FOOD FIGHT- The Siege of Vienna

Poor, old  Merzifonly Kara Mustafa Pasa (above). He comes down in history as despised for his petty meanness and infamous for his avariciousness. But the truth may be that his greatest sin historically was having been born with the perfect skills to be a second in command. He was a brilliant organizer. His attention to detail and precision was legendary. He could calculate a bribe as quick as greased lightening. Unfortunately, his Sultan, Mehmed IV, had an ambition for war but found he didn’t like living in a tent. So in 1683 he went home from the war early. And that left Kara Mustafa alone as the Grand Vizier of the army, with no limits on his fastidious obsession for detail,  hunger for wealth and a blind faith in violence as a negotiating position.

Sultan Mehmed IV (above) was always trying to convince people that he was who his titles said he was. He made his first entrance into history as an infant when his father, in a fit if temper, threw his baby son down a toilet. The servants rescued the boy, but Mehmed bore the scar from that experience, physically on his forehead (ala Harry Potter), and figuratively on his ego, his entire life. Instead of a cold simple diplomatic declaration of war - or more practically, a disarming surprise attack - on 31 March, 1683 Mehmed sent Austrian Hapsburg King Leopold I a letter dripping with adolescent bravado.

Mehmed IV informed Leopold (above), “…We will destroy your little country with our Army… Above all WE order you, to wait for us in your city…so WE can behead you…We will exterminate you and all of your followers, as you are the lowest creatures of God, as all unbelievers are, and erase you from the face of the earth. WE will expose the big and little to gruesome pains first and than give them to a vicious death. Your little Empire, I will take from you and its entire population I will sweep off the earth.”

In the realm of braggadocio Mehmed IV letter has to rank right up there with George Bush’s 2004 invitation to the Iraqi resistance to “Bring it on.” Still, it wasn’t as if either side needed a reason for this new war. The Christians and the Muslims had been butchering each other in the Balkans for 300 years, since the fall of Constantinople. In the first century of these wars Vlad the Impaler (Christian) made his reputation having 20,000 Ottoman P.O.W’s impaled on stakes. And then he had lunch. Things just got worse from there. As Andrew Wheatcroft explains in his recent book, “The Enemy at the Gate”, “Many of the horror stories of these wars are true: the massacres and the atrocities, the endless lines of newly enslaved Hungarians in Sarajevo on their road of tears to Istanbul….The Hapsburg armies also flailed men alive, impaled prisoners, took slaves, raped captives. Savagery was a weapon of war used by both sides.” This was ethnic cleansing practiced by experts. And it was no more successful in 1683 than it proved to be in 2004

During the winter of 1682-83 Kara Mustafa prepared the way to war. He oversaw the building and repairing of roads and bridges up to the border between Austria and Ottoman Hungry. Supply depots were established for ammunition and food. And then, in early May of 1683, an Ottoman army of 150,000 men under the direct command of Mehmed IV marched easily from Istanbul to Belgrade, just 300 miles from the Austrian capital of Vienna.

But after reaching the border between war and peace the Sultan handed over command to Kara Mustafa and returned to his hunting parties in Istanbul. And from that moment things started to go wrong with the expedition.

A month later, now under Kara Mustafa’s command, an advance guard of 40,000 Tartar cavalry reached the outskirts of Vienna. Remembering the note from Mehmed, King Leopold gathered up 80,000 of the residents of Vienna and ran to the west, to Linz, leaving just 5,000 citizens behind in the Austrian capital, defended by 11,000 soldiers and 370 cannon.

Kara Mustafa felt he had to offer the commander of Vienna a lesson in Ottoman diplomacy. The lesson was proffered in the little village of Perchtoldsdorf, 6 miles east of Vienna, where King Leopold had a summer estate. Not that he was there, at the time, He was in Linz, remember.

On 16 July, 1683, called upon by Mustafa to surrender, the citizens first tried to defend their town, and only when that proved hopeless did they surrender. It was too late. Mustafa released his troops who “…massacred the surrendered garrison with their sabers, slaughtered noncombatant civilians, and then incinerated a church and tower packed with women and children.” (World History of Warfare; Archer & Ferris)

However this bravado did not have the intended effect of destroying the enemies’ will to fight. “The Viennese responded by impaling severed Turkish heads in full view of their trenches and later flayed live captives.” (ibid) Mustafa had no choice now but to lay siege to Vienna.

And here technology was on the side of the defenders, thanks to the invention of the “trace italienne”, also known as the Star Fort. This design replaced vertical masonry walls which had defended Constantinople and which were easily knocked down by sold artillery shot.

Instead, as Wikipedia explains, “forts became both lower and larger in area…” Low brick curtain walls filled with earth absorbed enemy shells. Cannon embrasures allowed defenders to safely target any enemy artillery positions. An exterior ditch or moat kept enemy cavalry and troops at a distance." Mustafa would either have to accept the massive causalities of a direct assault or take the time to undermine the forts. With odds in his favor of 800 to 1 the direct assault might well have worked. But Kara Mustafa instead ordered his men to begin digging.

All through August the Ottoman engineers tunneled, hollowing massive galleries underneath Vienna’s outer defenses. In early September, when these were packed with gunpowder and exploded, an almost 12 mile line of fortifications simply collapsed; the fall of Vienna was only a matter of time. The defenders were almost out of food. Then, on 6 September, 1683, as the Austrians prepared for the literal last ditch defense of their city, out of the muddy waters of the mighty Danube River, arose a hero; Jan Sobieski, King of Poland.

Sobieski’s original not-so-heroic plan had been for an alliance between himself, France and the Ottomans against Leopold’s Austria. But finding Mehmed IV was not interested in sharing the booty from Vienna , Sobieski joined up the Austrians instead. The newly christened “Holy League” had about 80,000 men outside of Vienna, still giving Mustafa a numerical advantage of almost 2 to 1. But the Ottoman army was divided between fending off Sobieski and attacking Vienna. Mustafa refused to delay his assault. The last fortress had already been undermined, the charges planted and the fuses set. Whatever happened with Sobieski’s army, the final act of the siege would be played out on 12 September, 1683.

The Polish King chose as his battle ground a hill (Kahlen Berg) rising 1,500 feet above the Danube flood plain just outside the walls of Vienna. On this hill a large part of the Ottoman army was camped, including Mustafa’s own red tent. But anticipating Sobieski’s plan, at four that morning, Mustafa launched a spoiling attack against the Holy League’s troops.

As the armies threw themselves against each other all morning long on the hill, the Ottoman engineers were finishing their preparations underground. At about one that afternoon they lit the fuses and sealed the mine from their end. But an Austrian counter-mining operation then broke into the underground gallery and at almost the last second cut the fuses. Vienna would not fall this way. Kara Mustafa had run out of time.

Sensing the Ottoman forces were exhausted, at about five o’clock Sobieski launched a massed cavalry attack (20,000 men and horses), led by his distinctive “winged angels”. The Polish riders slammed into the Ottoman troops, and swept them from the hill.

By 5:30 that afternoon Sobieski was entering Mustafa’s personal tent and the Ottoman army was in full retreat toward the twin cities of Buda and Pest. Kara Mustafa had lost 15,000 dead and wounded and 5,000 captured, while the “League” had 5,000 dead. As history tells the tale, Sobieski got the glory while the Hapsburgs got the empire back.

To celebrate the miracle of victory the bakers of Vienna invented a new pastry, twisted into a crescent in remembrance of the Ottoman crescent flags. In Austria the pastry is called a “Vienniuserie”. When Marie Antoinette introduced the treat to France in 1770, it was given the name by which the rest of the world knows it; the “croissant”. A more suspect legend says Sobieski introduced the bagel to commemorate the stirrups of his victorious cavalry, and that Europe’s first taste of cappuccino was in bags of coffee left behind by the fleeing Ottoman troops, or perhaps what was left behind was some tasty “Vienna Roast” coffee. There may be an element of truth in some or all of these stories, but true or not, they are legendary.

Mustafa regrouped his forces at Belgrade, and put them into defense positions, in case the Austrians tried to quickly follow up their victory. But Sobieski and Leopold’s armies were as exhausted as the Ottoman troops, and the Hapsburg prince was not interested in taking undue risks. Leopold knew that time was on his side, now.

