1st Thanksgiving Had No Pilgrims and Was More Famine than Feast December 4, 2010

The Bird Was Safe On The First Thanksgiving

FDR Wanted Everyone to Cut the Turkey A Week Earlier Than Abe Proposed

On This Date in History:  Thanksgiving has come and gone and Black Friday is in the record books.  I”m not sure how the day after Thanksgiving has turned into such a big deal.  I suppose that its been coming for some time.  Previously, I had outlined the genesis of Thanksgiving and related how President Franklin Roosevelt had once tried to move Turkey Day to a week earlier in an attempt to add an extra week to the holiday shopping season.  Sorta a disguised depression era stimulus plan. It didn’t work and the experiment was scrapped after one year.  I’m not sure what is taught now, but when I was a kid, we were taught in school about how the Indians hooked up with the Pilgrims near Plymouth Rock to have a big feast in 1621.  Today, we sit around stuffing ourselves with Turkey (not the vegetarian Snow White) and watch football games with our eyes closed and belts loosened.   Trouble is, the Puritans on the Mayflower didn’t call themselves Pilgrims; they referred to themselves as “Saints” which seems a bit presumptuous considering not too many years down the road they were burning “witches” at the stake.  The other thing is that the real first Thanksgiving was on this date in 1620 and it was in Virginia.

1st Colonists in Jamestown

The first permanent English settlement in the New World was Jamestown in 1607 in the Virginia Colony and it wasn’t doing too well. The settlers didn’t know what they were doing and the winters were harsh…remember this was during the mini-ice age. Anyway, by the spring of 1610, the colonists were coming off a tough winter and only 60 of the original 409 were left. Sounds like a good time for prayers to me! And that’s what they did and when help arrived in the form of a ship with food and supplies from mother England, they gave thanks with a prayer service. I guess they weren’t a sentamental lot because they never did anything to commemorate the event.

Fast Not Feast On 1st Thanksgiving

Two other groups came to Virginia. They were supposed to arrive in Virginia but one(the Mayflower) ended up in Plymouth in 1620. The other (the Margaret) made it to Virginia on December 4, 1619 and their charter read “Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival…in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” On December 4, 1620 they commemorated their first year in the colony, not with a feast, but instead they did the opposite and fasted as they prayed. Guess we got that part wrong too. The colonists who landed at what they called Berkeley Hundred didn’t get a chance to mark their second anniversary…some were all killed by Indians and the rest retreated to Jamestown. Maybe they were upset that they weren’t invited to the First Thanksgiving.

ETA Thinks You May Need a Snow Shovel

GFS Thinks It Will Just Be a Pretty Weekend

Weather Bottom Line:  We have another pretty good shot at some snow and this time it will probably be more substantial than what we got on Thanksgiving night.  The long wave pattern is such that there is a dominant and persistent trof in the Eastern half of the US.  The reason why its persistent is because there is a big fat high, or ridge, in the middle of the Atlantic.  There is also a big trof on the front side of that ridge.  That forms a pattern that looks like the greek letter Omega, which is why its called an Omega Block.  Typically,  the Omega pattern is one that puts the breaks on progressive change in the long wave pattern; hence the name Omega “block.”    So, England has been getting slammed with big time snow along with much of the rest of western Europe.  And on this side of the pond, there is the persistent trof with the storm track running from the northern plains throgh the Ohio Valley to the Carolina Mountains.  So, we have another strong shortwave zipping down the storm track through the area.  We have some moisture to work with too.  The heaviest snow will be to the left of the core of that shortwave or “upper low.”  It will be impossible to forecast exactly who gets the biggest snow until about 12 hours before its arrival.  The ETA advertises some 4-5 inches for our area.  The GFS has the track about 50 miles farther east or northeast and so it only has about 1-2 inches.  Take your pick.  My guess is that both will be true for the area, but not for everyone in the area with folks over toward Frankfort having a better chance of 4 inches than the people in Lanesville, Indiana.  After that, the cold air will spill in behind and it will remain chilly for the forseeable future until the Omega Block decides to move.

A Kentuckian Proposed the First Thanksgiving and Another Pulled off the Greatest Diamond Scam November 26, 2009

Not the 1st Thanksgiving?

