Post by Catsmate on Mar 7, 2015 11:50:43 GMT
The cloud still hovers overhead,
And still the midnight sky is red;
As the lost wanderer strays alone
To seek the place he called his own,
And still the midnight sky is red;
As the lost wanderer strays alone
To seek the place he called his own,
'After the Fire' by Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Gilded Age was a term coined by Mark Twain to describe the United States in the late nineteenth century, from the 1870s to 1900. It referred to the serious social problems masked under a thin layer of economic prosperity and progress. Here are fifty more seeds, for adventures and encounters in the 1870s.
1. Interesting 1871 births include four admirals (David Beatty [British], Luke McNamee and Reginald Belknap [American] and Kozo Sato [Japanese]); numerous writers (Marcel Proust,Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Grazia Deledda, and Christian Morgenstern amongst them), politicians (Rosa Luxemburg and Cordell Hull), and scientists (Ernest Rutherford, Howard Ricketts, Victor Grignard, Boris Galerkin) as well as the aviation pioneer Orville Wright.
2. Also in 1871 began the saga of the Lost Dutchman Mine. Like all good adventures it started in a tavern, well outside one. Two Americans (Jacob Waltz and Jacob Weiser) rescued a man (Don Miguel Peralta) from a brawl in Sonora, Mexico. Don Miguel invited the men to his home and there he proposed a strange business venture; he told them that for generations his family’s fortune had come from a secret gold mine in Arizona. Periodically the Peraltas would lead a party of workers to the mine and dig out a vast quantity of rich ore. However in 1864 the party led by Don Miguel's grandfather, Enrico, was killed in an attack by Apaches. After this the family lacked the resources to mount another such expedition against the hostile Indians.
Don Miguel proposed was that the three men recruit a few others and make a fast raid into the mountains to recover the cache of ore at the mine site. Apparently the expedition was a success and the party returned with $60,000 in gold (around 100kg). After they returned Don Miguel offered the two Jacobs another deal; in exchange for the gold he’d give them title to the mine. The Americans agreed and received an ancient map drawn on rawhide.
Waltz and Weiser returned to the well concealed mine in 1879 (and killed to Mexicans who were working it) but Weisler disappeared and Waltz fled.Weisler was wounded by Indian arrows but survived and entrusted the secret to a local physician who treated him, but Dr.Walker wasn’t interested in treasure hunting and never tried to find the mine.
Waltz returned to the mine in 1890 and died soon after, telling the story on his deathbed. It was taken up by the press and the legend of the Lost Dutchman Mine became public property.
How much of this is actually true is impossible to tell, but it makes an interesting premise for an adventure,whether the party encounter gold seekers, hostile Indians or treasure map-sellers. Or perhaps the secret is stranger, an alien machine that transmutes rock into gold (or other metals) but slowly poisons whomever uses it.
3. On 26 March 1872 the small town of Lone Pine in California was devastated by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake (at least as powerful as that of 1906). Due to the isolation only 27 people are known to have died. Was this a natural event? And what might be found at the bottom of Diaz Lake, formed by the tremor?
4. In 1872 life in North America was severely effected by a plague, but not one that infected humans. ‘The Great Epizootic of 1872’ was an outbreak of horse flu on a huge scale, effecting about 97% of horses and mules in North America. It left animals ill for several weeks, and killed about 3% overall (~400,000 animals).
Given the reliance on animal power the effect on travel and transport was enormous, and catastrophic. Huge backups in freight occurred all over the US and Canada; even canals (which employed horses to pull barges) and some railways (where horse transport delivered coal) were idle.
A fire in Boston was exacerbated by the lack of horses to pull the fire-fighting appliances. The US Cavalry became infantry. The US government effectively shut down. Cities suffered shortages of everything from milk to beer and rubbish piled up in the streets.
The outbreak began in Ontario in early October and spread rapidly reaching Detroit on the 10th, New York and Boston on the 22nd, Chicago on the 23rd, Washington on the 28th, New Orleans on the 27th of November and Havana on the 7th of December.
Was this a natural outbreak? A deliberate act, perhaps meant to effect humans, or to weaken humanity for an invasion? Or the accidental result of contact with non-human life, whether aliens or reawakened Silurians perhaps.
