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From the June 4, 1891 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A man was found Tuesday afternoon in an outhouse at Bethpage, L.I. almost dead from exhaustion. He had been there for three days and could not get out because he lacked physical strength. No one in the vicinity knew him. He was taken to a private house and a doctor was summoned from Farmingdale, but before he arrived the strange man was dead. The cause of death has not been determined, but there are no indications of foul play.”
“Bleeding from all parts of the body was the principal thing noticeable.”
An 19th-century Illinois lad was often mysteriously soaked in his own blood, as evidenced by an article that ran in the January 27, 1881 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“Chicago–A boy named Willie Crawford is suffering from a strange disease, the most extraordinary feature of which is that he sweats blood. The boy’s parents live at 86 Seeley Avenue. He was born December 1, 1866, and hence is a little over fourteen years of age. Up to seven years ago last summer he was healthy. He played hard, ate heartily and slept soundly. One night he woke up and called his mother, and she found him bleeding at the nose. She could not stop it, so she called a doctor, who said, ‘it was nothing but a bad nose bleed. Put cold cloths on his back.’ This was done but without avail, and another doctor was called. The bleeding at the nose was stopped, and then there came out on his body great black patches, and they would bleed. Blood also flowed from his mouth and eyes and from his stomach, and upon one occasion from his bladder and kidneys.
Willie recovered from the first attack and became apparently as well as ever, but others soon followed, and he was constantly under the care of different physicians. Bleeding from all parts of the body was the principal thing noticeable. It made him very weak, and the blood from his mouth affected his taste so that he could not partake of nourishment without great difficulty. On some occasions blood would issue in small drops about the size of a pin head from, as it seemed, every pore in his body and would stain his clothing, just as though blood had been pricked into the cloth. These discharges were unaccompanied with pains, and, until the last attacks were without much fever. Spots of all shapes and sizes would appear upon all parts of his body and would turn as black as coal sometimes, and at others would be of red or blue color.
Three weeks ago to-day he was taken down suddenly with the worst attack he has ever had. He bled so much that his blood became so thin and reduced in quality that it would scarcely soil a white handkerchief. He also had a high fever and bled so badly from his nose that it had to be constantly plugged. His gums, mouth and tongue were covered with large blood blisters, and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot, and it seemed as though he could not live, he had become so weak. These attacks, though they have come without any apparent cause or warning, have sometimes been produced and stopped by sudden excitement. Mrs. Crawford said he was once bleeding so badly that she went for a doctor, and left him with the hired girl and one of her daughters. As she was coming back, Willie met her with the bleeding stopped, though he was deadly pale, as he said, ‘Bridget has fainted, and Maggie is almost scared to death.’ He was so frightened at the fainting of the hired girl that it had for the time cured him.
Willie Crawford is mentally bright, and his father, mother, brother and sister are strong and healthy. The physicians who have taken an interest in his case propose sending him to Edinburgh and London for examination by the Academy of Surgeons.”
Tags: Mrs. Crawford, Willie Crawford
By any standards, Luther Burbank was a virtuoso botanist and horticulturist, mixing, matching and creating. Among the hundreds of exotic varieties that were hatched from his experimental Santa Rosa farm, greenhouse and nursery–which included plants, potatoes, fruits and flowers–was the spineless cactus featured in the above classic photograph. The opening of an admiring 1906 New York Times profile of Burbank:
Every summer our transatlantic steamers are burdened with great throngs of travelers beginning their pilgrimages to the shrines of departed genius. In America, too, we may visit places made illustrious by the former presence of Washington, Jefferson, Lee, Lincoln, Emerson, Poe, and other native men of genius. But, disguise it as we will, the visits are at last to cemeteries, where everything is described in the past tense.