The final casualty of the battle of Vienna was Kara Mustafa himself. On 25 December, 1683, a date with little meaning to a Muslim, the soldiers came for him. He waited for them with his collar open, and stretched his neck so they might wrap the traditional silk rope around his throat. Ever attentive to details, his last words to the assassins were, “Be certain to tie the knot correctly.”

Then several men pulled the knot tight until the life was squeezed out of him. His decapitated head was carried to Istanbul and presented to Mehmed IV in a velvet bag.

His grave was disgraced and lost by conquering Hapsburg armies a generation later, and his headstone now rests along the Bugarian/Turkish border town of Edirne, as either a warning or a promise, depending on which side of the border you are standing on.

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PIKE'S PIQUE - The Shulb Who Burned Washington

I have been searching for the right word to describe Zebulon Pike, and I keep coming back to “Shlub”.   It is Yiddish word meaning a foolish or stupid person.  But at least he was handsome.  He stood “…5'8" tall, with a ruddy complexion, blue eyes and light hair…(was) a crack shot…(with) great physical endurance …”   He was also a teetotaler whom one biographer kindly described as “an efficient but unremarkable career officer” while another put it more succinctly; “…a puffed-up little popinjay...”.   As proof of Zeb’s shlub-dom I submit his first voyage of discovery in 1805 when he was ordered to find the source of the Mississippi River.

The 27 year old lieutenant set out on 9 August, 1805 from Fort Belle Fontaine, on the south bank of the Missouri River, four miles upstream from its joining with the mighty Mississippi.  He was accompanied by what he called a “Dam'd set of Rascels,” 20 soldiers manning a 70 foot keel boat. He included on his voyage no doctor, no interpreter and no one qualified to map the voyage, including Pike himself.

Because of the low water level, Pike’s men spent as much of their time dragging their boat over sand bars as they did laboriously poling it northward. Two days of exhausting work brought them to the mouth of Illinois River, near present day Grafton, Illinois - all of twenty miles from their starting point.

The Mississippi river has been winding and looping here for 145 million years, following a weakness in the crust now called the New Madrid Fault line. But north of the Illinois river the big river has been more influenced by ice.

A mere 130,000 years ago the “Wisconsin Ice Sheet” covered most of modern Wisconsin and Minnesota  under a lake. When the ice damn which had created the lake collapsed the lake drained catastrophically.  Called the Kankakee Flood it carved a valley so deep that when a similar glacier blocked the big river 13,000 years ago the Mississippi itself chose this channel, exiting its old course at Rock Island, Illinois, some 200 miles above St. Louis.

Another 150 miles above Rock Island, Pike found a perfect place for a fort. It was a 500 foot tall bluff (locally called Pike’s Peak) across the river from Prairie du Chien, a trading post at the mouth of the Wisconsin River. No fort was ever built there but it was here that Pike finally agreed the 70 foot keel boat monstrosity was too much trouble and shifted his men to two barges, easier to handle in the low water.  He might have tried some Indian canoes, but Lt. Pike was nothing if not obstinate.

At the mouth of the Minnesota River, ( now 655 miles from his starting point), on 23 September, 1805, Pike took advantage of a gathering of Sioux Indians for a little land grab. He promised to pay them less than a dollar an acre for land on which the government would eventually build a fort, which would eventually become the city of Minneapolis.

But when Congress finally paid up for their new “Fort Snelling”, in 1808, the price had been summarily reduced by 90%. And even that was actually paid to the French and British traders who had been feeding the Sioux rot gut whiskey on credit during the intervening three years. Commenting on the friendly welcome Pike received from the Sioux and the treaty Pike duped them into signing, a modern Sioux observed, “They gave him the keys (to the city), but they didn't expect him to think he owned the city”. I would say that seventy years later General Custer got the revised bill for this deal.

The next morning Pike arose to discover his personal flag was missing. He threw a fit. He had a soldier stripped to the waist and flogged for losing it. The Sioux were so disturbed by this display of pique that they dispatched two men downstream who found the flag floating in the river and returned it to the intrepid if insecure explorer.

Fifty miles further to the north Pike reached the 60 foot high St. Anthony Falls, where the river passed from the hard surface dolomites to the softer sandstone bedrock. It took three days for his men to drag their barges around the falls.  And it was here, finally, it occurred to Pike  that the local Ojibwe Indian canoes’ were lighter and more maneuverable than his barges. 

