Barbara Erni stole from countless inns thanks to a chest with a secret hidden within.
Everyone loves the story of a good grift, from brilliant ruse to inevitable downfall. This week, we’re ushering in the spring of the swindle by highlighting the stories of the greatest con women in history.
Barbara Erni’s secret was that she never had junk in her trunk. According to her, it held a potpourri of precious treasures. In reality, it held a tiny man, or possibly a large child.
Born to homeless parents in 1743 in the town of Feldkirch, Austria, which sits on the border between Switzerland and the tiny principality of Liechtenstein, Erni eventually made the best of her impoverished upbringing. Liechtensteinian legend has it that she was quite beautiful, boasting a mop of strawberry blond hair that earned her the nickname the “Golden Boo,” writes Barbara Greene in her book Liechtenstein: Valley of Peace. Erni also possessed what townspeople saw as nearly superhuman strength that allowed her to tramp through the European countryside with an enormous satchel or treasure chest strapped to her back. She walked from inn to inn, where she would spend her nights.
Before turning in for bed, Erni would insist that her chest was far too valuable to leave out unattended in a bedroom with minimal security. Instead, she would demand that the innkeeper store her chest in their best, most secure room, perhaps even one that held valuables of their own. Innkeeper after hapless innkeeper fell for Erni’s tale, squirreling away the hefty trunk into a room that contained their own precious possessions, Greene writes. They would leave the room—which, of course, had no other exits—lock the door from the outside, and go to bed.
The next morning, in unlucky obliviousness, the innkeeper would move to unlock the door and realize several horrible things: that the door was unlocked and that Erni’s trunk had vanished, along with all of the innkeeper’s own valuables.
Erni’s real treasure, of course, was a tiny man or large child who would stow away in the trunk and emerge during the night after he had been locked away in the room full of valuables, writes Dan Davies in Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World. He would then rifle through whatever seemed worth taking, toss it in the chest, and spirit away into the night with Erni. The man’s identity is lost to history, perhaps an unsurprising omission from a relationship where Erni literally did the heavy lifting.
The ruse was horribly, laughably simple, but Erni kept it up for nearly 15 years. It only fell apart when she became wealthy. In May 1784, the authorities finally apprehended Erni and her short accomplice in the town of Eschen, in northern Liechtenstein, and moved them to a holding cell in the capital city. During a court trial, Erni pled guilty to 17 separate burglaries. The two were sentenced to death by beheading, and on December 7, 1784, Erni lost much more than her goldenrod locks. On that day, she earned the dubious superlative of being the last person to be executed in Liechtenstein until the country abolished its death penalty in 1987.
Just four of her "Free Franks"—letters delivered without postage—are known to survive.
Serving as the United States’ first First Lady came with perks. Even after Martha Washington's tenure had concluded, and George Washington had died, the young American Congress was still offering freebies to Mrs. Washington, such as the “franking privilege” that allowed her to send mail without being charged for postage. Congress granted her this on April 3, 1800, about four months after George had died, and about two years before her own death.
To our knowledge, only four of Mrs. Washington’s franked letters—known as “Free Franks”—survive today. One was recently put up for auction at Hindman in Chicago, for an estimated $30,000 to $40,000. (It didn’t ultimately sell.) Ironically, the letter itself concerns, well, saving money, as she had sent it to discontinue a newspaper subscription.
Dated October 6, 1800, and written by Tobias Lear, George Washington’s personal secretary, the letter informs “Messrs Thomas & Thomas”—printers based in Walpole, New Hampshire—that Mrs. Washington “finds it inconvenient to take the number of Newspapers with which she has heretofore furnished; and is therefore determined to discontinue them at the end of the present year …” She took the extra step of having Lear clarify that the cancelation was nothing personal. “The discontinuance of your paper,” he writes on her behalf, “is not on account of any objection to it in any respect; but merely to obviate the inconvenience which Mrs. Washington expresses on receiving so many papers.” Basically, it was the 1800 version of an inbox purge.
Among Martha Washington’s other known Free Franks, one was written in 1801 by her granddaughter, Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis, and sold in 2014 for $32,500. Another—dated to November 1800 and addressed to Mary Lear, Tobias’s mother—makes direct reference to the slaves held by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. “[A]ll my family whites, and Blacks, have been very sick, many of them very ill,” she writes in what is apparently a general update on life at the estate. “Thank god they have all recovered again and I was so fortunate as not loose [sic] any of them …”
Following the English model, Congress first introduced franking in 1775, as a means for representatives to communicate with their constituents en masse. Today Congress members may frank certain kinds of approved mailings according to their own budgetary discretion, but the envelope requires more than a special signature. It must instead declare, “This mailing was prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense.”
Just $200 can get you a resin-encased chunk of horse racing history.
It was a bit of a lark when Kentucky-based artist Coleman Larkin decided to immortalize a little memento from one of the greatest racehorses of the 20th century. Larkin frequently encases found objects in clear resin as part of his practice, and horseshit didn’t feel like such a stretch. “It just occurred to me that if I could figure out how to get a horse turd in epoxy resin, people might like it,” he says. “And if I could get Kentucky Derby–winning turds in resin, people would really freak out.”
But it was easier said than done. Turns out is it hard to perfectly preserve a piece of shit in colorless and rock-hard epoxy resin. Larkin started experimenting with a pellet of his cat’s poop. The problem is that when epoxy resin mixes with hardener, the chemical reaction generates an incredible amount of heat that can foam, smoke, or even catch fire. Larkin’s first prototype reached 400 degrees, which resulted in a melted cat turd in an obliterated black plastic bowl. “It did not go very well at all,” he says.
After that first trial, Larkin asked a local stable if he could take a few buckets of horse manure off of their hands. Somewhat nonplussed, they agreed, under the condition Larkin retrieve and transport the turds himself. So he began trekking back and forth from his house to the stables, watching and waiting. Over the course of several weeks, he refined the surprisingly difficult process of transporting the clumps without damaging their original shapes. First, he tried plopping them in a vat of cat litter. This kept them from clumping together, but the tiny granules of litter stuck to the poop like burrs. He eventually switched to a large container of sawdust, spaced out each item, and then dried them out in a souped-up food dehydrator for 48 hours to prevent mold growth.
Larkin initially imagined a free-standing turd without a container, but he found the casting process far too laborious. “You have to pour the resin in many layers or else it will boil the turd,” he says. Apparently, a boiling turd releases bubbles into the resin, which appears to change the color from a healthy green-brown to a pallid gray. “Like a dog turd that’s been out in the sun,” he says. So he settled on encasing them in resin-filled Mason jars, which he sees as a fittingly Southern receptacle. It took him more than 200 attempts to perfect the process. Larkin refuses to give any more details, saying he needs to keep his formula a secret to stamp out possible copycats.
When selecting his ideal subjects, Larkin shot for the moon: He wanted a turd with a Triple Crown. He asked the stables that house American Pharaoh and Justify, the only living winners of racing’s most prestigious series, but the owners were “not enthusiastic” about the idea. “Maybe they’ll change their mind now that the turds have become popular,” Larkin says.
Larkin then approached Old Friends Farm, a retirement facility for thoroughbreds. The farm’s owner, former Boston Globe film critic Michael Blowen, happily handed over some offerings from Silver Charm, who had come up just one leg short of a Triple Crown after winning both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes in 1997. Blowen’s stables also house War Emblem, who won the Derby in 2002, but Blowen warned Larkin that the notoriously temperamental War Emblem would probably “kick his face in.” So Larkin opted for the chiller, elderly Silver Charm, who just turned 25. “Normally racehorses don’t make it that long because they’re often shipped overseas to be bred or killed because their upkeep is so expensive,” Larkin says. “So a place like Old Friends gives them a place to live out their last years in dignity.”
Now, you, too, can buy a Mason jar cradling one of Silver Charm’s perfectly preserved poops for just $200. Larkin calls them Derby Turds. Part of the proceeds goes to Old Friends Farm, where Silver Charm continues to produce around 37 pounds of potential art a day.
In Guatemala, to wear a huipil is to represent millennia of Maya history.
It is a rainy afternoon in the midst of Guatemala’s mild winter, in the small mountain town of Zunil. Sofia Ixcot Xivir walks quickly under the heavy clouds, on a side street leading away from the main road. She wears a hand-woven skirt and, tucked into it, a blouse known as a huipil with radiant floral patterns. This garment, worn by descendants of the ancient Maya, has come to represent indigenous solidarity and defiance amid oppression.
The basic shape of the huipil is simple, and identical all across Guatemala: two lengths of hand-woven fabric, stitched together to form a square blouse. Huipils are worn in neighboring Mexico as well; in fact, the word huipil comes from Nauatl, the language of the Aztecs, which is still spoken in parts of Mexico.
Weavers like Xivir make each huipil with a backstrap loom, the tool used to weave fabrics since the height of the Maya civilization. Ixchel, the moon goddess and patron of weaving, is often depicted with it tied around her waist.
Huipil designs and decorations vary according to local indigenous traditions. In Zunil, it is traditionally white and decorated with simple purple stripes. Weavers from San Antonio Aguas Calientes near the old capital Antigua use strong colors to make floral and geometrical patterns; in Nebaj in the northern highlands, tiny imaginary horses and birds are stitched.
“The huipil is important because it represents our shared history as Maya people,” says Alejandra Micaela Ujpán, a weaver from San Juan La Laguna, a town on the shores of the volcanic Lake Atitlan known for its textile traditions.
Guatemala is among Latin America’s smallest countries, but has one of its largest indigenous populations: 40 percent according to official numbers, or up to 60 percent as per informal sources. During the conflicto armada, the civil war from 1960-1996, indigenous Guatemalans were targeted in the brutal state-led repression. There were massacres in many towns and villages, and a large majority of the 200,000 people who died during the war were Maya.
“My husband was one of the victims of the war. He was captured by the military, he still has traces of those wounds around his arms and legs,” says Ujpán.
During the years of conflict, wearing traditional clothes came to be a dangerous act.
“If you wore the huipil it showed that you were an indigenous person, and people could identify where you came from. So many people stopped wearing them at that time,” says Ujpán.
She holds a thick huipil in her hands, with finely embroidered details around the collar.
