a plum colored flying suit.
The passenger died of drowning. Harriet died on impact; July 1, 1912. The Vin Fiz girl was dead, They gathered up the wreakage of her plane, collected her body from the mud. But who had Harriet Quimby been, really?
We will probably never know. She and her mother had concocted so many stories over so many years that they left the real Harriet in their shadow. And that seems to have been the way that the real Harriet Quimby wanted it.
For the first two million years of human evolution the limit to language was the sum of the speed of sound divided by the speed of walking, divided by the number, width and depth of rivers and oceans, and the height of mountains and width of deserts separating you from the persons you wished to speak to. Those kinds of obstacles and those kinds of delays made the world a very complicated place. When the Battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815, the War of 1812 had been over since the Treaty of Ghent had been signed on December, 24, 1814. That was three years you needed to refer to while talking about just one battle, because of the delays in communications. How much more complicated can you get than that?
Mail was the first invention in long distance communications. Cyrus the Great of Persia invented pony express riders to carry “words” to bind his empire together. According to Herodotus these civil service riders were so dedicated that “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”; which is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service. The U.S. Postal service has no official motto.
The next major technical advance in communication didn’t come along until 1792, when Claude Chappe invented a ‘semaphone’ network in France. In his sales brochures he called it a “telegraph” (Greek for “far writing”). It required a series of towers spaced 20 miles apart, upon each of which were erected two moveable arms connected by a longer moveable arm. A Chappe telegraph operator repeated the 174 different combinations of arm positions to relay up to two words a minute. Although this was such a dependable system that the Swedes kept theirs running until 1880, Chappe never saw it turn a profit, for two reasons. First he threw himself down a well in 1805. And second, it never turned a profit. Worse yet, for Chappe’s family, he copyrighted every thing about his brilliant invention except the name.
In 1837 a failed Calvinist minister, a proslavery Federalist, a pedantic anti-catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy freak named Samuel Fineley Breese Morse, co-opted the name for his “electronic telegraph” which he copyrighted from top to bottom, including the name. The first recorded “Mores Code” telegraphed was “A patient waiter is no loser”, in 1838; the dot and dash equivalent of “The quick bown fox”, etcetera. The more famous message, “What hath God Wrought”, was telegraphed as a publicty stunt in 1844 and was suggested by Anne Ellsworth from my home town of Lafayette, Indiana. She was married at the time to Mr. Roswell, who gave his name to the New Mexico town where, in 1947, aliens attempted to communicate with humans. Their message appears to have been the alien equivalent of “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” So far nobody has answered that message. 
The ultimate expression of this more complicated communication is the traditional or “snail” mail service. The complexities involved stagger the imagination. You write a letter. You take the letter to a collection point, a post office or mail box. A representative of the United States Postal Service (your stand in) then physically carries the actual letter to your friend’s home. There, your friend reads your words from the very paper you once held. It sounds fraught with opportunity for delays and errors, and it is. And yet it has worked in America for two centuries. And what is most amazing is that we expect it to work, and complain when it doesn’t.
As of 2008 the 656,000 employees of the USPS (as it likes to refer to itself) processed 667 million pieces of mail every day (7,700 every second). They generated $75 billion in fees and charges, which left them with a $2.8 billion loss. Still nobody (well, a few libertarian lunatics) are suggesting that snail mail delivery cease.
The ultimate complication of this ultimate complication of expression was Parcel Post, in which individuals were encouraged to send not only words from one end of the nation to another, but goods as well. The service was started in 1912 as an attempt to encourage economic development in rural America.
The first flaw in the plan became visible when Postal authorities deemed it permissible to mail live chicks (in special containers) for 53 cents apiece. Now farmers could order chicks from breeders and they would be delivered, cheaply and reliably, right to the farmer's front door. It was a great boon to the egg industry nationwide. But problems arose when some of the little cheepers in ever shipment died in their boxes en route, and the customers sought reimbursement from the Post Office. The rules denied the customer’s appeals, but they appealed anyway. What was not noticed at the time, was the fatal flaw in the logic of “live” parcel post.
The path to Parcel Post ad nauseam was first visible on the morning of February 19, 1914, when Mrs. John E. Pierstroff of Grangeville, Idaho, loaded her four year old daughter, May Pierstroff(above), into the mail car of the Camas Prairie train bound for Lewiston, Idaho, 55 miles away. A few moments later Harry Morris, the conductor, stumbled upon the little girl sitting quietly atop a pile of mail bags. Morris checked the 56 cents postage on the tag tied to May’s coat, and since the mother was no where to be seen, allowed the girl to ride in the mail car to Lewiston. There, mail clerk Leonard Mochel delivered May to her destination, the home of Mrs. Vennigerholz, the girl’s grandmother.
It was the beginning of a disturbing trend. Later that same year postal workers in Stillwell, Indiana accepted a parcel post box marked, “live infant”. They delivered the box to South Bend where the “package” was accepted and opened by the infant’s divorced father. Cost for the trip was 17 cents. The next year a Pensacola, Florida probation officer shipped six year old Edna Neff to her father in Christiansburg, Virginia. The postage was 15 cents.
The public was unsettled by this mailing of children, since the percentage of child molesters amongst the population in 1914 was about the same as it is today. The negative publicity probably prevented another child mailing until 1919, when it appears a press agent for the Aluminum Company of America arraigned for the mailing of five year old Marmi Hood and four year old Evan Hedge to their respective fathers, who were locked down inside in the company’s plant in Alco, Tennessee, surrounded by union picket lines. After a two hour tearful visit, complete with news photographs, the children were “mailed Special Delivery” back to the Alco, Tennessee Post Office, where their mothers were anxiously waiting for them. Postage for the stunt both ways was $2.26 cents. 
On June 13, 1920 The US Post Office Department issued new rules, announcing that children would no longer be accepted as a parcel post. The coda to this regulation, and perhaps a comment on the continued poverty in rural America even during the “Roaring Twenties”, was the C.O.D. package mailed to an undertaker in Albany, New York. It arrived on November 20, 1922, and carried no “return address”. In the box was body of a child who had died of natural causes. She was buried “...through the kindness of individuals” under the name of “Parcella Post.” How could you call such a world "simpler" than ours? 
As you would expect from people living in such complicated times, the denizens of that ancient confusion were able to predict the problems and solutions faced by our current “simpler" electronic age. It turns out the philosophical antithesis to twitter was written in 1854, not long after the Mores telegraph hinted at the self obsessed simplicity which was to follow.
It was written by that old foggey, Henry David Thoreau. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys”, wrote Henry David, “which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” And, what with the current Texas Governor advocating the re-secession of Texas from the union of states, it would appear that our modern politicians are leading the way by getting simpler and simpler all the time. 
