I contend that 1900 saw the single most horrific victory in modern Olmpic history, surpassed only by the ancient standard for horror when King Oenomaus was killed in an Olympic chariot crack up , followed by the race winner Pelops throwing another driver, Myrtilus, off a cliff. What could have surpassed such gore and horror, comitted in the name of the purity of athletic endevor? Simply, the Paris games of 1900 when Leon de Lunden from Belgium murdered 21 birds to win the "Live Pigeon Shooting" event.
In order to make the sport even “less sporting” for the birds, the little sacrifices were released one at a time, and each human contestant was allowed to keep blasting away until he missed – twice. Sports historian Andrew Strunk has described the event as “…a rather unpleasant choice. Maimed birds were writhing on the ground, blood and feathers were swirling in the air and women with parasols were weeping…”. In all 300 unlucky pigeons were sacrificed for the Olympic ideal. Just think of it; Dick Cheney could have been an Olympic athlete!
Those Paris games of 1900 almost didn’t happen, since the French considered Pierre Fredy Baron de Coubertin, who was pushing the modern Olympic concept, as "too English”, what with his alien ideas about exercise producing a healthy mind and body. In fact it wasn’t until Coubertin resigned from the French Athletic Associations that other French sportsmen agreed to back his idea.
Unfortunately, with Coubertin out of the way, the French Government stepped in and things went down hill very quickly from there. First the government decided not to award medals for first place, but "valuable artwork" instead. It must have been quite a sight to see Msr. Aumoitte, winner of the “one ball” croquet championship, standing on the victory podium with a Monet hanging around his neck.
Then there was the marathon, where two American runners, Arthur Newton and Dick Grant, lead from the start. But when they reached the finish line together they discovered two heretofore unnoticed French runners, Michel Theato and Emile Champion, rested and waiting for them, and already wearing their winner’s artwork. The Americans pointed out that all the other contestants were splattered with mud while Theato and Champion looked like they had not even broken a sweat. But this being France, the American protests were worst than meaningless.
In fact, because they protested the Americans were awarded sixth and seventh place. Well, as Albert Camus noted in one of his lighter moments, "Pauvre de moi, du cognito tricherie, ergo se donner la mort”, or, “Please excuse me but I think you cheated so I am now going to commit suicide". The International Olympic Committee took the American protests under consideration for twelve years, before finally rejecting them; proving once again the Jerry Lewis rule about sports rulings; timing is everything.
The Games of 1900 were the longest in Olympic History, running between May 14 and October 28, and including such extravigent events as "Cannon Shooting", "Life Saving", "Kite Flying", "Tug of War" and "Fire Fighting". The Croquet Tournament took 21 weeks to play out in front of a paying audience of exactly one, an elderly Englishman living in Nice, France.
Curiously the strongest protest in that the 1900 Olympics was between two Americans. The born-again coaches from Syracuse University felt that competing on a Sunday would be a sin. So they talked their student Myer Prinstein (above), the world record holder in the long jump, into going along with them. Myer was a nice Jewish boy, and he finally agreed to skip the Sunday competion out of “team spirit”. Besides, his qualifying jump on Saturday – his actual Sabbath - had been so impressive he thought it would be good enough for the victory. And it almost was. Almost.
That Sunday afternoon (July 14, 1900), while Myer was soaking in the Parisian culture, his Catholic teammate Alvin Kraenzlein(above) broke his own sabbath and beat Myer’s long jump mark by exactly...one centimeter. That Monday, when Myer noticed that Alvin was carrying an extra Van Gough around, he started pounding on Alvin. And Alvin pounded right back. But, since they were both track stars with no upper body strength, nobody got seriously injured.
The nineteen hundred games also featured a controversial final in the “Underwater Swimming” competition. This may sound like a fancy name for drowning, but the drowners, er, the swimmers, were actually awarded 2 points for each meter they swam under water and one point for each second they were able to remain submerged. But despite having stayed under for far longer than anyone else, Peder Lykkeberg of Denmark was disqualified because it was alleged that he “swam in circles”. Just read the rules, I say.
Also in the river (during this Olympics all the water sports were held in the river Seine, which was not nearly as clean a sewer then it is today), were the exciting finals of the “Swimming Obstacle Course”, involving swimming, pole climbing, more swimming, boat boarding and de-boarding, more swiming, followed by swiming under a boat, followed by more swimming. 
The winner was Freddy Lane from Australia, in 2:38, who climbed over the stern of the boat as opposed to clambering across the boat's wider middle. For his efforts Freddie recieved a 50 pound bronze horse. I presume the equestrian winners received statues of fish. Oddly enough neither of the water events were repeated at any future Olympics.