“The green color represents the mountains, the blue symbolizes the lake. And the pattern around the neck is a rainbow, all huipils here have it,” says Ujpán.
Other towns around the lake decorate their huipils differently. Santiago Atitlan, just a short boat ride away, is known for its elaborate flowers and birds; Santa Cruz La Laguna, on the northern shores, for a pattern symbolizing the sun reflected in the water.
This kind of symbolism has always been used by Maya weavers in their work. They have imitated the shapes of rivers and mountains, or animals like the snake and eagle—often conveying sacred or spiritual meanings. Objects like combs and scissors have been used to signify the mundane and the everyday. Different variations of the zigzag patterns have been woven all across the country—in some places to represent mountaintops, in others the ups and downs of life—as have the tree of life, a symbol used by nearly all the world’s civilizations.
In Mexico, weavers of the mountainous Chiapas region also incorporate spiritual symbols and patterns from nature. Frida Kahlo often wore clothes from her mother’s native region of Tehuantepec in coastal Oaxaca, and painted many portraits of herself in the dress.
Ujpán takes out examples of older huipils, belonging to her late mother and grandmother. They are heavy but soft from years of use, and have less radiant colors.
“The villages at that time didn’t have access to different colors. My mother used to go with kayak to the market to buy material,” says Ujpán.
The road leading down to the lake from her house in San Juan La Laguna is lined with small shops selling bags and ponchos to tourists. Maya art is often used to present an image of Guatemala as a tourist destination, and textiles play a central role in that.
“There is a folklorization of our textiles happening. The ministry of tourism photographs women in traditional clothes and uses it for campaign material, but they don’t provide people with their needs,” says Ixquik Poz, a lawyer from Zunil.
Weavers have started demanding reforms to Guatemala’s intellectual property laws, such as making sure that profits from traditional textiles go back to the craftspeople and that credit is given to the creators of the indigenous designs. A group called AFEDES (Asociación Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepéquez) filed a petition to the Constitutional Court, which in 2017 ruled in their favor and urged Guatemala’s Congress to legislate protection of these intellectual rights. Legal battles have been fought elsewhere in the region too: In Mexico, indigenous artisans won against a department store that used traditional iconography on a pair of shoes.
“Our ancestral knowledge and our weavings are tied together, we want to share it with the world, but in a fair manner, with rules that are clear,” Angelina Aspuac from AFEDES said in a public hearing.
In recent years, many women in Guatemala have started dressing in a new way, mixing clothes from different indigenous regions in what is known as the pan-Maya style. Nobel laureate and indigenous rights advocate Rigoberta Menchú Tum was one of the first to champion it.
“She may wear a huipil from, say, San Martin Chilotepequez together with a skirt with a generic pattern and a wrap-around headcloth from Chimaltenango. That way she is not representing her own village but the entire Maya people,” says Barbara Knoke de Arathoon, a textile expert who has authored several books about Maya fabrics.
“It is fashion, but also a way to convey unity and sisterhood.”
It is perhaps this, the way in which the huipil forms a bond of connection, which gives the garment its power. In a country where indigenous culture remains marginalized, the huipil manifests its worth and value.
Xivir and Ujpán both use huipils daily. Xivir wears one in many shades of pink and yellow, with machine-stitched decorative embroidery attached to its back and front. Machine-made huipils are becoming more and more common among Guatemalan women, not least since it significantly takes down the price of the huipil and makes it more affordable. Ujpán wears a more traditional huipil, woven entirely by herself. It has the typical rainbow of San Juan La Laguna around the neck, embroidered in a variety of bright colors.
“But I wear things from other places in Guatemala too, from any region and community. To me there is no style that is more beautiful than the other,” she says.
“It is all work from a Maya woman, and that is why it is valuable to me. This is how we preserve our culture: with our hands.”
Sarah Rachel Russell sold exotic makeup that turned out to be mostly arsenic.
Everyone loves the story of a good grift, from brilliant ruse to inevitable downfall. This week, we’re ushering in the spring of the swindle by highlighting the stories of the greatest con women in history. Previously, we heard about Liechtenstein's Barbara Erni and her very special trunk.
In 1863, Madame Rachel opened a salon on London’s Bond Street with the words “Beautiful for Ever” emblazoned above the door. Madame Rachel peddled strange, opulent cosmetics for astronomical prices, including a $160 Magnetic Rock Dew of the Sahara for Removing Wrinkles. The item was said to offer “the appearance of increasing youth to persons of considerable antiquity” and had been “brought to Morocco on swift dromedaries,” according to a court transcript of Russell’s eventual criminal trial. (Spoiler alert!) If you find yourself wondering what a “Magnetic Rock Dew of the Sahara” could be, you’re not the only one.
Madame Rachel was born Sarah Rachel Russell sometime in the first quarter of the 19th century, according to Helen Rappaport’s Beautiful for Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street—Cosmetician, Con-artist and Blackmailer. She grew up on London’s overcrowded, poverty-stricken East End, where she sold rabbit skins, used clothes, and dried fish. She found a husband (he died), then another (he also died), and finally moved in with a man named Philip Levison. She continued to do odd jobs—a bit of fortune-telling here, a spot of prostitution there—until she founded her own beauty salon in London’s snobby Mayfair district. There, Russell rebranded herself as Madame Rachel and launched an ethically goopy cosmetics practice capitalizing on Victorian women’s desire for eternal youth.
In the 1860s, British women who wanted to wear makeup had to do so on the downlow. In a decree that absolutely no one asked for, Queen Victoria declared skin cosmetics to be vulgar and unladylike, fit only for the theater or the brothel, according to the BBC. The only socially acceptable way to alter your appearance was to pinch your cheeks and bite your lips and get by good genes and the ephemeral hue of your own blood. Women who longed for something more might craft their own cosmetics at home, and frequently had to rely on unsavory ingredients such as arsenic. So when Madame Rachel opened up shop, society ladies couldn't queue up fast enough.
Unsurprising for someone peddling putative elixirs and powders from exotic locales, Madame Rachel dressed in an appropriative pastiche, according to Rappaport’s book. She wore lush robes, dripping jewels, and crystal talismans around her neck.
Inside each of her powders and creams and washes, of course, lurked a toxic cocktail of chemicals. If something had the power to burn off the skin of your face or poison your mind, Madame Rachel probably sold it. Her most-used ingredients included prussic acid, lead carbonate, and, of course, arsenic. Rachel’s trademark service, called enamelling, claimed to lighten a lady’s skin by removing all the hairs on her face and then dousing her with an alkaline wash one would normally use to clean a toilet.
Beyond her beauty scams, Rachel ran a series of other money-making schemes that didn’t sit quite right with the law. She regularly blackmailed women who couldn’t pay up front, by offering them credit and later extorting them and pawning their jewels, according to the court transcript. Inevitably, Rachel ran into the law as former clients levied numerous suits of malpractice and intimidation. Some even accused her of providing abortion-inducing drugs or running a brothel above her shop. British tabloids printed viciously offensive anti-Semitic cartoons criticizing Madame Rachel, according to Tammy Whitlock’s article, “The Madame Rachel Case, Fraud, and Retail Trade in 19th-Century England.” As Whitlock notes, she was twice prosecuted for fraud, once in 1868 and again in 1878, and eventually died in jail in 1880, leaving many of her clients to age of natural causes.
Computer scientists have studied these “pictorial prayers.”
Before the first rays of sunlight stream across the rice fields and mud roads in the Nilgiri Mountains, before they force their way through the high-rises in the urban jungle of Chennai and Madurai, the women of Tamil Nadu are up for the day. In the dark, they clean the threshold to their home, and, following a centuries-long tradition, painstakingly draw beautiful, ritualistic designs called kōlam, using rice flour.
Taking a clump of rice flour in a bowl (or a coconut shell), the kōlam artist steps onto her freshly washed canvas: the ground at the entrance of her house, or any patch of floor marking an entrypoint. Working swiftly, she takes pinches of rice flour and draws geometric patterns: curved lines, labyrinthine loops around red or white dots, hexagonal fractals, or floral patterns resembling the lotus, a symbol of the goddess of prosperity, Lakshmi, for whom the kōlam is drawn as a prayer in illustration. The making of the kōlam itself is a performance of supplication. The artist folds her body in half, bending at the waist, stooping to the ground as she fills out her patterns. Many kōlam artists see the kōlam as an offering to the earth goddess, Bhūdevi, as well.
But the kōlam is not just a prayer; it is also a metaphor for coexistence with nature. In her 2018 book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India, an Exploration of the Kōlam, Vijaya Nagarajan, a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, refers to the belief in Hindu mythology that Hindus have a “karmic obligation” to “feed a thousand souls,” or offer food to those that live among us. By providing a meal of rice flour to bugs, ants, birds, and insects, she writes, the Hindu householder begins the day with “a ritual of generosity,” with a dual offering to divinity and to nature.
The word kōlam means beauty. What it also embodies is a perfect symmetry of straight or curved lines built around or through a grid of dots. Nearly always, the grid of dots comes first, requiring spatial precision to achieve symmetry. The dot in Hindu philosophy represents the point at which creation begins—it is a symbol of the cosmos. No tools other than the maker’s deft fingers, and the rice flour, are used. Sometimes the designs are one continuous line that loops over itself, snaking to infinity. Intersecting into infinite figure eights, in a style known as pulli kōlam, the kōlam is also believed to be a representation of infinity, of the infinite cycle of birth and rebirth that forms a foundational concept in Hindu mythology.
Mathematicians and computer scientists have keenly studied the kōlam. The kōlam is “an unusual example of the expression of mathematical ideas in a cultural setting,” writes Marcia Ascher, a professor emerita of Mathematics at Ithaca College. Citing her ethnomathematical research (a field of study combining anthropology and mathematics), Nagarajan adds that “The kōlam is one of the few embedded indigenous traditions that have contributed to the western mathematical tradition.”
While the kōlam-makers themselves may not be thinking in terms of mathematical theorems, many kōlam designs have a recursive nature—they start out small, but can be built out by continuing to enlarge the same subpattern, creating a complex overall design. This has fascinated mathematicians, because the patterns elucidate fundamental mathematical principles. Nagarajan writes about how the symmetry of kōlam art, such as the recurring fractals in the design, have been likened to mathematical models such as the Sierpinski triangle, a fractal of recursive equilateral triangles.
