On October 29 the Otter, out of Boston, dropped anchor at Monterey, becoming the first American ship to visit California. Trade with foreign vessels was forbidden by the Spanish authorities, but Gov. Don Diego de Borica was happy to supply water and wood for cooking after the Otter’s captain, Ebenezer Dorr, Jr., showed his passport from President Washington. Dorr also asked permission to drop off eleven stowaways from the British penal colony at Botany Bay, Australia. When it was refused, Dorr landed them secretly under cover of night before departing on November 6. Borica was put out at having his hospitality abused, but Dorr had no choice; his ship carried a crew of only twenty-six, and the extra passengers would have overtaxed her resources. Things worked out for the best, however. Borica put the stowaways to work as carpenters and blacksmiths, and they did such a good job that he was sorry to see them deported to Cádiz by official edict the following autumn.
1846One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Anesthesia Is Born
At ten o’clock on the morning of October 16, a collection of eminent surgeons assembled in the operating room at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Such gatherings were not rare; it often took half a dozen men to hold down a writhing, screaming patient long enough to get the job done. But this operation was different. Instead of gulping a shot of whiskey and being strapped into place, the patient, a twenty-one-year-old printer named Edward Gilbert Abbott, inhaled ether for about three minutes and lapsed into unconsciousness. Dr. John C. Warren, one of the country’s most distinguished surgeons, stepped forward, made a three-inch incision, and calmly removed a tumor from Abbott’s neck as his colleagues looked on. Abbott muttered and wiggled a bit during the operation but said afterward that he had felt no pain. Just like that, anesthesia, long derided by surgeons, had been proved safe and effective. With tears in his eyes Warren exclaimed, “Gentlemen, this is no humbug.”
Within months surgeons around the world had enthusiastically adopted the new technique, and in the years since, its benefits to humanity have been incalculable. To the men who claimed credit for inventing anesthesia, though, it brought only grief. William Morton, who administered the ether to Abbott, had been a pupil of Horace Wells, a dentist who used anesthesia in his practice. He had also studied and consulted with Charles Jackson, a prominent chemist. After the success of the Massachusetts General demonstration, both men accused Morton of stealing their ideas. The ensuing wrangle tragically consumed the trio’s lives from that point on. All three eventually died insane.
Wells was the first to go. He promoted nitrous oxide as a rival anesthetic, with little success, and then turned to chloroform, to which he quickly became addicted. In 1848, while under the influence, he was arrested for throwing acid on a woman. In despair over the depth to which he had sunk, he anesthetized himself one last time, slit an artery, and bled to death in his jail cell. Morton outlived his former mentor by twenty years and spent the whole time pleading in vain to be rewarded for his discovery. He took out a patent, but ether had been known for decades to cause insensibility; in fact, a Georgia doctor had used it in surgery in the early 184Os without telling anyone. With his patent unenforceable, Morton petitioned Congress repeatedly for compensation, growing poorer all the while. In 1868, with his latest unsuccessful effort pending, he suffered a breakdown. Shortly afterward he plunged his head into a lake in a frenzy, fell unconscious, and died. Jackson, meanwhile, continued his scientific studies, alternating geological monographs with vitriolic attacks on Morton. In 1873 he was committed to an asylum, where he died seven years later. The question of who invented anesthesia remains unresolved to this day.
1871One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Two Fires
On the evening of October 7, Chicago firemen were summoned to the Lull and Holmes planing mill just west of downtown. There they encountered the latest and biggest in a series of fires the city had seen during an unusually dry summer and fall. Before the blaze was extinguished, fifteen hours later, more than half the 185-man department had been dispatched to the site. With twenty acres destroyed and damages estimated at a million dollars, it was the worst fire in Chicago’s history. That record held up for less than a day.
The next evening, around a quarter of nine, a fresh load of hay caught on fire in Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s barn at the corner of DeKoven and Jefferson streets. A tale sprang up almost instantly that one of their milk cows had kicked over a lantern, but there is no evidence for this; other possible explanations include arson, spontaneous combustion, and a discarded cigar or cigarette. Whatever the cause, high winds swiftly spread the flames, and the fire department, weary from the previous night’s marathon effort, was slow to respond. The first company to reach the site attacked the wrong end of the fire, while the second one found its steam pumper broken and without fuel. By the time the whole department could be mobilized, the blaze was out of control. A couple of hours later a gasworks exploded, intensifying the conflagration, and then at 7:00 A.M. hydrants ran dry when the city waterworks caught fire. From then on, all anyone could do was pray for rain.
