Before they had numbers, the “war to end wars” had Jackie the Baboon and Whiskey & Soda, the lion cub mascots of the Lafayette flying corps. World War II and Wild Bill Crump had Jeep, the only coyote and four-legged co-pilot to serve in the air war to retake Europe, from the Nazi occupier.
John William “Wild Bill” Crump was destined for the air. Born in 1924 in the Pacific Northwest village of Opportunity Washington, the boy’s first experience with the air came on a flight with his Dad, at the age of 5.
Attending nearby Edmonds High School and graduating in 1943, it is myedmondnews.com from which I have learned much of this story.
Hat tip Crump family, via myedmondsnews
The world was at war in 1944, and badly in need of pilots. Wild Bill Crump arrived at Harding Field, Nebraska at the age of 20 to complete pilot training.
While earning his wings, Crump found the most unlikely of co-pilots. Abandoned and alone, it was a two week old puppy. A young coyote, in need of a home.
“Eugene the Jeep” came to public attention eight years earlier, in the Popeye cartoon strip by E.C. Sugar (rhymes with cigar).
Eugene was a dog sort of character, with the magical power to go…anywhere.
In the early phase of World War II, military contractors labored to develop an off-road vehicle, capable of going anywhere, or close to it. Like Popeye’s sidekick Eugene, the General Purpose GP (“Jeep”) was just the thing. Eventually, the name stuck.
Of course, Crump named his new sidekick, “Jeep”.
Next came Baton Rouge and training on the iconic P-47, the high altitude fighter-bomber and foremost ground attack aircraft of the American war effort, in WW2.
The P-47 cockpit was built for only one pilot, but regulations said nothing about a coyote.
So it was that, here in Baton Rouge, the pair learned to work together. When orders came for England, there was little question of what was next. The luxury liner RMS Queen Elizabeth converted to a troop ship would hardly notice the small coyote, smuggled on-board.
Actual footage from Wild Bill’s P51 Squadron
Next came RAF Martlesham Heath Airfield in Ipswich, England and the 360th fighter squadron, 359th fighter group.
Jeep became the unit mascot with his own “dog tags” and vaccination records. He’d often entertain the airmen taking part in howling contests.
Curled up in the cockpit Jeep accompanied Crump on no fewer than five combat missions. One time, a series of sharp barks warned the pilot of incoming flak.
Crump logged 311 combat hours on 77 missions aboard the P51 Mustang “Jackie,” named after his high school sweetheart. Painted on the fuselage next to her name was the image of a coyote.
Wild Bill Crump survived the war. Sadly, his co-pilot, did not. On October 28, 1944, a group of children brought Jeep to school, to show the animal off. Tied to a tree in the rain he slipped his leash and was run over by a military vehicle, attempting to return to his base.
Jeep was buried with full military honors in a grave outside Playford Hall in Ipswich, England.
Before they had numbers, the “war to end wars” had Jackie the Baboon and Whiskey & Soda, the lion cub mascots of the Lafayette flying corps. World War II and Wild Bill Crump had Jeep, the only coyote and four-legged co-pilot to serve in the air war to retake Europe, from the Nazi occupier.
Lippincott’s monthly magazine, waxed rhapsodic: “This animal, homely as a steamroller, is the embodiment of salvation. Peace, plenty and contentment lie before us, and a new life with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigour, new romance, folded in that golden future, when the meadows and the bayous of our southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami”.
Only hours from now, families will gather from far and near, around the Christmas table. There will be moist and savory stuffing, and green bean casserole. Creamy mashed potatoes and orange cranberry sauce. And there, the centerpiece of the feast. Slow-roasted and steaming in that silver tray the golden brown, delicious, roast hippopotamus.
Wait…Uhh…What?
Water Hyacinth
The World Cotton Centennial and World’s Fair of 1884 began its second week on December 23. Located in New Orleans, Louisiana that year, among its many wonders was the never-before seen Eichornia crassipes, a gift from the Japanese delegation. The Water Hyacinth.
Visitors marveled at this beautiful aquatic herb, with yellow spots accentuating the petals of delicate purple and blue flowers floating across tranquil ponds on a mat of thick, green leaves.
The seeds of Eichornia crassipes are spread by wind, flood, birds and humans and remain viable, for 30 years. Beautiful as it is to look at, the Water Hyacinth is an “alpha plant”, an aquatic equivalent to the Japanese invasive perennial Kudzu, the “vine that ate the south”. Impenetrable floating mats choke out native habitats and species while thick roots impede the passage of vessels, large and small. The stuff is toxic if ingested by humans and most animals and costs a fortune, to remove.
This plant native from the Amazon basin quickly broke the bounds of the 1884 World’s Fair, spreading across the bayous and waterways of Louisiana, and beyond.
During the first decade of the 20th century, an exploding American population could barely keep up with its own need for food. Especially, meat. The problem reached crisis proportions in 1910, with over grazing and a severe cattle shortage. Americans were seriously discussing the idea of eating dogs.
Enter Louisiana member of the House of Representatives, New Iberia’s own Robert Foligny Broussard, with a solution to both problems. Lake Bacon.
The attorney from Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional district proposed H.R. 23621 in 1910, otherwise known as the “American Hippo” bill. Broussard’s proposed legislation enjoyed enthusiastic support from Theodore Roosevelt and the New York Times, alike. One Agricultural official estimated that a free-range hippo herd could produce up to a million tons of meat, every year.
Lippincott’s monthly magazine waxed rhapsodic: “This animal, homely as a steamroller, is the embodiment of salvation. Peace, plenty and contentment lie before us, and a new life with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigour, new romance, folded in that golden future, when the meadows and the bayous of our southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami”.
With a name deriving from the Greek term “River Horse”, the common hippopotamus is the third largest land animal living today. Despite a physical resemblance to hogs and other even-toed ungulates, Hippopotamidae’s closest living relatives are cetaceans such as whales, dolphins and porpoises.
All well and good. The problem is, those things are dangerous.