But there is in America at this moment a man of the very greatest genius, just in the flower of his fame, a visit to whom not only emphasizes his genius and his leadership in thought and living things, but also enables one to see far into the future. There is a searchlight of truth in constant operation at Santa Rosa, Cal., and the mind and heart of Luther Burbank are the lenses through which the light is focused. Long ago I resolved to beg the privilege of standing near the searchlight and making a few observations as it illumined some of the peaks of knowledge I could never hope to scale.
Our so-called “Captains of Industry” are busy men, but many of their duties and responsibilities they may delegate to others. Luther Burbank is the busiest man in the world. I make that statement without fear of successful contradiction. His ship is alone on a vast sea of nature’s secrets. With him on the voyage of discovery are a few near relations to encourage him, a dear friend or two for protection and companionship, and several humble helpers to feed the boilers and oil the engines. But he is more alone than was Columbus, because he has no first officer, no second officer, no mate. Like Columbus, upon him alone falls the responsibility for the expedition; he alone knows why the vessel’s prow is kept always in one direction; he alone has faith that it must ultimately touch the shores of truth and reality.•
Tags: Luther Burbank
From the June 14, 1854 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Ashtabula County, Ohio–An old bachelor by the name of Lyman Sutliff who was well off in the world, had a fine farm well stocked, lived in his house alone and carried on his farm himself, was about four weeks ago missing and his house was closed up. Not hearing anything from him, the neighbors got alarmed, broke into his house, and found an awful stench arising from meat, maggoty milk and a dead pet porcupine. The whole county turned out last Thursday to look for the missing man, supposing him murdered. Near one of the fences running across his back lot, his body was found buried in the ground, the corpse lying on its back, and so near to the surface that one of its knees protruded out. Suspicion immediately fell on one of the neighbors who had been seen ploughing with the deceased’s cattle. The crowd immediately surrounded his house and demanded his surrender. He was arrested.”
Tags: Lyman Sutliff
“He prints a letter by the blow of minute hammers.”
John J. Pratt, Alabaman inventor, devised his version of the typewriter, the Pterotype, in 1865. Two years later when Pratt demonstrated his machine in London, some genius from the Scientific Journal was there to inspect it and explain its operation to readers in excruciating detail. The story was repeated in the July 18, 1867 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. If you want to shoot yourself, read on:
“The Scientific Journal contains the following account of a newly invented and curious machine:
‘A machine by which it is assumed that a man may print his thoughts twice as fast as he can write them, and with the advantage of the legibility, compactness and neatness of print, has been exhibited before the London Society of the Arts, by the inventor, Mr. Pratt, of Alabama.
He draws up his alphabet in a solid square battalion, say seventy characters in seven rows, the whole in solid electrotype plate about five-eighths inch square or more according to the size of the type desired. He prints a letter by the blow of minute hammers of uniform size with all the type bodies, striking the face of the letter, with the paper interposed, and a carbonated sheet also between that and the type. Each letter, as wanted, is moved into position before the hammer by compound levers actuated by keys like those of a piano. The same touch of the key readjusts the paper to the new impression (with or without a space before it, according to the force used), readjusts the type plate, so as to present the desired type to the hammer, and gives the printing blow. Simple arrangements also retract the page at once laterally and vertically to begin a new line. The type plate and paper are placed vertically, the latter with its face to the operator, so that the work done is before his eyes as in writing. The keys actuate two double acting levers, one of which raises or lowers the type plate, while the other moves it laterally. Each key is so applied to the levers as to adjust the plate at once sideways and vertically to the position for bringing a particular character into the play. Or, a better way, one key will do duty for the vertical movement of each entire horizontal row, another key for the lateral movement of each vertical column, and thus by pressing two keys for each character, seventeen keys will be sufficient to operate the whole front of seventy characters above supposed.
The case of the instrument is small and compact, the parts are mostly of wood, and it could be manufactured and sold on a large scale for about $15 for a handsome profit.'”