But instead of asking for help, Pike instructed his men in hollowing out a large log.  Loaded with supplies, including most of their black powder, the huge canoe was slid into the river…and immediately sank. Pike ordered all the wet powder rescued and stacked on a rack over a fire, to dry out. The resulting explosion burned down his own tent and most of his personal clothing, supplies and notes. He barely saved his trunk.

Back into the river again, with the current weakening and the channel narrowing every day, four of Pike’s men came close to physical collapse. Sergeant Henry Kennerman, “one of the stoutest men I ever knew,” according to Pike, had begun to vomit blood. Zeb wrote the men were, “…killing themselves to obey my orders.” With snow already falling, on 16 October 1805, Pike ordered the men to build a blockhouse. While they worked, he hunted, supplying them with fresh meat.

With Sgt. Kennerman in charge of the ill men left behind at the blockhouse, Pike led a small detachment overland, on snowshoes and pulling sleds, both borrowed from local British traders. They followed the river as best they could. 

On 10 December they reached the little falls of the Mississippi, and on the last day of the 1805 they camped near the mouth of the Pine River.  On the night of 4 January 1806  Pike suffered another black powder explosion. (Where was he storing his powder, in the smoking tent?)

Finally, on 12 February, 1806, “…exhausted and worn out by cold, hunger and exposure” Pike reached Red Cedar Lake (later renamed Cass Lake). 

Here, I suspect,  out of sheer desperation, Pike wrote, “This may be called the upper source of the Mississippi River.”

Pike may have called it that, but it wasn’t. Twenty- six years later, in 1832, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft followed an Anishinaabe Indian guide (another approach Pike never tried) to a small lake that he named Itasca, and which he declared was the actual source of the great river, and that is what most tourist today accept. But that isn’t the actual source either.

The actual head water of the “father of waters” is Little Elk Lake  9 miles further upstream. Little Elk Lake drains into Elk Lake, which drains (above) into Lake Itasca. 

Ninety days after a drop of rain falls on Little Elk Lake, it flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

Pike was not very concerned with such details. What concerned him was that when he got back to the blockhouse he found that Sgt. Kennerman had recovered. In fact the Sargent was feeling so well, in fact, that he had eaten or bartered away the entire companies’ supply of meat and Pike’s personal trunk as well, which had survived two explosions and at least one dumping in the river. No explanation for his actions was offered by the now Private Kennerman. But Pike lost no time in returning to civilization.  Floating downstream was a lot easier than poling up. And faster, too.

He arrived back in Fort Belle Fontaine on 30 April, 1806.  Ordered to find the source of the Mississippi, Lt. Pike had failed. In fact he had failed to locate a single stream, river or lake which had not been previously mapped.  And yet the “Lost Pathfinder” was immediately dispatched to explore the southwestern edges of the Louisiana Purchase, during which he probably spotted a mile high peak named after him, and during which the long suffering Private Kennerman deserted, never to be seen again.  I have a great deal of empathy for Private Kennerman.

Ever a self promoter, Pike rose to the level of Brigadier General during the War of 1812. And he played a crucial but little known role in that war. It was General Zebulon Pike who led the assault on the capital of Upper Canada, the city of York, (since renamed Toronto). And on 17 April, 1813, when a British mine exploded prematurely, it killed  42 British and 52 American soldiers. General Pike was hit  in the back by a falling rock, which killed him.  In retribution his soldiers burned the Parliamentary Buildings in York. And it was that act of vandalism which the British repaid by the burning Washington, D.C. on 28 August, 1814.  I would call that quite an impressive funeral pyre for a schlub.

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LIGHT AT THE END - The Great Darkness

I suspect the citizens of New England were primed for the end of days in 1780. They were in the fifth year of a bloody war which would cost the new nation of 2 ½ million souls at least 50,000 dead, and $400 million dollars. Worse, the winter just passed had been brutal. In the core of what would later be called "The Little Ice Age", parts of Chesapeake Bay had frozen over, as had the Hudson River and New York and Boston harbors. Record cold and record snows were recorded from the Mohawk valley of New York east to the coast of Maine, and as far south as Georgia.

