Don't Drive While Loaded

Higgins at mental_floss shares five things he learned at the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center:

2. Emigrants didn’t know how to handle their guns. According to several exhibits, accidental gunfire was a leading cause of death on the Oregon Trail (and I seem to remember this from the Oregon Trail video game). The issue was that emigrants brought muzzle-loading rifles which required a laborious loading procedure — involving a piece of wetted cotton, a lead ball, a ramrod, a firing cap, and a few minutes of fiddling — which was deemed too time-consuming if the weapon was needed in a hurry. As a result, wagons were trundling along the plains with loaded rifles in them. Of course, when a wagon hit a big enough bump, the weapon would discharge, often with tragic results. (Later invention of the breech-loading rifle largely eliminated this problem.)

Whenever I played the Oregon Trail video game I died from malnutrition before I got the chance to shoot myself.

When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be There in 20 Days

Ali ibn Aed Damkhan is taking a 1,000 kilometer trip on a camel from his native village to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to rid himself of a family heirloom.

He is making this journey in order to present Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah with a musket that is more than 200 years old, the daily Al-Watan reported yesterday. The gun once belonged to Damkhan’s great-grand father and has come down to him from his father. [Link]

Potato Pit or Washtub?

Monacan Indians attacked the Virginia plantation of John and Sara Woodson while an itinerant shoemaker named Ligon was visiting in 1644. A six-foot-long musket now displayed at the Virginia Historical Society played a role in the skirmish.

John Woodson was just riding into the clearing around his cabin when a confederation raiding party poured out of the woods. The doctor was struck by an arrow and fell from his horse. Ligon grabbed the rifle from above the fireplace and took a position at a window. Sara bolted the door from the inside and hid her two sons - John in the potato bin under the house, Robert beneath a washtub.

Ligon, the shoemaker, killed five of the attackers with the musket, and Sara bludgeoned two more to death with a heavy iron roasting spit when they tried to come down the chimney. John Woodson lay dead in the clearing, but his family had survived.

“Ever since, there have been two branches of the family,” said Carolyn Lusardi of Brookneal, a Woodson descendant. “You’ve got the ‘Potato Pit Woodsons’ and the ‘Washtub Woodsons,’ depending on whether your line comes from John or Robert.” [Link]

Time to Talk Turkey

I don't know whether to buy Godfrey Hodgson's new book, A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving, after reading this excerpt. It states that "There was a feast in 1621, but not of turkey." A review provides Hodgson's argument, that "turkey couldn't have been served because the Pilgrims' heavy matchlock muskets simply were no match for the few wild turkeys inhabiting eastern Massachusetts at that time."

This would make a liar of my 10th great-grandfather William Bradford, who wrote that "besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc." In his defense, Bradford was reconstructing the Pilgrims' menu many years after the event, and may have been thinking of this painting.

How Not to Inspect a Loaded Pistol

From Scotsman.com:

How they got to be buried in Edinburgh

MICHAEL T R B TURNBULL

GRAVEYARDS are a fascinating gateway into the extraordinarily diverse lives of the men and women who have found themselves - by accident or design - in the capital city of Scotland.

[snip]

The cemetery is also home to gunsmith Thomas Leslie, who went to inspect the pistol with which the well-known geologist and writer Hugh Miller had committed suicide the day before in Portobello while tormented by brain disease. The revolver, rusted from lying overnight in Miller's bath, was taken to the gunsmith who had sold it to discover how many bullets had been fired. The gun was handed over to the foreman, Thomas Leslie, with the spoken words "Mind, it is loaded". Leslie examined the rusty safety-catch. He held it up to his eye and lifted the hammer to count the bullets. At that instant the pistol went off, blowing his brains out. Leslie, who had eight children and had worked with guns for 25 years, was buried in the Grange Cemetery a little earlier on the same day as Miller.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

tags: genealogy, family history, family tree