The adult bull hippopotamus is skittish, extremely aggressive, unpredictable and highly territorial. Heaven help anyone caught between a cow and her young. Hippos can gallop at short sprints of 19 mph, only a little less than the top speed of Jamaican Sprinter Usain Bolt, and he’s “the fastest man who ever lived”.
To keyword search the “10 most dangerous animals in Africa” is to be rewarded with the knowledge that hippos are #1, responsible for more human fatalities than any other large animal in Africa.
Be that at it as it may, the animal is a voracious herbivore, spending daylight hours at the bottom of rivers & lakes, happily munching on vegetation.
Back to Broussard’s bill, what could be better than taking care of two problems at once? Otherwise unproductive swamps and bayous from Florida to East Texas would become home to great hordes of free-range hippos. The meat crisis would be averted. America would become a nation of hippo ranchers.
As Broussard’s bill wended its way through Congress, the measure picked up steam with the enthusiastic support of two men, mortal enemies who’d spent ten years in the African bush trying to kill each other. No, really.
Frederick Russell Burnham
Frederick Russell Burnham argued for four years for the introduction of African wildlife into the American food stream. A freelance scout and American adventurer, Burnham was known for his service to the British South Africa company, and to the British army in colonial Africa. The “King of Scouts’, commanding officers described Burnham as “half jackrabbit and half wolf”. A “man totally without fear.” One writer described Burnham’s life as “an endless chain of impossible achievements”, another “a man whose senses and abilities approached that of a wild predator”. He was the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character and for the Boy Scouts. Forget the Dos Equis guy. Frederick Burnham really was the real-life “most interesting man in the world“.
Fritz Duquesne? Well that’s another story. Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne was a Boer of French Huguenot ancestry, descended from Dutch settlers to South Africa. A smooth talking guerrilla fighter, the self-styled “Black Panther” once described himself as every bit the wild African animal, as any creature of the veld. An incandescent tower of hate for all things British, Duquesne was a liar, a chameleon, a man of 1,000 aliases who once spent seven months feigning paralysis, just so he could fool his jailers long enough to cut through his prison bars.
Destined to become a German spy it is he who lends his name to the infamous Duquesne Spy Ring, of World War 2.
Frederick Burnham described Duquesne, his mortal adversary: “He was one of the craftiest men I ever met. He had something of a genius of the Apache for avoiding a combat except in his own terms; yet he would be the last man I should choose to meet in a dark room for a finish fight armed only with knives“.
During the 2nd Boer war, these two men had sworn to kill each other. Now in 1910 the pair became partners in a mission to bring hippopotamus, to the American dinner table.
Biologically, there is little reason to believe that Hippo ranching wouldn’t work along the Gulf coast. Decades ago, Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar introduced four hippos to the Columbian interior. Today, officials estimate that, within a few years, the hippo descendants of Escobar’s exotic animal menagerie will number 100 or more individuals.
Back to the American Hippo bill. Broussard’s measure went down to defeat by a single vote, but never entirely went away. Always the political calculator, Representative and later-Senator Broussard died with the bill on his legislative agenda, waiting for the right moment to reintroduce the thing.
Over time, the solution to the meat question became a matter of doubling down on what was already taking shape. Factory farms and confinement operations came to replace free ranges while the massive use of antibiotics replaced even the notion of balanced biological systems.
We may or may not have “traded up”. Today we contend with all manner of antibiotic-resistant “Superbugs”. The Louisiana department of wildlife and fisheries maintains no fewer than 85 separate aquatic vegetation control plans, aimed at the water hyacinth.
The effluent from factory farms from Montana to Pennsylvania works its way into the nation’s rivers and streams, washing out to the Mississippi Delta to a biological dead zone, the size of New Jersey.
Gulf of Mexico dead zone, image credit NOAA
As for that once golden future, Lippincott’s hippo herds roam only in the meadows and bayous of the imagination. Who knows, it may be for the best. I don’t know if we could’ve seen each other across the table, anyway. Not when that hippo came out of the oven.
The humor of the situation was hard to resist, and the “ass jokes” all but told themselves. (Sorry, but we’re talking about Marines, here). Dozens of Marines laughed uproariously in that mess hall in 2009, belting out a mangled version of an old Kenny Rogers song: “Yes, he’s once, twice, three times a donkey…. I loooooove youuuuuuuuu.”
Al Taqaddum Airbase or “TQ” in military parlance is a military airbase, 45 miles west of Baghdad on the Habbaniyah Plateau of Iraq. In 2008, Al Taqaddum was home to the 1st Marine Logistics Group, under the command of Colonel John D. Folsom.
Early one August morning, Colonel Folsom awoke to a new sound. The thwap-thwap-thwap of helicopters, the endless hum of the generators – those were the sounds of everyday life. This sound was different. This was the sound of braying donkey.
Folsom emerged from his quarters to find the small, emaciated animal, tied to a eucalyptus tree. Standing all of 3′ tall, a sergeant had spotted the donkey roaming outside Camp Taqaddum and thought it would be amusing to catch him. Folsom thought it might be fun to have one around. Time would tell they were both right.
Smoke visits Sgt Lonnie Forrest
The website for a UK donkey sanctuary recommends a diet of highly fibrous plant material, eaten in small quantities throughout the day. I read the list twice and nowhere will you find bagels and yet, for this little Iraqi donkey, there was nothing better. Preferably frozen. He’d hold them in his mouth and walk along, scraping the bagel in the dirt before eating it. He liked to play the same game, with a deflated rubber ball.
You won’t find cigarettes on the list either, but he stole one once, and gobbled it down. It didn’t seem to matter that the thing was lit. For that reason and because of the color of his coat Marines called him, “Smoke”.
Before long, Smoke was a familiar sight around Camp Taqaddum. After long walks around the wire, Smoke learned to open doors and wander around. If you ever left a candy dish out on your desk, you were on your own.
Regulations prohibit the keeping of pets in a war zone. A Navy Captain helped get Smoke designated as a therapy animal, and he was home to stay. As it turned out, there was more than a little truth to the label. For young women and men thousands of miles from home in a war zone, the little animal was a welcome reminder of home.
The humor of the situation was hard to resist, and the “ass jokes” all but told themselves. (Sorry, but we’re talking about Marines, here). Dozens of Marines laughed uproariously in that mess hall in 2009, belting out a mangled version of an old Kenny Rogers song: “Yes, he’s once, twice, three times a donkey…. I loooooove youuuuuuuuu.”
That was the year Folsom’s unit cycled out of Camp Taqaddum, to be replaced by another contingent of Marines. These promised to look after the 1st MLG’s mascot, but things didn’t work out that way. A Major gave the donkey away to a Sheikh who in turn dumped him off on an Iraqi family, and that was the end of the story.
Except, it wasn’t.
Colonel Folsom couldn’t get the little animal out of his head and, learning of his plight in 2010, determined to get him back. There were plenty of kids who had survived trauma of all kinds in his home state of Nebraska. Folsom believed this animal could do them some good, as well.
You can even find his poster if you like, on sale on the internet, for about nineteen bucks
There ensued a months-long wrangle with American and Iraqi authorities, who couldn’t understand why all the fuss over a donkey. For the family who now owned him, the neglected, half-starved pack animal out back suddenly became a “beloved pet”. They couldn’t possible let him go for anything less than $30,000, US. (But, of course).
900 donors pitched in and, despite seemingly endless obstacles and miles of red tape, Smoke the Donkey slowly made his way from al-Anbar to Kuwait and on to Turkey and finally, to a new home in Nebraska.
Smoke the Marine Corps Donkey, at his new home in Omaha
ABCNews.com broadcast this announcement on May 18, 2011. Smoke the Marine Corps Donkey, “mascot, ambassador, and battle buddy” was now, an American. Semper Fi, Smoke.
Man and dog stepped off the ship in 1928 to a throng of reporters. There were flash bulbs, shouted questions and the din of traffic and honking horns that can only be New York City. Buddy never wavered. At the end of that first day, Dorothy Eustis received a single word telegram: “Success”.
Morris Frank lost the use of an eye in a childhood accident. He lost his vision altogether in a boxing mishap, at the age of 16. Frank hired a boy to guide him around but the young man was easily bored and sometimes wandered off, leaving Frank to fend for himself.
German specialists were working at this time on the use of Alsatians (German Shepherds) to act as guide dogs for WWI veterans blinded by mustard gas. An American breeder living in Switzerland, Dorothy Harrison Eustis, wrote an article about the work in a 1927 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. When Frank’s father read him the article, he wrote to Eustis pleading that she train a dog for himself. “Is what you say really true? If so, I want one of those dogs! And I am not alone. Thousands of blind like me abhor being dependent on others. Help me and I will help them. Train me and I will bring back my dog and show people here how a blind man can be absolutely on his own. We can then set up an instruction center in this country to give all those here who want it a chance at a new life.”
Dorothy Eustis called Frank in February 1928 and asked if he was willing to come to Switzerland. The response left little doubt: “Mrs. Eustis, to get my independence back, I’d go to hell”. She accepted the challenge and trained two dogs, leaving it to Frank to decide which was the more suitable. Morris came to Switzerland to work with the dogs, both female German Shepherds. He chose one named “Kiss” but, feeling that no 20-year-old man should have a dog named Kiss, he called her “Buddy”.
Man and dog stepped off the ship in 1928 to a throng of reporters. There were flash bulbs, shouted questions and the din of traffic and honking horns that can only be New York City. Buddy never wavered. At the end of that first day, Dorothy Eustis received a single word telegram: “Success”. Morris Frank was set on a path that would become his life’s mission: to get seeing eye dogs accepted all over the country.
Frank and Eustis established the first guide dog training school in the US in Nashville, on January 29, 1929. Frank was true to his word, becoming a tireless advocate of public accessibility for the blind and their guide dogs. In 1928, he was routinely told that Buddy couldn’t ride in the passenger compartment. Within seven years, all railroads in the United States adopted policies allowing guide dogs to remain with their owners while onboard. By 1956, every state in the Union had passed laws guaranteeing access to public spaces for blind people and their dogs.
Frank told a New York Times interviewer in 1936 that he had probably logged 50,000 miles with Buddy, by foot, train, subway, bus, and boat. He was constantly meeting with people, including two presidents and over 300 ophthalmologists, demonstrating the life-changing qualities of owning a guide dog.
Sadly, no dog is given the span of a human lifetime. Buddy’s health was failing in the end, but the team had one more hurdle to cross. One more barrier to break. Frank wanted to fly in a commercial aircraft with his guide dog. The pair did so on this day in 1938, flying from Chicago to Newark. Buddy passed the time curled up at Frank’s feet. United Air Lines was the first to adopt the policy, granting “all Seeing Eye dogs the privilege of riding with their masters in the cabins of any of our regularly scheduled planes.”
Buddy was all business during the day, but, to the end of her life, she liked to end her work day with a roll on the floor with Mr. Frank. Buddy died seven days after that plane trip, but she had made her mark. By this time there were 250 seeing eye dogs working across the country, and their number was growing fast. Buddy’s replacement was also called Buddy, as was every seeing eye dog Frank would ever own until he passed away, in 1980.
Four decades and more since Morris Frank left this earth, his dream lives on. Today there are an estimated 10,000 seeing eye dogs currently at work, in the United States.
The trompe l’oeil painted bronze statue “The Way to Independence” was unveiled on April 29, 2005, on Morristown Green, Morristown NJ. Artist John Seward Johnson, II
Mr. Columbus seems not to have been impressed with his mermaids, describing these particular creatures as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.”
Pax Romana”. The “Roman Peace”. A period between the 1st and 2nd century AD when the force of Roman arms subdued nearly all, who would stand against them.
Unsurprisingly, the conquered peoples described the period, somewhat differently. Sometime around 84AD Calgacus of the Caledonian Confederacy in Northern Scotland said, “They make a desert and call it peace”.
The conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors accomplished much the same during the 13th and 14th century. The “Pax Mongolica” effectively connected Europe with Asia, a time when one could travel the “Silk Road” from Britain in the west to China in the east. Great caravans carrying Chinese silks and spices came to the west via transcontinental trade routes. It was said of the era that “a maiden bearing a nugget of gold on her head could wander safely throughout the realm.”
Never mind the pyramids of skulls, over there.
Over time the “Black Death” and Mongol fracturing along political lines brought the Pax Mongolica to an end. Muslim domination of Middle Eastern trade routes made overland travel to China and India increasingly difficult in the 15th century. After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, such travel became next to impossible. Europe began to look for a water route to the East.
It’s popular to believe that 15th century Europeans thought the world was flat, but that’s a myth. Otherwise, cats would have pushed everything over the edge by now.
The fact that the world is round was understood for over a thousand years, though 15th century mapmakers often got places and distances wrong. In 1474, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli detailed a scheme for sailing westward to China, India and the Spice Islands. He believed that Japan, which he called “Cipangu”, was larger than it is, and farther to the east of “Cathay” (China). Toscanelli vastly overestimated the size of the Eurasian landmass while the Americas were left out, altogether.
This is the map that Christopher Columbus took with him, in 1492.
Columbus had taken his idea of a westward trade route to the Portuguese King, to Genoa and to Venice, before he came to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1486. At that time the Spanish monarchs had a Reconquista to tend to, but by 1492, they were ready. The Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria sailed that August.
By the new year the expedition had been at sea for six months. Sailing off the coast of Hispaniola on January 9, what we now call the Dominican Republic, Columbus spotted three “mermaids”.
They were almost certainly Manatee, part of the order “Sirenia”. “Sirens” are the beautiful sisters, half birdlike creatures who live by the sea, according to ancient Greek mythology. These girls, according to myth, sang a song so beautiful that sailors fell into hypnosis, dashing ships on the rocks in vain efforts to reach them.
Columbus seems not to have been impressed, describing these particular mermaids as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.”
Small wonder. These marine herbivores measure 10 to 13-feet from nose to tail and weigh in at 800 to 1,200 lbs.
Not everyone was quite so dismissive. A hundred years later, the English explorer John Smith reported seeing a mermaid, probably a Manatee. The creature was “by no means unattractive” Smith wrote, but I’m not so sure. Maybe Mr. Smith just needed to get out a little more.
Lippincott’s monthly magazine, waxed rhapsodic: “This animal, homely as a steamroller, is the embodiment of salvation. Peace, plenty and contentment lie before us, and a new life with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigour, new romance, folded in that golden future, when the meadows and the bayous of our southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami”.
Only hours from now, families will gather far and near around, the Christmas table. There will be moist and savory stuffing, and green bean casserole. Creamy mashed potatoes and orange cranberry sauce. And there, the centerpiece of the feast. Slow-roasted and steaming in that silver tray the golden brown, delicious, roast hippopotamus.
Wait…Umm…What?
Water Hyacinth
On this day in 1884, the World Cotton Centennial and World’s Fair was beginning its second week, in New Orleans. Among the many wonders on display was the never-before seen Eichornia crassipes, a gift of the Japanese delegation. The Water Hyacinth.
Visitors marveled at this beautiful aquatic herb, its yellow spots accentuating the petals of delicate purple and blue flowers floating across tranquil ponds on a mat of thick, dark green leaves.
The seeds of Eichornia crassipes are spread by wind, flood, birds and humans and remain viable, for 30 years. Beautiful as it is to look at, the Water Hyacinth is an “alpha plant”, an aquatic equivalent to the Japanese invasive perennial Kudzu, the “vine that ate the south”. Impenetrable floating mats choke out native habitats and species while thick roots impede the passage of vessels, large and small. The stuff is toxic if ingested by humans and most animals, and costs a fortune to remove.
This plant native from the Amazon basin quickly broke the bounds of the 1884 World’s Fair, spreading across the bayous and waterways of Louisiana, and beyond.
During the first decade of the 20th century, an exploding American population could barely keep up with its own need for food, especially, meat. The problem reached crisis proportions in 1910, with over grazing and a severe cattle shortage. Americans were seriously discussing the idea, of eating dogs.
Enter Louisiana member of the House of Representatives, New Iberia’s own Robert Foligny Broussard, with a solution to both problems. Lake Bacon.
The attorney from Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional district proposed the “American Hippo” bill, H.R. 23621, in 1910, with enthusiastic support from Theodore Roosevelt and the New York Times. One Agricultural official estimated that a free-range hippo herd could produce up to a million tons of meat, per year.
Lippincott’s monthly magazine, waxed rhapsodic: “This animal, homely as a steamroller, is the embodiment of salvation. Peace, plenty and contentment lie before us, and a new life with new experiences, new opportunities, new vigour, new romance, folded in that golden future, when the meadows and the bayous of our southern lands shall swarm with herds of hippopotami”.
With a name deriving from the Greek term “River Horse”, the common hippopotamus is the third largest land animal living today. Despite a physical resemblance to hogs and other even-toed ungulates, Hippopotamidae’s closest living relatives are cetaceans such as whales, dolphins and porpoises.
All well and good. The problem is, those things are dangerous.
The adult bull hippopotamus is extremely aggressive, unpredictable and highly territorial. And heaven help anyone caught between a cow, and her young. Hippos can gallop at short sprints of 19 mph, only slightly less than Jamaican Sprinter Usain Bolt, “the fastest man who ever lived”.
To search the “10 most dangerous animals in Africa” is to learn that hippos are #1, responsible for more human fatalities than any other large animal, in Africa.
Be that at it as it may, the animal is a voracious herbivore, spending daylight hours at the bottom of rivers & lakes, happily munching on vegetation.
Back to Broussard’s bill, what could be better than taking care of two problems at once? Otherwise unproductive swamps and bayous from Florida to Louisiana would become home to great hordes of free-range hippos. The meat crisis would be averted. America would become a nation of hippo ranchers.