Tags: John J. Pratt
From the October 7, 1887 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Cairo, Ill.–While Dr. J.H. Leach, of Cairo, was walking the floor of his office Wednesday night a sudden and very severe pain darted into his right eye, which seemed to jump out of his head. A profuse hemorrhage began and continued all night. The pain was intense. An examination showed that the eye had burst and that its immediate removal was necessary. Dr. Leach was taken back to his own office where the operation was performed.”
Tags: Dr. J.H. Leach
From the August 1, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Laredo, Tex.–The 7 year old son of a well to do Mexican is dying a horrible death from a very unusual cause. A few days ago that little fellow had a slight attack of bleeding at the nose and lay down to sleep without removing the blood. While asleep a large green fly deposited its eggs in the bloody nostril. Physicians have extracted over fifty worms, about half an inch long, and have detected evidences of many others eating toward the brain. They say the child will die.”
“They attempted to force liquor down his throat, and slapped and kicked him.”
As I understand it from this 19th-century article from the Big Timber Express (which was republished in the March 11, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle), a bunch of nice fellas in a Montana town bought a round of drinks for a local newspaperman and no one appreciated the kindly gesture. An excerpt:
“Occasionally an Eastern newspaper voices the general impressions of the people of the country where it circulates concerning social conditions in far Western states. Lynching, murders, highway robbery, untamed cowboys and heroes of the Deadwood Dick type are represented as the striking elements in the average Western town, and one would think to read the stuff, that every other Western citizen is a ruffian and a cutthroat, and that the only semblance of law and order is maintained by the constant intimidation of the sheriff’s pistol and a few scattered churches. Of course such articles only betray the ignorance of their authors to those who have been West, but it must be admitted that a measure of justification is found for them in such experiences as George H. Scott, of the Rocky Mountain Husbandman had at Perry (formerly Joliet), Montana, a week or two ago.
Mr. Scott is a gentleman who is opposed on principle to the use of intoxicating liquors, and when the prominent ruffians of Perry invited him to drink with them, he very properly but civilly declined, whereupon they attempted to force liquor down his throat, and afterward slapped and kicked him. When it is remembered that Mr. Scott is an invalid, the brutality of the drunken scoundrels is horrible, and if it be a fact as stated, that some of the most prominent business men of the place participated in the outrage, the town should be at once quarantined, and missionaries backed by a military force, sent in to effect the civilization of the Perry barbarians. Perry is as much a disgrace to Montana as it would be to as Eastern state, and decent people will do well to avoid the town as they would a plague district, until it proves itself possessed of some of the elements of civilization and self respect.”
Tags: George H. Scott
From the November 1, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Great Falls, Mont.–A twelve year old boy named Southwick kidnaped the six year old son of G.W. Ryan, a prominent grocer, yesterday, and sent a note to the father demanding $1,500 ransom, threatening to put pieces of glass into the child’s eyes and cut his hands off unless the demand was complied with.
Mr. Ryan notified the police, who arrested young Southwick shortly after the Ryan boy had arrived at his father’s store unharmed, having been released by Southwick.
Southwick confessed that he did the deed of his own volition, and that he had no accomplices. He expressed no repentance and said: ‘I would have hit the old man for $8,000 if I thought he would have stood for it.'”
“Spider farming as a money making industry is yet in its infancy.”
A Frenchman and his spider farm are the focus of this bizarre Philadelphia Press story which was republished in the July 21, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“There is but one spider farm in the United States. As far as the writer can learn there are only two in the world. Entomologists have collected and raised spiders for purposes of scientific observation and investigation, just as bacilli and other unpleasant animals are nurtured. Here and there a spider has been made a pet of of by some lonely prisoner of Chillon or the Tombs, but spider farming as a money making industry is yet in its infancy. What in the world is done with a crop of spiders? One only has to go four miles from Philadelphia on the old Lancaster pike and ask for the farm of Pierre Grantaire to see what can be found nowhere else in this country and abroad only in a little French village in the department of the Loire.