5. Then there’s that fire in Boston, the most destructive in the city’s history, destroying 26hectares of the city and killing at least thirty people. The fire started at around 7:20PM on 9 November in the basement of a warehouse at 83-87 Summer Street and spread quickly though the poorly designed, high flammable, and over-insured city buildings. An excellent opportunity for a spot of looting, or heroic efforts to help fight the fire. Or perhaps it disrupts the plans of travellers, already effected by the horse plague.
6. On 27 November 1872 France and Italy witnessed an incredible meteor display, with several thousand meteors visible per hour. These are generally believed to be the remains of a comet (3D/Biela) which broke up on close approach to the sun. One observer described the shower "seemed a real rain of fire" with several meteors appearing every second. The shower started around 6:30PM and had decreased to around 10 meteors per minute by 10:30PM (Paris times).
Was this phenomenon, which was visible across the planet with less intensity than in Europe, a natural one? Or the impact of a spaceship or debris from ships destroyed near the Earth entering the atmosphere in pieces?
7. On 21 December 1872 HMS Challenger set out on a four year scientific voyage to explore the ocean depths, the beginning of modern oceanography. Over the 130,000km trip depth soundings were taken (including the discovery of what is now called the Challenger Deep), the ocean temperature was measured, thousands of photographs taken and more than 4,000 new species documented. Maybe the ship gains some unexpected visitors? Or discovers something really odd, such as a crashed spaceship or aquatic Silurian base, which needs specialised investigation. Or cover-up.
8. Births of 1872 included the writer Zane Grey, the artists Piet Mondrian, Aubrey Beardsley,Hendrik Christian Andersen and W. Heath Robinson, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, the aviation pioneers Louis Blériot and Horace Short, Calvin Coolidge, future US President of the United States, polar explorer Roald Amundsen, Charles Greeley Abbot (American astrophysicist and solar energy pioneer) and British politician (and Nobel peace prize winner) Norman Angell.
9. The sinking of the RMS Atlantic off Halifax on 31 March1873 killed at least 535 people. Was the ship’s hitting a rock really just down to carelessness on the part of the crew? Or was a Sinister Plot involved? Why wasn’t the captain notified of their approach to the coast? Why was no lookout posted? How did the crew miss the Sambro lighthouse and go so far off-course?Were the under some malign mental influence perhaps?
10. In 1873 the French Assembly considered reviving the monarchy and giving the throne to Henri, count of Chambord, as Henri V. At the time French monarchists were split into two factions, the Legitimists (who favoured Henri) and the Orleanists (who supported Philippe d'Orléans). The entire matter had been planned by MacMahon, the ceremony, the throne, the coach everything. But the plan floundered because of one detail; Henri V's insistence that the tricolour flag be replaced by the Fleur-de-lis of his ancestors. Even for the most vehement monarchists this was unthinkable. On such a trivial detail the plan sank.
But what if Henri accepted the Tricolour?Or wasn’t around, conveniently dying earlier and leaving the throne to the more popular Philippe? The Third Republic is replaced by a constitutional monarchy,with sweeping changed to European history.
11. On 9 May 1873 the Vienna Stock Exchange crashed, starting of the ‘Panic of ‘73’ and leading to what was known as the ‘Long Depression’, the worst period of economic disruption until the 1930s. A wide range of factors (the fall in silver prices, share speculation, the opening of the Suez canal, bank failures in the USA, the after-effects of the Franco-Prussian War, the Credit Mobilier fraud, and general economic shifts) contributed to the troubles, which would last for years. The effects are equally widespread, from the Land War in Ireland to the revival of colonialism, from the labour troubles in the USA (including the first nationwide strike, of railway workers) to improvements in industrial processes.
12. The 9 June 1873 fire at Alexandra Palace in London, only sixteen days after it opened,destroyed the new exhibition and recreation centre in north London. Three members of staff died with only the outer walls surviving.
Was this an accident? Or cover for a huge theft; a loaned collection of English pottery and porcelain, nearly five thousand items of historic and intrinsic value, was also destroyed, as were paintings and other valuables.
Did someone (the Alexandrian Society would be apt) use the fire as a cover for the theft?