In Sudbury, Massachusetts seven feet of snow had kept widower Samuel Savage from reaching his own barn. He complained to his diary, “…one snow upon another…and it keeps coming still…” Then, March brought a sudden thaw, which saw bridges carried away by swollen rivers jammed with ice. April was cold and wet, with late snows. And then in May, the days abruptly turned warm.

Mr. Savage’s diary recorded six days of “fair and pleasant “weather in May, although merchant Samuel Phillips of Weston, Massachusetts, observed that the air was remarkably “thick” with vapors and mists, and odd fogs rose from the still frozen north facing slopes of the White Mountains. “The sun rises and sets very red”, wrote the 55 year old Patriot.

That May, encamped with the Continental Army in Morristown, New Jersey, General George Washington was anticipating bad news from Charleston, South Carolina, and he would soon get it. His meteorological observations fit his mood. He noted on the evening of 18 May, “Heavy and uncommon kind of clouds, dark and at the same time a bright and reddish kind of light intermixed with them….” But back in New England, these odd atmospheric phenomena proved merely the curtain riser for the dramatic morning of Friday, 19 May, 1780.

At six that morning, when the sun rose over West Rupert, Vermont, a haze was already gathering beyond the New York border. Beginning about nine “...a dark dense cloud gradually rose...and spread itself until the heavens were entirely covered, except at the horizon, where a narrow rim of light remained.”

One hundred miles to the northeast, on the other side of the White Mountains, in the little village of Lancaster, New Hampshire, workmen remembered the sun had risen with a “strange enchanting hue”. Despite the odd air to the air, they quickly got down to digging a foundation and cellar for Jonas Wilder’s new home.

A little past nine that morning, widower Samuel Savage noticed there “came on an appearance over the whole visible heavens…a light brassy hue, nearly the color of pale cider.”

By about 10:00 am the gathering gloom had reached Cambridge, Massachusetts, 150 miles to the south – a speed of about 25 miles per hour. A half hour later 37 year old Harvard College professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, Samuel Williams, decided to begin taking notes on the darkening phenomena.

Wrote farmer Savage, “By ten o'clock the sun had almost entirely disappeared”, and “…songbirds that cheered the day only hours before, now fell silent. Fowls retired to their roosts, or collected together in clusters...cocks crowed and crickets shook their fiddles. It was all as if night was falling”. About 11:00 that morning the darkness was so thick the laborers in Lancaster could no longer see well enough to dig.

A ship's captain, 200 miles southeast of Boston had observed the approach of the blackest cloud he had ever seen. About ten he ordered his crew to take in the sails, but as the cloud engulfed them, they found it impossible to “find their way from one mast to the other”. By eleven he was obliged to steer by lantern light upon his compass.

According to the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, several amateur scientists in Ipswich Hamlet, Massachusetts, being "...gentlemen of liberal education", noted that at half past eleven “…in a room with three windows…open toward the southeast and south, large print could not be read by persons of good eyes.” By noon, “…a candle cast a shade so well defined on the wall, as that profiles were taken…”

In the gathering  twilight on Boston Common a man rushed up to a nervous crowd, shouting that the tide in the harbor had “…ceased to flow.” A panic almost ensued, but was stopped by a Mr. Willard who calmly drew his pocket watch and dryly observed, “So it has…for today. It is past twelve o’clock.”

In Harvard, Professor William recorded a light rain had begun to fall “..thick and dark and sooty”.  Jeremy Belknap (above) , a visiting minister and historian, noted that the rain gave the air the “ smell of a malt-house or a coal-kiln".  Noted another observer further north in Maine, “... Woodcocks…whistled as they do only in the dark. Frogs peeped. In short, there was the appearance of midnight at noonday”.

The rabble – rousing “Massachusetts Spy” paused their political harangues to record “...that at about 12 o’clock…the day light was not greater...as that of bright moon-light” and that “no object was discernible but by the help of some artificial light.” And a man riding through the 4,000 foot hills above Penacook, in south central New Hampshire suddenly found himself among black clouds so thick he could barely breathe. Nearby, Mr. Sammuel Tenny noted that a sheet of paper “…held within a few inches of the eyes was as black as velvet.”

Back in Ipswich the amateurs noted that “About one o'clock…the darkness was greater than it had been for any time before…We dined about two…two candles burning on the table.” Another wondered if “..every luminous body in the universe had been shrouded in impenetrable darkness, or struck out of existence...”

