The city of Wisconsin Dells was founded in 1857, 13 years after Wisconsin had become a state, by Byron Kilbourn and was originally named Kilbourn City; the name was changed to Wisconsin Dells in 1931.
Byron Kilbourn was also responsible for the founding of Kilbourntown at the confluence of the Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic Rivers on the shores of Lake Michigan on the east side of the state, which was one of the three original towns (along with Juneau and Walker’s Point) which eventually merged to become Milwaukee.
Juneau County, Wisconsin was named after trader Solomon Juneau, who helped found Milwaukee.
Juneau, Wisconsin is a city in Dodge County. It is named after its founder, the Métis Paul Juneau, son of Solomon Juneau, founder of Milwaukee.
Juneau, Alaska, the state capital, was named after Joseph Juneau, who helped found the city there.
With just over 32,000 inhabitants, Juneau ranks as the fifth smallest state capital by population. The smallest is Montpelier, followed by Pierre, Augusta, Frankfort, Juneau, and Helena.
The November 1942 loss of the five Sullivan Brothers in the sinking of the US Navy light cruiser USS Juneau partly inspired the plot of the WWII movie Saving Private Ryan.
Whoa – good trivia. Didn’t realize they went down on the Juneau. Saving Private Ryan (1998) was the first date with my now wife. We married four years later, in 2002.
But that is not my play! Saving Private Ryan is not based on the Sullivan brothers, the five brothers killed aboard the USS Juneau. The movie is actually based on the Niland brothers, four siblings from Tonawanda NY who all served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Three brothers—Edward, Preston, and Bob — were supposedly killed in action, which caused their remaining brother, Fritz (whom the titular Private Ryan was based on), to be shipped back to America so that the Niland family wouldn’t lose all of their sons. Edward, who was originally thought dead, was actually found alive after escaping a Japanese prison camp in Burma, making two surviving brothers out of the four who fought in the war.
Preston Niland was KIA on 7 June 1944, in Normandy. He was with the 4th Infantry Division.
Bob Niland was KIA on 6 June 1944, in Normandy. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division.
Edward Niland parachuted from a B-25 Mitchell bomber and captured in Burma on 16 May 1944. Held prisoner in a Japanese POW camp in Burma for a year, he was liberated on 4 May 1945. He lived out his remaining days in Tonawanda NY, until he died in 1984 at the age of 71.
Frederick “Fritz” Niland served in the 101st Airborne Division and fought through the first days of the Normandy invasion. A few days after D-Day he went to the 82nd Airborne Division to find his brother Bob. At Division, he learned of Bob’s death. He was shipped to the English country and eventually back to New York. He lived out his days and died in San Francisco in 1983 at the age of 63.
Interestingly, Fritz Niland is buried in Anchorage, Alaska.
British Army Dr. John H. Watson was wounded at the July 1880 Battle of Maiwand. As he wrote in his account “A Study in Scarlet” (edited, some believe, by Arthur Conan Doyle), “I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.”
That’s fine, and I wasn’t writing my post as a rebuttal to yours. It was more about the fact that many people think it is about the Sullivans, than the Nilands.
John Lawrence Sullivan (October 15, 1858 – February 2, 1918), known simply as John L. among his admirers, and dubbed the “Boston Strong Boy” by the press, was an Irish-American boxer recognized as the first heavyweight champion of gloved boxing, reigning from February 7, 1882, to 1892. He is also generally recognized as the last heavyweight champion of bare-knuckle boxing under the London Prize Ring Rules.
The Marquess of Queensbury Rules are a code of rules for the sport of boxing, and are the code which still underlies the modern sport of boxing.
The rules were originally developed by a Welsh sporstman, John Graham Chambers, but when they were published in 1867, with the endorsement of the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, it was the title of the Marquess which was affixed to them.
The Queensbury Rules eventaully became widely adopted, and superceded the earlier London Prize Ring Rules; one of the key differences in the Queensbury Rules was the mandated use of boxing gloves, which eventually spelled the end of bare-fisted boxing.
There are 14 Marquesses in the United Kingdom who still own land in England. Between them, they own over 95,000 acres of land and, in 2016, received over 3.5 million pounds in agricultural subsidies.
Two famous Marquesses in fiction are (using the French spelling) the Marquis of Carabas, from the tale Puss in Boots, and the Marquis St. Evrémonde, from Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities.
The Marquesas are one of four groups of islands that comprise French Polynesia, which as a whole is dominated by Tahiti. But Tahiti is culturally separate from the Marquesas, which are now hotly disputing Tahiti’s Domination. All people of the islands have full French nationality and citizenship, the same as Parisians.
“Southern Cross” is a 1982 song by Crosby, Stills & Nash (though David Crosby had not yet reunited with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash when the song was recorded, and doesn’t appear on it). The song is based on another song, “Seven League Boots,” written by Rick and Michael Curtis, though Stills wrote new lyrics for it, based on a long sailing trip he had taken to the South Pacific after his divorce.
The lyrics make several references to French Polynesia, including mentions of Papeete (a city on Tahiti, which serves as the capital city of French Polynesia) and the Marquesas.
Papeete, or spelled Pape’ete in Tahitian, is the capital city of French Polynesia. The country abbreviations for French Polynesia are PF and PYF, according to the ISO 3166-1 standard. Papeete is subdivided into quartiers, or wards, and there are 11 of them. Besides Southern Cross, Papeete is also mentioned in the song Somewhere Over China by Jimmy Buffett.
The Southern Cross is a constellation centered on four stars in the southern sky in the Milky Way. Even though it is the smallest of all 88 modern constellations, it is one of the most distinguishable, because the four stars are all nearly 3 times as bright as an average star.