The rain finally arrived late in the evening of the ninth, and around three o’clock the next morning the fire at last went out. Dazed residents combed through Chicago’s smoldering embers and totaled up the devastation. According to the best estimates, the fire destroyed nearly 17,500 buildings in an area of about 2,500 acres, leaving 90,000 people homeless. About 300 Chicagoans died, and property damage was perhaps $200 million.
These statistics make Chicago’s conflagration the second-biggest fire of its day—that is, the second-biggest fire of October 8, 1871. On the same evening, at almost the same hour as the O’Leary barn went up, a forest fire of unimaginable intensity erupted near the lumber-milling town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, about 220 miles to the north. The pinewoods had seen no rain for three months and had been plagued with numerous small fires, which residents had managed to extinguish. This time, though, fire broke out in several places at once and was fanned by the same southwest wind that had spread the Chicago blaze. It flowed through the treetops so fast that fighting it or trying to run away was useless.
The first flames reached Peshtigo around nine o’clock. Ten minutes later the village and half its residents had been incinerated. Some saved themselves by jumping into the Peshtigo River, while others lay low in nearby marshland. Those overtaken by the flames, or unlucky enough to be trapped in buildings, were quickly reduced to heaps of ashes. Although Peshtigo’s property damage was about $5 million, mild by comparison with Chicago’s, the death toll was much higher—around 1,200 to 1,500, as near as anyone can guess. About 2,000 square miles—or 1.3 million acres—were devastated along the west shore of Green Bay and on the nearby Door Peninsula.
Despite its deaths, the story of the Chicago fire is inspiring. There’s the legend of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, the courthouse officials who released prisoners from the basement jail just before the building collapsed, Phil Sheridan bringing in troops to maintain order, and most of all the city’s phoenixlike rebirth, which gave rise to the modern skyscraper. The Peshtigo fire, by contrast, is simply horrifying. The entire modern city of Chicago stands as a monument to its great conflagration. In Peshtigo a modest plaque marks the mass grave of hundreds of unidentified victims.
A Riot in L.A.
On October 24 hundreds of white Los Angelenos surrounded a Chinatown building and yelled for the massacre of its occupants. The rowdies had come seeking retribution for the murder of a policeman and several other citizens who had interfered in a dispute between Chinese gangs. The offenders in that crime were holed up in the Coronel Building, on Chinatown’s notorious Galle de los Negros. When they saw the numbers facing them, the killers tried to surrender.
The mob would have none of it. One Chinese man peeked out the door and was greeted with a fusillade of bullets. Another made a break and was shot dead; still another was captured, beaten, and hanged. The vigilantes then broke through the roof and proceeded to flush out any Chinese they could find, pausing only to steal what was left behind. Others lynched and looted their way down the street. Rioting continued for four hours before the sheriff could restore order. The final tally: four Chinese shot, fifteen hanged. Only one of the victims had any connection with the original killings.
The riot was Los Angeles’s first major appearance in the national news, and not an auspicious one. Yet it had the paradoxical effect of ending two years of lawlessness that had started soon after completion of the transcontinental railroad. A vigorous roundup of rioters drove much of the criminal element elsewhere, and responsible citizens took care to prevent any recurrence. Almost overnight Los Angeles had a reputation for peace and tranquillity that it would enjoy well into the next century.
1896One Hundred Years Ago
RFD
On October 1 the Post Office inaugurated rural free delivery (RFD) in the area surrounding three West Virginia towns. For years the Post Office had been putting branches in increasingly remote locations, but many backcountry residents still had to travel long distances to send or pick up mail. Farmers envied the convenience of daily delivery that city dwellers had enjoyed since 1863, and with their growing political prominence, they were able to secure congressional appropriations and overcome bureaucratic inertia and an economic panic. Postmaster General William L. Wilson honored his hometown of Charles Town by making it one of three pilot sites, and the local carrier sneaked out a few days early to make sure he would have nearby Uvilla and Halltown beaten.
Within a year eighty-two rural routes had been established in twenty-eight states and the Arizona Territory. Carriers rode on horseback or in carts or buggies; where roads were smooth enough, bicycles could be used. Besides their statutory function, they often served as messengers or deliverymen and played an important role by spreading information and gossip in areas with no telephone service. The system got an enormous boost in 1898, when the Post Office announced that any group of farmers served by adequate roads could qualify for service by submitting a petition. The policy spurred on road improvements in many areas. A year later RFD had spread to all but four states. By 1902 some eight thousand rural routes were in operation, and three years later the figure had quadrupled. RFD picked up the pace of rural life, giving farmers regular access to daily newspapers for the first time. The mail-order business also flourished.
