The Foreign Origins of the Rise & Demise Japan’s Military Empire

Over the course of several years of doing extensive research, I have collected a variety of puzzle pieces about different places that bring a bigger picture into focus that is not immediately apparent on the surface.

This includes, but is not limited to, extensive research of cities and places in linear or circular alignment with each other across long-distances; places that viewers have suggested that I look into; and research into seeing the events of our modern history since 1945 with new eyes.

I have found puzzle pieces about places like Japan that specifically relate to not only the foreign involvement in the development of Japan’s Military Empire of the late 19th-century to the mid-twentieth-century in our historical narrative, and in its being dismantled, I have found this same foreign involvement taking place in other countries as well, in a way that events seem to have been orchestrated and manipulated for desired outcomes and setting the stage for future events.

I will bring in other countries that experienced similar foreign involvement, but my main focus will be on the example of Japan.

Commodore Matthew C. Perry led four ships into Tokyo Bay’s Harbor on July 8th of 1853 in an effort to re-establish regular trade and discourse between Japan and the western world for the first time in 200-years.

Commodore Perry was ordered by President Millard Fillmore to Tokyo Bay with the mission of forcing the opening of Japanese ports to American trade by any means necessary.

Millard Fillmore had been the Vice-President in the administration of President Zachary Taylor, the 12th President of the United States whose term started in March of 1849.

A hero from the Mexican-American War, General Zachary Taylor died only a short-time after that, in July of 1850, allegedly after consuming copious amounts of raw fruit and iced milk at a July 4th fundraising event at the Washington Monument.

President Taylor became severely ill, and died several days later, and Millard Fillmore became the 13th President of the United States, serving as President from July 10th of 1850 to March 3rd of 1853.

Sounds like there might perhaps be more to the story than that, though after exhuming his remains in 1991, a coroner found traces of arsenic but ruled there was not enough to conclusively support poisoning as his cause of death, and he was re-interred.

Regardless, still seems rather suspicious, even after all these years have passed.

At any rate, reasons given for the interest of the United States in establishing a relationship with Japan included, but were not limited to: 1) The opening of China’s ports to regular trade and the annexation of California, which had created an American port on the Pacific Ocean for increased trade between North America and Asia; and 2) the replacement of the sailing ships of these American traders with steamships, necessitated the securing of coal supply stations, which Japan was believed to have vast deposits of.

With regards to the opening of Chinese ports to the United States just referenced, this took place under Caleb Cushing appointed by President John Tyler, the 10th-President of the United States, as Ambassador to China in 1843, a position which he held until March 4th of 1845.

The Cushing Mission to China arriving in Macau in February of 1844 consisted of four American Warships, which were loaded with gifts, and devices like telescopes and revolvers, in the hopes of impressing the Royal Chinese Court.

When the Chinese were not inclined to receive Cushing as an envoy, Cushing threatened with the U. S. Warships in his entourage, to go directly to the Chinese Emperor.

This tactic resulted in the Chinese Emperor negotiating with Cushing, and the Treaty of Wanghia, also known as the Treaty of Peace, Amity, and Commerce between the United States and the Chinese Empire in 1844.

Within six years of the signing of the Treaty of Wanghia, China was enmeshed in the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war between 1850 and 1864.

This was a civil war between the established Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China, and Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, an unrecognized oppositional state in China supporting the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty.

Though, we are told, the Qing Dynasty ultimately defeated the opposing forces with the eventual help of British and French forces, the Taiping Rebellion left the economic heartland of China in the central and lower Yangzi River basins in ruins, and millions of people lost their lives as a result of it, as well as that in western eyes, China was marked as poor and backwards.

The “Daoguang Depression” took place in China between 1820 and 1850, a prolonged economic decline that coincided with the two most traumatic events of the 19th-century in China, the First Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, and was a reason for the beginning of Chinese immigration to the United States in the 1840s, from which Chinese immigrants supplied labor for America’s growing industry, in the form of workers for mines, factories, textile mills, and the railroad.