But the sport I miss having seen the most from the 1900 Paris games was the "Equestrian Long Jump". Now, try to picture this: four spindly legs holding up a big muscular body, and with a human in riding garb and top hat balanced on their back. Horse and rider gallop up to the jump line and then fling themselves into the air.
The winner was a British stallion named “Extra Dry”(above), with a soaring leap of 20 feet and one quarter of an inch. Can you image the excitement that must have gripped the crowds, watching this equrestian suicidal display? A horse leaping twenty feet and one quarter of an inch; that’s just nine feet short of the current human long jump record. And we've only got two legs.
It makes me wonder if the X Games are really all that original.
- 30 -
Every winter a low pressure zone forms off the southeast coast of Greenland. And while this it not Greenland’s fault, it still makes them a very bad neighbor. Because lows rotate counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere, this low draws bursts of warm moist southern air into the arctic and fuels one storm after another, creating a dully predictable pattern of lousy weather for Europe all winter long, a legacy from Greenland.
It is not an accident that Alfred Wegener, the scientist who first suggested what he called "Continental Drift", died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930. One of the first pieces of evidence which caused Wegener to suspect the world had not always looked as it does today, came when he compared longitude measurements from the 1820’s with those made in the first decade of the 20th century and found that, in a hundred years, Greenland had somehow moved a mile further away from Europe.
More than 80% of Greenland is covered in glacier ice several miles thick, which has compressed the land underneath to 1,000 feet below sea level. If all that ice were to melt quickly (as it appears to be doing) then a map of the largest island in the world (which Greenland is) would have to be redrawn as a string of islands.
Greenland represents the first great marketing scam in history. Norseman Erik the Red was such a violent maniac that in the year 983 he was banished from his native Iceland for three years. When he returned he told everyone about a wonderful place he had discovered over the western sea. He called his nirvana Greenland, because if he had called it “Popcicle Land" or “land frozen solid”, nobody would have followed him there.
Looking at a map, Greenland is not as big as you think. On the average map it looms like a center piece on a banquet table, as large as Africa or South America. But in fact it is about the same size as Mexico But at least we know who to blame for this particular misconception, a Belgium cartographer named Gheert Cremer. In Flemish the family name means merchant, and that was why, when, as was the custom in the Middle Ages, Gheert chose a Latin name for his professional career, he chose the Latin word for merchant; Mercator.
It was after his moved to Duisburg, in 1569, that Gheert discovered a way to transfer the great circle routes, which are the shortest travel distance between two points on the surface of a globe, to the shortest routes drawn between two points on flat sheet of paper, a straight line. The system he came up with, what is today called a Mercator Projection, compressed the distances between latitudes at the equator and lengthened those nearer the poles, allowing all the lines of longitude and latitude to cross at right angles even as the surface area they are demarking expanded and shrank. The result makes Greenland (836,000 sq. miles) appear to be the same size as the African continent (30 million sq. miles) and twice the size of China, which is actually about the same size as the United States.
Using this projection a navigator does not have to account for the curvature of the earth, the map does it for him. That makes a Mercator Projection a true tool, like a ruler or a hammer. And that makes what the local Catholic Church officials did to Gheert in the name of defending the faith an actual betrayal of that faith. Because it denied Gheert the use of God’s greatest tool - his brain.
Perhaps it is best to remember the words of one map shop owner, who wrote on his blog, “I sell this map. I don't warn people when they buy it that, like any good newspaper, it contains a few lies".
By the way, Gheert Cremer (Mercator) did something else for us. He dedicated his first collection of maps to the mythical African King of Mauretania, who, according to legend, built the first celestial globe to show the positions of the stars and thus balanced the whole world on his shoulders. Today we refer to all collections of maps by the name of that king; Atlas.
Dodge City owes its fame to a tiny tick, Boophilus microplus, which carries anthrax. The tick and the disease were endemic amongst the herds of Texas Longhorns, which had developed a resistance to the fever. But in 1868 anthrax on imported Longhorns killed 15,000 cattle across Indiana and Illinois. So as the sod busters plowed across Kansas they insisted the state restrict the rail heads for Texas cattle drives further and further from their farms. In 1876 the demarcation line was moved to the 100th meridian, which made the town on the north bank of the Are-Kansas River, the new “Queen of the cattle towns”, the ‘Wickedest Little City in America’, "The Beautiful, Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier": Dodge City, Kansas.
Like the other ten to fifteen cowboys in his crew, George Hoyt had just ended two months of hard, dusty, dangerous and monotonous work and had $80 cash money burning a hole in his pocket. And it was the business of the merchants of Dodge City to separate George from as much of that cash as possible before he left town. In essence Dodge City was a tourist trap, dependent for its yearly livelihood on the May through August ‘Texas trade’.
The little town of less than 1,000 year round citizens could boast 16 saloons, and south of the “deadline” (Front Street that bordered the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad) there were assorted brothels and dance halls where “anything goes”.
