Creative History

Indiana’s Dunes National Park sits on the shores of Lake Michigan.  It is really nothing more than a large, desolate, sandy beach composed of over fifteen thousand square acres of constantly shifting sand dunes.  In 1876 well over one hundred years before this landscape became part of the National Park Service--that didn’t happen until 2009 and until then this place was known simply as “Indiana’s Dune Country”--it was the perfect place to hide away from the long arm of the law or even the perfect place to hide a dead body for that matter. In October of 1876 master counterfeiter Benjamin Boyd was jailed in the city of Joliet, Illinois at the state’s penitentiary after having come to the attention of Chicago law enforcement for--what else?--passing off fake bills.  Passing off fake bills, or counterfeiting was big business in the days after the American Civil War, in fact, it’s not a stretch to say that as the United States celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1876 th...

  By July of 1864 the Union Army’s assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia though massive and determined, had ground to a complete and bloody halt. Tens of thousands of young American soldiers lay dead scattered across the fields and woodlands of northern Virginia.  A veritable state of siege, centered around the strategically important railroad town of Petersburg, had begun to settle in between the two opposing armies.  Public outcry in the north started calling Ulysses S. Grant -Commanding General of the Union Army of the Potomac-a drunkard and a butcher.  The press clamored for President Lincoln to fire or demote his erstwhile General. Sensing an opportunity, and seeking to capitalize on the bloody stalemate that was the American Civil War in July of 1864,  a Confederate Army composed of 10,000 elite troops led by the audacious and flamboyant General Jubal Early moved north towards Washington DC.  The Confederacy hoped to take the Un...

  It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving off the New England coast.  November 26, 1898. The sea is calm and temperatures are seasonably cool and crisp.  Weather stations all along the eastern seaboard note nothing out of the ordinary that day except for one thing: the color of the sky.  The sky that evening is yellow.  It is glowing with an ominous and almost surreal luminescence as the sun begins to set. Sailing Master, Joseph Kemp, employed aboard a steamship in Boston Harbor noted that the yellow sky off the coast of Massachusetts on November 26, 1898 looked like, “The greasiest evening you ever saw.” On that “greasy” evening two low pressure fronts, one charging eastward from the Great Lakes, and the other, a warm weather system moving northward from the Gulf of Mexico are about to collide off the Massachusetts coast and create one of the most ferocious and destructive nor’easters in American history. Late 19th century forecasters know through baromet...