As Broussard’s bill wended its way through Congress, the measure picked up steam with the enthusiastic support of two men, mortal enemies who’d spent ten years in the African bush, trying to kill each other. No, really.
Frederick Russell Burnham had argued for four years for the introduction of African wildlife into the American food stream. A freelance scout and American adventurer, Burnham was known for his service to the British South Africa company, and to the British army in colonial Africa. The “King of Scouts’, commanding officers described Burnham as “half jackrabbit and half wolf”. A “man totally without fear.” One writer described Burnham’s life as “an endless chain of impossible achievements”, another “a man whose senses and abilities approached that of a wild predator”. He was the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character and for the Boy Scouts. Forget the Dos Equis guy. Frederick Burnham really was the “most interesting man in the world“.
Frederick Russell BurnhamFritz Joubert Duquesne
Fritz Duquesne? Well that’s another matter. Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne was a Boer of French Huguenot ancestry, descended from Dutch settlers to South Africa. A smooth talking guerrilla fighter, the self-styled “Black Panther” once described himself as every bit the wild African animal, as any creature of the veld. An incandescent tower of hate for all things British, Duquesne was a liar, a chameleon, a man of 1,000 aliases who once spent seven months feigning paralysis, just so he could fool his jailers long enough to cut through his prison bars.
Destined to become a German spy it is he who lends his name to the infamous Duquesne Spy Ring. Frederick Burnham described this, his mortal adversary, thus: “He was one of the craftiest men I ever met. He had something of a genius of the Apache for avoiding a combat except in his own terms; yet he would be the last man I should choose to meet in a dark room for a finish fight armed only with knives“.
During the 2nd Boer war, the pair had sworn to kill each other. In 1910, these two men became partners in a mission to bring hippos, to America’s dinner table.
Biologically, there is little reason to believe that Hippo ranching couldn’t have worked along the Gulf coast. Colombian officials estimate that, within a few years, the hippo descendants of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s exotic animal menagerie will number 100 or more individuals.
Broussard’s measure went down to defeat by a single vote but never entirely went away. Always the political calculator, Representative and later-Senator Broussard died with the bill on his legislative agenda, waiting for the right moment to reintroduce the thing.
Over time, the solution to the meat question became a matter of doubling down on what was already happening, as factory farms and confinement operations took the place of free ranges and massive use of antibiotics replaced the idea of balanced biological systems.
We may or may not have “traded up”. Today, we contend with ever more antibiotic-resistant strains of “Superbugs”. Louisiana spends $2 million per year on herbicidal control of the water hyacinth. The effluent of factory farms from Montana to Pennsylvania works its way into the nation’s rivers and streams, washing out to the Mississippi Delta to a biological dead zone, the size of New Jersey.
Gulf of Mexico dead zone, image credit NOAA
That golden future of Lippincott’s hippo herds roam only in the meadows and bayous of the imagination. Who knows, it may be for the best. I don’t know if any of us could’ve seen each other across the table, anyway. Not when the hippopotamus came out of the oven.
Ironically, the threat posed by humans outside the exclusion zone is greater for some species than that posed by radiation, within the zone.
The accident began as a test. A carefully planned series of events intending to simulate a station blackout at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine.
This most titanic of disasters began with a series of smaller mishaps. Safety systems intentionally turned off, reactor operators failing to follow checklists, inherent design flaws in the reactor itself.
Over the night of April 25-26, 1986, a nuclear fission chain reaction expanded beyond control at reactor #4, flashing water to super-heated steam resulting in a violent explosion and open air graphite fire. Massive amounts of nuclear material were expelled into the atmosphere during this explosive phase, equaled only by that released over the following nine days by intense updrafts created by the fire. Radioactive material rained down over large swaths of the western USSR and Europe, some 60% in the Republic of Belarus.
It was the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history and one of only two such accidents classified as a level 7, the maximum classification on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The other was the 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, in Japan.
One operator died in the steam-blast phase of the accident, a second resulting from a catastrophic dose of radiation. 600 Soviet helicopter pilots risked lethal radiation, dropping 5,000 metric tons of lead, sand and boric acid in the effort to seal off the spread.
Remote controlled, robot bulldozers and carts, soon proved useless. Valery Legasov of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, explains: “[W]e learned that robots are not the great remedy for everything. Where there was very high radiation, the robot ceased to be a robot—the electronics quit working.”
Hat tip, Chernobyl Museum, Kiev , Ukraine
Soldiers in heavy protective gear shoveled the most highly radioactive materials, “bio-robots” allowed to spend a one-time maximum of only forty seconds on the rooftops of surrounding buildings. Even so, some of these “Liquidators” report having done so, five or six times.
In the aftermath, 237 suffered from Acute Radiation Sickness (ARS), 31 of whom died in the following three months. Fourteen more died of radiation induced cancers, over the following ten years.
Chernobyl “Liquidators”, permitted to spend no more than a one-time maximum of forty seconds, cleaning the rooftops of surrounding structures.
The death toll could have been far higher, but for the heroism of first responders. Anatoli Zakharov, a fireman stationed in Chernobyl since 1980, replied to remarks that firefighters believed this to be an ordinary electrical fire. “Of course we knew! If we’d followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor. But it was a moral obligation – our duty. We were like kamikaze“.
The concrete sarcophagus designed and built to contain the wreckage has been called the largest civil engineering project in history, involving no fewer than a quarter-million construction workers, every one of whom received a lifetime maximum dose of radiation. By December 10 the structure was nearing completion. The #3 reactor at Chernobyl continued to produce electricity, until 2000.
A plastic doll lies abandoned on a rusting bed, 30 years after the town was evacuated following the Chernobyl disaster. H/T Dailymail.com
Officials of the top-down Soviet state first downplayed the disaster. Asked by one Ukrainian official, “How are the people?“, acting minister of Internal Affairs Vasyl Durdynets replied that there was nothing to be concerned about: “Some are celebrating a wedding, others are gardening, and others are fishing in the Pripyat River.”