Pierre Grantaire furnishes spiders at so much per hundred for distribution in the wine vaults of the merchant and the nouveau riches. His trade is chiefly with the wholesale merchant, who is able to stock a cellar with new, shining, freshly labeled bottles and in three months see them veiled with filmy cobwebs, so that the effect of twenty years of storage is secured at a small cost. The effect upon a customer can be imagined and is hardly to be measured in dollars and cents. It is a trifling matter to cover the bins with dust. The effect is easy to the veriest tyro in the wine trade. But cobwebs–that is a different matter–cobwebs spun from cork to cork, cobwebs that drape the slender neck like delicate lace when the flask is brought to the light–the seal of years of slow mellowing and fruition.
It was a bit shuddering for the visitor, who had been brought up to smash a spider with a slipper or whatever came handiest, to be brought into a room, where there were spiders in front of him, spiders to the rear of him, myriads of spiders on every hand.
“This is Sara. She has the grace, the chic, the slender beauty of the divine Bernhardt. She is the pride of all my pets.”
The walls were covered with wire squares from six inches to a foot across, like magnified sections of the wire fence used to enclose poultry yards. Behind these wire screens the walls had been covered with rough planking. There were cracks between the boards, apparently left by design, and their weather beaten surfaces were dotted with knot holes and splintered crevises. The sunlight streamed through the open door and the room seemed hung with curtains of elfin woven lacework. The king of this fairy palace rapped his stubby pipe against the door, and the webs were dotted with black spots as the spiders scampered from their retreats in the wall cracks and a score of villainous looking pets as big as half dollars emerged from their crannies on a table and clustered against their glass roofing.
‘Tell us how you raise them, Pierre,’ asked the visitor.
‘Corbeau, it is a science, this raising of spiders. I have on hand at one time about 10,000 spiders, old and young. I brought some eggs from France, and the choicest webmakers to be found. This is Sara. She has the grace, the chic, the slender beauty of the divine Bernhardt. She is the pride of all my pets. Ah, here is Zola looking at you.’
A hideous hairy monster crawled up the wire netting that kept him within bounds and stared sardonically not a foot away from the writer’s pose. A start and an exclamation were natural, but Pierre looked aggrieved.
‘I do not blame you much,’ said he ‘Zola is good natured and would not hurt you, but he has the horrible look. He has fits of bad temper sometimes. Then ventrebleu, look you out. He is the bird spider of Surinam. His body is two inches long and he catches and eats small finches and sparrows when in the woods. His bite is bad poison. I doubt not it would kill you. But I tame him with kindness. He is king of all spiders–le grand monarch. therefore I call him Zola, the most superb of writers.”
Tags: Pierre Grantaire
From the November 4, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Colorado–Among the rich mines of Leadville is one called Dead Man’s claim. It seemed a certain popular miner had died, and his friends, having decided to give him a good send off, hired a man for $20 to act as a sexton. It was in the midst of winter; there were ten feet of snow on the ground and the grave had to go six feet below that. The grave digger sallied forth into the snow, depositing the corpse for safe keeping in a drift, and for three days nothing was heard from him. A delegation sent to find the fellow discovered him digging away with all his might, but found also the intended grave converted into an entrance of a shaft. Striking the earth it seems that he found pay rock worth $60 a ton. The delegation at once staked out claims adjoining his and the deceased was forgotten. Later in the season, the snow having melted, his body was found and given an ordinary burial in another part of the camp.”
From the June 24, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Riverhead, L.I.–In the ocean off Fort Pond, recently, on the fishing steamer, Montauk, Captain Burns of Greenport, caught over two thousand large Boston Mackerel. Jacob Josie, one of the crew, while dressing one of the fish, found in its entrails a cent of the 1889 date.”
Tags: Captain Burns, Jacob Josie
From the March 13, 1892 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Joseph Williams of Fiftieth Street in this city, and Joseph Driscoll of 7 Washington Street, New York, got into a row in a New Street pool room Friday afternoon. They began by calling each other names and then went out into the street to fight it out. Joe Ellingsworth, the prize fighter, urged them on, but he got disgusted with their lack of courage and gave them both a good beating.”
“This convinced her that what she long suspected was true–she had a snake in her stomach.”
A 19th-century widow went a long way to avoid going on a diet, as recorded in a Chicago Tribune article that was republished in the October 29, 1882 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Chicago–If a man were to assert in all seriousness that he had a real, live, hungry snake in his stomach he would be set down at once as having not a snake in his stomach but several in his boots. Nevertheless there is a woman at No. 610 South Canal Street, Mrs. Caroline Seber, who is so firmly convinced she is harboring a large reptile within her anatomy that any one hearing her remarkable story is almost forced too accept it as true.
A Tribune reporter called on Mrs. Seber last evening and was entertained for an hour or more of her recital of the experiences to which that snake subjected her. Mrs. Seber proved to be a woman about 42 years old, very neatly attired, with a smiling face and a pleasant voice. The story was a very long one, and was told so fast as to be absolutely astounding. But then, as it afterward appeared, she has been rehearsing it for about a dozen years. She was born in Prussia. When about 14 years old she began to feel peculiar sensations in her stomach, but reached no conclusion as to the cause. Two years later she distinguished herself by displaying a ponderous appetite, which had never left her but has continued to increase. Still she was at a loss to find a cause for it all. She came to America when 21 years old, and direct to Chicago, where she married Mr. Seber.
“What did you feed the snake this evening for dinner?”
About a year after the marriage she was lying on the lounge one day, when she distinctly felt something crawl from one side of her stomach to the other. This convinced her that what she long suspected was true–she had a snake in her stomach. She consulted physicians who assured her that the snake existed only in her imagination. As it did not bother her much except to constantly increase her appetite, she made no attempt to evict the slimy tenant. Time passed on, her appetite increased, and also the size of her corsets, and, finally, twelve years ago her husband died, leaving her with four children, one of them a cripple, and the snake to provide for. The snake continued growing larger and more ravenous, biting viciously at the walls of her stomach whenever a meal was missed. She again consulted the physicians and visited every hospital in the city, asking for an operation to relieve her of a snake.
The physicians laughed at her and treated her for tapeworm. On several occasions she fasted for four days, with a view to discouraging the supposed tapeworm and inducing it to come out. But all to no purpose. The snake during the fast tortured her almost beyond endurance and would never come up any higher than the breastbone. Finally four years ago she got Dr. Mitchell to consent to perform an operation. She went to Hahnemann Hospital and was put under the influence of ether. She was cut slightly in three different places on the abdomen, the incisions being immediately sewn up again. But in the meantime one of the students had prepared a basinful of snakes and lizards, and when Mrs. Seber came from under the influence of the drugs she was shown the miniature aquarium and told the specimens were contributed by her. She discovered the fraud at once, but concluded to make no fuss about it.
In September, she got Dr. Etheridge interested in her case, and after many consultations, that gentleman arranged to perform the desired operation on Sunday morning at the Michael Reese Hospital. The reporter promised to be on hand, and then he began questioning Mrs. Seber:
‘What food does the snake most fancy?’
‘Well, it takes beefsteak and milk, and is particularly fond of beef broth flavored with celery. For fish it has no use at all.’
‘How much does it eat a day on average?’
‘I eat four pounds of meat every day, drink three quarts of milk and a little tea and coffee.”
‘Did you ever try getting it drunk?’
‘No, because I don’t like liquor.’
‘What did you feed the snake this evening for dinner?’
‘I gave it twenty-seven cents worth of ham just before you came in. I’m afraid I will not live much longer even if the operation is successful, because the snake has bitten me up too much inside.'”