13. On 3 September 1873 one James Worston disappeared under odd circumstances near Coventry in England. After boasting of his running prowess Worson had accepted a challenge to racefrom the town of Leamington to Coventry, a distance of around 30km. He was followed by two friends (Hammerson Burns and Barham Wise) in a horse-drawn gig, Burns being equipped with a camera. Worson was never out of their sight, andwould occasionally turn around while running to speak to them. After covering about six kilometres, running in the middle of the road, Worson suddenly appeared to stumble and pitch forward, having time enough for only one short,piercing scream (described later by Wise as “The most ghastly sound ether of us had ever heard”). As Worson fell he completely and totally vanished in mid-fall, before hitting the ground. Summoning aid Worston’s companions searched the area but found no trace of the missing man. He vanished into thin air.
There is however one problem with this story; despite being often quoted, it’s a complete fabrication, written by Ambrose Bierce in 1873 under the title An Unfinished Race.
Unless of course it did happen…
14. Interesting births of 1874: eight Nobel laureates including Joseph Erlanger (American physiologist), Johannes Stark (German physicist), Ernst Rüdin (Swiss geneticist), Guglielmo Marconi (Italian physicist and inventor), Carl Bosch(German chemist), August Krogh (Danish physiologist), Egas Moniz (Portuguese neurologist); aviation pioneers Thomas Benoist, Gustav Weißkopf and Henr iFarman; writers William Somerset Maugham, Gertrude Stein, Lucy Maud Montgomery,Robert Frost and G. K. Chesterton; Composers Arnold Schoenberg (Austrian) and Gustav Holst (English) and such other notables as John D. Rockefeller Jr., Winston Churchill, Thomas J. Watson (American computing pioneer) explorers Howard Carter and Ernest Shackleton, and Harry Houdini.
15. After the disputed 1872 elections the US state of Arkansas was wracked by conflict, known as the Brooks-Baxter war, over the governorship of the state. The situation gradually escalated and in 1874 both sides (Elisha Baxter and Joseph Brooks) raised troops and a low level civil war ran for several months, in addition to racially motivated violence by former Confederates.
All in all an interesting place and time with potential to become embroiled in the warfare, or to make use of it to cover other activities.
16. From 15 April to 15 May 1874 the first major public exhibition of impressionist paintings occurred in Paris, with the term being coined to describe Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise. This was also the first independent Salon, separate from the artistic ‘establishment’, and included approximately 165 paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Caillebotte, Cezanne,Degas, and Manet amongst others (assuming no-one had prevented their births).
An interesting exhibition and a tempting target for thieves, or an opportunity to pick up some hugely valuable masterpieces cheap.
35, Boulevard des Capucines, 35 Ar., open 10AM to 10PM,admission free, 50 centimes for a catalogue.
17. On 10 November 1874 at 1422 North Twentieth Street Philadelphia John Ernst Worrell Keely demonstrated his ‘induction resonance motion motor’, a machine that created energy from etheric vibrations. A fraud of course, but that didn’t stop Keely from raising millions of dollars ($50,000 was given after the first demonstration) and fooling many people who should have known better.
Unless it wasn’t a fake and Keely actually did create such a machine, perhaps using information or technology recovered from a crashed alien craft or ancient Silurian base.
18. 1874 saw a rash of odd animal killings in Ireland; dozens of sheep (mainly) were slaughtered in Cavan, Clare and Limerick counties, starting in January and continuing into April. Whatever was killing them made no attempt to eat the kills but punctured their necks and drained their blood. Vampire? Damaged Cyberman? Alien experimentation? Lost pet from the future?
19. On 24 February 1875the SS Gothenburg sank after encountering a powerful storm off Australia's east coast (near the Great Barrier Reef) with the loss of approximately 102 lives, many of them government officials (judges, civil servants, RN officers and others). Also on board was around 125kg of gold, plus more carried by travelling miners (many of whom drowned because they insisted on trying to swim while carrying it).
A natural disaster? Or deliberate act?Another sinking that year was the German emigrant ship SS Deutschland which ran aground in the English Channel on the night of 5-6 December, resulting in 157 fatalities.
20. Two performances that time travellers might want to see (and record for posterity); on 3 March1875 Bizet’s Carmen is first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris and on 25 October Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 gets its first performance of in Boston, Massachusetts.
21. On 25 August 1875Captain Matthew Webb is the first person to swim the English Channel. An event that saw much interest and publicity, suitable as a piece of background even ifa group isn’t involved in the actual swim, trying to prevent it or protecting Webb fro aquatic Silurians.
