Creative History

  It began on May 23, 1901 when the Paris Attorney General received an anonymous letter.  To this day, though there has been much speculation over the past 12o years, no one knows for certain who wrote that letter. The note stated: “Monsieur Attorney General I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence.  I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half-starved and lying on a putrid litter for the last twenty-five years--in a word--in her own filth.” The letter spoke of a once beautiful and captivating young woman, a socialite who had stolen the hearts of many a potential young suitor named Blanche Monnier from the central French city of Poitiers. Blanche, born on March 1, 1849 was the daughter of strict Catholic bourgeois parents Charles and Louise Monnier.  Her family name in central France was one of long-standing nobility and she was by birth a member of the French aristocracy. As a young woman Blanche was renowne...

  A maul is a war hammer.  It is traditionally thought of, in reference to European history anyway, as a medieval weapon.  However, well into the 18th century many of the indigenous peoples of North America used stone war hammers, mauls, to protect their homeland from white settlers and to terrorize their enemies.   In the unassuming suburban town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania in Luzerne County which sits along the banks of the Susquehanna River about five miles north of Wilkes-Barre is a large boulder known to posterity as “Queen Esther’s Rock” often simply called by locals “The Bloody Rock”. During the 1960’a monument with a plaque was erected on this site in the middle of town by local historians to commemorate the supposed massacre of fourteen Continental soldiers during the American Revolution that took place on or near that site by a vengeful maul-wielding Iroquois woman who sought retribution for what she perceived as the unjust murder of her son. The mo...

  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...