From the August 26, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Atlantic City, N.J.–The zenith of the most glorious season Atlantic City has ever seen was reached here Sunday when the population reached the quarter million mark. A New York woman in bloomers, riding astride a camel in the Streets of Cairo, was the sensation of the day. She caused considerable interest and amusement.”
From the October 9, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Cleveland–Frank Buettner, a well known contractor of this city, died early to-day as the result of an operation performed to remove a set of false teeth which it was supposed he had swallowed while asleep Monday night. Just as his esophagus had been opened its entire length a relative of Buettner’s rushed into the operating room with the missing set of teeth, which had been found in Buettner’s bed. It was then learned that Buettner was suffering from acute laryngitis. The pain in his throat led him to believe he had swallowed his teeth.”
Tags: Frank Buettner
From the April 28, 1890 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“While a boy was cutting bananas from a bunch hanging in front of a Burlington, Vt., grocery store, a large tarantula sprang at him, striking him on the back of the neck. From the boy’s neck the insect leaped into a barrel half full of crackers. No one caring to meddle with such an ugly customer, at the suggestion of a policeman, the barrel was doused with kerosene and then carried into the street and set on fire.”
“Gradually he widened his teachings to his little band until he openly advocated the drinking of blood for all diseases.”
A 19th-century American religious cult became convinced that drinking human blood was the way to cure all ills, as evidenced by this article in the January 27, 1890 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Tags: Chief Spears, John Wrinkle, Officer Marrau, Secretary Hackett, Silas Wilcox
From the December 19, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Some crazes are social in nature, but social laws are so fixed by custom that these usually only have a local run. When I was a lad in New York City, setting type, I fell in with a smart newspaperman who had set up a free love institution on the co-operative plan. A number of married couples went to live in the establishment, and they all traded wives and husbands. The notable fact about the affair was its outcome. After the trading had gone on for a year or two nearly all the original couples returned to their old relationships and became heartily ashamed of their departure from the orthodox marriage state.”
“I obeyed a sudden impulse and taking my knife severed the left ear of the cadaver”
Keeping a severed human ear in your vest pocket and showing it off to your family and friends was just fine a century ago, provided you didn’t throw the ear in a gutter outside of a Baptist church. From the November 27, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The mystery surrounding the finding of a human ear on the east side of Marcy Avenue, between Madison Street and Putnam Avenue, and almost in the front of the Marcy Avenue Baptist Church on Sunday, has been solved. The ear was cut from a cadaver in the dissecting room of the Cornell Medical College, corner of First Avenue and Twenty-eighth street, Manhattan, by Carol Nichols, a student of that college, some days ago. After carrying the grewsome little human fragment in his vest pocket as sort of a souvenir of his anatomical researches, he exhibited the severed ear to a number of his boy friends in the Sunday school of the Marcy Avenue Baptist Church on Sunday and then cast it away in the street when he left the church in the late afternoon.
Carol Nichols is 19 years old. He is a son of Dr. George Nichols of 306 Monroe Street, Brooklyn, and is prominent in church work at the Marcy Avenue Baptist Church. This is his first year in the Cornell Medical College. Young Nichols is worried over the publicity given to the finding of the human ear which he cut from the head of the corpse of a young girl which he was dissecting in the college.
The ear is still at the Coroner’s office in the Borough Hall and the authorities are puzzled as to what disposition will be made of it. Now that the mystery has been elucidated it is probable that the fragment will be disposed of.
When seen to-day at the Cornell Medical College and asked about the ear, Nichols was at first reluctant to tell what he knew concerning the fragment. Finally, however, he admitted that the ear had been thrown into the street by him. He said:
‘I was at work dissecting a body–that of a young woman–a few days ago. When I was about through with the work I obeyed a sudden impulse and taking my knife severed the left ear of the cadaver. The ear I treated with carbolic acid and then after I wrapped it up in a piece of oiled paper I put in my vest pocket, That night I took it home with me and showed it to my father and mother, afterward putting the ear back in my pocket again.
‘At Sunday school, I showed the ear to a number of my friends and classmates. They seemed to think it was funny I was carrying such a thing but didn’t seem at all timid when I showed it to them. When I left Sunday school and reached the street I decided I would get rid of the ear. I threw it into the street and the rain, which was falling fast at the time, washed the oiled paper away. I was surprised when I read in the paper an account of its discovery and thought that I would not say anything about it having been cut off and thrown away subsequently by me, because I did not want any publicity in the matter.
‘I have been afraid that there might be a law against throwing away a part of a human body in that way but I hope there will be nothing further said or done about the matter. The students very often carry home pieces of cadavers on which they are at work, sometimes to study them and then again merely to show them to their friends and have some fun with them.'”
Tags: Carol Nichols, Dr. George Nichols
From the May 22,1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Portland, Ore.–The body of the late millionaire W.S. Ladd, which was stolen from the grave last Monday night, has been recovered, and Daniel G. Magone, a middle aged farmer living near Oregon City, and Charles Montgomery, a young man who also resides near there, are under arrest. The body was found practically in the same state in which it was when removed from the grave.”
From the March 7, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Patchogue, L.I.–David Robinson, a resident of East Moriches, is dead. Robinson weighed 500 pounds and was buried in a coffin large enough to hold four ordinary men. Mr. Robinson showed signs of great strength and rapid growth before he was 21 years of age. For some years he was a whaler and sailed on several ships from Sag Harbor. He was a giant in strength. Though the whalers, as a rule, were pretty tough characters in those days, it was said that Robinson was more than a match for the roughest of them. It is said that he could at one time life a dead weight of 2,000 pounds with his neck and shoulders. Of late years, Mr. Robinson had grown tremendously in size and moved about very little, owing to his weight. He had amassed quite an estate.”
Tags: David Robinson
“The breach grew wider with time, each sending word that he meant to kill the other.”
A San Antonio cattle deal gone bad led to a deadly duel in 1886, as reported in that year’s November 8th edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A Times special from San Antonio, Tex., says: ‘Information has reached here from Prio Town, the seat of Prio County, of a duel which took place Friday afternoon in Seavala County, near the county line, between two of the wealthiest ranchmen in Seavala County–Hiram Bennett and John Rumfield. The men for several years were close friends and owned many cattle and sheep jointly. About a year ago they dissolved business relations and a difficulty arose regarding the number of cattle in a certain bunch which figured in their settlement at a valuation of $10,000. The breach grew wider with time, each sending word that he meant to kill the other. Friday afternoon the two rich men, with a few cowboys, happened to meet near the edge of the little village of Batesville. They were both on horseback and carrying Winchesters. It was agreed that they should dismount and fire at the word of command from one of the cowboys. They stood about 150 feet apart. Both men were crack shots and each fired at the word. Bennett fell dead, with a bullethole through the brain. One report says Rumfield was wounded in the thigh; another account says he is uninjured. No attempt has been made thus far to arrest Rumfield, who is on his ranch, and would doubtless fight before being carried to jail. The dead man was worth about a quarter of a million dollars in cattle, sheep and lands. He leaves a family.'”
Tags: Hiram Bennett, John Rumfield
From the September 19, 1898 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Uniontown, Pa.–A christening last night at Banning, a mining settlement near here, ended in a free for all fight, in which knives, pistols and clubs were used. One man was killed and five others were injured. The participants in the melee fled and the police are after them.”
From the June 18, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Kerwood, W. Va.–William Miller, a farmer, is dying from the effects of knife wounds inflicted by George Sell, a music teacher at Stemple Ridge. A few evenings ago Sell was conducting a song when a son of Miller interrupted and a fight ensued. Sell whipped young Miller. The father interfered and Sell disemboweled the elder Miller with a knife.”
Tags: George Sell, William Miller