The Greatest War Stories Never Told by Rick Beyer

Author:Rick Beyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

At the Battle of Ridgeway, the Canadian troops suffered ten dead and thirty-eight wounded. The Fenians lost only a handful of men. Colonel John O’Neil, a Civil War cavalry veteran who led the invasion, led two more Fenian invasions of Canada, in 1870 and 1871, each one a more resounding failure than the one before.

1869

CHEW ON THIS

From the Alamo to the invention of modern chewing gum.

Antonio López de Santa Anna liked to refer to himself as “the Napoleon of the West.” Most famous for storming the Alamo in 1836 and putting the defenders to the sword, he became ruler of Mexico four different times before the Mexicans finally drove him into exile.

So it was that Santa Anna became a New Yorker—for a while.

In 1869 the seventy-five-year-old dictator was living on Staten Island. He had in mind a scheme to raise money for another revolution in Mexico by selling chicle, the gummy resin taken from sapodilla trees. Upon meeting an inventor named Thomas Adams, he painted a rosy picture of how they could both make a fortune by turning chicle into a low-priced rubber substitute. Adams agreed to give it a try.

Their get-rich scheme was a complete failure. Adams spent a year experimenting on the chicle, but to no avail. Santa Anna ended up going back to Mexico, and Adams ended up stuck with the useless chicle. He was ready to dump it in the East River when he walked into a drugstore and saw a little girl ordering chewing gum made out of paraffin wax. Remembering that Mexicans chewed chicle, Adams thought he might salvage his stash by turning it into chewing gum.

Chewing chicle proved far superior to chewing wax. “Adams New York Gum Number 1” became hugely popular. It was the first modern gum, the forerunner of every package of chewing gum on store shelves today, and it launched a chewing-gum craze that is still going strong.

One more reason the motto “Remember the Alamo” should stick in your mind.

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