As the scale of the disaster became apparent, civilians were at first ordered to shelter in place. A 10-km exclusion zone was enacted within the first 36 hours, resulting in the hurried evacuation of some 49,000. The exclusion zone was tripled to 30-km within a week, leading to the evacuation of 68,000 more. Before it was over, some 350,000 were moved away, never to return.
Evacuation of Pripyat
The chaos of these evacuations, can scarcely be imagined. Confused adults. Crying children. Howling dogs. Shouting soldiers, barking orders and herding the now-homeless onto waiting buses, by the tens of thousands. Dogs and cats, beloved companion animals, were ordered left behind. Evacuees were never told. There would be no return.
Two bumper cars lie face to face in the rusting remains of an amusement park in the abandoned town of Pripyat near Chernobyl
There were countless and heartbreaking scenes of final abandonment, of mewling cats, and whimpering dogs. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich compiled hundreds of interviews into a single monologue, an oral history of the forgotten. The devastating Chernobyl Prayer tells the story of: “dogs howling, trying to get on the buses. Mongrels, Alsatians. The soldiers were pushing them out again, kicking them. They ran after the buses for ages.” Heartbroken families pinned notes to their doors: “Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good dog.”
View from an abandoned gym in the Prypyat ghost town, of Chernobyl. H/T Vintagenews.com
There would be no mercy. Squads of soldiers were sent to shoot those animals, left behind. Most died. Some escaped discovery, and survived.
Today the descendants of those dogs, some 900 in number occupy an exclusion zone some 1,600 square miles, slightly smaller than the American state, of Delaware. They are not alone.
In 1998, 31 specimens of the Przewalski Horse were released into the exclusion zone which now serves as a de facto wildlife preserve. Not to be confused with the American mustang or the Australian brumby, the Przewalski Horse is a truly wild horse and not the feral descendant, of domesticated animals.
Named by the 19th century Polish-Russian naturalist Nikołaj Przewalski, Equus ferus przewalskii split from ancestors of the domestic Equus caballus some 38,000 to 160,000 years ago, forming a divergent species where neither taxonomic group is descended, from the other. The last Przewalski stallion was observed in the wild in 1969. The species is considered extinct in the wild, since that time.
Today approximately 100 Przewalski horses roam the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone one of the larger populations of this, possibly the last of the truly wild horses, alive today.
In 2016, US government wildlife biologist Sarah Webster worked at the University of Georgia. Webster and others used camera traps to demonstrate how wildlife had colonized the exclusion zone, even the most contaminated parts. A scientific paper on the subject is linked HERE, if you’re interested.
Ironically, the threat posed by humans outside the exclusion zone is greater for some species than that posed by radiation, within the zone. Wildlife spotted within the exclusion zone include wolves, badgers, swans, moose, elk, turtles, deer, foxes, beavers, boars, bison, mink, hares, otters, lynx, eagles, rodents, storks, bats and owls.
Not all animals thrive in this place. Invertebrates like spiders, butterflies and dragonflies are noticeably absent, likely because of eggs laid in surface soil layers which remain, contaminated. Radionuclides settled in lake sediments effect populations of fish, frogs, crustaceans and insect larvae. Birds in the exclusion zone have difficulty reproducing. Such animals who do successfully reproduce often demonstrate albinism, deformed beaks and feathers, malformed sperm cells and cataracts.
Tales abound of giant mushrooms, six-pawed rabbits and three headed dogs. While some such stories are undoubtedly exaggerated few such mutations survive the first few hours and those who do are unlikely to pass on the more egregious deformities.
Far from the post-apocalyptic wasteland of imagination the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a thriving preserve for some but not all, wildlife. Which brings us back to the dogs. Caught in a twilight zone neither feral nor domestic the dogs of Chernobyl are neither able to compete in the wild nor are many of them candidates for adoption, due to radiation toxicity.
Since September 2017, a partnership between the SPCA International and the US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit CleanFutures.org has worked to provide for the veterinary needs of these defenseless creatures. Over 450 animals have been tested for radiation exposure, given medical care, vaccinations, and spayed or neutered, to bring populations within manageable limits. Many have been socialized for human interaction and successfully decontaminated, available for adoption into homes in Ukraine and North America.
For most there is no future beyond this place and a life expectancy unlikely to exceed a span of five years.
Thirty five years after the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster a surprising number of people work in this place, on a rotating basis. Guards are stationed at access points whose job it is to control who gets in and to keep out unauthorized visitors, known as “stalkers”.
BBC wrote in April of this year about the strange companionship sprung up between these guards, and the dogs of Chernobyl. Jonathon Turnbull is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Cambridge. He was the first outsider to recognize the relationship and gave the guards disposable cameras, with which to record the lives of these abandoned animals. The guards around this toxic sanctuary had but a single request: “please, please – bring food for the dogs”.
When it comes to loyalty, it’s hard to beat the love of a dog.
According to National Geographic, “Wolves were the first animal to be domesticated, sometime between 33,000 and 11,000 years ago“. The first wolf may have approached some campfire, looking for a morsel. Maybe someone took in a sick or injured pup. Wolf packs may have shadowed human hunting parties, the two groups learning to work together for their own mutual benefit. The facts are lost to history, but one thing is certain. When it comes to loyalty, it’s hard to beat the love of a dog.
Miguel Guzmán of Cordoba Argentina, died in 2006. The following day Capitán, the family’s German Shepherd, disappeared. Mrs. Guzmán and the couple’s son searched all day, until the dog arrived at the cemetery. Forty-five minutes away. No one knows how he got there. The family claims they didn’t bring him. Cemetery director Hector Baccega remembers when he first saw the dog: ‘He turned up here one day, all on his own, and started wandering all around the cemetery until he eventually found the tomb of his master”.
Capitan. H/T Guardian, for this image
Capitán was brought home but he came back, the following day. Baccega describes what has since become, routine: “During the day he sometimes has a walk around the cemetery, but always rushes back to the grave. And every day, at six o’clock sharp, he lies down on top of the grave [and] stays there all night”.
Capitán lived to fifteen or sixteen, old for a large breed, and died in February 2018, in the cemetery in which he had lived. He was crippled and mostly blind by the time he went to join his “Dad”.
Who knows. I certainly don’t. Maybe they really Are, together again.
“Greyfriar’s Bobby” was a Skye Terrier in 19th-century Edinburgh, who waited 14 years by the grave of his owner, Police night watchman, John Gray. He died there in 1872 and was buried in the Greyfriars Kirkyard, not far from where his master lay.
Artist William Brodie created a life-sized likeness atop the Greyfriars Bobby Fountain in Edinburgh. Paid for by local aristocrat Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the memorial was formally unveiled on November 15, 1873
Greyfriars Bobby
Hidesaburō Ueno taught agriculture during the interwar years at Tokyo University. Every day, Ueno would take the train to work from Shibuya Station. In the evening, the professor’s golden colored Akita “Hachikō” would always be there waiting, at the station.
Hidesaburō stopped coming home one day in May 1925 after a cerebral hemorrhage took him away, in the middle of a lecture. Every day for nine years, nine months and fifteen days, the Akita appeared at Shibuya Station, precisely on time for that evening train.
Japanese children know the golden colored Akita as chūken Hachikō. “Faithful dog Hachikō”.
Ruswarp was a fourteen-year old Border Collie who went hiking with Graham Nuttall on January 20, 1990 in the Welsh Mountains, near Llandrindod.
On April 7, a hiker discovered Nuttall’s body near a mountain stream. The dog had been standing guard, for eleven weeks.
Ruswarp, the Border collie
Ruswarp was so weak he had to be carried off the mountain and died, shortly thereafter. Can there be any doubt the dog would have expired right there by Graham’s side, had he not been discovered.
Today there’s a small monument erected in the memory of this extraordinary animal, on a platform near the Garsdale railway station.
In the early morning hours of August 6, 2011, 30 American military service members including 22 United States Navy SEALs were killed along with eight Afghans, SEAL Team 6 handler John “Jet Li” Douangdara and his Military Working Dog (MWD) “Bart”. The Chinook helicopter in which they were all riding was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in the Kunar Province, of Afghanistan.
To anyone around at that time, the images of “Hawkeye”, together for the last time with slain Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson, are hard to forget.
In 1936, a sheep dog called “Shep” belonged to a herder whose name is now, lost to history. This was near Fort Benton, in Montana.
The man fell ill and was taken, to a local hospital. For over a week, Shep waited at the hospital, for his master to return. On the 11th day the man died, his casket taken to the local train station and placed in the cargo hold, to be returned home for burial.
Shep was there throughout and watched the train chug away with the body of his “Dad”. He’d return to that hospital door where a kindly nun would feed him a scrap, but every time he heard that train whistle, there was a sheepdog waiting at the station.
In those days, there were four trains a day. For nearly six years, Shep returned to the station, every time he heard that whistle. He even dug a den for himself, near the track.
Passengers took the Havre to Great Falls rail line just to see the dog. Shep received so much fan mail, the Great Northern Railroad assigned a secretary to write responses.
In time, the old boy wasn’t quite as fast as he used to be, his hearing not so good. On January 12, 1942, “Forever Faithful” Shep was struck and killed on the tracks, waiting for a man who could never return.
Stories like these are enough to fill a book, if not a library. I’m not a big one for bumper stickers but, if I were, this would be my first: “Lord, make me half the man my dog thinks I am“.
The CCC lives with his three “Chicas”, Margarita, Roxana and JoJo. They’re all rescues, from Cozumel. Of course, there has to be a margarita.
Before the age of King George III, readers scoffed at the notion of a venomous, egg-laying mammal with the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver and the webbed feet, of an otter. Until one was discovered, in 1799.
As the story goes, the Irish priest Columba was traveling the Scottish Highlands, teaching Christianity to the Picts. He was walking along the shores of Loch Ness one day, when he came upon some local villagers burying one of their own. The poor unfortunate had swum out to retrieve a boat adrift from its moorings, when he was bitten by a water creature of some sort. The priest sent one of his followers swimming across the loch to get the boat. The monster rose from the depths once again and was just about to eat the man, when Columba commanded the beast to depart.
There’s no telling how it actually happened. The story was written down 100 years, after the fact. The events described took place on August 22nd, 565, meaning that we’ve been talking about the Loch Ness monster for about 1,500 years. At a minimum.
Loch Ness is formed by a 60 mile, active tectonic fault, where the hills are still rising at a rate of a millimeter, per year. It’s made up of 3 lochs; Loch Lochy, Loch Oich and Loch Ness with Loch Ness being by far, the largest. There is more water in Loch Ness than all the other lakes in England, Scotland and Wales, combined. It is 22½ miles long and varies from a mile to 1½ miles wide, with a depth of 754-feet and a bottom “as flat as a bowling green”.
Loch Ness never freezes. There is a thermocline at 100-feet, below which the water remains a uniform 44° Fahrenheit. As the surface water cools in winter, it is replaced by warmer water rising up from below, causing the loch to steam on cold days. The heat energy generated has been compared to burning 2 million tons of coal. With the steam rising off the water and the occasional seismic tremor, Loch Ness can be a very eerie place.
Loch Ness ‘Monster’ as photographed, by Hugh Gray
The first photographic “evidence” of the Loch Ness monster was taken on the 12th of November 1933, by Hugh Gray. Some said the picture showed an otter, while others believed it was “some kind of giant marine worm”. The UK Daily Mail sent a team to look for evidence, headed by the famous big game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell. There was great media excitement when Wetherell discovered enormous footprints along the shore in December. Researchers from the Natural History Museum examined the tracks, which they determined to have come from a dried hippo’s foot; probably one of the umbrella stands popular at the time. That was the end of that.
Surgeon’s Photo
A British surgeon, Colonel Robert Wilson, took what might be the most famous picture of “Nessie” the following year. He didn’t want his name associated with it, so it became “The Surgeon’s Photo”, showing what appears to be a head and neck rising above the waters of the loch.
