When the Dutch first arrived to Manhattan, there were massive oyster beds. Ellis Island and Liberty Island were originally called Little Oyster and Big Oyster Island.
Oysters were widely available from street vendors in major East Coast cities in the United States, including New York City, at the time of the Civil War.
Rocky Mountain oysters are not seafood, at all, but are, in fact, a dish made from cattle testicles (typically coated in flour and deep-fried). In Canada, the dish is known as “prairie oysters.”
In 1790, George Washington toured New York State and dropped in for breakfast at the home of Hendrik Onderdonk, a farmer and mill owner in Roslyn, Long Island. The Onderdonk family was having their own breakfast of roasted oysters, at that time considered a food for the poor, and when they heard that Washington was coming they quickly hid the oysters in a closet.
Hendrick Onderdonk’s former home is still standing; for decades it was known as the George Washington Manor Restaurant, and the story of Washington’s visit and the hidden oysters was printed on brochures. The building now houses a restaurant called Hendricks Tavern.
Andrew Onderdonk was born in New York State and may be a family connection of Hendrik Onderdonk.
Andrew Onderdonk received several contracts from the federal government in Canada to build portions of the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia, through some of the most mountainous and difficult terrain.
He has been criticised for importing Chinese labourers and paying them well below the rates paid to “whites” to keep his costs down.
Chinese labor was integral to the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad, which linked the railway network of the Eastern United States with California on the Pacific coast. Construction began in 1863 at the terminal points of Omaha, Nebraska and Sacramento, California, and the two sections were merged and ceremonially completed on May 10, 1869, at the famous “golden spike” event at Promontory Summit, Utah.
Both the county of Sacramento and the city of Sacramento took their names from the Sacramento River, which was named by Gabriel Moraga, a Spanish cavalry officer. The river was named for the Santisimo Sacramento (Most Holy Sacrament), referring to the Catholic Eucharist.
The Promontory Tower is a high-rise condominium building in Victoria, British Columbia. At 218 feet tall, it currently stands as the tallest building in Victoria. A 30-story building is in development that will replace it as the tallest.
The Lucin Cutoff is a 102 mile railroad line in Utah which runs from Ogden to its namesake in Lucin. The most prominent feature of the cutoff was a 12 mile long railroad trestle crossing the Great Salt Lake, in use from 1904 until the late 1950s. It has since replaced by a rock and dirt causeway. It was built by the Southern Pacific Company between February 1902 and March 1904 to bypass the original Central Pacific route through Promontory Summit where the Golden spike was driven in 1869. It cut 44 miles off the original route and also significantly decreased curvature and grades.
The Big Hill was the steepest part of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s main line through the Rockies. The normal desired grade in the mountains was 2.2%. The Big Hill was 4.5%, one of the steepest railway grades in the world. Special locomotives were needed to push the trains up the grade. Runaway trains and accidents were common.
The CPR’s solution was to build the two Spiral Tunnels: each tunnel was about 3/4 of a full circle. The added length of trackage reduced the grade considerably.
300 million years ago the Arthropleura, a millipede, could grow to as much as 2.3 meters in length. They are considered to be the largest land invertebrates in Earth’s history.
In North America there at least two road signs for the Arctic Circle one can drive to from San Francisco (and I don’t think there are any others – are there?). One is in Alaska, on the Dalton Highway (gMap https://goo.gl/SaZhMS, 3,100 miles from San Francisco [a former address]), and the other is in the Yukon Territory, on the Dempster Highway (gMap https://goo.gl/EdpfpE). Links are safe – I just created and shortened them) The two signs are 1,300 miles apart, by car (2,100 kilometers; gMap Google Maps).
From the sign on the Dalton Highway in Alaska, it is a 4,700-mile drive to the Tropico de Cancer sign in Baja (gMap https://goo.gl/F4BVfj) by way of San Francisco. I’ve driven to the latter, in 2006 (my imgur, Imgur: The magic of the Internet), but not yet to the former but it’s on my short list!
Lasting four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the magnitude 9.2 megathrust March 27, 1964 Alaskan earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history, and the second most powerful earthquake recorded in world history
The entire history of America can be spanned by the lives of just four presidents: George H.W. Bush was alive while Taft was alive, who was alive while Van Buren was alive, who was alive while Washington was president.
The President John Tyler family has spanned the entire American presidency in THREE generations: John Tyler was born when George Washington was President, and he has two living grandsons: Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. was born in 1924. Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928. They are the sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr., one of President Tyler’s 15 children.
‘Tippecanoe and Tyler too’ was a campaign slogan for the Whig party in the 1840 presidential election. The presidential candidate was William Henry Harrison, who was a hero of the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe against a confederacy of Native American tribes. John Tyler was the vice-presidential candidate for the Whigs.
Harrison defeated the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren. However, Harrison died just 31 days after his inauguration.
The Whig Party had two of it’s candidates elected President; General W.H. Harrison in 1840 and General Zachary Taylor, in 1848. Besides both being generals, neither man completed their term of office, Harrison dying of pnuemonia and Taylor of acute gastroenteritis. They were succeeded by John Tyler and Milliard Fillmore respectively.
According to the earthquake.usgs.gov page, the earthquake that hit Anchorage AK yesterday morning was centered at 61.323°N 149.923°W, about 7.3 miles north of the city on Point Mackenzie (gMap, Google Maps). Point Mackenzie is across the Knik Arm of the Gulf of Alaska from Anchorage, and the epicenter was about 25 miles underground. It was caused by the subduction of the Pacific tectonic plate (Wiki image, Pacific Plate - Wikipedia) into the mantle beneath the North America tectonic plate (Wiki image, North American Plate - Wikipedia). This same subduction created the arc of the Aleutian Islands which extends about 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Alaska in the east to the Kamchatka peninsula in the west — this arc boundary can be seen in those Wiki images. Relative to a fixed North America plate, the Pacific plate is moving northwest at a rate that increases from roughly 60 mm/yr at the arc’s eastern edge to 76 mm/yr near its western terminus.
Point Mackenzie is named for the Scottish explorer Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820), who completed the first east-to-west crossing of North America north of Mexico in 1793, or 12 years before the Corps of Discovery commanded by Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark. The Mackenzie River, the longest river system in Canada and the second longest in North America, is named after him.
Lieutenant William Clark had been refused promotion to Captain when President Thomas Jefferson asked his Senate to appoint him. Earlier, he had been too young to serve during the War for Independence, but he had two older brothers who did and who later attained the rank of General, his oldest brother, Jonathan Clark, and his second-oldest brother, George Rogers Clark.
In 2001, or 163 years after Lewis’ death, President Bill Clinton posthumously promoted William Clark to Captain. Some of Lewis’ descendants attended that ceremony.
(And that’s a play that encompasses yesterday’s earthquake, explorers Alexander Mackenzie, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Bill Clinton, and the second longest river in North America!) :smack:
Some years ago (10-15?), a bridge was proposed to go from the vicinity of the Port of Anchorage to. . .wait for it. . .Port MacKenzie. The supposed purpose for this boondoggle was so that in the case of a major earthquake, there would be another route out of Anchorage other than the Glen Highway. The real reason, of course, was so land speculators could make a killing in what is now moose pasture. There’s a better than even chance that the bridge, had it been built, would have suffered major damage.
Alaska’s Glenn Highway runs about 180 miles from Anchorage to Glennallen on the Richardson Highway. Paved in the 1950s, it is named for Captain Edwin Glenn, leader of an 1898 US Army expedition to find an Alaska route to the Klondike gold fields. This route became the Richardson Highway, which runs about 370 miles from Fairbanks to Valdez.