First Thanksgiving: Most people enjoy  Thanksgiving Dinner and we all probably learned in grade school that the first Thanksgiving involved the Pilgirms and the native Indians of North America. But, the real first official Thanksgiving Holiday was proclaimed on October 3,1863 by President Lincoln, calling for an annual day of national Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. The president used the opportunity to thank the Union Army for the reversal of fortune in the Union effort by the victory at Gettysburg. President Washington had declared a “national day of thanksgiving and prayer” in 1789, but it didn’t become an annual event. In fact, Thomas Jefferson thought that such national events of demonstration towards a deity was not appropriate. Other presidents agreed until President Lincoln’s decree. President Franklin Roosevelt tried what I call a political move in 1939 when he moved the holiday to the third Thursday. However, I suppose its plausible to argue that Lincoln’s initial declaration was rooted in politics. Anyway, FDR was hoping to extend the Christmas shopping season. I guess he thought that by moving Thanksgiving he could pull the wool over American’s eyes and use the psychology of calling a different day Thanksgiving to get them to spend more money. Anyway, Congress had enough of the foolishness and in 1941 put the national holiday back to where President Lincoln put it in the first place.

Diamond Scam Pulled Off My Enterprising Kentuckians

Charles Tiffany Duped By Kentuckians

On This Date in History: In the second half of the 19th century, there was gold fever out west. Lot’s of
swindling was going on. A typical scam was for someone to “salt” a worthless mine by tossing out some gold dust or small nuggets so that somone else would think that there was lots of gold there and they would buy it for an exhorbitant sum.

William C Ralston Duped By Kentuckians

A man from LaRue County Kentucky, Philip Arnold, had gotten into the prospecting game for about 20 years without much success. In 1870, the poorly educated Arnold got a job as an assistant bookkeeper in San Francisco for a drill maker that used industrial grade diamonds on drill bits. No one seemed to notice but, for an accountant, Arnold took quite an interest in the diamonds as he read many academic sources on the subject.

In 1871, San Francisco businessman George D. Roberts was sitting in his office one night when two dirty men entered carrying a bag. They said what they had inside was something of great value but they could not deposit it in the bank due to the late hour. At first, they were reluctant to say what it was but one of the men let slip that they were uncut diamonds. Roberts tried, but they refused to say from where it came. The two men were Philip Arnold and his cousin John Slack. Arnold later told the Louisville Courier Journal that he told Roberts not to tell anyone. Arnold knew that the best way to spread a tale was to tell someone not to tell anyone else. As soon as the pair had left his office, Roberts was out the door to tell a big shot financier named William Ralston.

Asbury Harpending Duped By Kentuckians Then Wrote About It

This is a legnthy and interesting story (worth the read if you’ve got the time) but the long and short of it is that Ralston got together some other bigshots and started the New York Mining and Commercial Company with $10 million in investors money. Among the investors were prominent politicians, military leaders and businessmen, including Asbury Harpending who wrote extensively of the story in his biography. Arnold and Slack first took a blindfolded expert to the site in Colorado where the man “found” all sorts of diamonds..and rubies..and emeralds! When they returned to San Francisco, Ralston offered to buy them out but the pair of Kentucky hoodwinkers weren’t as dumb as the city slickers thought. They took $50,000 up front. They then went to London where they bought a large volume of low end jewels…so crummy they were generally considered not jewels…for $20,000. They returned to the states and salted the site a couple of more times to convince more experts. The Ralston group even took 10% of the take to Tiffany’s in New York for appraisal and were told that the $20,000 worth of stuff bought by Arnold and Slack in London was worth $1.5 million. So, they ended up paying Arnold and Slack $600,000 (1872 dollars). They disappeared. News of the big jewel find got out and piqued the attention of a young member of the geographical survey who was assigned to that region. Clarence King and his crew were extremely skeptical and decided to investigate. The found the site and determined that it was a fraud. On This Date in 1872, Clarence King became an international celebrity when his story was printed in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin which dubbed it as The Great Diamond Hoax. (Here is another version of the story along with evidence produced by King)

Clarence King Exposed Kentuckians But Died A Pauper

Arnold was tracked down in Elizabethtown where he had started a bank and was living the life of luxury. The good old Commonwealth of Kentucky, for unknown reasons, decided to protect one of its boys and refused to extradite him. Arnold paid $150,000 in exchange for no charges being filed but couldn’t enjoy the remaining part of his fortune for long because he died of pneumonia in 1878. His cousin, John Slack, apparently was not the brains of the operation because he was last reported to be a coffin maker in New Mexico. Then again, maybe he was smarter than I give him credit for because his fate is unknown…maybe he gave everyone the slip and lived like a king.

Speaking of King….Clarence became the first director of the US Geological Survey and became friends and hobknobbed with a host of international dignitaries, politicians and celebrities. He became a celebrated author. He had it all, but apparently not enough. He left the Geological Survey and tried getting rich in mining, ranching and even banking. He lost all of his money, most of his friends and much of his reputation. He died at the age of 60 in poverty and debt of tuberculosis in 1901 in Phoenix in a small brick house.

So, it would appear that the whistleblower who gained fame and prominence was the biggest loser in this tale. He had it all and lost it all and more. The brains of the caper, Arnold, did okay but didn’t get to enjoy his larceny for long. History seems to suggest that John Slack was also a loser because the last thing they know about him was he was making coffins in New Mexico. But, I would submit that its possible the nit-wit cousin may have been the big winner and the smartest of them all, pulling off one final scam before disappearing from view. As Hank Williams, Jr sang, A Country Boy Can Survive.

Thanksgiving Conjunction Junction November 27, 2008

Will We Be Able To See The Conjunction Junction?

A warm and nice Thanksgiving is upon us. While we all have something to be thankful for, don’t forget about the weather. It’s been lousy until Wednesday and with highs in the upper 50′s to near 60, its the best day we’ve seen in weeks and maybe for several days to come.  We start to get some clouds in here on Friday and subsequently cooler air.  Saturday also will be on the cool side but keep in mind, that neither day will be too terribly cold.  Now, I”ve been telling you for days that the second half of the weekend will be chilly again but what I have kept from you is what happens after that.  While I said we stay cold into early next week, some of the data is trying to develop something interesting. There is no clear consensus as the data is not just inconsistent between sources, but also within each source itself.  It will be a rain turning to snow event and it will take another couple of days to show itself.  The elements are in place.  The question is if they come together properly…in conjunction if you will…which leads us to…

 

Conjunction Junction: We have a conjunction of planets going on. Not totally unusual but this one is a bit

Keep Your Eye to the Sky

 different in that the moon is going to cooperate. It’s going to be in a down phase. Not so sure that the weather will cooperate though because we’ve got that system coming in. But, if you have been wondering about those two “stars” that have been pretty close together in the sky the last few nights, you’ll want to read this little tidbit, courtesy of the folks at the Louisville National Weather Service:

Are you wondering what those two bright objects are in the Southwest sky during the evening? It is a conjunction of the planets Venus and Jupiter. A planetary conjunction refers to two planets that share the same right ascension in the sky’s dome.

With the exception of the sun and moon, Venus is the brightest light in the heavens and Jupiter is the second brightest.

Venus/Jupiter Will Be This Close

During previous recent conjunctions a bright moon nearby has washed out the

We May Have More Clouds Than This

brightness. For this conjunction only a waxing crescent moon will be nearby. A conjunction of the two brightest planets will not happen again until March of 2012.

On Sunday and Monday evening the two planets will only be 2 degrees apart. This is about the same width of the Moon or about the width of your finger at an arms length away.

Its Looked Like This in Recent Weeks

In case you are wondering it is possible for two planets to appear to merge into a single point of light. This is called an occultation. The last one occured in 1818. The next one will not occur until 2065.

The weather during the next several evenings looks fairly favorable for viewing this event. Just look where the sun has set. You will not be able to miss it.

Not the 1st Thanksgiving?

On This Date In History: We’ve all enjoyed Thanksgiving Dinner and we all probably learned in grade school that the first Thanksgiving involved the Pilgirms and the native Indians of North America. But, the real first official Thanksgiving Holiday was proclaimed on October 3,1863 by President Lincoln, calling for an annual day of national Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. The president used the opportunity to thank the Union Army for the reversal of fortune in the Union effort by the victory at Gettysburg. President Washington had declared a “national day of thanksgiving and prayer” in 1789, but it didn’t become an annual event. In fact, Thomas Jefferson thought that such national events of demonstration towards a deity was not appropriate. Other presidents agreed until President Lincoln’s decree. President Franklin Roosevelt tried what I call a political move in 1939 when he moved the holiday to the third Thursday. However, I suppose its plausible to argue that Lincoln’s initial declaration was rooted in politics. Anyway, FDR was hoping to extend the Christmas shopping season. I guess he thought that by moving Thanksgiving he could pull the wool over American’s eyes and use the psychology of calling a different day Thanksgiving to get them to spend more money. Anyway, Congress had enough of the foolishness and in 1941 put the national holiday back to where President Lincoln put it in the first place.

Hope you enjoyed yours and the nicest weather in weeks…and perhaps days to come.