Computer scientists have also used kōlams to teach computers language fundamentals. Kōlam designs can be studied as a picture language. Quoting Ascher, Nagarajan notes that "akin to natural languages and computer languages, picture languages are made up of restricted sets of basic units and specific, formal rules for putting the units together.” Teaching the computer to draw kōlams gave computer scientists insight into how picture languages function, which they then used to create new languages. “It’s actually helping computer scientists understand something elemental about their own work,” said Nagarajan, in a presentation on the geometry of kōlam.
Despite the deep mathematical principles exhibited in kōlam designs, practitioners describe the process as intuitive and enjoyable. “It’s easy, especially once you start with a proper grid of dots,” says Godavari Krishnamurthy, who lives in Chennai and has been making kōlams for more than half a century. Krishnamurthy speaks to me over the phone as her daughter-in-law, Kaveri Purandhar, who lives in Ahmedabad, translates.
Today, the tradition of making kōlam is wrestling with time, short attention spans, and porch-less apartment living. It is grappling with changing affiliations to divinity, and changing displays of community among women. Kōlam competitions during festivals are now one of the few opportunities to showcase this artistic ritual. Although fewer Tamils are making the kōlam today, the competitions allow for more inclusivity, welcoming all who are interested to participate in this traditionally Hindu ritual.
During the festival month of Margazhi on the Tamil calendar, which falls between December and January, Krishnamurthy takes to the street in front of her Chennai home, drawing elaborate kōlams on the main thoroughfare, defiantly taking up the road and stooping low for hours. There is almost an urgency to her work, her need to preserve a disappearing tradition, even as passing cars cover her in the dust of a city pulsating with modernity, with little space for such painstaking, back-breaking pursuits. “It’s a great exercise in concentration,” she says, via Purandhar, “and good for health and for nurturing one’s creativity.”
Krishnamurthy learned from her mother, and mothers have been teaching daughters for centuries. “The kōlam is a powerful vehicle for Tamil women’s self-expression, a central metaphor and symbol for creativity,” writes Nagarajan. “It evokes an entire way of being in the world; it articulates desires, concerns, sensibilities, and suffering, and ultimately it affirms the power of women’s blessings to create a desired reality: a healthy, happy household.” Although some men make kōlams, it is historically the domain of women.
Krishnamurthy’s immediate family offers wholehearted support, but little inclination to participate. She gives copies of her designs to anyone who shows interest. Little design books for kōlam have been around since at least 1884, writes Nagarajan. Skilled kōlam makers will maintain a ledger of their own designs that becomes a family heirloom.
Kōlam is meant to be ephemeral: the rice flour pattern gradually fades as day turns to dusk, trodden upon by visitors, family members, the odd bicycle, mailman, or stray animals. Holes appear in the design from tiny ants or nibbling bugs. But as the ritual of making kōlam itself is fading away, perhaps as a counter to this loss, more and more kōlam makers are turning to powders and acrylic paints that will hold the design for longer. The traditional kōlam continues to be made with rice flour and kavi, red ochre considered sacred. This is the kōlam drawn within the temple sanctum sanctorum, for the eyes of the gods, says Purandhar. But the elaborate kōlam displays entered in competitions and drawn on the streets of Tamil Nadu during the Pongal festival use a variety of colored powders, to the consternation of traditionalists who rue that kōlam is becoming more like the rangoli of North India—similar floor art made with colored rice flour, stone powders, or flower petals that follows a different set of design principles.
Tomorrow, while Chennai sleeps the tired slumber of a fast-paced, tech-driven life, Mrs. Krishnamurthy will rise before dawn, clean a patch of verandah in her home, and begin illustrating her obeisance to nature, and to the divine mothers that inspire a lifelong devotion to this ritualistic art. “It’s easy,” she says, again.
It's all thanks to Big Boy No. 4014, the world's largest steam locomotive.
In seventh grade, Elrond Lawrence and Robert Spinuzzi made a pact with each other: If a Union Pacific Railroad 4-8-8-4 locomotive—known to railroad enthusiasts around the world as “Big Boy”—ever ran again, they would do everything they could to see it in person.
This past week, 40 years after Lawrence and Spinuzzi made that promise, their boyhood dream finally came true.
Thousands of train fans and history buffs are making a pilgrimage this week to Wyoming and Utah, to see the world’s largest steam locomotive run for the first time in nearly six decades. On May 1, the Union Pacific completed an extensive overhaul of Big Boy No. 4014, one of 25 such locomotives built by the American Locomotive Company in the 1940s, and a behemoth of a steam engine that many train lovers had thought was too big to ever run again.
The Big Boys weighed more than one million pounds and were 132 feet, 9 inches long. A single Big Boy was so powerful it could pull a train with enough material to build 16 Statues of Liberty. Although the locomotives were originally going to be named “Wasatch,” in honor of the mountains they would haul freight over, a shop worker is said to have written “Big Boy” in chalk on the front of the first one, and the name stuck.
The locomotives spent nearly 20 years hauling freight through the mountains of Wyoming and Utah. But in 1959, the Big Boys and other steam locomotives were replaced with diesel-electric locomotives, which were easier and cheaper to maintain. All but eight of the Big Boys were scrapped. The ones that remained were sent to museums from Pennsylvania to California.
In 2013, the Union Pacific announced that it was reacquiring a Big Boy to restore ahead of the 150th anniversary of the First Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 2019. In 2014, the railroad moved Big Boy No. 4014 from a museum in Pomona, California, where it was on display at the RailGiants Trains Museum, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Union Pacific keeps and maintains two other historic steam locomotives for special events and excursions. At the time, the man leading the restoration, the locomotive engineer and mechanic Ed Dickens Jr., likened the effort to resurrecting a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Five years after Big Boy No. 4014 arrived in Wyoming, it returned to the rails under its own power for the first time on May 1. The following day, the locomotive was taken on its first run out of the rail yard to test its recently repaired systems. Along the way dozens of railroad enthusiasts came out to see the locomotive on its previously unannounced trip. Among them was Dave Schaaf, a railroad enthusiast from Denver who left work early last Thursday to drive to Cheyenne when he heard the locomotive might make its first run down the main line. Schaaf says even though the test run had not been publicly announced, word spread quickly and people lined the tracks in small towns along the line.
“It was impressive. The Big Boy is a locomotive in a class all its own,” Schaaf says, adding that he did not get home until 1:30 a.m. after following the locomotive through the night.
On May 4, the locomotive was christened in Cheyenne before departing for Ogden, Utah, where it will take part in a number of events to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Railroad enthusiasts from across the country and around the world have been following the Big Boy on its five-day journey to Ogden, while others have been tuning into a livestream from Trains magazine to watch the progress.
Lawrence and Spinuzzi, the childhood friends who had vowed to someday see a Big Boy run in person, staked out a spot to see the locomotive climb Sherman Hill west of Cheyenne and say it was worth waiting 40 years.
“I never thought I would see a Big Boy run,” says Lawrence, who made the trip from California to see it. “When the engine went by, it really was a dream come true.”
Big Boy No. 4014 arrives in Ogden on May 8 and will be on display at Ogden Union Station until May 11. On May 12, the locomotive will start its journey back to Cheyenne, making stops in numerous small towns along the way. Union Pacific has published a schedule online of where people can see the locomotive for themselves in the coming days and tips on how to safely view the locomotive trackside. You can also track the train online in real time. Once the locomotive returns to Cheyenne, the crew will start preparing for a tour of the Union Pacific system—which covers 32,000 miles in 23 western states—this summer. Details of that trip are expected to be released soon.
Lawrence says it’s worth a special trip to see the locomotive in action.
Who doesn't love a great amusement park? Sure, there are bigger, better-known options out there, but we've got a soft spot for the smaller, local theme parks all over the world that manage to offer something truly unique or unusual. Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forum to tell us about their own favorite local theme parks, and the responses were a real rollercoaster... in that they were very fun!
Take a look at some of our favorite recommendations below, and if you have an amazing local amusement park of your own that you'd like to tell us about, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going. Just because a theme park isn't world-famous doesn't mean it's not full of adventure.
“A theme park I would visit all the time as a child was Storybook Land in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey! It’s intended for young kids, and most of the attractions and rides are based on stories. They have a maze that appears to be built of huge cards based on Alice in Wonderland, a (slightly creepy) animatronic retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Snow White’s House, Little Red Riding Hood, and Santa’s Workshop, with a ‘North Pole’ which is just a tall, cold pole covered in ice (which is great in the summer). Some of the rides include a carousel, small ferris wheel, teacup ride, a small roller coaster featuring a dragon who blows bubbles, a ‘drop’ ride, and much more. The park is intended for kids, so the most extreme ride is the small roller coaster. It’s not much of a visit if you don’t have young kids, but I have fond memories of going at least once a year. They’ve been open since 1955 and do maintain the park with renovations, so although it is a classic, it is up to date.” — srosa
“When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, Knoebels was the greatest place in the world. I loved the wooden roller coaster, the Phoenix, and the Cosmotron, as well as other classic thrill rides. The atmosphere is part storybook, part county fair. It’s still going strong!” — latourex
“Growing up in Tokyo I spent much of my summer at Toshimaen, an amusement and water park. During the winter, the water attractions would shut down but my friends and I would still go to ride on the roller coasters and play games in the GC (Game Center (arcade)). I didn’t go to a Japanese school, so I had the same schedule as kids in the U.S. from what I could tell, so in the beginning of summer there were very few Japanese student-aged kids there, and in the winter, while they were studying hard, we more or less had the park to ourselves then too. I remember standing in a very short line to get into one of our favorite rides, leaning over the railing towards the walkway, and seeing Takeshi Kitano (Beat Takeshi, as he was known in early days) walking around the park with a very obvious member of the Yakuza. At the time I still knew him primarily as a comedian, but now whenever a new movie like Brother or Outrage comes out, all I can think of is seeing him walking around with that member of the Yakuza, perhaps studying for a film role?” — denisewilkerson
“Belmont Park in San Diego, California. It’s got a seaside roller coaster with rides and shops. We always begged my dad to take us, although at the time I was too chicken to ride the coaster. The rollercoaster is one of the original wooden ones built.” — Rhoswyn
“Phantasialand, near Brühl, Germany. One of the scariest rides I’ve ever seen (didn’t ride it) is the Talocan Topspin, and a quieter children’s section that’s like a blend of Hobbitland and steampunk. Like something from a cool dream!” — rheik
“Silver Dollar City, near Branson, Missouri, literally started out as a hole in the ground. In the 1950s, the family operating the tours of Marvel Cave decided to reconstruct an 1880s mining town that had once stood near the cave entrance. The idea was to have something to occupy cave-goers while they waited for the next tour. A handful of shops that included a general store, a doll shop, an ice cream parlor, and a blacksmith shop opened in May of 1960 as Silver Dollar City and has grown from that humble beginning to one of the top-rated theme parks in the country.” — dembrees4
“Holiday World is Indiana’s best kept secret. We go here every year for their enthusiasts-only weekend, where attendees get the entire park to themselves at night for ‘exclusive ride time.’ The Voyage is the best wooden roller coaster in the world (I’d argue best wooden roller coaster period, wooden or otherwise). It’s a beautiful park in a valley, very family-friendly and affordable, with an exceptional waterpark as well. We camp at Lake Rudolph next to the park and you can walk right up to the entrance from your campsite. It’s an hour from Louisville so you can pair it with a trip along the bourbon trail. It’s truly my favorite weekend of the year!” — kayjtoomey
“Gold Reef City, Johannesburg is a unique theme park in South Africa. It has 30 thrilling rides, a hotel in a Victorian style, and a casino.” — laura10
A giant oak is staring down the leafy green beyond.
