Horse Racing & Kentucky Pioneers - William Whitley

  By Tiffany Amber Stockton

Last month, in the spirit of Christmas, we learned about some of the island traditions surrounding this special holiday on Chincoteague Island. If you missed that post, you can read it here. This month, I'm beginning a new series featuring facts and people who discovered and settled what is now southeastern Kentucky.

With all the past research I have on my personal family history, and since we have recently moved to Kentucky after 15 years living in Colorado, I needed a new focus as I work on the books coming from my previous research. I'm not sure what will come of what I discover this year, but I'll be keeping my readers informed on my FB Page and VIP  readers group.

You can also stay current on my "fictional" life as an author and receive industry news every 3 months by subscribing to my newsletter. Receive a FREE omitted chapter from my book, A Grand Design, just for subscribing!

WILLIAM WHITLEY - KENTUCKY PIONEER

My family now lives in Whitley County in Kentucky, and as I was driving up the interstate, I saw signs for the William Whitley Historical House. That set me off on a rabbit trail of research looking up who this man was and why he was so important to the state, or commonwealth of Kentucky. I've only just begun to scratch the surface, but here is what I've learned so far.

William Whitley was born in Virginia, and his parents were immigrants from Ireland. Just before the onset of the Revolutionary War, Whitley suggested to his wife that they leave Virginia and move a little west across the Appalachians into the uncharted territory there. Following a scouting expedition, Whitley laid claim to a parcel of land and planted ten acres of corn as proof of ownership. Unfortunately, the local Shawnee and Cherokee tribes weren't too happy with Colonial settlers encroaching on the land the British had promised would be theirs, and they responded with escalated hostility.

William was quite the adventurer, though, and he wasn't one to give up easily. Although he and the other family who scouted with him sought safety inside a nearby fort, Whitley continued to fight for his land. He spent a little time after the Revolutionary War in the Northwest Territory fighting Indians, but when he returned, he again set forth with building his home.

There are a lot of amazing features about the home William built. It was the first brick home west of the Allegheny Mountains, built somewhere between 1787 and 1794. The brick he used was two feet thick!  He did that to help protect his family from Indian attack. He also put the windows high above the ground so attackers couldn't shoot straight through at him, and he didn't have a porch or patio or anywhere around the home where attackers could hide. Rather ingenious of him, I'd say.

One feature I found endearing is that in addition to his own lighter bricks bearing his WW initials, he also had brick initials of EW placed in honor of his wife, Esther, to the rear of the house. He might be a famed Indian hunter, but his wife was known for being a sharpshooter herself. Guess they made quite the pair together!

Although he called his home "Sportsman Hill," friends and area residents considered it the "Guardian of Wilderness Road," so it also holds that name. It actually became a popular meeting and gathering place for other Kentucky settlers like George Rogers Clark and Daniel Boone.

Whitley County and its county seat of Williamsburg were both named after William Whitley. One of his grandsons was William L. Sublette, a fur trader who became co-owner of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company with Jedediah Smith. There's even Whitley City named after Colonel Whitley.

Another fun fact is how important William Whitley was to the establishment of horse racing in the United States. He was an avid fan of the sport, but he didn't care much for how the British designed their tracks. So, he built a track out of clay instead of turf, and he designed the track to be raced in counter-clockwise fashion instead of clockwise as it's done in England. It's why Kentucky is now world-famous for its horse-racing venue and is an integral location for the sport.

My daughter has been bitten by the horse-loving gene that flows down from my mother's side of the family, so we've already made plans to attend the Kentucky Derby and check out the various breeding farms and racing venues throughout the state, as well as the Derby Museum. She even wants to attend a summer horse camp, but we'll have to see about that. *grins*

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN:

* Have you researched anything about the area where YOU live? Are there any interesting facts or people from history who were pioneers in your area?

* What kind of person do you think you would have been had your birthday been in the 1600's or 1700's instead of the 1900's?

Leave answers to these questions or any comments you  might have on this post in the box below. Come back on the 9th of February to learn more about Daniel Boone and his trek across the Cumberland Gap.

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BIO

Tiffany Amber Stockton has been crafting and embellishing stories since childhood, when she was accused of having a very active imagination and cited with talking entirely too much. Today, she has honed those skills to become an award-winning, best-selling author and speaker who is also an advocate for literacy as an educational consultant with Usborne Books. She loves to share life-changing products and ideas with others to help improve their lives in a variety of ways.

She lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Vaughn Stockton, along with their two children, two dogs, and two cats in Kentucky. She has sold twenty-four (24) books so far and is represented by Tamela Murray of the Steve Laube Agency. You can find her on Facebook and GoodReads.

Arson Takes a City

Cara Grandle here,

This is the second post in a series of four covering crazy disasters, some more natural than others, that folks had to deal with as they worked to carve out a settlement or homestead in the mid-1800s.

Last month we covered locusts and all the crazy destruction they brought. Now we’re going to talk fire.

Fire has been an issue to lots of big cities.

Fire is something we still deal with nowadays. Think of all the systems, people, and equipment that is dispatched when one home burns, let alone a whole forest or town.

There have been so many fires over the course of history you can look up a list of great city fires in Wikipedia. A Wiki page! Ugh. That is too many losses, yet they still occur.

Many of the fires before the 20th Century had a lot in common. The buildings were all made out of combustable material and the sidewalks that were used to keep the people from walking in the “mud” were also made out of easily burned material. (See my post on The Great Manure Crisis Here.)

The Great Chicago fire of 1871 is one such fire. But an interesting fact that earned a space on this blog isn’t about the fires themselves, but about how they were started.

Many of the big city fires started as an act of arson.

Arson?

Somebody started it on purpose.

Da, da, daaaaah.

Can you hear the Perry Mason theme song in the background?

Why would anyone want to burn down a town? What would be their motive? Was the intention to burn a city? 

Well, I have a least one answer to those questions and it involves the San Francisco Fire of 1851 as an example.

Picture the times:

1851 California, less than a year after it became the 31st state, the gold rush that started in 1849 is in full swing. Those folks hunting treasure had been pouring into the city for two full years. The harbor was packed with ships that had been dry-docked, run aground, left to rot, or used as stores. They sat crowded alongside the ones in use.

Many convicts shipped from England to Australia were coming into the city via boat as an alternative to serving out there full sentence. Many of these men banded into gangs called the Sydney Ducks. As a group, they usurped political power, corrupted officials, conducted secret trials, lynchings and deportations. Things were so bad that they were the catalyst for the first Committee of Vigilance of 1851. Needless to say these men were trouble with a capital T.

And what do you get when you mix crowds of people, gold, hard times, and ex-cons? Thieves and opportunists.Fellows who would do anything to make a future better than the one they could expect.

So these unsavory men, who where no longer interested in the back breaking labor of mining, needed money.

They would find a hotel with lots of customers, or at least one wealthy one, suspected of keeping their coin with them. They would enter the building, find a hidden corner, start a fire, and then rob the guests after they escaped the hotel for safety.

There was so much of this going on, that even though they never proved it they believe this was how the San Francisco Fire of 1851 began.

On May 3rd at 11pm, a fire broke out in a paint and upholstery store that was located in the space above a hotel. Winds picked up. The fire burned for 10 hours burning 2000, yes 2000, buildings, businesses, and homes covering a very populated 18 blocks. The destruction claimed three-quarters of the city. Nine lives were lost.

All because of greed. So on top of natural disasters, crazy weather patterns, and things like locusts, the settlers had to face greedy men.

But they always began again. I like that reminder. It’s never too late to start over.

Interesting side note:

One of the hotels that was claimed in the fire was owned by Domenico Ghirardelli, who after the loss, would go on to found the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. (A win for Chocolate lovers everywhere.)

I love that starting over for Mr. Ghirardelli brought about such a long lasting legacy. Have you ever faced a natural disaster or man made disaster? Have you ever been pressed into a “We will rebuild.” Season? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Next month we’ll talk about the effect of cooooold, cold weather. The lyrics to that song, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” comes to mind. And also Psalms 46:1 “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

Until next time, blessings on your new year!

If you've made it this far, I'd like to tell you about something new. I started a podcast. If you are a podcast listener and you need a dose of joy-meets-common sense, come on over to Life Caraphrased. 

CaraGrandle is a Historical Romance Novelist who prefers to write about the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest. Think trappers and loggers and scroungy-backed woodsmen. She is represented by the Steve Laube Agency. Cara leads the author4TheAuthor writers group on Facebook, home to 190 writers. Together they're pressing back on busy and making a space for their dreams. 

Cara is currently out on submission. Follow her journey on her Facebook author page.

Prayers much appreciated. Smile.

Locust invasion and US Army aid

Cara Grandle here.

Have you ever read a western, settlers or pioneer novel where a major environmental catastrophe was involved? Floods, fires, blizzards? How about locusts? Over the next few posts I’m going to talk about interesting historical facts behind several of these obstacles.

Starting with locusts.

Locust storm wipe out everything. Crops. Food. Wood. Even the wool off the sheep’s back. They were a serious threat to survival. An invading swarm could mean starvation for all around.

Where should we begin?

How about finding out the difference between a grasshopper and a locust?