Approaching two o’clock, while standing at a window, farmer Samuel Savage could no longer read his own watch. His neighbor was forced to cease fertilizing his crops when he could no longer “...discern the difference between the ground and the dung.” About the same time, forty miles south west of Boston, in Killingly Connecticut, Joseph Joslin jr., who had worked as a teamster for the Continental Army, was forced to abandon work on a stone wall for want of light.

Schools across New England were dismissed and churches were filled. Many could not help but remember their scripture, in particular Revelations, Chapter 6, verse 12 and 13; “...The sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became as blood. The stars of the sky fell to the earth, like a fig tree dropping its unripe figs when it is shaken by a great wind."

In the small Massachusetts village of Sutton, 72 year old Reverend David Hall (above) noted in his diary, “People came flocking to the meetinghouse requesting my presence (to guide them in prayer)." Two hundred and twenty years later you can still almost see the leader of the First Congregational Church smile as he added,"The people were very attentive.” In Salem, the 42 year old Presbyterian minister Nathaniel Wittaker told his flock the blackness was God's judgment upon their “cumulative sin”, while another, braver, local preacher admitted to his flock that he was “as much in the dark as they were”.

Salem lawyer William Pynchon, grandson of one of the colonies' Puritan founders, observed most of his fellow citizens were filled with “melancholy and fear” except for a small knot of drunken sailors, “hallooing and frolicking throughout the streets” heckling women and urging them to remove their clothing. Pynchon even quoted them. “Now you may take off your rolls and high caps, and be damned.” Sailors, it seems, have been the same since time began and were determined to remain so even at it's end.

Meanwhile, further south in Hartford, the Connecticut Colonial House of Representatives was so shaken by the dark they voted to adjourn. A similar motion was introduced in the upper house, the Governor's Council, which was debating a bill to regulate shad fishing. But the Councilor from Stamford objected. 

Colonel Abraham Davenport declared, “The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty.” Shamed by his logic, at least part of the government of Connecticut decided to go forth and regulate the fishes by candle light.

The incident inspired the Quaker anti-slavery poet, John Greenleaf Whittier to write, “... All ears grew sharp, To hear the doom blast of the trumpet shatter, The black sky... Meanwhile in the old Statehouse, dim as ghosts, Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut, Trembling beneath their legislative robes. 'It is the Lord's great day! Let us adjourn,' Some said; and then, as with one accord, All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport”

Back in Morristown, with the Continental Army, Connecticut Corporal Joseph Plumb Martin, a six year veteran at the age of 21, admitted, “...it has been said that the darkness was not so great in New Jersey...but I know that it was very dark where I then was...fowls went to their roosts, the cocks crew and the whip-poor-wills sang their usual serenade; the people had to light candles in their houses to enable them to see to carry on their usual business...”

When the superfluous night fell the full moon was due to rise at nine, but did not appear, until 1:00 A.M., and then it shown, high in the sky and blood red. Shortly afterward dim stars began to appear. 

Then, “About three o'clock the light in the west increased, the motion of the clouds more quick, their color higher and more brassy…There appeared to be quick flashes…not unlike the aurora borealis.... About half past four the company of Ipswich amateurs, “who had passed the darkness very cheerfully together” staggered home to their beds, not afraid but none the wiser.

With the dawn on Saturday, 20 May, 1780, New England struggled to return to normal. The day was light and the night was dark again, at least for the present. But few could look upon the setting sun with absolute assurance that it would reappear. But that morning, the workmen in Lancaster, New Hampshire returned to their labors. If they did not work, they did not eat. And like all practical men, they knew they would be hungry tomorrow.

With time, came a return to reason, for some. On 22 June, 1780, another Boston paper, The Independent Chronicle, printed a letter from a royalist medical doctor. Samuel Stearns, claimed a special knowledge of "... philosophy and astronomy." He assured readers the darkness could not have been a solar eclipse, since “...the moon was more than one hundred and fifty degrees from the sun all that day.” Besides, the moon, sun and earth are all spinning, meaning the longest it is possible for the moon to block out the sun at any spot in earth is 7 minutes and 32 seconds. In Boston The Great Darkness had lasted, “...for at least fourteen or fifteen hours."  In any case, American colonists had seen eclipses before, in 1776, 1777 and 1778.  Few still thought eclipses portended doomsday.