In one of history’s more interesting death bed confessions, Christian Spurling claimed in 1994 at the age of 93, that the surgeon’s photo had been a hoax. According to Spurling, his step-father Marmaduke Wetherell, was smarting over his hippo-foot humiliation. Spurling remembers Wetherell saying “We’ll give them their monster”, and asking his stepson to build a credible model of a marine creature. And so he did, the photo was taken, and Dr. Wilson became the respectable front man for the hoax.
An entire study called “Cryptozoology” (literally, the study of hidden animals) has sprung up around Nessie and other beasts whose existence is never quite proven, and never completely debunked. There is Big Foot, who seems to have made it to stardom with his own series of beef jerky commercials. You have the Chupacabra, the Yeti, Ogopogo, Vermont’s own Lake Champlain monster, “Champ”, and more.
And yet, some of these critters have proven to be, very real. The terrifying ‘Kraken’ of sailor’s lore was likely a colossal squid, now known to gain lengths up to 46-feet. Before the age of King George III, readers scoffed at the notion of a venomous, egg-laying mammal with the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver and the webbed feet, of an otter. Until one was discovered, in 1799. Today we know that little guy, as the duck-billed platypus. The Coelacanth was ‘known’ to be extinct since the late cretaceous, until one of them popped up in a fisherman’s net, in 1938.
Hundreds of images have been taken over the years, purporting to demonstrate that these critters do exist. Some were transparent hoaxes, for others there is less certainty. In the end, people will believe what they want to believe. The existence of these mythical creatures may never be proven, short of one of them washing up on shore somewhere. Even then, someone will take to social media, to argue otherwise.
The horse lobby did a lot to kill the camel project. The animal’s unpleasant personality traits didn’t help.
The Cedar Hill Cemetery, established by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, contains the final resting place of some 5,000 Confederate Soldiers who died in the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Each one stands in memory of a soldier killed in the line of duty.
Even the one with the camel on it.
The story begins with Jefferson Davis, in the 1840s. We remember him today as the President of the Confederate States of America. Then, he was a United States Senator from Mississippi, with a pet project of introducing camels into the United States.
Re-introducing them might be more like it. Today, the distribution of these animals is almost the inverse of their area of origin. According to the fossil record, the earliest camelids first appeared on the North American continent, these even-toed ungulates ancestor to the Alpaca, Llama, Guanaco and Vicuña of today.
Jefferson Davis’ experiment was to be the first large-scale re-introduction of these animals on the North American continent, in geologic history.
Davis envisioned the day when every southern planter would have a stable full of camels. In the kind of pork barrel tit-for-tat spending deal beloved of Congressmen to this day, the senator bslid $30,000 into a highway appropriations bill, to get the support of a fellow senator from Illinois.
The measure failed, but in the 1850s, then-Secretary of War Davis persuaded President Franklin Pierce that camels were the military super weapons of the future. Able to carry greater loads over longer distances than any other pack animal, Davis saw camels as the high tech weapon of the age. Horses and mules were dying by the hundreds in the hot, dry conditions of Southwestern Cavalry outposts when the government purchased 75 camels from Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Several camel handlers came along in the bargain, one of them a Syrian named Haji Ali, who successfully implemented a camel breeding program. Haji Ali was a character and became quite the celebrity in the West Texas outpost. The soldiers called the man “Hi Jolly”.
When the Civil War broke out, Camp Verde, Texas had about 60 camels. The King of Siam, (now Thailand), saw the military advantage to the Confederacy and wrote to President Abraham Lincoln. “Here”, he wrote, “we use elephants”. The King went on to propose bringing elephants into the Northwest, to help the Union war effort. This “animal arms race” appears to have gotten no further than that one letter to the President, but the imagination does run wild, doesn’t it. The idea of War Elephants, at Gettysburg….
The horse lobby did a lot to kill the camel project. The animal’s unpleasant personality traits didn’t help. A camel will not passively accept a riding crop or a whip. They are vengeful, and can spit stinking wads of phlegm with great accuracy over considerable distances. If they’re close enough, they will rake the skin off your face with their front teeth. Camels have even been known to trample people to death.
Douglas, the Confederate Camel
Cut loose, one of those Texas camels somehow made its way to Mississippi, where he was taken into service with the 43rd Infantry Regiment, who named him “Douglas”.
Douglas wouldn’t permit himself to be tethered, but he always stuck around so he was allowed to graze on his own. Southern soldiers became accustomed to the sight of “Old Douglas”. The 43rd Mississippi became known as the “Camel Regiment,” but the horses never did get used to their new companion. On this day in 1862, Major General Sterling Price was preparing to face two Union armies at Iuka, when the sight of Old Douglas spooked the regimental horses. One horse’s panic turned into a stampede, injuring several and possibly killing one or two.
The 43rd Infantry was ordered to Vicksburg during General Ulysses S. Grant’s siege of the city, when Douglas was shot and killed by a Union sharpshooter. Enraged by the murder of their prized camel, the 5th Missouri’s commander Lieutenant Colonel Robert S. Bevier enlisted six of his best snipers, who stalked the killer until one of them had his revenge. Bevier later said of Douglas’ killer, “I refused to hear his name, and was rejoiced to learn that he had been severely wounded.”
So it is that there is a camel at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He is not forgotten. Douglas and other camels of the era are remembered by the Texas Camel Corps, a cross between a zoo and a living history exhibit.
The organizations website begins with: “Texas Camel Corps was established to educate the public about the historic use of camels in America in the 19th century”. I might just have to check those guys out.
Before long, Smoke was a familiar sight around Camp Taqaddum. After long walks around the wire, Smoke learned to open doors and wander around. If you ever left a candy dish out on your desk, you were on your own.
Colonel Folsom couldn’t get the little animal out of his head and, learning of his plight in 2010, determined to get him back. There were plenty of kids who had survived trauma of all kinds in his home state of Nebraska. Folsom believed this animal could do them some good, as well.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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