Quoting the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior contributor, Alexandre Bsevolo Latchininsky, Entomologist says, “All locusts are grasshoppers but not all grasshoppers are locusts. Out of 12,000 described grasshopper species in the world, only about a dozen should be considered locusts.”

Phew. Only a dozen. Which after we figure out what defines a locust you will be as grateful as I am that only 12 of 12,000 behave this way:

• Dreaded and destructive. 
• Like a firestorm. 
• Travel on the winds. 7 mph. Looks like a dust cloud. Desert locust covers huge area. 
• Wings crackling. Thrumb-humbing buzzing. 
• Scientists don’t know how the insects choose to land. Maybe color…the green of food looks like a McDonalds stop. They eat everything. One woman reported wearing a dress of white with green stripes. The locusts settled on her and ate every bit of the green stripe in the dress before anything could be done about it.
• Locusts are three inches long, weigh one ounce, and eats its body weight in one day. 
• Locusts respond different than grasshoppers to crowding. It changes color. From russet browns to yellow and black. Then it eats a belly full of poison plants, so if a predator eats him it will not eat another. The head changes shape. They band. After they eat all the local food, they swarm. 
• The swarm is able to eat up to 200 tons of vegetation in a single day.
• Locusts swarms have been recorded on every continent accept Antarctica.
• Locusts outbreaks happened on a small scale every 3-5 years, with a major infestation every 6-8 years. 

Libya, June 2012, 2 million people starved to death after a locust infestation that could have been prevented with infestation control. A political move by a now deceased leader led to this tragedy.


Utah, July 1847, A swarm of Mormon Crickets, a wingless desert locust three times the size of a regular desert locust, marched by the millions clearing 10,000 acres of crops. Cannibals, they march to keep from getting eaten by the locust behind them. The swarm lasted for three weeks.


Rocky Mountains, June 1875, the sun was blocked for five days as the land was infested with Rocky Mountain Locusts. Named Albert’s Storm. Albert Child was a county judge and a weather watcher who measured the swarm with his weather tools. He determined that the swarm was 100 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and 1.5 miles high, containing 3.5 trillion locusts covering 198,000 miles. 300 thousand acres destroyed.
As the weather cooled the swarms would collect on the railroad tracks to absorb the heat of the sun by day and retain it well into the night. They wouldn’t get out of the way of the train, creating a slippery gooey mess that made train passage precarious.


Famine. Death by starvation. 

Survival facts:

Farmers tried all sorts of things to scare the insects away. They built trenches and filled them with fire only to have the grasshoppers smother the fires. One survival tactics was to eat the locust. Many pulled the legs and wings and fried them in butter to stay alive.

Only 1 in 10 families were left with enough provisions to last out the winter. Kansas alone lost one third of its population. Folks abandoned their stakes and return to the east, slowing The Oregon Trail flood by 20 percent. 

 

Where is the hope in such news?

People are resilient. People do great things.

Hope:

The first ever organized relief effort preformed by the US Army was in answer to this locust invasion.
During that terrible winter, soldiers distributed thousands of heavy coats, boots, shoes, woolen blanket and nearly 2 million rations to suffering families in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado Territory and Dakota Territory. More importantly, it gave the Army a beginning experience with this type of aid.


Add more hope:
The eggs from this massive storm hatched and were frozen out by an early winter storm and the people passed The Grasshopper Act which made it mandatory for able-bodied men to work for at least 2 days during hatch season to eliminate locust larva or be fined $10.00. On top of that, they offered a bounty of $1.00 a bushel for locust's larva collected. By the 1880s they had recovered enough to resume exports. Some switched to winter crops that could be harvested before the larva hatched.


And the final hope:
The Rocky Mountain Locust is now considered extinct. The last sighting was in 1902 in Canada. The reason they are extinct is still considered a mystery.

With all this crazy, it’s amazing to me that there aren’t more stories of locust invasion in pioneer, western, and settler stories. Hmmmmm. Book idea anyone?

Have you ever experienced any sort of insect invasion? I'd love to hear from you.

If you've made it this far, I'd like to tell you about something new. I started a podcast. Home for writers, readers and regular Joes. If you are a podcast listener and you need a dose of joy-meets-common sense come on over to Life Caraphrased. 

CaraGrandle is a Historical Romance Novelist who prefers to write about the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest. Think trappers and loggers and scroungy-backed woodsmen. She is represented by the Steve Laube Agency. Cara leads the author4TheAuthor writers group on Facebook, home to 190 writers. Together they're pressing back on busy and making a space for their dreams. 

Cara is currently out on submission. Follower her journey on her Facebook author page.

Prayers much appreciated. Smile.