The old oak tree known as the Kvill Oak or Rumskulla Oak has skeletal limbs and a hollow heart. The tree has stood in the Swedish city of Kalmar for hundreds of years—maybe close to 1,000, maybe more—and each of those years seems to be written in its branches and bark. Sometime over the centuries, fungi apparently feasted on its heartwood, the deep core of its trunk. Since then, the graceful, arching branches have become less and less green. Last year, only a single one sprouted leaves, The Local reported.
It can be hard to picture the death of a big, stalwart giant that has silently witnessed the march of time, says Matteo Garbelotto, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on forest pathology and mycology. We think of these trees as constants, but “trees have a lifespan, like humans,” he explains. “It’s just that their lifespan is so much longer than ours.” Oak trees in California, where Garbelotto works, can occasionally live for 700 or 800 years, he says. European oaks can live even longer.
Broadly speaking, several factors can spell the end for various oaks, says Garbelotto. They may be toppled by bulldozers and buzzsaws to make way for development, or slowly defeated by wood-decay fungi (which also help break down and recycle the tree’s nutrients during its life and after its death), or infected by pathogens such as Phytophthora ramorum, which can cause a disease called Sudden Oak Death, marked by cankers in the bark or moldy-looking patches on the leaves. This last scenario might occur with increasing frequency as climates change—providing pathogens with long summers to spread, and leaving trees stressed and more susceptible to infection, Garbelotto says.
The Swedish tree, which stands in a nature reserve close to Norra Kvill National Park, is reported to have been additionally stressed by iron chains and bands that were fastened around it decades ago to hold it steady. This and its advanced age left it vulnerable to a caterpillar infestation and a fungal infection, says Jerry Svensson, manager of nature reserves at the Kalmar County administrative board. Judging by photos from recent years of the tree’s sparse, denuded canopy, Garbelotto suspects that something is also going awry in the roots, which aren’t absorbing enough water or nutrients. (It doesn't help that recent summers have been especially scorching by Scandinavian standards: In 2018, southern Sweden saw its highest temperatures in more than 40 years.) By the time symptoms start showing up in the branches, Garbelotto says, more than half of the roots might already be compromised. “It becomes really difficult, because you can’t really do anything underground to restore the root system,” Garbelotto says. According to Svensson, after convening a panel of experts from Sweden, England, and Germany in 2013, the county tried several interventions to nurse the tree back to health. They swapped the band for new wire supports, for one thing, and laid down layers of mulch to in an effort to nourish the roots. They watched and waited for a few years, but nothing seemed to make a difference. Things just kept getting worse.
Every arboreal citizen eventually goes to the great, leafy beyond, and it seems this tree’s time has come. “We don’t know if that means this year or any of the following, but we think that we have to be ready for the worst,” Svensson says. “Maybe it has reached its final years in a natural way as we all will do.”
Garbelotto calls the Swedish oak “overmature”—a kindly euphemism for surprisingly old. It’s had a good, long run. But even if death is natural and inevitable, he says, majestic trees have often gained the affection of tourists and locals, who grieve for them when they’re gone. “Sometimes we biologists can be a little cold, and look at these processes too much from the outside,” he says. “Embracing the value of the tree and doing something to celebrate the tree with the community that lives around it is really important.” Garbelotto once attended poetry readings around the base of the beleaguered, several-hundred-year-old Jack London oak, near the writer’s home in California’s Sonoma County. He wonders if people might like to pay their respects to the Swedish oak as it falls apart. If dangerous, dangling branches were removed, he figures, maybe mourners could gather around the fence that surrounds it and watch it go to pieces from a safe distance—and appreciate the beauty of growth and decay. They might also want to scour for acorns to propagate offspring, as scientists did with the Jack London tree, and keep the legacy alive. “Before the tree disappears,” he says, “make sure you celebrate it.”
Thérèse Humbert played French bankers like fiddles to live in the lap of luxury.
Everyone loves the story of a good grift, from brilliant ruse to inevitable downfall. This week, we’re ushering in the spring of the swindle by highlighting the stories of the greatest con women in history. Previously, we heard about Barbara Erni and her very special trunk and Madame Rachel's dangerous cosmetics.
Thérèse Humbert built an empire, acquired a castle, and owned a rather distasteful but expensive leech hat, all through invented schemes so torturously convoluted that no one could understand them enough to prove them wrong.
In 1856, Thérèse Daurignac was born into a peasant family in Toulouse, France. Her father was a verified kook who spent his days studying alchemy and ranting about noble ancestors or hidden inheritances. Neighbors often spotted him running around their fields in thunderstorms with a magic wand, as he claimed he could control the weather, according to Hilary Spurling’s biography La Grande Thérèse: The Greatest Scandal of the Century. It seems that a young Thérèse got her first ideas from her fanciful father, who warded off would-be creditors by showing them a locked chest that he claimed held legal documents that could incontrovertibly prove his wealth.
Humbert pulled off her first scam when she married her first cousin, Frédéric Humbert, the son of the mayor. (It was very appropriate to marry cousins back then, particularly if they were related to the mayor.) They met while Thérèse worked as a laundry-maid in Frédéric’s home, where she wooed him with tales of a castle she supposedly inherited from the wealthy lover of her dead mother. Though Frédéric may started out as a mark, he soon became a willing accomplice when she used this very fake castle—she called it the Chateau de Marcotte—as collateral for a very real bank loan, which allowed the Humberts to move into a real castle of their own, according to Spurling’s book.
But Thérèse’s master scam occurred, so she said, in 1879, when she boarded a train to discover a man having a heart attack in the adjacent compartment. Upon being revived by her smelling salts, the man said he was an American millionaire named Robert Henry Crawford and that he would be forever in her debt. Just two years later, she said, she received a letter naming her sole beneficiary of his will, which stated that his family fortune should remain in a sealed safe until Thérèse’s younger sister Marie was old enough to marry one of Crawford’s nephews. Thérèse kept this document in a lockbox in one of her handful of Parisian apartments, along with three other separate wills that each detailed some oddly specific filial requirement—and each of which, coincidentally, happened to leave Thérèse with an enormous fortune.
The wily Thérèse told her bankers that if they would just lend her six million francs, she would axe the Crawford nephews out of the will, inherit a hundred million francs, and pay her them all back with considerable interest, Spurling writes. They, absurdly enough, agreed.
And so Thérèse lived an unbelievably posh life in an apartment on 65 Avenue de la Grande Armée, where the lavatory brushes had pink satin bows and her famed lockbox was polished once a week. Thérèse entertained the snobs of Paris, welcoming presidents and prime ministers in her customarily enormous hats, heaped high with feathers and fake fruit, according to Spurling’s book. One of her hats quite famously resembled a giant leech, slurping away at her coiffed hair.
When her web of claims came into question, Thérèse had her two brothers impersonate the two Crawford nephews (with horrible American accents, of course) in an actual court of law, Spurling writes. The ruse finally collapsed there, when one fed-up lawyer asked where the Crawford brothers lived and Thérèse replied “1302 Broadway”—a laughably vague address for America. In 1902, the Humberts fled to Spain, and the State Prosecutor seized Thérèse’s lockbox for a very public opening. Before nearly 10,000 people, he lifted the lid to find an old newspaper, an Italian coin, and one trouser button.
Needless to say, the Humberts were arrested and sentenced to five years’ solitary confinement with hard labor. The 52-year-old Thérèse was released from prison in Rennes in 1908, and her husband was released from a prison in Melun the same year. The two promptly disappeared from history as if, like the inheritance, they never existed in the first place.
The Lipez Altiplano region of southwestern Bolivia is known for being extremely arid and extremely remote. And both of those attributes contributed to the preservation of evidence of a very old, very trippy ritual. Deep in a cave at 13,000 feet, archaeologists found a 1,000-year-old leather bundle containing ancient tools and plants dedicated to causing vivid visions and altered perceptions of time.
“The extreme aridity of the region in addition to the fact that these remains were recovered from a dry rock shelter were critical for the preservation of these remains,” says lead archaeologist José Capriles of Pennsylvania State University. “In most cases, leather, textiles, wood, and other vegetable materials tend to degrade quite fast but the extreme aridity and burial of these materials helped on their preservation.” It also helps that the cave is so far from modern civilization that it had been left undisturbed for a millennia or more.
This kit, which dates to roughly 550 to 950, when the pre-Inca Tiwanaku civilization lived among llamas and alpacas in these Andean highlands, contained carved wooden snuffing tablets and a snuffing tube, human hair, llama bone spatulas, and dried plant material. The plant mix was found in a pouch made of three fox snouts sewn together.