Yet even as RFD broke the isolation of rural dwellers, it weakened ties with their neighbors. Postal administrators realized that large areas could be served from a single point, and as routes proliferated, many small post offices were eliminated, with the total number declining steadily after 1901. Automobiles accelerated this process of consolidation, and before long the crossroads post office/general store had been eclipsed as a rustic meeting place. Like today’s Internet, RFD opened new worlds while dissolving some of the bonds that had held the old one together.
1921Seventy-five Years Ago
Bat Man and Superman
In New York City the hometown Giants and Yankees played the first in a long string of Subway Series that would continue until the Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California in 1958. The Giants defeated the upstart Yankees, who had just won their first American League pennant, by five games to three. The World Series was played entirely in the Polo Grounds and was the first to be broadcast on radio. It was the last to be the best-five-of-nine; the next year’s fall classic reverted to today’s best-four-of-seven format.
The Giants’ victory was helped by the absence of Babe Ruth from the last two contests, due to injury. Ruth was coming off his best year yet, in which he set career highs in total bases, runs scored, runs batted in, extra-base hits, and even stolen bases. He also pitched in two games. After the series, the famed theatrical manager Edward F. Albee signed the Bambino for a vaudeville tour. He asked a fellow promoter, Tex Rickard, whether it would be proper to bill Ruth as “The Superman of Baseball,” and Rickard cabled George Bernard Shaw, the author of Man and Superman, for his opinion. Shaw’s reply was of little help: “Sorry never heard of her. Whose baby is Ruth?”
1971Twenty-five Years Ago
The Thames They Are A-Changin’
Two landmark events in America’s shift to the Sunbelt occurred this month: On October 1 Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, Florida, and on October 10 the antique London Bridge was rededicated in its new home of Lake Havasu City, Arizona. For centuries much of Florida had been steamy swampland and virtually all of Arizona had been barren desert. But as the country’s most inhospitable spots were watered, paved, and air-conditioned after World War II, it became clear that you can import anything except sunshine. Armed with this insight, developers acquired large tracts in warm places and let their imaginations run free.
Disney’s agents had started buying land in central Florida in the summer of 1964. Most residents assumed that a defense or aerospace firm was behind the purchases and were surprised when plans for an amusement park leaked out. By the time of his death in 1966, Walt Disney had mapped out his vision for a metropolis of high-tech corn that, with undeveloped portions, would eventually cover twenty-seven thousand acres, an area twice as big and thousands of times as clean as Manhattan. Opening day drew a smaller-than-expected crowd of about ten thousand (to the relief of Disney executives, who had feared a huge traffic jam); a gala inauguration, complete with a World Symphony Orchestra containing musicians from sixty-six countries, followed on October 23.
Early visitors were generally enthusiastic, though a few complained about the absence of thrill rides. In the years since, Disney World and its sister attractions have never lacked for guests to fill their streets and cash registers or for commentators to explain what it all means. Some are laudatory ("the most imaginative and effective piece of urban planning in America"), and some are scornful (”comforting stereotypes of corporate achievements"); with others it’s hard to tell, like the scholar who called the Enchanted Tiki Birds “the embodiment of Jean Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality in their extension of a naive realist aesthetic.” Disney World’s innovations in construction, sanitation, and robotic entertainment have become widely adopted elsewhere, while its linguistic contributions, such as imagineers and utilidors, are thankfully less popular.
Meanwhile, in Arizona the famous London Bridge—purchased, dismantled, transported, and reassembled around a reinforced-concrete core at a cost of ten million dollars—was unveiled before a crowd of forty thousand. Participants in the ceremony included marching bands, floats, skydivers, five thousand pigeons, the lord mayor of London (who sweltered with his entourage beneath the desert sun in seventeenth-century costumes), and “some 800 Beautiful People,” according to Newsweek. An ersatz English village provided the requisite architectural context. At the climax of the festivities, the pigeons were released along with thirty thousand balloons, one of them five stories tall and decorated with a huge Union Jack. A British visitor taking in the spectacle remarked: “It’s all quite mad. It could only happen in America.”
