A Brief History On June 9, 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier became the first European (White) man to discover the mighty St. Lawrence River, the gateway into North America for European explorers. Digging One of the mightiest rivers in the world, the St. Lawrence River can be described as consisting of all the Great Lakes as well as the Niagara River and the portion we traditionally refer to as the St. Lawrence itself. Draining over 1 million square kilometers of the United States of America and Canada, the St. Lawrence has a discharge even greater than that of the Mississippi…
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A Brief History On June 8, 2017, we sit on the eve of the premier of the 2017 blockbuster monster movie, The Mummy. Lucky for us, we got to see an early screening of the movie on June 6, 2017, and in RealD 3D no less! Digging Deeper The screening audience filled the theater, and the film elicited an enthusiastic vocal reaction from the crowd throughout. Gasps, oohs, ahhs, peals of laughter and exclaimed comments were sprinkled liberally throughout the presentation, the type of experience that makes seeing a movie in a crowded theater so much more exciting than watching…
A Brief History On June 7, 1769, frontiersman and American legend Daniel Boone first laid eyes on the forests, hills and valleys of Kentucky, and this epic moment in US History is commemorated by the Kentucky Historical Society as National Daniel Boone Day each year on June 7th. Digging Deeper Daniel Boone, famed American pioneer, explorer, woodsman, hunter, trapper, frontiersman and legend was born in 1734 in Pennsylvania. His career on the frontier began at birth, as he was born in a log cabin, the 6th of 11 children to a Quaker family that had moved to America to escape…
A Brief History On June 6, 1822, a Canadian fur trapper “voyageur” was accidentally shot in the stomach with a musket, leaving him with a hole that healed open, leading to extensive study of the human digestive tract. Digging Deeper A French-Canadian woodsman, St. Martin was 20 years old when the musket shot him at close range at a fur trading post on Mackinac Island. The local US Army doctor, surgeon Dr. William Beaumont attended to the terrible wound that was expected by all observers to prove fatal. Instead, the wound healed into a fistula, an open hole through St.…
A Brief History On June 5, 1829, the British ship, HMS Pickle, a 5 gun schooner, captured an armed slave ship, the Voladora, off the coast of Cuba. This vessel was not the first British ship named “Pickle,” and in fact, it was the third British Navy ship with that name. Indeed, there have been 8 Royal Navy ships with that goofy name! With all the cool and bad ass sounding names you could give a warship, why settle for some goofy name? Well, there are a bunch of goofy named warships, and here we list 10 of them. (Our…