The First Opium War was fought between Qing Dynasty of China and Britain between 1839 and 1842, a military engagement that started when the Chinese seized opium stocks at Canton in order to stop the opium trade, which was banned.

The British government insisted upon free trade and equality among nations and backed the merchants’ demands.

From 1757 to 1842, the Canton System served as a means for China to control trade with the west by focusing all trade in the southern port of Canton.

To counter this, the British East India Company began to grow opium in Bengal, in present-day Bangladesh, and allowed private British merchants to sell opium to Chinese smugglers for illegal sale in China.

As a result of these events in history, opium dens, establishments where opium was sold and smoked, became prevalent in many parts of the world throughout the 19th-century.

Some of the world’s wealthiest families today earned a fortune engaging in the opium business, like the Forbes family, a wealthy American family of Scottish descent long prominent in Boston. whose original fortune came largely from trading opium and tea between North America and China in the 19th-century.

The Treaty of Nanjing – AKA Nanking – ended the First Opium War on August 29th of 1842, the first of what was called unequal treaties between China and foreign imperialist powers, in which China paid the British an indemnity, ceded the Territory of Hong Kong to Great Britain; and agreed to establish a “fair and reasonable tariff.”

Back to Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan.

Commodore Perry stopped in the Bonin Islands in 1853, also known as the Ogasawara Islands, on his way to Tokyo Bay to open it up for trade with the west.

They are comprised of over 30 tropical and subtropical islands located south of Tokyo.

There, Commodore Perry laid claim to the largest island, as a United States colony, calling it the U. S. Colony of Peel Island after former British Home Secretary and Prime Mininster Sir Robert Peel

Perry appointed a governor for the colony, a colonist on the island since the early 1830s named Nathaniel Savory, whom he purchased land from on Peel Island, for a steamship coaling location in 1853.

Once Commodore Perry and his ships arrived in Tokyo Bay, Perry was allowed to land and deliver a letter with United States demands to the Tokugawa Shogun, Ieyoshi, but only after Perry threatened to burn Tokyo to the ground.

The Shogun Ieyoshi died a short time after Perry’s departure in July of 1853, leaving effective administration in the hands of the Council of Elders, though nominally to his sickly son, Iesada, who was the Tokugawa Shogun from 1853 to 1858.

The Tokugawa Shogunate is called the last feudal Japanese Military Government…

… ruling from 1600 to 1868 from Edo Castle in Tokyo.

Here is a photo of one of the polygonal megalithic walls found on the grounds of Edo Castle…

…compared with this exquisite example of polygonal masonry at the Coricancha in Cusco, Peru.

Polygonal masonry is defined as a technique where the visible surfaces of the stone are dressed with straight edges or joints, giving the stone the appearance of a polygon, with minimal clearance between stones, and no mortar.

Perry returned again with eight naval vessels in February of 1854, and on March 31st of 1854, the Japanese Emperor Komei signed the “Japan and United States Treaty of Peace and Amity” at the Convention of Kanagawa under threat of force if the Japanese government…

…did not open the ports of Shimoda, located at the southern tip of the Izu Peninsula, and central to Japan’s political crisis around its inability to maintain its national seclusion policy during this time in its history…

…and Hakodate to American vessels, a port city located on the Tsugaru Strait of the Sea of Japan between the Japanese Islands of Honshu and Hokkaido.

The star fort of Goryokaku is located at Hakodate on Hokkaido, and was said to have been built between 1855 and 1866, by the Tokugawa Shogunate to protect the Tsugaru Strait from possible invasion by the Russian fleet.

Goryokaku was the site of the last battle of the Boshin War tha took place from December of 1868 until the end of June of 1869 between the Tokugawa Shogunate and Imperial forces seeking to seize power, and marked the official end of the Tokugawa Shogunate as the rulers of Japan.

Imperial rule had been restored to Japan starting in 1868 in the form of the Emperor Meiji in a time-period known in Japanese history as the Meiji Restoration, and brought in a centralized form of government in order to strengthen their army to defend against foreign influence as we are told.

Edo Castle, the star fort residence of the Tokugawa Shoguns, became the Imperial Residence in 1871.