Capriles and his colleague Juan Albarracín-Jordán of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in Bolivia discovered the plant material and enlisted University of California, Berkeley archaeologist Melanie Miller to identify what they had. After running liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry tests, the team determined found at least five psychoactive plants: Banisteriopsis caapi (the primary ingredient of the currently popular psychedelic drink ayahuasca), Erythroxylum (coca), Anadenanthera (cebil or wilka), and the leaves of the chacruna (Psychotria viridis) shrub. It would have been a powerful cocktail. According to Capriles, “The plants are not poisonous [but] depending on how they are consumed, how much, and the proportion of alkaloids, they can be quite potent and toxic.”
The archaeological team had focused on the caves in this remote region to learn more about early hunter-gatherers. “Although the region has an abundance of these sites, most of them are open-air camps, subject to wind erosion and therefore with little stratigraphy,” says Capriles. “By excavating rock shelters, we hoped to gain a better outlook into these early societies.” One thing is for sure: These Andean societies definitely knew how to trip.
Interestingly, these plants are not native to the high-altitude region where they were found. Instead, they have historically been found in the jungle, so this discovery suggests they arrived in the area with a traveler or through trade. “Although our project verified the use of many rock shelters as temporary campsites for early mobile foragers, it also revealed an interesting record of later societies that used these places for funerary and other ritual purposes. It was excavating these later contexts that we encountered the ritual bundle that we describe in the paper,” Capriles says. Though the team didn’t find any human bones in the cave, the presence of a medicinal bundle indicates that the location must have been significant, and ripe with rituals of life and death.
“Bundles such as the one we discovered have been previously found associated with human burials,” Capriles says. “The bundle was placed above a plastered surface that was a part of a structure with a plastered floor that at one point completely sealed the rock shelter. There are examples of such structures elsewhere in the region and in those cases, they seemed to have been used primarily as burial structures in a context of ancestor veneration.” The structure in this case appears to have been destroyed, which may indicate a dispute over the site. Maybe it wasn’t all so chill after all.
A new version of the humble teapot reintroduces features from the past.
Although you might not know it by name, the Brown Betty is the quintessential British teapot. According to Stephen Murray of Cauldon Ceramics, it’s beloved for its ability to brew a good cup of tea, almost every time. “When people picture iconic images of the U.K., there’s usually the Union Jack, the London Eye, a red London bus,” he says. “Often you’ll find a Brown Betty teapot in there too.”
The style of teapot known as the Brown Betty has existed since the mid-19th century. Its brown glaze is praised for its heat-retaining and stain-hiding abilities, and some tea-lovers theorize that its globed shape allows for a better diffusion of loose leaf tea. However, despite their ubiquity, it’s hard to find out much about the Brown Betty’s past, or how it received its mysterious name. According to ceramicist Ian McIntyre, “It’s one of those objects that everyone recognizes, but nobody knows why it’s relevant. It disappears into everyday life.” McIntyre himself spent three years researching, then reengineering, the Brown Betty, putting the spotlight on an under-appreciated piece of British design.
Researching industrial ceramics innovations for his PhD, McIntyre’s interest in the Brown Betty began with its material, which links it back to the beginning of the British ceramics industry. When tea first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it was prohibitively expensive for all but society’s elite. Imported Chinese wares for serving tea, particularly Yixing red stoneware, became luxury items. Realizing that the local red clay could offer an economical alternative, two brothers from Holland, John Philip and David Elers, established a pottery in Bradwell, Staffordshire.
That red clay, Etruria Marl, was used for Britain’s first domestically made teapots. The following centuries cemented the area as the center of the ceramics industry, and today, it’s still referred to as the Potteries.
While he doesn’t know who made the first Brown Betty, McIntyre does know that local ceramic firms first developed glazes for redware teapots in the mid-18th century. Rather than being associated with one designer or Staffordshire factory, the Brown Betty evolved for “purely functional” reasons, he says, especially as tea became affordable for more of British society. As a result, Brown Betty pots became associated with the working class. According to Ben Miller, assistant curator of ceramics at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, “everybody had these big brown pots. If you went round to someone’s house, you’d be served tea and that’s just how society worked.”
But it was the popularization of creamware and bone china that made the Potteries famous throughout the world, not humble redware. The stories of pottery makers such as Minton, Spode, and Wedgwood dominate the history books. Yet McIntyre couldn’t find anything written about the Brown Betty. The Potteries Museum doesn't even have a Brown Betty on display.
McIntyre describes the redware industry as "running alongside the whiteware industry, but in a much more undocumented, vernacular way, because it wasn’t seen as worthy as writing into history.” The Brown Betty’s popularity with the working class may also have contributed to their invisibility. “The only real awareness that this style of teapot was produced in such large quantities were the sales catalogs going out all around the world,” he says.
In these 19th-century export catalogs, McIntyre spotted unadorned Brown Betty-style pots, made by a variety of different companies, alongside ever-changing fashionable wares. Surprising inventiveness went into the making of these “big brown pots.” McIntyre discovered that the company Alcock, Lindley, and Bloore patented a Brown Betty with a non-drip spout and a locking lid in the 1920s. By the middle of the decade, an estimated half a million Brown Betty-style pots were made every week.
However, the more McIntyre looked into the history of the Brown Betty, he realized that changing production processes and a shift to overseas manufacture resulted in an over-simplified Brown Betty. Seen in the later 20th century as a heritage product, manufacturers focused on the way it looked, rather than “the details that made it so successful,” he says. So McIntyre decided to reengineer the design, reintroducing in the innovations of the past, while adding a few of his own.
But then, McIntyre discovered the Cauldon Ceramics company was still hand-making redware teapots in Stoke-on-Trent. According to current owner Murray, Cauldon Ceramics was established in 2005 by the late Zamir Shaikh, who grieved the demise of the locally made Brown Betty. (These days, the ceramics industry in Staffordshire is a fraction of its former size.) “A lot of the companies that had been manufacturing the Brown Betty in the past had gone out of business, and I think he wanted to carry it on,” Murray says. After an introduction was brokered by the British Ceramics Biennial, one of the funders of McIntyre’s PhD, the ceramicist and ceramics company teamed up to develop and produce improved Brown Bettys.
By the time Murray took over Cauldon Ceramics in 2017, the project was well underway. “I just thought what [McIntyre] was doing was a fantastic opportunity for us,” he says. But there were a number of challenges. For one thing, he had to work directly with the local clay, rather than combining it with other ingredients as subsequent generations of ceramic makers did."We work with a natural material, dug out of the ground in Stoke-on-Trent,” explains Murray.
McIntyre’s new Brown Betty also had to be made in a factory of six workers making hundreds of teapots each week. Features such as Alcock, Lindley and Bloore’s locking lid originally benefited drinkers, stopping the lid falling out when the pot is lifted for pouring. McIntyre also redesigned the lid so it could sit inside the pot when inverted, allowing the teapots to be stacked, saving space within the small factory. Keeping the teapot’s usefulness at the forefront of his mind, he also introduced a removable metal strainer for loose leaf tea.
The process gave both McIntyre and Murray new respect for the Brown Betty’s intricacies, particularly the reintroduced non-drip spout. “It took me months and months to figure out why the spout wasn’t working,” McIntyre laughs. “I thought I was copying the original quite accurately.” A kink in the spout, left over from the casting process, allowed tea to dribble down the outside while pouring. While the kink simply needed to be softened down with a sponge during the manufacturing process, this tiny detail delayed the design’s commercial release by a year, finally going on sale in 2018. But it turned out to be worth it. The Reengineered Brown Betty Teapot nabbed a nomination for the Beazley Designs of the Year by London’s Design Museum, and will feature in the upcoming exhibition FOOD: Bigger than the Plate at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Nevertheless, it’s nearly impossible for British manufacturers to compete with the price of teapots manufactured in East Asia. While most of the sales of the new Brown Betty have been to Cauldon Ceramic’s traditional export markets, Murray is pleased to note increased sales in the United Kingdom. Hopefully, the redesigned Brown Betty teapot will once again earn the appreciation of a nation of tea-drinkers.
There's a benefit to being able to eat almost anything.
New York City’s Upper West Side has a long history with unusual animals becoming part of the scenery. Just ask Harry, Jim, and Phil, the peacocks who live on the grounds of Saint John the Divine, one of the world’s largest cathedrals.
So the goats who are going to move into two acres of Riverside Park this summer may not seem too out of place. In an effort to control invasive plants that keep growing in the steep, sloping parts of the park, which staffers have trouble accessing, the Riverside Park Conservancy will introduce to the area a squad of 24 goats, which can both stand the slanted ground and stomach the pesky weeds. The goats will occupy the grounds from May 21 to August 30, in an initiative the Park Conservancy is calling “Goatham.”
These “summer interns”—as the Conservancy’s president and CEO, Daniel Garodnick, calls them—will have a fairly wide selection of invasive snacks to choose from. The options include the sumptuous-sounding wineberry and porcelain berry plants, the full-bodied bittersweet and multifloral rose, and—of course—piquant poison ivy, which the park’s guests can fortunately “gulp down ... without a second thought,” according to the Goatham webpage. They can, in fact, “consume 25% of their own body weight in vegetation in just one day.” At that rate, they might put such a dent in the weeds that they could erase them from the landscape altogether. We know what you’re thinking: “If the goats are going to eat so much, what will the park do with all the excrement?” It's all part of the plan—it will just enrich the soil.
This all makes for not only an effective sustainability program, but also a valuable opportunity for public education. The goats, says Garodnick, offer a model for how to treat damaged landscapes without relying on chemicals. To get the message out to the public, the Conservancy will partner with Columbia University, which will send scientists to conduct live testing on the soil’s quality throughout the goats’ stay.
Larry Cihanek, whose organization Green Goats is providing the park with the fleet, says that the most “visually interesting” goats were chosen for the project in order to maximize public engagement and attention. (The organization owns about 180 in total.) They do not need training for a project like this, he adds, as eating these kinds of weeds is just a day’s work for goats. The animals are unique, says Cihanek, in the sense that they’ll “eat the junk stuff that no other animal would eat,” and because their digestive tracts neutralize seeds. Once deposited, in other words, their droppings won't produce a new generation of weeds.
Cihanek says he’s glad to collaborate on environmental issues with cities, in particular, because people don’t often associate livestock with urban environments, and thus don’t appreciate the benefits the animals can offer. (In years past, Green Goats worked on similar projects with Prospect Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park.) That may be true, but New York City’s connection with goats actually runs very deep. The city’s nickname “Gotham,” in fact, actually comes from an old Anglo-Saxon term for “Goat’s Town.”
A newly available Library of Congress collection shows the lives of an oft-overlooked minority.
In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the Library of Congress, in conjunction with the National Central Library of Taiwan, has digitized and released 1,000 rare Chinese books produced prior to 1796. Some of the titles date back as far as the 11th century. “These are the most valuable resources of premodern China in the Library of Congress,” says Qi Qiu, of the library’s Asian Division. The collection brings together Buddhist sutras, ancient maps, books on medical remedies, and other rare insights into ancient China. Among the treasures, 12 watercolor paintings take viewers on a voyage through indigenous life on the island of Formosa, better known as Taiwan.
The paintings are a look into the daily lives and customs of the aborigines who called Taiwan home for more than 6,000 years before the 17th-century arrival of Han settlers from the mainland. They depict a subsistence lifestyle, from picking coconuts to hunting deer to planting taro. The Council of Indigenous Peoples recognizes 16 tribes native to the island. Taiwanese aborigines are considered Austronesian and have genetic and cultural ties with other indigenous populations across the Pacific, such as the Polynesians and the Maori. It’s believed that Taiwan was actually the launching point for many of the cultures that settled the Pacific region.
With the arrival of the Han, the lifestyle the aborigines knew changed forever. Many people were forced to assimilate into the Han social order, and had their lands taken, or were met with outright violence. In fact, the 12 paintings are believed to have been commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor after the royal inspector visited the island in the 1740s. Today, more than 23 million people live in Taiwan, but only around 2 percent belong to an aboriginal group. The Library of Congress selection not only highlights the aborigines of Taiwan but also another ethnic minority in China, the Miao from the mountainous regions of southern China, who are featured in another collection of watercolors.
According to Jeffrey Wang, Chinese reference specialist at the library, the digitized collection represents a small slice of their 5,300 rare Chinese books. The initial release features 1,000 items, and the plan is to add another 1,000 in the near future. Due to preservation issues, some of the collection can’t be viewed by the public, according to Wang, so digitization is the only way to make them easily accessible to researchers, students, and history buffs.“That’s why we spent so much money and time to do this,” he says.
In April 1817, in the small English town of Almondsbury, a humble cobbler was going about his day—no doubt attending to some urgent shoe business—when he spotted an eccentrically garbed woman alone on the road. She wore a black turban and a red-and-black shawl and spoke in an incomprehensible foreign tongue, according to John Mathew Gutch’s 1817 account Caraboo. Kind-hearted locals put her up in a local inn for the night, where she saw a painting of a pineapple on the wall, exclaimed “Ananas!” and promptly tried to go to sleep on the floor.
In a bit of expository deus ex machina, a Portuguese sailor who spoke the woman's "language" just so happened to pass through Bristol at the time, and soon came to town, according to the History Channel. His name was Manuel Eynesso, and no, of course he didn’t mind translating the lady’s story for the curious townsfolk. According to Eynesso, this wanderer was no random woman but actually the Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean. She had, rather regrettably, been abducted by pirates but managed to escape by jumping off the ship and into the Bristol Channel, which is how she washed up in Almondsbury. The flattered townspeople began treated her like a visiting dignitary.
In turn, she put on quite a show. She used a bow and arrow, carried a gong on her back, and wore flowers and feathers in her hair. She gave fencing demonstrations, using a blade stained at the tip with vegetable poison. She even, quite scandalously, swam naked in a lake. Each night before she went to sleep, she would pray to her god, whom she called Allah-Tallah, often from the top of a tree. She entertained audiences of foreigners, linguists, painters, physiognomists, craniologists, and vagabonds.
Perhaps it's surprising lasted as long as it did, but the ruse fell apart in a matter of months. In June, Princess Caraboo made the local papers and attracted the notice of one Mrs. Neale, who owned a lodging house in Bristol. Neale recognized the princess as none other than Mary Baker, a lodger who would often dance around in a black turban and speak an invented language. Baker did not hail from Javasu—there is no Javasu—but rather a town called Witheridge, and had been working as a servant. The papers seized upon Baker’s story after her exposure, and even ran poetry and ballads composed in her honor. The final verse of one such ode published in the Bristol Mercury in 1817 reads: “I admir’d thy Caraboo./Such self-possession at command,/The bye-play great—th’ illusion grand:/In truth—’twas everything but True.”
By the end of that month, the town of Almondsbury shipped Baker across the Atlantic, to Philadelphia, where Americans were all too happy to see her perform the part of the fake foreign princess. Baker returned to England in 1824 to continue her acting career, to dismal results. But she settled down, married, had a kid, and spent most of her life selling leeches to the local hospital—similarly parasitic souls with considerably less pizzazz.
Eventually, quilted, glittering pajamas gave way to parkas and moon boots.
In the 18th century, working at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, was a pretty good gig, particularly if you enjoyed long nights tinkering with instruments and gawking at the sky. The main drawback was that it could get quite chilly.
A coat and scarf would probably suffice, but Nevil Maskelyne, who worked as Astronomer Royal for several decades until his death in 1811, found a more dapper solution: his very own custom-made stargazing suit.
Maskelyne spent a lot of time outside and in transit as he built on other astronomers’ foundations to develop a novel navigation method. With a sextant to measure the angle between the moon and other celestial objects, he figured, mariners could determine Greenwich time and gauge their longitude at sea. And in his role as founder and editor of the Nautical Almanac, which compiled star data, Maskelyne weathered many long, bitter nights at the observatory. His work was tedious and time-consuming: He trained a telescope on a meridian, listened to the clock tick, and jotted down the precise moment when various stars moved across the sky. Unfortunately for Maskelyne, the same clear, crisp conditions that are ideal for peering at stars also lead to shivering beneath them.
One way or another, Maskelyne got his hands on some gold silk from India. (Some accounts say it was a gift from his brother-in-law Robert Clive, divisive commander-in-chief of British India, while other historians have pointed out that such imported fabric was readily available in London at the time.) Sometime around 1765, Maskelyne had it fashioned into an observing suit that looks like a hybrid of glittering, jaunty evening attire and a toddler’s pajamas.
The suit is insulated with wool and flannel, and boasts a pair of built-in slippers to keep Maskelyne’s toes nice and warm. Ample cushioning around the seat of the trousers would have kept his rump a little more comfortable during long nights in his observing chair. “This suit reminds us of how physical and demanding astronomy was in the 18th century,” says Louise Devoy, senior curator of the Royal Observatory Greenwich, where the suit is currently in storage at the Prince Phillip Maritime Collection Centre.
Maskelyne’s contemporaries in England and abroad surely bundled up for chilly nights, but as far as Devoy can tell, a full observing suit like this one is pretty rare. Judging by the wear and tear around the collar and down the sleeves, though, she adds, it seems that Maskelyne got a lot of use out of it.
Clothing has changed since Maskelyne’s day. Technology, too. “In some ways, now, we're quite spoiled,” Devoy says. “You've got astronomers sitting in a nice warm office, everything controlled by computer.” Instead of spending hours shivering on a rooftop observatory, many install their arrays on a remote mountaintop, then leave them behind and check in on them from home—even several states, countries, or continents away. “One of my colleagues and I observed using the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, but we didn't do it from there,” explains Michelle Nichols, director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. “I was in suburban Chicago in my jammies sitting on my couch and the telescope was 1,300 miles away.” Snazzy getups like Maskelyne’s may be less necessary for the observers who survey the sky while “sitting in an office with a cup of coffee,” Devoy says, or in the comfort a living room.
When astronomers do venture out into the cold today, it’s often with a set of pretty standard-issue supplies. Astronomers who do stints with the United States Antarctic Program receive cozy, high-visibility Canada Goose parkas that they call “Big Red,” says Junhan Kim, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Arizona. Kim has traveled to Antarctica several times to work on the Event Horizon Telescope project, which recently stitched together the images used to visualize the shadow of the black hole in the galaxy known as Messier 87. Nestled in the parka, “it’s almost kind of warm,” Kim says. Almost.
Then again, in some ways, Kim hasn’t had it so bad. He went south during December and January, which are among the balmiest months in Antarctica. Considering that temperatures often slip below -100 degrees Fahrenheit in June and July, Kim’s -40 degree days don’t seem so terrible. Still, beneath the parka, layers are key. Researchers are encouraged to wear fleece jackets underneath, don Carhartt pants or overalls, and cover their heads with knit hats, balaclavas, and goggles. Kim stuffs hand and toe warmers in his gloves and boots, which resemble what astronauts wore on the lunar surface. (Nichols also uses these warmers as well, plus alpaca socks, when she is out working in the bitter Chicago winter—less brutal than Antarctica but still fairly ferocious.) When Kim had to free his fingers from the gloves to, say, adjust the screws on the telescope, he sometimes ducked inside to take a warming break afterward. He has also participated in a joyfully masochistic ritual known as the 200 Club or 300 Club, in which researchers sprint from the geographic South Pole into a sauna in the research station—about a one-minute run—wearing only swimsuits or skivvies. (The name of the activity is a nod to the temperature difference between the outside air and the sauna at various times of year.)
The puffy red parkas are loans that must be returned when researchers depart, but they’re on call and ready to be worn. In the 21st century, there’s less of a pressing need for a bespoke astronomy wardrobe—but if you do want to wear footie pajamas or head-to-toe gold silk while searching for the Corona Borealis or Delphinus, by all means, don’t let us stop you.
It's also helping incarcerated women reconnect with nature.
Carolyn Exum hadn’t touched a plant for almost 20 years. It’s hard to see, much less touch, nature from inside the medium-security correctional facility at Coffee Creek, where Exum is currently incarcerated. For years, no green things grew within the walls of Coffee Creek, Oregon’s only women’s prison. But that’s changed, thanks to a new program that is teaching Exum and others how to rear endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies within the prison itself, giving Exum and others newfound access to nature. Exum, who worked in a garden before her incarceration, almost forgot how much she loved rooting her fingers in dirt and or feeling the soft green veins of a leaf. “There’s life in plants,” she says. “We didn’t have a lot of that before.”
The Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly has stubby, orange-checked wings just longer than two inches. Thanks to agricultural and urban development, the butterfly has now lost 99 percent of its former grassland habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Only two known populations of the Taylor’s checkerspot remain in the wild.
