Thursday

                                  Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

                                                               Victor Hugo

At one time I was working for Halliburton in the oil and gas fields in western Oklahoma. One day I was going west from Oklahoma City and stopped at a roadside marker in the small town of El Reno. The marker stated that approximately 2.5 million cattle crossed over this spot on trail drives from central Texas to the railroad in Abilene, Kansas. I looked south across a field and there as indeed a shallow depression about 50 yards wide as far as the eye could see...it was the Chisolm Trail, y'all, this kind of thing is right up my alley.

Down in Pensacola the county cops were called out to a domestic disturbance. Three officers showed up and all three were shot soon after arrival. After this display of hostility a SWAT team was called in and the shooters themselves were shot by the team. I don’t think anyone was killed but a couple was in serious condition. It is really is a mistake to shoot a cop, they are better trained and much more heavily armed.

A while back down in Summerville, South Carolina a man and woman pulled into the parking lot at Perkins restaurant. Witnesses said they could hear the couple screaming at each other as they entered the lot. The woman was driving. After they got out of the car, the man produced an automatic pistol and began shooting at the woman. She went down almost immediately but the man kept shooting at least eight more rounds. He then pointed the gun at the nearby witnesses and told them got “get inside.” The woman was declared dead at the scene and the man was last seen running behind the restaurant. 47 year old Randal Benton was captured in Alabama the next day and charged with the murder of 36 year old Trevi Benton at Perkins Restaurant. How can things get that bad? All he had to do was leave.

            This Date in History    November 2

1863 Major General John C. Fremont is relieved of command of the Western Department of the Union Army. Fremont was an interesting character. He was born in Savannah, Georgia and raised in Charleston, South Carolina and attended the College of Charleston. He was kicked out of school because of “idleness and lack of attention” but he excelled in mathematics and secured a position with the US Navy teaching mathematics. He was the illegitimate son of prominent Virginia socialite Janice Whiting who got knocked up by a French teacher from Norfolk, Virginia named Jean Fremon. It was later on the John changed his name by adding a “t” and a comma over the “e” in his last name. John joined the Union army in 1838 but made a great career move by marrying Jesse Benton. Jesse was the daughter of powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. As a result of his father-in-law’s influence, John was assigned three different expeditions of discovery. He started by mapping the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers that had been explored earlier by the Lewis and Clark expedition but they did not map the area like Fremont did. The next two were in the American west which he also mapped and proved to be of incalculable help to the pioneers that followed. It is believed that he was the first honkie to lay eyes on Lake Tahoe but he did not do it alone; he had guidance from mountain men like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. Fremont was superb cartographer but his expertise in combat was suspect. At the outbreak of the Civil War, again with his father-in-laws influence, he was named commander of the Union Army Western Department based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Soon thereafter a Union army commanded by US General Nathaniel Lyons ran up against a CSA army commanded by CSA General Sterling Price at the place called Wilson’s Creek. It was a massacre, y’all. The Union army was cut to pieces, including General Lyons. That Union army fled into the four winds in a complete rout. General Fremont was assailed for not providing Lyons assistance. Fremont was stung by this criticism and fought back by declaring martial law and chose to free the slaves in the state of Missouri. This act was way more than he had authority for. Not only that, it put A. Lincoln and the Republicans between a rock and a hard place. There were four slave holding states that had not seceded and they were Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. When Fremont freed the slaves in Missouri, he really pissed off the slave owners that had voted not to secede into thinking that maybe they really should secede and join the Confederacy. When Fremont’s actions in Missouri reached Kentucky, Delaware and Maryland the fires of secession were again kindled. Lincoln knew he had to do something so he requested Fremont to rescind his order. Fremont refused and that forced Lincoln to relieve him of command and Lincoln rescinded the order himself. They really did not know what to do with Fremont so they gave him command of a small army and sent him to a safe location, or so they thought, in West Virginia near the Shenandoah Valley. Soon after his arrival in West Virginia, the US army sent three separate armies, including Fremont, into the Shenandoah Valley to kick CSA General Thomas J.”Stonewall” Jackson and his army out of the valley. There is an upside to this for Fremont. He was included in the details of one of the greatest military actions ever documented when Stonewall Jackson defeated and routed not only Fremont but the other two armies as well. But it took an enormous amount of grit, endurance and determination by Stonewall’s troops and well as his unquestioned military genius. After having his ass handed to him by Jackson, Fremont retired from military service. In 1864 he was approached to challenge A. Lincoln for the Republican nominee for president but he declined. After the war he became the territorial governor of Arizona. He died in 1890 in New York. Fremont delivered some of the most important information ever discovered about the topography this country. He was just did not have a military mind.

1982 At the beginning of Russia’s disastrous war in Afghanistan, the worst disaster of that entire debacle occurred. There was a long truck convoy coming from Russia into Afghanistan carrying troops, fuel and other tools of war. The convoy had to traverse the Salang tunnel near the border town on Hairotum, Afghanistan. This tunnel was at an elevation of 11,000 feet, was 1.7 miles long, 24 feet high and 17 feet wide. After the trucks were about half way through, a truck load of troops rear ended a tanker truck full of diesel fuel and an explosion and fire erupted. The Russians thought that they were under attack and put guards on each end of the tunnel and would not let anyone out. The fire quickly spread and ate up most of the oxygen and the oxygen was replaced by carbon monoxide from the fire and the still running trucks. To make matters worse, the tunnel ventilation system was out of order. After the Russians figured out what had happened, they began pulling the trucks out of the tunnel but it was too little too late. Over 3,000 bodies were found. Due to the tight-lipped Russians who rarely tell the general public about negative news, we may never know the true bottom line in this disaster.

Quotable quotes:

“I stumbled across a case of bourbon and went on stumbling for several days thereafter.” That sounds like Jack Daniels to me.

W.C Fields

“When I was in grammar school, I was so fat that I was chosen to play Bethlehem in the school nativity.”

Jo Brand.

                      Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow