Daily History

Good morning,



Quote of the day:


“The Golden Rule of politics is never get caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman.”


                                     Larry Hagman


Here is a small vignette about the pioneer that settled in what is now downtown Greenville, SC.


                       Biography of Richard Pearis


Richard Pearis was born in Ireland in 1725 to affluent parents named John and Sarah. When Richard was 10 years old the family immigrated to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. By the time Richard was 25 he owned 1,200 acres near Winchester, Virginia and had a wife named Rhoda and three children. He began trading heavily with the Cherokees, Creeks and Shawnee tribes in eastern Tennessee. In 1753 he teamed up with another trader named Nathaniel Gist and opened a trading post near Kingsport, Tennessee. Pearis decided to expand his horizons and began trading with the Cherokees in South Carolina. While on one of these expeditions he fathered a child by a Cherokee woman. It was a boy and he named him George. Pearis won favor in the eyes of Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie, an Englishman, when he rounded up a company of Cherokee warriors and put himself and his warriors under the command of British General Forbes during the French and Indian War. He and his warriors were present at the re-capture of Fort Duquesne. After the war he became an Indian agent for the colony of Maryland. About 1770 Pearis and a man named Jacob Hite forged a letter that was supposedly from the major Indian chiefs in the area that they were willing to cede land to Virginia. Also included in the document was a paragraph stating that the Indians had granted Pearis 12 square miles around what is now Greenville, South Carolina. There was a British law that stated no British subject could own Indian land and this land grand deed was canceled. Pearis negotiated a land grant for the same land to be given to his son George who was half Cherokee. Of course, George immediately gave rights to his land to his father. Pearis, his son George and twelve slaves began clearing land on the banks of the Reedy River Falls which is presently in the dead center of present day Greenville, South Carolina. They built a “substantial house”, a trading post, a saw mill and a grist mill along with grain fields and fruit and nut orchards. Pearis named his holdings “Great Plains”. Then the Revolutionary War erupted. For reasons known only to Pearis he chose to be a Loyalist meaning that he maintained loyalty to the British crown in spite of his neighbors fighting and dying for freedom. Pearis commanded a Loyalist company of infantry. He and several other Loyalist leaders were captured by the patriots and Pearis was locked up for nine months in Charleston, SC. He eventually escaped and made his way to British West Florida. In the mean time all of his buildings on the banks of the Reedy River were burned to the ground by the Patriots. He was present with the British infantry when the city of Augusta, Georgia fell to the Patriots and Pearis was captured once again. The Patriot soldiers wanted his head but Patriot general Andrew Pickens intervened and put him in a boat and sent him down the Savannah River out of reach of the wild-eyed soldiers. He found his way to the Bahamas where he became a planter. He spent the rest of his days there where he died at the age of 69. I do not know where he was buried. There is a fair sized mountain just north of Greenville named Paris Mountain that was named after Richard Pearis but the spelling was corrupted over the years. I hold this man in very low self esteem. He was a liar, cheater and a traitor as far as I am concerned.


This date in history October 8


1989    Operation Sealords is initiated by US Vice Admiral Zumwalt whereby a combined force of American and South Vietnamese river boats named Task Force 194 would patrol the smaller and lesser used tributaries of the Mekong river delta in an attempt to prevent incursions by the North Vietnamese from Cambodia. Needless to say this operation was a failure because incursions continued unabated until the end of the war. In 1971 the total responsibility for the patrols was given to the South Vietnamese navy. What a fiasco the whole war was.


1862    The Battle of Perryville, Ky. happens on this day. Two Confederate forces commanded by CSA Gen. Braxton Bragg and CSA Gen. E. Kirby Smith having entered Kentucky earlier in an attempt to recruit support for the cause and to draw Union forces away from the Chattanooga area. They succeeded in drawing troops from Chattanooga when a union army commanded by US Gen. Don Carlos Buell left Chattanooga and began a chase to catch Bragg and Smith. He caught up with the Confederates at Perryville. Buell dispatched 58,000 to confront Bragg and 20,000 to handle Smith. A ferocious battle ensued and the Union army prevailed from the sheer force of superior numbers. The Union army suffered 4,200 casualties and the Confederates 3,400. The Confederacy could not well afford these numbers of casualties and the Union could because the Kentuckians could not be swayed to the Confederate cause and there were 80,000 Union troops in training in Cincinnati.