Launched in May 2017, the Coffee Creek butterfly conservation lab is the result of a partnership between the Oregon Zoo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and the Institute for Applied Ecology, a Corvallis-based nonprofit. In the program’s first year, three incarcerated technicians worked with eggs and larvae, but no butterflies. This March, the program raised 476 caterpillars that were released back into the western plains of Oregon by biologists at the USFWS.
In recent years, organizations such as the Sustainability in Prisons Project have pushed to bring science and conservation programs into correctional facilities. The majority of these take place in minimum-security prisons, where incarcerated people require less-intense security and can be cleared to work off-site for landscaping or gardening, according to Chad Naugle, the sustainability programs manager for the Oregon Department of Corrections. Coffee Creek’s lab is the first of its kind in a medium-security facility.
People in medium- and maximum-security prisons have far less flexibility. Adults are not allowed to cross the gate without two security officers, so all available jobs all take place inside the prison fences—mostly limited to food production, janitorial work, or taking calls for the local Department of Motor Vehicles, Naugle says, as well as in educational programs. Before the conservation lab, Exum worked as one of Coffee Creek’s GED tutors. Sarah Martin, who also now works in the lab, previously worked in the facility’s computer-aided drafting program. “We wanted a more meaningful job opportunity for the adults in custody,” Naugle says. “The chance to work with a live animal and get to help out this endangered species becomes restorative justice and provides self-worth for them.”
Naugle first came up with the idea in 2016 while assembling the department’s sustainability program. He knew the Taylor’s checkerspot was in trouble and reached out to the Oregon Zoo to see if Coffee Creek could help. The zoo, cautious but excited, tasked Coffee Creek with raising and harvesting a batch of viola plants, the only food source for another endangered butterfly, the Oregon silverspot. After the successful propagation of around 100 violas, the zoo agreed to let Naugle open a captive rearing lab—inside the prison. Naugle interviewed and selected four incarcerated women with a history of good behavior and sufficient time left on their sentences so that they could be involved in the program long enough to train others. (Exum and Martin are both currently serving life sentences at Coffee Creek.)
Naugle converted a spare room—formerly used for yoga and emergency bed storage—into a makeshift, climate-controlled lab. Coffee Creek installed a stainless steel industrial sink, humidifier, split-air AC system, water station, tool cage, shadow board for organizing tools, racks, cages, and grow lights. The lab connects to the prison’s housing unit, so the technicians have access in an emergency. Outside, Naugle had a shed built for the checkerspots to use during hibernation.
The Oregon Zoo has a checkerspot rearing lab of its own, but they’re not quite the same. Coffee Creek’s must adhere to certain standards. For example, the technicians are only allowed to use soft-point scissors, says Ronda Naseth, a butterfly conservationist at the Oregon Zoo who oversees the program at Coffee Creek. When the lab got a microscope, Naseth had to swap out the traditional sharp-cornered glass plate for a plastic shield. Anything that could be considered a tool by the prison system is locked in a box on the wall.
Butterflies are fragile and not easy to raise, so Naseth worked with the technicians for a month before any animals actually arrived. To catch and hold a butterfly without damaging its delicate wings, for example, you must use your nondominant hand and press your pointer and middle fingers together at the base of the wings, Martin says. It’s hard to master this level of care, so the technicians practiced on plastic models from Dollar Tree. To teach the technicians how to count and handle the checkerspot’s eggs—which the butterfly lays in large clusters on the bottoms of leaves—Naseth gave everyone a tiny paintbrush and handful of poppyseeds. She also trained the women in data entry and ran through several scenarios that might happen in the butterfly’s various life stages, such as a malnourished larva deciding to hibernate for several years or a stray egg getting lost in soil.
Even in the larval stage, the butterflies seemed remarkably charismatic. “They are very social,” Martin says. “When they’re larvae they cuddle together and nominate a scout and send one [larva] up to check.” In July, the larvae then enter a state called diapause and remain dormant until mid-February, when they wake up as ravenous caterpillars. The technicians then feed them leaves harvested from the plantago plant, a hardy invasive that the caterpillars love. They grow, molt, grow more, molt again, and then USFWS biologists cart the critters back into the wild so they can complete their development, first in the hard crescents of chrysalides, and then in their brief and wondrous twilight as butterflies. That was the entire process the first year. By the next, the technicians and lab were ready for live butterflies.
The Coffee Creek lab received its first shipment of live butterflies in 2018. The insects had been captured in the wild—carefully—by USFWS biologists. And they arrived already gravid, meaning that they were carrying clusters of eggs to lay, Naseth says. Armed with good handling practices from the plastic models and poppy seeds, the technicians waited for the butterflies to lay their signature pale yellow eggs on the undersides of leaves. If any dropped off, they dipped a fine paintbrush in a little water and reattached it. If the butterflies seemed to overheat in the sun, the technicians sprayed a fine mist on the edge of their net enclosure. They also fed the butterflies by hand with cotton swabs dipped in sugar water. It was exacting, precise, slow work. “I would say our first season was very nerve-wracking,” Martin says. “We were very careful,” Exum adds. “You have to go slow, you need to be steady and meticulous. They’re very fragile animals at all stages.”
Martin swears the three original butterflies all had distinct personalities. “One nested, one bounced around, and one kept passing out,” she says. So Exum, Martin, and another technician named Mary Arreguin named them. Exum’s was Mamma Mia. Arreguin named hers Novela, after telenovelas. And Martin named the one who kept fainting Belle. “She was a huge drama queen,” she says.
The Taylor’s checkerspot only spends around two weeks of its life as a butterfly, Naseth says, and all that’s left of its life is to mate and die. So the moments the technicians spend with the fluttering creatures are bittersweet. Last season, the technicians cared for a butterfly that lived an unusually long 15 days. “We would just sit there for hours, watching her lay eggs,” Martin says. “It is always sad to see them go,” Exum adds. In its second year, the program welcomed 20 butterflies—too many to individually name. But each still has a number for tracking. “We do a lot of quality control and check to make sure that no caterpillar is left behind,” Naseth says.
Once a year, the facility welcomes the children of incarcerated mothers, and the technicians get to teach kids about the butterfly’s life cycle, and provide flower seeds for them to take home. Martin’s 14-year-old daughter dreams of being a veterinarian one day, and was thrilled to learn that her mom was involved in the butterfly program. “I remember she said, ‘Mom, it’s almost like you’re a veterinarian!’” Martin says.
Martin acknowledges there are challenges to working in such close quarters with a small team (in a setting they are unable to leave). Some days got very intense. “Sometimes we’ve had personality conflicts,” she says. “But we’ve built a wonderful rapport as teammates, and we concentrate on the task at hand because we have a common goal.” And there was time for fun. “Shallow,” Lady Gaga’s bellowing hit from the blockbuster A Star Is Born, was a popular radio singalong. “I believe that country music is what our butterflies thrive on,” Exum says.
“I disagree,” Martin retorts. “They love the 80s.”
Aside from the butterfly technicians, the lab recruited another team of 10 incarcerated women responsible for planting and tending to the 2,200 plantago plants that provide meals for the voracious checkerspot larvae. The team planted the plantago in the exercise yard, which makes the otherwise bleak place feel a bit like a garden. This past year, two workers from the plantago crew have been cross-training with the butterfly technicians to learn more about the pollination process and share their separate bodies of knowledge.
Exum and Martin say they both cared about the environment prior to their incarceration, but the Coffee Creek program has changed their perspective. “When I was younger, butterflies were everywhere. But we’ve learned they’re a direct impact of the environment around us,” Martin says. “I have always been on the side of conservation, but this program really opened my eyes,” Exum says. “We need to help replenish what we can.”
In nature, Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly eggs experience a 50 percent attrition rate for every life stage, meaning only half of the eggs make it to larvae, and half of those make it to diapause, and so on. In the Coffee Creek lab, the technicians beat those numbers. They saw an impressive 736 caterpillars mature from a batch of around 2,000 eggs laid in June 2018. USFWS biologists released the animals in two batches this spring in the fields near Corvallis, 70 miles away.
Now considered second-year technicians, Exum and Martin say they feel confident in their butterfly-rearing prowess, and have added database entry, digital photography, and microscope handling to their repertoire. They gave a slide presentation to the other incarcerated women at Coffee Creek, which they say made butterflies a hot topic at the prison. Exum is working on another presentation, this time on what it’s like to release the butterflies. The lab is growing fast and looking to add three new technicians, for a total of six, Martin says.
“I think life in general is about continually learning,” Exum says, “If you’re not learning, then something’s not right.” Just this week, she learned that a group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope.
Martin says the lab gives her a sense of peace in a world full of chaos. “It’s such a rare opportunity to help sustain the life of an endangered species,” she says. “It feels so good to give a little back.” Exum agrees. When she wakes to head to work at 7 a.m., she likes to tell herself that she’s just off to save the world, one butterfly at a time.
Thick, sugary, and creamy, rich with saffron and almonds, bhang thandai is so sweet that at first it’s hard to pinpoint the drink’s secret ingredient. After a sip or two, however, the telltale taste lingers: spicy and slightly musky, it’s the signature whiff of cannabis. After a few minutes, the high comes, dreamy as the rainbow play of Holi colors. An Indian festival staple, drunk especially during North Indian Holi celebrations, bhang thandai is part of a long history of South Asian cannabis culture.
Mentions of cannabis in South Asia date back to at least around 1500 BC, where it makes an appearance as one of five sacred plants in the Atbarva Veda. Beloved by Sikh soldiers and Mughal kings, cannabis has also long been part of spiritual practice across South Asian religions, from Shiva devotees who smoke the god’s treasured herb, to Sufi seekers who use hashish as a tool to unite with the divine. Today, bhang recipes are widely available, and the drink, made from the leaves of the plant, is legal and broadly accepted. Yet British colonialism dramatically shaped modern attitudes toward cannabis in South Asia and, in turn, around the world.
William Brooke O’Shaughnessy could have given you a bhang recipe or two. In early 1830s England, O’Shaughnessy, a young Edinburgh graduate, had gained recognition as a clever chemist. But when he found himself unable to acquire his license in London, he followed in the footsteps of many a young British lad unsure of his next step, and hightailed it to the colonies.