22. In Montreal during the winter of 1875 an outbreak of typhoid fever strikes at an Ursuline convent school,amongst others places. The corpses of the dead were placed in a vault until they could be collected (some of the dead students were Americans and travel was particularly difficult). However the corpses were stolen by body-snatchers before their relatives could arrive.
This ‘Convent Scandal’ caused an international furore; rewards were offered, and the city’s hospitals and anatomy schools (including McGill) searched. This would lead to changes in the law and eliminate the then rife practice of corpse theft.
A fascinating piece of history and one that’s rife with possibilities. Were the bodies actually dead? Or infected with a disease that mimicked death (as the Cybermen have used)? Perhaps they carried a nano-machine plague that caused them to revive as nano-zombies? Much to the surprise of any body snatchers. Maybe they were needed as material for studies more esoteric than conventional anatomy..
23. Another decade,another World’s Fair. The Centennial International Exhibition ran from 10 May to 10 November in Philadelphia and was the first World's Fair to be officially held in the United States. More than ten million visitors wandered the kilometres of halls and more than 250 buildings constructed in a 110 hectare section of Fairmount Park, overlooking the Schuylkill River.
Amongst the highlights and firsts of the exhibition were: Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, the Remington Typographic Machine (the first typewriter), Heinz Tomato Ketchup, the first automatic screw-making machine, Braxton’s early internal combustion engine, Line-Wolf Ammonia Compressor (for ice-making and cooling), a selection of Krupp’s cannon and much more.
It was also the first World’s Fair to have a woman’s pavilion. The exhibition was responsible for the ‘Colonial Revival’ era in American architecture and furnishings and the popularisation of the Kudzu vine as a method to prevent soil erosion.
A perfect place for predators, whether human or not, to stalk. Or assassinate dignitaries such as President Grant or Brazilian Emperor Pedro II at the opening ceremony.
Admission 50 cents, payable only with the exhibition’s own paper scrip. Closed Sundays.
24. On 4 June 1876 the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco at around 9:30AM, completing the first express journey across the continent by the First Transcontinental Railroad in 83 hours and 39 minutes. Would someone want to interfere with this historic event? Or perhaps someone merely needs rapid transport across America.
25. 25 June 1875 saw one of the most famous events of the American Indian Wars, the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 300 men of the US Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, are wiped out by a force of about 5,000 Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Unless someone tampers with history of course, somehow persuading Custer to act on a warning and make use of better tactics, and his battery of Gatling guns.
Or maybe a US Army tank is dropped back in time to help? An episode of The Twilight Zone did this.
26. Two events in 1876 that might attract musically inclined tourists, whether born in the century or not; on 13 August Richard Wagner inaugurates the Bayreuth Festival with the first performance of the Ring Cycle over four days. And on 4 November Brahms’ much anticipated First Symphony premieres at Karlsruhe.
The first Bayreuth Festival was attended by dozens of dignitaries, including Kaiser Wilhelm, Dom Pedro II of Brazil, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Friedrich Nietzsche, and composers Anton Bruckner, Edvard Grieg, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, George Henschel, Franz Liszt, and Arthur Foote. A group with many possibilities…
27. At around 11:20PM on Tuesday the 5th of December 1876, during a performance of The Two Orphans at the Brooklyn Theater(southeast corner of Washington and Johnson streets, north of City Hall) a fire broke out behind the stage. Despite the efforts of staff to fight it the fire spread, while actors continued to play their parts on the stage. Soon it became obvious to the audience of more than a thousand people that a fire has started,but the cast attempted to maintain calm. However soon panic erupted and people attempted to leave. More than 300 people died in the fire.Twenty five minutes after it started the building partially collapsed and fire-fighters concentrated on containing the blaze.
Another possible piece of background,perhaps time travellers are taking in the show? Or perhaps trying to save someone who died in the fire, or prevent the disaster. Or jaded tourists of the far future might be there to experience the thrill of danger and disaster.
28. In the summer of1876 work started to spread about a disastrous famine occurring in northern China, triggered by the drought conditions. Typhus was also rampant in the effected areas. The famine persisted until 1879, when rainfall returned to normal patterns, with more than thirty million deaths.
While it’s unlikely to imagine easily causing this tragedy, without large scale geo-engineering, unwary time travellers could become involved in its consequences, including disease and civil unrest.