Some suggested the dark cloud had been volcanic. But the New England farmers were not so ignorant of what lay beyond their horizon, as to have missed sulfur spewing mountains hidden among the Appalachians. Two hundred years later it would be known that sometime around 1780 there had been eruptions in the Cascade range, 3,000 miles to the west. But none of these produced ash clouds large or high enough to have crossed the Rocky Mountains and blanketed New England.

To the pragmatic New England Puritans the answer was staring them in the face, since the one thing – other than rocks – Europeans battled in the new world every day - were trees. North America, was covered by forests. And it was noted for several days after the Great Dark, that the Merrimack River, the largest stream flowing out of New Hampshire, was coated with a black scum. Some also claimed to have smelled burnt leaves and wood smoke – odors familiar before the 21^st century. But if you passed over such observations, the mystery of The Great Dark, remained a mystery.

So the descendants of Puritans were eager to accept only one explanation for The Great Dark, and in the end the loyalist Doctor Sterns assigned responsibility for the frightening 19 of May, 1780, to “...Him that walketh through the circuit of heaven, who stretcheth out the heaven like a curtain, who maketh the clouds His chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” In other words, God almighty. Yaway, the vengeful Hebrew God. Elahim, the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. That God. A God who might destroy an entire universe out of wounded pride. And such was the power of religion that after  the living memory of the Great Darkness faded,  it would be two centuries before humans dared to actively look for real evidence.

At the turn of the 21^st century a group of scientists working out of the University of Missouri finally began gathering chronicles of Dendrochronologists who had counted tree rings upwind from places struck by the Great Darkness.

And 300 miles north northwest of Samuel Savage's farm, they found the answer patiently awaiting them, north of the finger lakes of New York State, across the cold expanse of Lake Erie, north of Alexander Bay and the source of the St. Lawrence River, among the 3,000 square miles of coniferous and deciduous forest surrounding Opengo Lake, in Ontario, Canada.

The tree rings found there tell those who can read them that the deep snows of New England in 1780 had been balanced by a scarcity of precipitation in Ontario. They cannot tell us, at least not yet, what started the great fire. It may have been lightening, it may have been an Algonquin or a French Canadian burning out a new canoe's interior, or flushing game or a human enemy, or slashing and burning to clear land. But once started there was no rain that spring to stop 35 square miles of old growth forest from burning.

This was not the first time this forest had burned, as shown by the lack of clutter around each tree. This was shown by the  lowered temperature of the conflagration, which allowed perhaps half of the trees in the forest to survive. 

Still, the trauma left scares on the survivors (above). And in following years their growth rings were wider, showing they benefited from a sudden lack of competition. This had all happened before, of course. But what was particular about 19 May, 1780 was not merely the fire, but also the weather.

The calm at the center of a persistent high pressure zone atop Ontario, which had caused the drought which fed the fire, also allowed the smoke to climb vertically and deprived the flames of the influx of oxygen and super heating a wind would have. A low pressure cyclone turning around the Ohio/Pennsylvania border would have drawn the Flammagenitus clouds - “often grayish to brown in color”- southwestward . 

Gradually the massive soot cloud cooled and dropped and slowed to about 20 miles an hour. And when it encountered the 4 to 6,000 foot high barrier of the White Mountains, it became what was called at the time a “timber fog”.

On the east side of the mountains the timber fog collided with a dense ocean fog, carried onshore from the Atlantic. And where these two air masses, dry smoke and salt air fog, collided, they bloated out the sun for a full day. About midnight the natural coastal patterns of morning on shore and afternoon off shore winds pulled the fog and smoke out to sea, where it dispersed. It was all a perfectly natural, if unusual chain of natural events.

By Wednesday, 26 July, 1780 the workers in Lancaster, New Hampshire, were able to raise the frame for the new home for Jonas Wilder's family, 10 children – 5 sons and 5 daughters. It was the first two story house built in New Hampshire, and still stands. It is now called the Wilder-Holton House, and houses the Lancaster Historical Society, and a small museum. It stands as a monument to those who have faith in the future, because if doomsday does not rescue us from our mistakes, we have to live with them.

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