Eddie Foy had been dancing and clowning in Chicago bars to feed his family since he was six. He was now 22, and this was his second swing through the western circuit, telling such local jokes as “What's the difference between a cow boy and a tumble bug (a dung beetle)? One rounds up to cut and the other cuts to round up”. Eddie had an appealing V-shaped grin, and a comic lisp, which he offered each night in a solo rendition of the plaintive homesick poem, “Kalamazoo in Michigan”
At about 3 A.M. on Friday, July 26th, while Eddie was just beginning his reading, George Hoyt and several of friends left the Comique and saddled their horses at a nearby stable. Then the cowboys buckled on their gun belts and mounted up. As they rode up Bridge Street past the Comique on their way back to camp, George suddenly wheeled his horse and returned to the side of the Comique. George pulled his six shooter and banged out three quick shots into the side of the building.
According to Eddie Foy, inside the hall “Everyone dropped to the floor at once, according to custom.” Amongst the crowd of 150 gamblers and poetry aficionados in attendance was lawman Bat Masterson and gambler Doc Holiday, both of whom, according to Eddie, beat him to the floor. “I thought I was pretty agile myself, but these fellows had me beaten by seconds at that trick.” The Dodge City Globe agreed. “A general scamper was made by the crowd, some getting under the stage others running out the front door and behind the bar; in the language of the bard, “such a gittin up the stairs was never seed”. Observed Bat Masterson, “Foy evidently thought the cowboy was after him, for he did not tarry long in the line of fire”.
In George Hoyt’s impulsive decision to blast away at the Comique he had failed to notice two men lounging in the shadows on the sidewalk. One was Jim Masterson, younger brother to Bat and a fellow city deputy. The other shadow was legendary lawman Wyatt Earp.
Wyatt (above,on the right) was 30 years old and stood about six feet tall, weighed about 160 pounds and had light blue eyes. But what friends and opponents remember most about Wyatt was his manner. The editor of the Tombstone Epitaph would later note his calm demeanor, saying he was “…unperturbed whether...meeting with a friend or a foe.” Bat Masterson (on the left) described him as possessing a “… daring and apparent recklessness in time of danger.” But beyond that the man did not seem legendary at all.
After serving in an Illinois regiment during the Civil War Wyatt became a teamster between the port of Wilmington, outside of Los Angeles, and the desert mining town of Prescott, Arizona. He had managed houses of prostitution in Peoria, Illinois for several years before becoming a lawman in Wichita, Kansas. He lost that job in 1874 for embezzling county funds, which he probably used to finance his education in gambling.
So when George Hoyt began blasting away in the dark, Wyatt made the immediate assumption that the cowboy meant to kill him. As George galloped his horse back up Bridge Street, Wyatt drew his own weapon and fired after the fleeing cowboy; once, and then a second shot. The second bullet hit Hoyt in the arm.
Bat Masterson claimed years later that George Hoyt fell from his horse, dead on the spot but that seems embellishment. Bat, as we now know, was on the floor of the gambling parlor. His brother Jim was outside standing next to Wyatt but never spoke of the shooting. Other accounts say the two lawmen ran up the street together after Hoyt.
The cowboy fell from his horse, and either from being shot or from the fall, he broke his arm. Wyatt and Jim Masterson ran after Hoyt, and after he was disarmed they sought out Dr. T. L. McCarty to treat him. The Globe commented that George Hoyt “…was in bad company and has learned a lesson “he won’t soon forget”. He didn’t. Gangrene set in and the cowboy died a slow and foul death, passing at last on Wednesday, August 21st, 1878; 26 days after Wyatt shot him. The Legendary Wyatt Earp had killed his first man.
In September of 1878 a cattle broker and gunman named Clay Allison came to Dodge looking for a showdown with Wyatt Earp. One story told is that Allison was a friend of George Hoyt’s. It seems that Wyatt sensibly stayed out of sight until Allison left town, despite Wyatt's strories to the contrary. In 1879 Wyatt and his brothers moved on to Tombstone, Arizona. There, in October of 1881, he took part in the infamous Gunfight at the O.K Corral, which in fact was a gangland brawl which occurred in a vacant lot down the street from the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral. But none of that reality stopped the fight from becoming the most famous twenty seconds in the American West.
After the railroads penetrated south Texas in the mid 1880’s the need to drive cattle a thousand miles to Kansas came to an end. And with it the “Queen of the Cattle Towns” became just another small American town of some 25,000 people. It’s connection to its past is the Dodge City Cargill packing plant, whose 2,500 employees can slaughter up to 6,000 head of cattle a day, turning them into four and a half million pounds of meat shipped all over the world.
It was always the unpleasant underside of Dodge City that the town depended for its fame and fortune upon the death of so many.