1918    On this day US Private Alvin York in one engagement kills 25 Germans and captures 132. Earlier, York and 15 others had been sent to capture a railroad depot in the Argonne Forest and gotten lost and found themselves behind enemy lines. There was a brief firefight and in the confusion a number Germans surrendered. On their way back toward their lines, a German machine gun nest above saw how small York’s unit was and in German yelled to the captured Germans to hide and then opened fire. Half of York’s unit was killed almost instantly. York, being a backwoodsman hunter from Tennessee, started picking off the Germans with his rifle with deadly accuracy. After a while York jumped up and charged the nest with the other following close behind. A detachment of 6 Germans were sent to intercept York but all were cut down by York and his .45 automatic. York kept up the killing until the rest of the Germans surrendered. On the way back to his lines many other Germans surrendered thinking it was a general surrender. Alvin York was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.


1918    A fire started in the barn of Patrick O’Leary in Chicago and the flames, fanned by winds off the prairie, spread quickly and the Great Chicago Fire was underway. After the fire finally burned itself out two days later an area four miles long and 2/3 of a mile wide was incinerated. The fire took the lives of 300 and made over 100,000 homeless. The upside of this catastrophe was that the fire did not reach the many grain silos and stock yards on the outskirts of Chicago and the great city was back in business in a short while.


1780 On October 7 the Battle of Kings Mountain occurs with the destruction of British Major Patrick Ferguson and his detachment. Ferguson had been sent by British General Cornwallis to make sure that there would be no guerilla tactics against his army while moving from Winnsboro, S.C. through North Carolina into Virginia. After hearing about the destruction of Ferguson and his troops, Cornwallis reverses course and went back to Winnsboro to await reinforcements. The strange thing about this engagement was that Ferguson was the only British subject in the battle. All the others were American Loyalist and Patriots. The beginnings of this victory had begun on September 25 when Patriot leaders Colonels Charles McDowell, John Sevier, Isaac Shelby and William Campbell met in western North Carolina and decided to eliminate Ferguson and his troops. They marched for 5 days before stopping at the Quaker Meadows Plantation in present day Morganton, N.C. there they were joined by many frontiersmen. In the mean time Ferguson who was in camp at Gilbert Town near present day Rutherfordton, N.C. decided to move on to Kings Mountain. The Patriots found out that Ferguson was not at Gilbert Town and followed him to Kings Mountain. Ferguson camped on a plateau about 60 feet higher that the surrounding lands. The Patriots surrounded the base of the plateau and the battle began. After about an hour of ferocious gunfire Ferguson raised a white flag of surrender, and yelled out “I am an officer in the King’s army and will be treated with dignity and respect”. That was greeted almost instantly with eight musket balls and Ferguson was dead before he hit the ground. The second in command raised the white flag of surrender again but the Patriots kept killing for a while remembering that when some Patriots tried to surrender to the infamous British Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Waxhaw, North Carolina he continued to kill them anyway. There were no British/Loyalist survivors at the Battle of King’s Mountain. British General Henry Clinton recognized this as the beginning of the end and said so. About a year later Gen. Cornwallis handed his sword to Gen. George Washington. There were a few skirmishes after this but essentially the Revolutionary War came to an end and this great ship of liberty and freedom was launched on the sea of blood shed by our ancestors.


Born today:


1912    US writer John Gardner. He said “All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.” That sounds like a football game to me.


1890    US aviator Eddie Rickenbacker. He said “Aviation is proof that given the will, we can achieve the impossible.” Tack onto that “and the understanding of the female mind.” I’m just joking.


1915    US writer Bill Vaughan. He said “Perhaps the crime situation would get better if we took the police off television and put them on the street.” Careful there Bill, I am a Law and Order fan.


1920    US writer Frank Herbert. He said “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe that nothing can stand in their way.” That sounds like Jimmy Swaggart and Hillary Clinton entertaining each other.


1926    German actor Klaus Kinski. He said “A man should be judged by his depravities. Virtues can be faked, depravities are real.” See the previous paragraph.


1938    Hell’s Angels founder Sonny Barger. US writer Hunter Thompson spent a year with the San Bernardino branch of the Hell’s Angels gathering information for a book. After he left Sonny said “Hunter turned out to be a real weenie, and a stone f**king coward. He was a total fake.” If you read Hunter’s book about his experience here, you would have thought that he was a Spartan at Thermopylae. Hunter blew his own brains out.


       Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow