Look At My Horse

In 1493, known asshat Christopher Columbus arrived in America on his second expedition, this time bringing along a very special cargo, a bunch of horses.  Given that at that point horses had been extinct in the America's for over 10,000 years, the native tribes naturally freaked the fuck out.  Some even became convinced that the strange new white people must be gods, which seems a little strange given that though they were riding around some kind of magical animal, that magical animal was constantly shitting everywhere.  Regardless, the Spanish used this confusion to their advantage, allowing them to quickly spread across the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico.  

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish had spread north as far as New Mexico, where they enslaved the local Pueblo people.  By this time, the natives had abandoned the belief that the Spanish were gods, instead recognizing them as being just another group of assholes, but the horse still gave the Spanish a distinct advantage.  Being assholes, but not morons, the Spanish had gone out of their way to keep horses and knowledge of how to ride them out of native hands.  However, despite these attempts, the secret slowly leaked out, largely due to various Spaniards teaching their enslaved Pueblo how to ride while others started selling horses to the various tribes.  In 1680, tiring of the general shittiness of their situation, the Pueblo rebelled and started killing every Spaniard they could get their hands on.  The Spanish, not liking this turn of events, retreated south, leaving behind thousands of horses.  The Pueblo, who were farmers at heart, mostly used their new horses for plowing and eating, but soon after also found a market in selling them north to other tribes.  

At the time, the tribes of the Great Plains and Great Basin were very different than how we picture them today.  Most of the tribes were sedentary, mostly relying on farming where they could and hunting and gathering where they couldn't.  While they did kill buffalo, it was usually just when they were nearby.  The tribes at time did fight amongst each other, but mostly they kept to their own isolated areas.  The introduction of the horse fucked everything up.  The first two tribes to really embrace the horse were the Shoshone and Comanche.  Relatively weak tribes who had often gotten the shit beat out of them by their stronger neighbors, the Shoshone and Comanche fully embraced the horse as a better way to hunt and wage war.  Within a decade, both had staked out wide territories across the western United States, killing anyone who dared stand in their way.  Other tribes, seeing the success, began adopting similar methods, transforming the lifestyle of the entire Plains by 1770.  

Prior to the widespread adoption of the horse, Plains tribes only had dogs to carry their shit around.  The horse allowed for a much more nomadic lifestyle, with tribes ranging over a wider area searching for buffalo, which were basically giant treasure chests on legs.  What followed was an economic boom which attracted more tribes into the area from both the east and west, with some tribes traveling as much as a thousand miles each year to hunt buffalo.  Formerly egalitarian societies splintered and became more about the obtainment of wealth with the richest men of the tribe claiming numerous wives and slaves.  As well, the new wide ranging nomadic lifestyle meant that the tribes came into contact with each other much more often, which of course led to increased violence and warfare over territories and resources.  Many tribes became extremely militarized and numerous empires rose and fell over the decades.  These warlike tribes halted the northward expansion of the Spaniards for most of the seventeenth century, and the westward expansion of the Americans for a good part of the nineteenth century.  

Unfortunately, it was all unsustainable.  So many tribes were hunting buffalo on the Great Plains by the early 1800's that numbers began to decline sharply.  As well, the large herds of horses on the Plains caused widespread overgrazing, the horse being one of the worse animals for such things.  The situation became bad enough that the natives took to setting large prairie fires to encourage the increased growth of grass.  What might have happened next will never be known.  By the mid-nineteenth century, the Americans were performing a full court press.  With disease depleting their numbers, the tribes could only offer so much resistance, resulting in them being pushed into increasingly small territories.  The final straw was the widespread slaughter of the buffalo in order to send the hides back east and to Europe for various products.  By the end of the century, the buffalo were nearly extinct.  In a similar fashion, as the native tribes were increasingly wiped out, they left behind vast herds of wild horses across the western United States.  While the U.S. Army rounded up most of these in the early twentieth century, to be either sold or slaughtered, many remain ranging about to this day, treated as magical symbols of the old west by some, while being recognized as destructive nuisances by others. 

Image: https://www.pickpik.com/native-americans-horse-green-grass-grass-field-photo-historical-52406

Shooting for the Moon

In 1969, the United States landed the first man on the moon.  It was the culmination of the one of the greatest and most useless dick wagging contests in world history.  Though many thousands of people gave everything they had to see this moment, perhaps no other had a boner of pride quite like the one wielded by Wernher Von Braun.  For Wernher, it was the completion of over forty years of work, though in his mind, it was only the first step towards the conquering of the stars.  Wernher was the father of modern rocketry.  Eve the rockets used by the Soviets were descended from his early designs.  More importantly, he was also the most forceful promoter of space travel, single handedly raising the eyes of an entire nation to the stars.  It’s too bad the guy was a Nazi. 

Wernher, being a German, was of course born in Germany, though with the added luxury of being part of a wealthy family.  From an early age, he took a great interest in rocketry and the idea of space travel.  Though his early boyhood attempts only resulted in him blowing up a wagon in the middle of a street, he kept at it.  The entirety of his education was centered on physics, mathematics, and engineering.  Unfortunately, by the time he graduated, there really wasn't that much money going around for random rocket research and dreams of the stars.  However, there were plenty of jobs available in the area of militarizing rockets.  Wernher, not being a man to turn up his nose at any opportunity, took one of these jobs with the German Army in 1937.  Recognizing it as a surer way to rise higher within his chosen field, he soon after joined the Nazi Party.    

Like many Germans of the late 1930's, Wernher was overall supportive of Hitler and his Nazi regime.  Sure, there were definitely questionable things going on, but with the economy and standard of living rising exponentially, many people were more than happy to bury their heads in the sand.  For Wernher, it was all about the pursuit of his goal.  As the world fell into chaos and Hitler unleashed the horrors of the Holocaust, Wernher happily worked away on an island in the Baltic Sea, building bigger and better rockets.  In 1940, to gain further authority for his research, he joined the SS, Hitler's fanatical private army and secret police.  By 1943, Wernher was only 31, but already in charge of the entire program, which allowed him to develop the V-2, the first rocket designed for space travel and the model for every child’s drawing of a rocket today.  Unfortunately, soon after, things began to turn against the Nazis, and Hitler personally ordered Wernher to quit fucking around already.  Hitler wanted a super weapon.

To manufacture the weaponized V-2, the Nazis built a secret factory under a mountain.  Not having enough people available to run the factory, which they called Mittelwerk, what with the war and all, the Nazis settled on using slave labor, building a nearby concentration camp called Mittelbau-Dora.  The concentration camp became the home to 60,000 POWs, Jews, and others labeled as ne'er-do-wells.  The building of the factory was horrific, costing 8,000 lives.  The construction of the V-2 was no better.  Murder, unsafe working conditions, starvation, and disease all took their toll.  Some 12,000 prisoners are estimated to have died working in Mittelwerk.  Though he would later claim ignorance, Wernher knew all about it.  He and his staff were said to have personally picked prisoners for the skills they needed, and when attempts at sabotage began, he ordered prisoners flogged and even hanged.  His loyalty and perseverance eventually led to him getting permission to launch one of the 3,000 V-2’s built straight up into the sky rather than at Allied cities.  It was the first man-made object to reach space.     

When it became apparent that the Nazis were not going to win the war, Wernher arranged it so he and his team could be captured by the Americans, thus avoiding the Soviet Army which took control of the Mittelwerk.  Both of the soon to be Cold War belligerents were desperately grabbing up whatever Nazi scientists and super weapons they could find.  Wernher and his team were taken back to the U.S., where they were given government jobs, their dark pasts hidden away.  They were given personas of unwitting dupes, eggheads too busy with their research to notice what was happening.  While his team developed the rockets which launched the first ballistic missiles and first American satellites, Wernher worked tireless to promote space travel, even appearing in several Disney specials.  Eventually, his efforts, along with the Soviets shooting a man into space, led to the American manned space program, which culminated a decade later with the moon landing.  

It was the peak of Wernher’s career.  Public support dropped after the moon landing, and NASA abandoned plans to go to Mars.  Wernher puttered around NASA for the remainder of his career, his last accomplishment being the founding of NASA’s space camp for kids.  He died very painfully of cancer in 1977 at the age of 65.  The majority of his Nazi scientists also lived out their lives in the U.S., thought one, Arthur Rudolph, was eventually tried for war crimes in 1984.  He was 78 years old.  After being found guilty, he was allowed to return to Germany where he died a free man in 1996.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Backfire_(World_War_II)#/media/File:V-2_lift-off.jpg

I'm Not Homer Plessy

A lot of learned people, Professor Errare fans of course amongst them, know who the hell Homer Plessy was.  For those of you who might have forgotten, Homer Plessy was an early activist from the 1890's involved in efforts to end a Louisiana law requiring railroads to have separate passenger cars for blacks and whites.  Homer, as an eighth black man in a time when even that wasn't white enough for the racist asshats of the day, was the leading man in a plot cooked up by Civil Rights leaders and the owners of the railroads.  Basically, Homer got on a whites only passenger car, declared himself eighth black, and got his ass arrested.  While this might sound like a dumb plan, the end goal was to get the Supreme Court to declare such segregation illegal.  Thus setting a legal precedent for equality and saving the railroads a lot of money.  However, things backfired terribly when the Supreme Court instead ruled that segregation was a-okay, leading to decades of shitty policies that didn't end until the 1960's.  It's a pretty great story.  One that definitely earned Homer the right to be honored today.  You can almost see the light of defiance in his eyes in the above photograph.  There's just one little problem.  Despite what countless Google searches might claim, the man in the photograph isn't Homer Plessy.  

So, who is the above dude?  Well my friends, that guy is actually the awesomely named Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, who we're just going to call PB for short.  What's that, you've never heard of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback?  Well buddy, you better just sit your ass down and listen.  PB's father, William, was a plantation owner in Mississippi.  Though William already had a wife and family, he fell in love with one of his slaves, named Eliza, and the pair had six children.  Being somewhat progressive, at least for the time, William freed Eliza and treated her children just like the children born to his actual wife.  He even sent PB and one of his brothers to a private school.  This all came to an end when William died.  Eliza, fearing William's other wife might make her and her children slaves again, fled with them to Ohio.  

Though PB was only quarter black (his mother being half black), as with Homer, that was still too black for the racists of the time.  Despite this, PB did well for himself in Ohio.  When the Civil War broke out, he traveled south to New Orleans where he helped raise several companies of black soldiers to fight for the Union cause.  PB remained in New Orleans after the war, getting involved in local politics within a few years of the last shot being fired.  At the time, the south was under Reconstruction policies, which guaranteed equal voting rights for all men regardless of race.  PB was elected to the Louisiana state senate in 1868 and then became lieutenant governor in 1871 after the sudden death of his predecessor.  Following the impeachment of the governor the following year, he served as the first black governor in the United States for six weeks.  Throughout his political career, PB worked to improve the educational opportunities for black people.  He was unfortunately forced out of politics, as were many black politicians of the era, after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870's led to new laws disenfranchising most black voters.  However, he continued to work to improve things for the rest of his life.  In fact, he was one of the activists who set up the plan involving Homer Plessy.  

Okay, so now we know all of that, but what about the picture?  Why the hell is it that everyone thinks the picture of PB is actually a picture of Homer Plessy?  Well my friend, as with a lot of things wrong with the world, you can blame idiots on the internet.  Sometime in the early 2010's, some numbskull mistakenly labeled a picture of PB as being one of Homer Plessy.  God only knows why, but it was probably a mixture of laziness and the fact that no pictures of Homer actually existed.  For whatever reason, this one mislabeling led to a second, which led to another, which so on and so forth has led to a state of affairs where literally hundreds of websites and even books contain the error.  In fact, the mistake is so pervasive that people have been known to claim that the situation is the other way around, where people are mistaking a photo of Homer as a photo of PB.  The pinnacle of all this bullshit is the fact that in 2013 a sculptor created a statue of Homer for the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis.  Guess which photo was used as the basis of the sculpture?  Just goes to show you, don't trust the internet.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homerplessy02.jpg