At that time, India was still controlled by the East India Company; it wouldn’t be officially “transferred” to the British crown until 1858. But in the colonial capital of Calcutta, British elites, often in collaboration with elite classes of Indians, had embarked on a grand scholarly mission. Their aim was to learn everything possible about the subcontinent, from its history and languages to its flora and fauna, in order to better understand—and thus, better control—the Indian population. O’Shaughnessy, the bright, young Irish physician, was no different. Upon his arrival in Calcutta, he took up a post at the Medical College Hospital, where he turned his attention to studying a unique aspect of Indian medical and culinary culture: cannabis.
At the time, cannabis use was uncommon in England, and British colonials regarded the drug with suspicion. They had long feared that cannabis could cause madness, and 19th-century colonizers considered its use a threat to colonial power. “Murderous assaults by individuals under the influence of Indian hemp have been somewhat frequent,” declared one Bombay newspaper in 1885. As a result of this violent influence, an Allahabad newspaper opined, “The lunatic asylums of India are filled with Ganja smokers.” This was true, but not necessarily because the drug caused madness. Instead, officials running “native-only” colonial asylums sometimes admitted Indian people suspected of being habitual ganja smokers for the mere fact that the system regarded them as unruly.
But British colonials were interested in anything that could yield knowledge about the colonized population. So in the 1830s, O’Shaughnessy set out on a rigorous program of research, detailing his inquiries in his 1842 The Bengal Dispensatory. Drawing from interviews with Indian colleagues, The Bengal Dispensatory provided—among descriptions of hemp plants and hemp-related literature in Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian—several cannabis recipes detailed enough for an ambitious home chef to attempt today.
To make sidhee, subjee, or bhang—drinkable cannabis preparations similar to bhang thandai—O’Shaughnessy writes: “About three tola weight [of hemp seeds] are well washed with cold water, then rubbed to powder, mixed with black pepper, cucumber, and melon seeds, sugar, half a pint of milk, and an equal quantity of water. This is considered sufficient to intoxicate an habituated person. Half the quantity is enough for a novice.”
He provides similarly detailed descriptions of majoon, or ma’jun, a cannabis-infused milk-based sweet that was a favorite intoxicant of the Mughal emperor Humayun. After providing a recipe for weed ghee that would make any contemporary brownie-baker proud, O’Shaughnessy details, “The operator then takes two pounds of sugar … when the sugar dissolves and froths, two ounces of milk are added; a thick scum rises and is removed.” Finally, the chef adds the cannabis butter, pours and cools the mixture on a pan, cuts it into small slabs, and enjoys. While O’Shaughnessy labels the consumption of these delicacies a “vice,” he also notes that the effect of bhang intoxication is “of the most cheerful kind, causing the person to sing and dance, to eat food with great relish, and to seek aphrodisiac enjoyments.”
O’Shaughnessy would know. Aside from collecting cannabis recipes, he decided to run experiments to understand the effects of the drug first-hand. From his post in the Medical College Hospital, O’Shaughnessy recruited patients (sometimes with dubious ethical standards: his subjects included children and some very stoned dogs) to be part of what Sujaan Mukherjee, a research scholar at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, argues were the first clinical marijuana experiments of modern Western medicine. In articles published between 1839 and 1843, he details the results of his investigations into the potential of cannabis to treat seizures, rheumatism, and cholera.
His study notes are high comedy. Half an hour after giving a dose of Nepalese hash, dissolved in spirits, to a “middling sized dog,” O’Shaughnessy records, the dog “became stupid and sleepy, dozing at intervals, starting up, wagging his tail as if extremely contented, he ate some food greedily.” Besides puppies with the munchies, O’Shaughnessy gave his tincture to several human subjects, one of whom “became talkative and musical, told several stories, and sang songs to a circle of highly delighted auditors.” Intriguingly, O’Shaughnessy found that hemp was effective in treating “infantile convulsions”—over 170 years before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration came to a similar conclusion.
By the 1894 publication of the British government’s Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, the notion that cannabis caused murderous madness had been partly put to rest. Analyzing the results of a survey of over 1,000 British and Indian sources across the subcontinent, the Report concluded that while “it may be accepted as reasonably proved in the absence of other cause that hemp drugs do cause insanity,” cannabis consumption could be acceptable in moderation. “As a rule,” the report concluded, “these drugs do not tend to crime and violence.” In the final decades of their reign, the British government, considering cannabis use too culturally significant to ban and too difficult to regulate, put their attempts to outlaw the drug to rest.
This ambiguous legal status hasn’t stopped the popularity of South Asian cannabis culture. From the smoky ablutions of wandering Shaivite sadhus to everyday ganja smoking on the street, from tall glasses of bhang lassi to rose-scented thandai, cannabis continues to enjoy an exalted position in many South Asian communities. With marijuana legalization leading to a rise in cannabis cuisine across the United States, it seems that—almost 200 years after William O’Shaughnessy compiled his rudimentary cannabis cookbook—the West may have finally caught up.
When Sam Nixon, an archaeologist with the British Museum, excavated ancient coin molds in Tadmekka, Mali, in 2005, it triggered a several-year exploration of how medieval Africans purified the gold they were using for their currency. Nixon had found little droplets of highly refined gold left over in the molds—which have been dated to the 11th century—as well as curious fragments of glass. Now scientists have recreated the advanced process behind the purification method they used then.
“This is the first time in the archaeological record that we saw glass being used to be able to refine gold,” says Marc Walton, codirector of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, a collaboration between Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago. “The glass appeared to be material that was [actually] recycled glass materials … so it really shows the industriousness and creativity of the craftsmen, who understood the properties of gold and glass enough to [use them for] this process of refining gold.” The recycled glass materials were remnants of broken vessels. Tadmekka was a town right in the middle of the trans-Saharan caravan route, so Nixon uncovered several types of material culture that had to do with trade, namely molds for “bald dinar,” or coins that hadn’t been stamped with the name of a mint (or a 10th-century equivalent of one).
According to Walton, Europeans in the 10th and 11th centuries purified their gold through cupellation, a process in which lead is mixed with gold laced with impurities, and then heated in a furnace until the droplets of purer gold can be skimmed off. But in the case of medieval West Africans, “They were taking the ore and other raw materials from the river and mixing it with glass,” says Walton. Since gold is inert, it doesn’t fully dissolve into melted glass, while impurities and other materials do, making this “a really novel way of using recycled glass material.”
Walton’s team at the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts replicates a lot of ancient technologies. To get to the bottom of how medieval Africans purified gold so successfully, they also made do with what their environment provided them. “We bought gold dust from a chemical supply company and then we mixed it with local Lake Michigan sand and then we made our own synthetic glass,” says Walton. “We heated it up, were able to dissolve the minerals in the sand, and were left behind with gold.”
Though Walton and his team updated this small-scale, bespoke process for purifying gold to modern times and adapted it to their environment in Illinois, their results show that the medieval Malian technique was both clever and sophisticated.
Bertha Heyman never stopped swindling men—even from behind bars. While serving time on Blackwell’s Island, New York, in the early 1880s, she managed to befriend and con a man out of his entire life savings of $900 (the equivalent of $20,700 today). But unlike other scammers of her day, she preferred to target those who really should know better. “The moment I discover a man’s a fool I let him drop,” she told a police chief in Jersey City in 1883 after one of her many, many arrests, according to Kerry Segrave’s Women Swindlers in America, 1860–1920. Heyman added: “But I delight in getting into the confidence and pockets of men who think they can’t be skinned. It ministers to my intellectual pride.”
Born Bertha Schlesinger in Prussia, she came to the United States in 1878, according to Thomas Byrnes’s 1886 Professional Criminals of America. She married twice—once in New York and once in Wisconsin—and took on the surname of her second husband, John Heyman. According to crude descriptions in newspapers of the day, Bertha was built like a tank, but what she lacked in society-approved feminine wiles, she more than made up with in charisma.
Bertha pulled off an impressive number of capers over the course of her criminal career, most of which hewed to a similar core premise. Bertha would claim to be fabulously wealthy woman who was having trouble accessing her abundant funds, and if a kind man would simply lend her a small cut of money she would access her estate and pay them back handsomely. Think of it as a 19th-century advance-fee email scam.
For some years, Bertha drifted around New York stealing watches and jewelry, forging checks and bonds, and, consequently, moving through the New York Penitentiary as if she were in a revolving door. In 1888, she moved to San Francisco with a man she said was her son, Willie Stanley. She approached Rabbi A.J. Messing, an acquaintance from her Prussian childhood, and explained that she had made the grave mistake of marrying a husband who was not Jewish (and, conveniently, deceased). She said he left her an enormous fortune, but she now wished to marry a man within her faith and needed help finding a husband. Fortunately, Messing’s brother-in-law, Abraham Gruhn, was quite taken with Bertha. He proposed in a matter of days, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
And so Bertha became joined the high society of San Francisco’s Beth Israel Congregation, attending soiree after soiree in a wardrobe purchased solely on credit and bad checks. Before the two were to be wed, Bertha’s alleged son, Willie, asked Gruhn for $500 because he was unhappy with the idea of their union. Gruhn obliged. Willie also asked for many of Gruhn’s jewels, so that he could reset them in a modern way that Bertha would appreciate. Gruhn, again, obliged. And within the week, Bertha and Willie were gone, on their way to Los Angeles.
Gruhn turned to San Francisco’s captain of detectives to plead his case. Before he’d finished the story, the captain opened a book, flipped to photo Number 122, and asked, “Is this the woman?” Gruhn nodded in disbelief.
The detectives traced the pair to Texas, arrested them, acquitted Bertha, and found Willie guilty in a sensational trial in which the judge “could hardly force his way through the crowd” to reach the bench, according to an 1888 story in the Daily Alta California. As her story spread across San Francisco, Bertha was approached to do a one-woman show in which she recreated her scandals in an opera house, posing with flesh-colored tights. She often played scenes from Romeo and Juliet with an actor named Oofty Goofty who had made a name as a human punching bag. Due to Bertha's size, Oofty sat on the balcony and she remained on the ground, according to the San Francisco Examiner. The show was a hit, and she soon went on tour across the West Coast, frequently engaging in wrestling bouts with any man who dared try her—and she generally knocked them out.