29. It's 1877 and the Democrats would gloat.
But they're all amazed, when Rutherford Hayes,
Wins by just one vote.
Actually the Compromise of 1877 (2 March) was a bit more complicated than that. After the controversial US Presidential election of 1876 (with massive vote fraud, intimidation of black voters, violence and disputes over the appointment and actions of Electors) the United States faced a constitutional crisis, and a possible outbreak of violence. An Electoral Commission was empanelled to decide the result and awarded the election to Hayes by one vote in the Electoral College amidst accusations of corrupt dealings.
Shortly after taking office Hayes removed Federal troops from the remainder of the former Confederacy and ended the Reconstruction. This led to the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South and decades of officially sanctioned racism.
Of course it wouldn’t be that difficult for someone to change the relatively peaceful settlement and plunge the United States into another round of warfare, or merely become embroiled in the situation.
30. On 16 May 1877 the French Third Republic was struck by a constitutional crisis regarding the distribution of power between the President and the legislature. It was triggered when the Royalist President Patrice MacMahon dismissed the Republican Prime Minister Jules Simon, leading to the dissolution of parliament on 16 May. Elections ended in an decisive victory for the Republicans and ended hopes for the restoration of the monarchy. This is certainly the final opportunity for French monarchists to attempt to reintroduce the monarchy.
31. Tourists visiting1877 might want to take in the first ever Test cricket match (England v Australia, 15 March, England won), the only ever draw in the annual Boat Race between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (24 March), or perhaps the first ever Wimbledon tennis tournament (9 July).
Though the debut performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake (4 March) or Ibsen's The Pillars of Society (Odense Theater, 14 November) might be more suited to other tastes.
32. The 1877 Iquique earthquake was one of the most powerful of recent times, estimates of it’s magnitude range between 8.5 and 9.0. It occurred at 21:16 local time on 9 May in the disputed area between Chile and Bolivia on the pacific coast of South America and caused extensive destruction, much of it due to the consequent tsunami.
It was also indirectly responsible for the War of the Pacific, which started two year later over taxes levied by Bolivia to fund reconstruction. About 2,500 people were killed.
Like many such disasters it has interesting gaming potential; characters could witness the quake and try to assist, be embroiled in the aftermath, lose track of one another or discover that it wasn’t a natural disaster at all.
33. Was the eruption of the volcano Cotopaxi in Ecuador (26 June 1877) a natural event? The volcano was(and is) quite active but did someone trigger this eruption? Pyroclastic flows descended all sides of the mountain, vapourising or melting the snow cover in their path, and mudflows travelled over 100km to the Pacific Ocean and the western Amazon basin.The small city of Latacunga was destroyed and more than 1,000 people died.
34. The Great Upheaval,otherwise the ‘Great Railroad Strike of 1877’ began on 14 July 1877 in the West Virginia town of Martinsburg and lasted about six weeks. Rioting and civil unrest were widespread, mainly triggered by wage cuts, the general economic depression and the disputed election of 1876.
Pitched battles were fought in several cities and towns, between strikers and police, vigilantes, private guards, state militia and Federal troops (though in several cases police and militia refused to fire on strikers). Hundreds were killed, many (if not most)of them unarmed.
Workers in St. Louis briefly established a Communist government before troops were deployed.
A fertile time for meddling, perhaps to trigger a full-scale revolution in the United States, to gather human test subjects or slaves, or simply to loot.
35. In August 1877 the American astronomer Asaph Hall first discovered the moons of Mars; Deimos on 11 August and Phobos on 18 August. Did someone suggest he look for them?
Or maybe they simply weren’t there before this.
36. The Blantyre mining disaster happened on the morning of 22 October 1877 and remains Scotland's worst mining accident. Two pits of the Blantyre Colliery were the site of an explosion which killed 207 miners. The presumed cause was ‘firedamp’ (a highly explosive mix of methane, air and coal dust) ignited perhaps by a naked flame.
Of course in the Whoniverse the cause could be more esoteric, perhaps the miners had intruded on a Silurian hibernation facility and the latter caused the explosion to deter further human exploration.
