In 1938, Republican Party members in the small town of Milton, Washington assembled for their monthly meeting. On the agenda was the election of a committeemen to represent them at county level. Only one written nomination was tabled, from a Mr Boston Curtis. With no other candidates put forward, Boston was duly elected, despite the voters not knowing who or what he actually was:
“Boston Curtis, a mule, has been elected as Republican committeeman in the town of Milton, Washington. Boston was entered in the race by the Democratic mayor and received 51 votes – without offering a platform or making a speech.”
Boston’s nominator, Mayor Kenneth Simmons, later told the press he had nominated the mule as a prank, not expecting him to be elected. According to Simmons, he made no secret of his japery. He had led Boston to the local courthouse and ‘signed’ the nomination form with his hoof print, while laughing heartily with city officials.
In the end, the joke was on those who blindly voted a mule up the Republican Party ranks:
“It was a pretty mean trick to play on a mule, getting him into politics that way and making a fool of him. But at least Boston Curtis can congratulate himself on being no more of a donkey than the 51 Republicans who voted for him, without taking the trouble to find out what he was.”
Clement L. Vallandigham, whose prepping for court didn’t go entirely to plan
Clement L. Vallandigham (1820-71) was a prominent Ohio lawyer and politician who served in Congress prior to and during the Civil War.
A pacifist by nature, Vallandigham made several inflammatory speeches against the war and those he deemed responsible for it, including Abraham Lincoln. In May 1863, Vallandigham was arrested and temporarily interned, before being deported to the Confederacy. The following year he sneaked back into the United States via Canada, with the aid of a new hairstyle and a false moustache.
After the war, Vallandigham returned to his native Ohio and to practising law. In June 1871 he was in the town of Lebanon, acting as lead defence counsel in a murder case. His client, a Hamilton ruffian named Thomas McGehan, was charged with shooting another man in the stomach during a bar room fight. Vallandigham’s line of defence was quite simple: the victim had in fact shot himself while trying to withdraw his pistol while rising to stand.
At breakfast one morning, Vallandigham showed his legal team how he intended to demonstrate this in court – but made a fatal error:
“Mr McBurney [another lawyer] had expressed some doubts as to the possibility of Myers [the victim] shooting himself in the manner described by Mr Vallandigham, when the latter said ‘I will show you in a half a second’. He picked up a revolver and putting it in his right pocket, drew it out far enough to keep the muzzle touching his body, and engaged the hammer. The weapon exploded and sent its deadly missile into the abdomen at a point almost corresponding with that in which Myers was shot. Mr Vallandigham immediately exclaimed that he had taken up the wrong pistol… There were two revolvers on the table, one loaded and the other unloaded. Unfortunately Mr Vallandigham seized the former.”
Vallandigham was carried to bed and doctors were summoned but they were unable to locate the bullet or stem his internal bleeding. He died some 12 hours later. His corpse was packed in ice and returned to his home in Dayton for burial. Vallandigham’s wife Louisa, who was attending her brother’s funeral at the time of her husband’s demise, was grief stricken; she died from a heart attack seven weeks later. Vallandigham’s client, Thomas McGehan, was retried twice and eventually acquitted.
In April 1779, a young Staffordshire woman, Miss Nangle, set out to walk from her Uttoxeter home to nearby Doveridge. A mile into her journey, Miss Nangle smelled smoke and discovered that the back of her skirt was in fire.
When her attempts to damp down this fire failed, she ran to douse herself in a nearby pond. But by the time Miss Nangle reached the water her clothing was fully ablaze, the flames reaching “an alarming height”. Severely burned, Miss Nangle was carried back to Uttoxeter and given medical assistance, though she was “without hope of recovery”. She lingered in agony for five weeks before dying on June 2nd.
According to Miss Nangle herself, the fire was ignited by a small spying-glass she was carrying in her pocket:
“It was a very hot day and it is supposed the reflection of the sun upon the glass set some part of her clothes on fire… She persisted to the last that the fire began in her pocket where the spying-glass was… Her death could not otherwise be accounted for, no lightning having been observed that day.”
Coronial records from the 16th century describe the death of Henry Pert, a gentleman from Welbeck, near Worksop in Nottinghamshire. Pert died a day after receiving an arrow to the head – apparently fired from his own weapon. According to the coroner’s finding, Pert was stood over his loaded longbow while attempting to release a jammed arrow:
“[Pert] went out to play at Welbeck and drew his bow so fully with an arrow In it that he lodged the arrow in the bow. Afterwards, intending to make the arrow climb straight into the air, he shot the arrow from the bow… Because his face was directly over the arrow as it climbed upwards, it struck him above his left eye, near to his eyelid, and into his head to the membrane. Thus the said arrow (worth one penny) gave him a wound, of which he immediately languished and lay languishing until noon on October 29th, when he died at Welbeck by misadventure.”
One of the world’s largest gas explosions occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in November 1927, causing catastrophic destruction. As with many similar accidents, human stupidity was chiefly to blame.
The Equitable Gas Company’s gasometer, a prominent city landmark, was billed as the largest man-made gas tank on Earth. On the morning of November 14th a team of workmen was sent to investigate a gas leak in an adjoining side tank. Thinking it safe, they began to repair the tank with acetylene blowtorches. Their flames ignited more than five million cubic feet of natural gas in the main tank, blowing it to pieces.
According to eyewitness accounts, the explosion created a fireball that reached 200 metres in height. The blast shook Pittsburgh like an earthquake and was felt in four different states. More than a square mile of the city was levelled, leaving several thousand people homeless. Metal shards, broken glass and burning debris rained down on the city for an hour. Large chunks of debris landed more than a mile from the scene.
More than 800 people were seriously injured but surprisingly, only 28 were killed, including the workmen who triggered the explosion.
In January 1865, US president Abraham Lincoln received an unsigned letter sent from Pittsburg. The letter was riddled with poor spelling and grammar, for which the writer apologised (“I am nervos and a poor schollor”). The focus of the letter, however, was unmistakeable:
“Dear friend, the Peapple is in for making Peas, yes Peas they wand and thay pray that you will make it… before the Lextion [election] there was Bills posted up evrewhere that you would make a change in the cabnet and would make Peas… the tok is about Peas but we cant see it and have not seen it… this cruel Ware has bin going long a nuf…”
Simon Harcourt was raised to the peerage in 1749 after his military service to George II. Thereafter the 1st Earl Harcourt, he served as an advisor to the future George III and an ambassador on the European continent, including four years in Paris.
Harcourt met a watery end in September 1777, aged 63. While walking on his estate in Oxfordshire, the earl apparently fell head-first into a well while trying to rescue his dog:
“The body of Earl Harcourt was found dead in a narrow well in his park, with the head downwards and nothing appearing above water but the feet and legs. It is imagined this melancholy accident was occasioned by his overreaching himself in endeavouring to save the life of a favourite dog, which was found in the well with him, standing on his lordship’s feet.”
Atkinson Williamson was parson of St Philip’s, an Episcopal church in Charlestown, South Carolina, in the late 1600s. Several private letters from the early 1700s make mention of the fact that Williamson, sometimes referred to as “Williams”, was an alcoholic. Some report that he was removed from his position after an unseemly incident.
In one exchange of letters, South Carolinian gentlemen Thomas Smith recalls this as Williamson turning up to church drunk and being convinced to baptise a young bear:
“[He] was too great a lover of strong liquor, etc… Some wicked people… made him first fuddled and then got him to christen the bear.”
The incident was also mentioned by James Moore, the British governor of South Carolina between 1700 and 1703. After Williamson’s removal he remained in Charlestown and continued as a clerk of the church.
In July 1790, Russia’s Black Sea fleet, commanded by Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, defeated an Ottoman naval force in Kerch Strait, near the Crimea.
In October a Boston newspaper, the Columbian Centinel, informed its readers of the Russian victory. The outraged Centinel also reported that Catherine the Great had rewarded Admiral Ushakov by allowing him to shoot 2,417 peasants. “It is not [only] in Africa where the horrors of slavery are to be commiserated”, the Centinel bemoaned.
Days later, however, the Centinel ran this brief and somewhat unapologetic correction:
“By a subsequent English paragraph the above is found to be a mistake. The Empress gave her Admiral leave to shoot 2,417 pheasants.”
