On this night in 1781, one man on a horse saved the American Revolution from losing Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and half of Virginia's government in a single morning.
You were never taught his name.
June 3, 1781. The British had chased Virginia's entire government out of Richmond. Jefferson, in his final days as governor, and the legislature had fled to Charlottesville, thinking they were safe in the foothills.
They were wrong.
That evening, 26 year old militia captain Jack Jouett was at a tavern in Louisa County when roughly 250 of the most feared cavalry in the British army came pounding down the road. Their commander: Banastre Tarleton, nicknamed "The Butcher," the man whose dragoons had cut down surrendering Americans at Waxhaws.
There was only one place they could be going. Charlottesville. 40 miles away. And the capture of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, would be the prize of the war.
Jouett couldn't outrun them on the main road. So he didn't use it.
He swung onto overgrown backwoods trails and the abandoned Old Mountain Road, riding 40 miles through the dark with only the full moon for light. Legend says low hanging branches whipped and scarred his face for life.
Tarleton stopped his men for a 3 hour rest. Jouett never stopped.
Before sunrise on June 4, he came up the mountain to Monticello and woke Jefferson. Then he rode down into Charlottesville and warned the legislature.
Jefferson got out with minutes to spare. British dragoons were coming up his mountain as he left. The legislature escaped over the Blue Ridge to Staunton. Tarleton caught only seven stragglers, one of them a frontiersman serving in the legislature named Daniel Boone.
Paul Revere rode about 12 miles in 1775 and got captured before reaching Concord. Longfellow wrote him a poem and made him immortal.
Jack Jouett rode 40 miles, lost nothing, saved everything, and got a thank you gift of two pistols and a sword from the Virginia Assembly.
No poem. No fame. Almost no memory.
Huh. Had no idea it was that much. I need to go see Deadwood, the Ozarks and the Spiro Mounds, Pipestone National Monument. Going to see the daughter in FL this summer.
@RavnReborn@DChadwickAuthor No I was PIMO, I was looking for another tradition, found out that all religions are train wrecks, historically, moved on to atheism and then discovered that was a moral dead end. Then it was a fairly complicated story on the road back.
We suspect we have been to less than 500 sites in the US. I'm essentially certain that if all mounds, earthworks, shell/sand mounds, middens, shell rings, and stone cairns are counted that 100,000 still exist. While I was writing the encyclopedia, I counted--for awhile. But there is missing data on a lot of sites. Alabama likely has a thousand stone mounds (or more) and also some 1,000 mound sites, previously unknown were found in surveys in the 1930s-1960s, all on private property. 100 still exist in Arizona (Hohokam); Arkansas has 1,275 sites currently existing (1-16 per site); The state archaeologist told us there were likely thousands more. Mississippi has over 1000 sites still existing. Minnesota's state archaeologist reported on 12,500 burial mound still in the state. I could go on... I followed several old maps from Arkansas sites--near Texas, and saw dozens still existing and Texas still has many. Like I wrote in all 3 editions, the problem was what NOT to include. If I live long enough I may do more.
It has to be Lucas and the costume department f***ing up the Jedi uniform. Which was never, ever supposed to be the rough-spun garb that Ben Kenobi wears on Tatooine. Luke's black outfit in Return of the Jedi is the real uniform. I don't care what the prequels portrayed.
Mario Bava on the troubles he faced while making 'Planet of the Vampires' (1965):
"I wish that the audience and the critics knew the conditions under which I am forced to make movies. For 'Planet of the Vampires' (1965), I didn’t have anything to work with. There was only a studio, completely empty and squalid, because there was no money: I had to turn that into a [mysterious, alien] planet.
So what did I do? In the studio next door there were two big plastic rocks, a leftover prop from a sword-and-sandal movie or something. I took these two rocks and I put them in the middle of my studio, then I covered the floor with smoke and I darkened the white wall in the background.
I shot the whole movie by moving the two rocks around the studio. Can you believe it? And, while I was shooting, there was this American screenwriter who kept rewriting the script, changing scenes and dialogues… After a while, I stopped listening to him.
Do you remember that, at the end of the movie, the astronauts land on planet Earth at the beginning of its existence? Well, the screenwriter wanted the astronauts to get off the spaceship and meet Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which was located in Missouri, USA. Naturally, I refused to shoot this kind of stuff."
(Mario Bava's interview with Luigi Cozzi, translated by Cinepugno, 1970)