Lured by Indian tales of gold, the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñnez de Balboa led 190 men through dense, steaming jungles and rugged mountains across the narrow isthmus of Panama. On September 25, Balboa encountered the Pacific Ocean. According to
the early Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera, Balboa “commanded his armie to halt, and himselfe went alone to the toppe, where, having sighted the Mar del Sur, he knelt down, and raising his hands to Heaven, pouring forth mighty praises to God for His great grace in having made him the first man to discover and sight it.”
1813 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
Cannon shot boomed across the waters of Lake Erie as Oliver Hazard Perry, in command of the flagship Lawrence, led his small, undermanned fleet into battle against the British, commanded by the one-armed Robert Heriot Barclay, on the morning of September 10.
Perry’s second officer, Jesse Duncan Elliott, commanding the 480-ton brig Niagara, mysteriously held back (later he lamely asserted that his ship had been stalled by a lack of wind), leaving Perry to engage the enemy’s two most formidable vessels with just his own ship and two small schooners.
By the time the Niagara finally came up, the Lawrence was little more than a floating assemblage of splinters. Eighty-three out of just over a hundred crew members had been killed or wounded. Perry, miraculously unscathed, transferred command of the flagship to a junior officer and took the ship’s remaining dinghy over to the Niagara.
With a fresh ship he now had the upper hand. The Detroit, despite her advantage, had taken quite a beating from the Lawrence. Barely afloat, she angled frantically to present a narrower target to the American fleet but blundered into the Queen Charlotte in the process. As the two ships struggled to keep clear of each other, the Niagara’s broadsides quickly decided the battle.
With victory at hand Perry hurriedly wrote out a dispatch to Gen. William Henry Harrison on the back of an old envelope: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.…”
The defeat of the British fleet at Lake Erie left British troops at Fort Maiden dangerously exposed, so Gen. Henry Procter and his men retreated up the Thames River in Ontario. American troops under General Harrison pursued.
The Shawnee chief Tecumseh had forged an alliance with the British in hopes of putting an end to the cession of Indian lands to the Americans. He found General Procter a disheartening ally. “We must compare our father’s conduct,” he said, “to a fat dog that carries its tail upon its back, but when affrightened drops it between its legs and runs off.”
On October 5 Harrison’s forces overtook Procter near the Indian settlement of Moravian Town. It was a brief battle, during which Procter fled the scene. Tecumseh and his braves fought well but received scant help from the dispersed and unnerved British regulars.
Tecumseh had foreseen this would be his last battle. “Brother warriors,” he is reported to have said, “we are about to enter into an engagement from which 1 shall never return.” Before the fighting began, he shed his British uniform and donned the buckskins of his younger days.
Tecumseh’s fate remains a mystery; his body was never found. The following year, at the close of the War of 1812, Indian veterans of the Battle of the Thames were asked what had happened to their leader. They raised their arms to the sky and said, “Gone.”
1838 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Unusual sightings reported in September included “a monstrous longtailed snake” in Indiana, “grasshoppers so ravenous in Maryland that they devour hoe-handles, ploughshares, and harrows,” and several ghosts.
In October began the twelve-hundred-mile journey of the Cherokee nation from its Georgia homeland to Oklahoma. The migration was not a voluntary one. White settlers hungry for land in the Southeast had already pushed the Creeks and Choctaws across the Mississippi. But the Cherokees, a proud people with a rich land lovingly tended, did not go easily.
In 1835 the government coerced a small minority of Cherokees to sign on behalf of the entire nation a treaty agreeing to cede all lands owned by them east of the Mississippi River. They had two years to clear out.
When the deadline approached, the Cherokees were forced from their homes into hastily built detention camps. Gen. John Ellis Wool, assigned to enforce the treaty, wrote, “The whole scene since I have been in this country has been nothing but a heart-rending one ... I would remove every Indian tomorrow beyond the reach of the white men, who, like vultures, are watching, ready to pounce on their prey and strip them of everything they have.…”
Over the sweltering summer, dysentery, measles, and whooping cough raged through the ill-provisioned camps, where some two thousand Indians died. Finally, that autumn, the great exodus commenced. “In the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning,” wrote a young soldier who witnessed the event, “I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west.…”
An entire nation, fifteen thousand men, women, and children, set forth on a six-month trek to an unfamiliar land. On the way about two thousand more Cherokees succumbed to disease, exposure, and exhaustion and were buried in shallow graves along what became known as the Trail of Tears.
1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Gen. William S. Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland had the Confederates in Tennessee on the run. A daring series of maneuvers severed the Rebels’ supply line and forced Braxton Bragg’s army to retreat from Chattanooga. “Old Rosy” led his men straight into a sudden counterattack on the banks of Chickamauga Creek on September 19.
Bragg had picked up reinforcements from Knoxville and from Mississippi and Virginia and was now ready to go on the offensive again. Rosecrans found his campaign in tatters. Casualties totaled thirty thousand in the course of the two-day battle.
Threatened with a rout, the Federals retreated to Chattanooga. Bragg and his troops closed in, and the Army of the Cumberland found itself facing the beginning of a bitter siege.
1888 One Hundred Years Ago
The Washington Monument opened to the public on October 9. Visitors crowded into a lumbering steam elevator for the twelve-minute ride to the top of the 555-foot obelisk.
On September 4, George Eastman received a patent for his Kodak camera, enabling the Eastman Company to bring photography within the reach of the unskilled amateur by processing the film for the customer. This simple, fixed-focus camera sold for twenty-five dollars, with a one-hundred-exposure roll of film and a case included. With the “Kodak System,” wrote Eastman, “the mere mechanical act of taking the picture…is divorced from all the chemical manipulations of preparing and finishing pictures.”
The Kodak was a phenomenal success. Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1893 operetta Utopia Limited even featured a chorus of Kodak-wielding girls and two blushing maidens singing, “To diagnose/Our modest pose/The Kodaks do their best:/If evidence you would possess/Of what is maiden bashfulness,/You only need a button press—/And we will do the rest.”
The first issue of National Geographic magazine appeared in October.
1938 Fifty Years Ago
Weather forecasts called for merely “overcast with rain,” but on September 21 a hurricane tore across Long Island, drowned Providence, Rhode Island, with a ten-foot tidal wave, and lashed Cape Cod with 150-mile-per-hour winds. In its wake the storm left sixty thousand families homeless, damage totaling half a billion dollars, more than six hundred dead and missing, and for the survivors, haunting, indelible memories of the Hurricane of 1938.
Robert Sherwood’s play Abe Lincoln in Illinois opened in New York on October 17 with a memorable performance by Raymond Massey in the title role. The drama chronicled the three decades preceding Lincoln’s election to the Presidency, including his ill-fated romance with Ann Rutledge and his hesitant marriage to the volatile Mary Todd. “Mr. Sherwood has looked down with compassion into the lonely blackness of Lincoln’s heart,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times, “and seen some of the fateful things that lived there.”
After several years of dogged experimentation, Chester Carlson of New York produced the first xerographic copy at his laboratory in Astoria, Queens, on October 22. The ordinary-looking piece of waxed paper simply read, "10-22-38 Astoria,” but it represented a technological breakthrough that would at last satisfy the reproducutive urges of office workers everywhere.
Existing methods of reproducing documents, such as mimeography, were cumbersome, expensive, and often messy. Carlson’s ingenious but involved process, which he called electrophotography, attracted little attention at first. Then, in 1945, the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York, became interested in electrophotography. The company funded research into making the process commercially viable and in 1949 introduced a new product, and a new word, with the XeroX Model A.
On the evening of October 30, invaders from the planet Mars landed in New Jersey. At least that’s what thousands of terrified radio listeners thought when they tuned in late to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater of the Air adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
The twenty-three-year-old Welles updated H. G. Wells’s turn-of-the-century novel of aggressive extraterrestrial colonialism by presenting the dramatization as a sequence of news bulletins describing the death-ray-wielding Martians’ attack on rural New Jersey. So convincing were the bulletins that thousands believed that interplanetary war really was at hand.
Despite a series of disclaimers by CBS announcing the fictional nature of the broadcast, many families fled their homes to seek refuge from the Martians. The “invasion” left in its wake two hundred thousand dollars in lawsuits filed against CBS and Welles for broken bones, miscarriages, and other injuries suffered during the furor.