37. On 21 January 1878 Cleopatra's Needle arrives in Britain. It was presented to the British government by the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali, in 1819 at the instigation of Giovanni Battista Belzoni
- Belzoni himself was a fascinating person, well worth dropping into a scenario set earlier in the century; a two metre tall former circus strongman (he could carry a tonne on his back), former seminarian and hydraulic engineer, turned Egyptologist, with a legendary fondness for explosives.
The obelisk was encased in a huge iron cylinder (28m long, 5m wide) which was converted into a ship of sorts by the addition of a mast, keels, rudder and so on. It was to be towed to London.
En route it almost sank in the Bay of Biscay, with six sailors killed. Eventually a steam-tug hauled the needle to London, arriving at Gravesend in the estuary of the river Thames on 21 January. It was finally erected on the Victoria Embankment on 12 September 1878, with a time capsule underneath.
A strange story, full of possibleadventures. Is the obelisk really just sandstone, or is it a mass ofcrystalline Osiran circuitry? Perhaps a psionic amplifier of some sort? Or are there artefacts hidden inside it? Whatstrange effects does it cause?Or perhaps some travellers just want towatch the ceremony. Or drop something into that time capsule, something that’llremain safe.
38. What really sank HMS Eurydice on 24 March 1878? Thebroad hulled, shallow draught frigate had been refitted for service, after decades as a stationary training vessel, a few months earlier, and made a remarkably quick Atlantic passage before sinking in the English Channel in a storm, with all but two of her complement of 319 killed.
What was she really being used for?
Oddly one of the witnesses to the disasterwas a young Winston Churchill, then living at Ventnor.
Even more odd is the seemingly frequent appearance of the Eurydice as a ghost ship, with several Royal Navy officers (and Prince Edward) having apparently sighted her. Hoaxes? Hallucinations? Mis-identifications of other ships? Psychic resonance from the young trainees who died aboard, amplified by whatever she carried back from the West Indies?
39. Another maritime disaster happened on 3 September 1878, with over 640 killed when a crowded pleasure steamer (the Princess Alice) collided with a collier (the Bywell Castle) in the River Thames at around 7:45PM. The overloaded Princess Alice sank rapidly and many of those who made it into the river were drowned in the hundreds of millions of litres of sewage that had been recently vented into the river.
Was this tragedy just an accident caused bypoor navigational practices? Or something more sinister?
40. Births of 1878. Scientists Pierre Fatou (French mathematician), George Whipple (Americanbiologist); writers John Masefield and Edward Plunkett (Lord Dunsany); Aviation and automotive pioneers Glenn Curtiss, André Citroën, Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet; Social activists, revolutionaries and politicians, Upton Sinclair, Pancho Villa, Grace Abbott, Nikolai Bryukhanov, Gustav Stresemann, Carlos Saavedra Lamas, Hirota Koki and Joseph Stalin.
41. In 1878 the Mississippi river valley region, south of the city of St. Louis, was struck by an outbreak of Yellow Fever. Tens of thousands of people fled the cities of New Orleans,Vicksburg, and Memphis, perhaps 120,000 were infected and about 20,000 died. Another outbreak in Memphis killed about 5,000 people.
The plague devastated Mississippi, both socially and economically, with entire families killed and thousands fleeing. Quarantine regulations ended trade and travel. Some entire towns, for example Beechland, near Vicksburg, were abandoned completely, becoming ghost towns because of the epidemic.
A natural outbreak? Or deliberately spread tocover other activities in the region? Perhaps an attempt at biological warfare, testing a potential weapon against humanity. Or was the disease (also known asthe ‘Saffron Scourge’, ‘Yellow Jack', and 'Bronze John’) really just Yellow Fever.
All in all an excellent period for looting, kidnapping and mayhem. Or desperateattempts to save lives.
42. The Anglo-Zulu War began on 10 January 1879, but started going badly for Britain on 22 January when a force of around 1,200 troops was wiped out at the Battle of Isandlwana. This was followed by the by the successful defense of Rorke's Drift the next day. Britain was again defeated in the Battle of Hlobane on 28 March. And on 1 June the great-nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte was killed while attached to the Britishforces. The difficulties with the conduct of the war would lead to thebeginning of reforms of British military practices.
But what if someone with access to advanced weapons intervened, either to assist the British to a quick victory, or to helpthe Zulu nation resist them?
