Creative History

  It is Sunday October 21, 1638 and approximately 300 worshippers are packed into St. Pancras church in the English village of Widecombe-in the-moor during the early afternoon.   The worshippers represent almost the entire able-bodied population of Widecombe.  Only a few idle church dodgers, whose souls are sure to go to Hell anyway, everyone in St. Pancras’ church believes, choose to spend their Sabbath day drinking and gambling at a tavern just a few miles outside the village.    The faithful are there in church, as they are every Sunday, to listen to the sermon of  their Anglican minister, George Lyde and to hear the Word of the Lord.  Lyde stands at the altar, as he does each week, with his faithful wife sitting attentively in the first pew only a few feet away at the very front of the church.  Little does he, or anyone else in St. Pancras that fateful afternoon know, but many there that day have only moments left to live. St. Panc...

  Ben Kuhl was born in northern Michigan sometime in the year 1884.  A school dropout with alcoholic parents, some would say that Ben Kuhl never had a chance at an honest life from the very beginning.  As a teenager he drifted west and in 1903 he was arrested for horse theft and sentenced to a term of 1 to 10 years in an Oregon state prison. It’s not known exactly how long Ben Kuhl spent in prison, but what is known for sure, is that by the year 1916 at the age of 32 Ben Kuhl had both literally and figuratively drifted his way into the remote and isolated mountain town of Jarbidge, Nevada.  Upon his arrival in town Ben took up residence in a tent with two other drifters named Ed Beck and Billy McGraw. He worked for a stint as a cook at the OK Mine, a place just outside of Jarbidge, where miners from all over the American west hoped to strike it rich by finding gold.  By 1916 the small frontier town of Jarbidge located in Elko County, Nevada only about ten mi...