43. At around 8PM on 21 August 1878, a group of fifteen people claimed to have seen a series of apparitionsof Christian religious figures at a parish church at Knock, in Mayo, Ireland. The commission of inquiry found the witnesses to be credible, with no suggestion of fraud or hoax, and that no natural phenomenon explained theevents?
So what did happen?
44. Who was ‘A Public Man’? In 1879 a series of remarkable of articles appeared in the North American Review, a highlyrespected magazine of the era. They were diary excerpts of an individualidentified only as ‘A Public Man’ and covered the period from 28 December 1860 to 15 March 1861, immediately prior to the American Civil War.
The entries covered events at the highest levels of the Lincoln administration, and included many otherwise unrecorded statements and opinions of Lincoln himself. There was littledoubt that the author was a high-level Washington insider. But who?
While his identity was much speculated upon it has never been revealed. The editor of the North American Review, Allen Thorndike Rice, took his pledge of anonymity seriously and died without revealing anything.
The identity of A Public Man remains an interesting (if frustrating) enigma to historians, and the anonymity means that the accuracy of the diaries cannot be judged. With access to time travel this would be aninteresting investigation, probably as part of a detailed study of the period. A period rife with spies and those hunting them…
45. Theatrical premieres in 1879; Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premières at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on 21 December and Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance is first performed at Paignton in Devon on 30 December.
46. A sequel to the loss of HMS Erydice in 1878 was the loss of HMS Atalanta in February 1880. Built to a nearly identical design this training ship disappeared near Bermuda between the 12th and 16th of February. Despite awide search none of the more than 280 sailors aboard (many of them children) were seen again, nor was wreckage recovered.
47. On 28 June 1880 the saga of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly came to an end in the town of Glenrowan in Victoria, Australia. Kelly, dressed in homemade plate metal armour was wounded in the legs by gunfire and captured. He was tried for murder and hanged on 11 November1880 at Old Melbourne Gaol.
But what if he and his gang had survived thebattle? The train tracks had been sabotaged to derail the special traincarrying police, but a teacher named Thomas Curnow slipped out from the hotel,where he and others were held, and stopped the train, warning them of the ambush.
If this hadn’t happened, and the ambush succeeded, could the actions of the Kelly gang have triggered a general rebellion in Australia, perhaps with support from American and European sympathisers? Could Australia have waged a war of independence, perhaps featuring steam-powered Gatlings, armoured trains, steam war-cars, dynamite cannon and dirigible airships?
48. The Great Blizzard of 1880 began on 15 October and continued with worst winter ever experienced in North America. A huge snowstorm engulfed the Mid-west, catching farmers and others unprepared, before crops had been fully harvested, grain milled and fuel supplies for the winter in place. Starvation stalked the prairies.
The snowfalls persisted until around March 1881, with railways shut down from January, the tracks impassable, despite the efforts of hundreds of men to dig away the snow.
On 2 February 2 1881, a second massive blizzard struck, lasting for nine days and covering even two story houses. In towns the snow necessitated tunnelling to get around, with roofs collapsing under the weight.
The spring thaw brought large scale flooding, rivers choked with ice and debris and entire towns washed away.
The events of the winters are detailed in the children's book The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A freak natural event? A rift draining heat from middle America to somewhere else? Either way an interesting opportunity for players to get in trouble.
49. On 13 March 1881 Tsar Alexander II of Russia is killed near his palace, when a pair of bombs are thrown at him. He was succeeded by his son, Alexander III who reversed his father’s reforms.
But what if someone saved the life of therelatively liberal, reforming, Alexander II, and he didn't die at the hands of Ignacy Hryniewiecki that cold Sunday morning? Perhaps a very different and morepacifist Russia would emerge, with huge consequences for history.If only Alexander had taken the advice of his guards and left the area after Nikolai Rysakov was captured following the first bomb’s detonation…
50. A few months later, on 2 July 1881, another world leader would be assassinated. US President James Garfield was shot by a failed lawyer of dubious sanity Charles J. Guiteau in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, this would be reasonably simple death to prevent. Guiteau succeeded in shooting Garfield because the latter was unguarded and Garfield might well have survived if it weren’t for the efforts of his doctors to remove the bullet lodged in his body, which caused a fatal infection.
Their unsterilised probings would cause a slow and unpleasant illness ending with Garfield’s death on 19 September.
Comments? Suggestions? Typos? Requests?
And does anyone know an easy way to paste from Word without formatting problems?