It was during the Meiji era that Japan westernized and rapidly industrialized, leading to its rise as a military power by 1895.

Thomas Glover, a Scottish merchant, supplied machinery, equipment, ships, arms, and weapons to the Samurai of Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosu clans, who toppled the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate with the Fall of Edo on May 3rd of 1868.

Thomas Glover had arrived in Nagasaki in 1859 as an agent for what is today known as Jardine Matheson, a British multinational trading conglomerate that was founded in 1832 and based in Hong Kong, with the majority of its business interests in Asia.

The firm of Jardine, Matheson & Company emerged in 1832 from an evolving process of partnership changes of foreign companies that had first been established in 1782 as Cox & Reid, by John Cox and John Reid.

John Reid was an agent of the Trieste Company, part of the Austrian East India Company, the catchall term used for a series of Austrian Trading Companies based in Ostend and Trieste, that also included the “Imperial Asiatic Trading Company of Trieste and Antwerp,” the origins of which started in 1775 in our historical narrative for the Habsburg Monarchy government of the Empress Maria-Theresa for Austria to trade with British East India Company-ruled India from the Adriatic port of Trieste after a proposal to do so presented by Dutch-born British merchant William Bolts was accepted, and Bolts sailed forth with a 10-year charter allowing him to trade under Imperial colors between Austria’s Adriatic Ports and Persia, India, China, and Africa.

Two University of Edinburgh Medical School graduates, William Jardine and James Matheson, set-up headquarters of the firm that had evolved from Cox & Reid in Hong Kong after it had been ceded by China to Great Britain in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing.

Jardine, Matheson & Company grew rapidly, smuggling illegal opium from British-controlled India into China, and the company has been called the “most successful opium smuggling company in the world.

Along with the trade in smuggled opium, as well as tea and cotton, the firm diversified into insurance, shipping and railways.

By the mid-19th-century, Jardine, Matheson & Company had become the largest of the foreign trading conglomerates, with offices in all the major Chinese cities, and in Japan in places like Nagasaki, where Thomas Glover had established the Glover Trading Company in 1861.

Glover was credited with building the Glover House overlooking Nagasaki Ironworks in 1863 as a base for his business operations in Japan.

Glover played a major role in Japan’s rapidly emerging industrialization.

Among other things, he was involved in establishing businesses that would become part of Mitsubishi’s early growth and diversification, which included the development of the first coal mine on Takashima Island.

Takashima Island was the location of the Hokkei Pit, the first coal mine in Japan to be mechanized by steam engines, and which operated between 1869 and 1876, and of which there are a few visible remains you can visit on the island.

Mitsubishi bought the coal mine on Takashima Island in 1881, which was the largest coal mine in Japan…

…and the mine was in operation until November of 1986.

When I was looking for information on the Takashima Coal Mine, I came across the article about the investment of British capital into the development of the Takashima Coal Mine, which played a crucial role in the rapid industrialization of Japan.

Mitsubishi was founded in 1870 under the name “Tsukumo Shokai” as a shipping company by Japanese industrialist and financier Iwasaki Yataro, only two years after the Meiji Restoration.

The company’s name was changed to Mitsubishi Shokai in 1873, with Mitsubishi coming from “mitsu” or three, from the number of oak leaves on the crest, or “mon” in Japan of the Yomauchi Clan that ruled over Yataro’s birthplace of the Tosa Peninsula, which is similar to the mon of the Tokugawa clan, called the “Triple Hollyhock…”

…and the “bishi” in the company name refers to the rhombuses seen in the company’s logo, known as the “three diamonds.”

Mitsubishi quickly diversified into fields related to shipping.

Things like entering into the coal-mining business in order to gain the coal needed to fuel ships; acquired a ship-building yard and an iron mill in Nagasaki to supply iron for its ships; and started a marine insurance company to insure ships.

In 1884, Yataro, the founder of Mitsubishi, leased the Nagasaki shipyard and iron foundry from the Imperial Meiji government and entered ship-building on a large-scale, and by 1887, had purchased these facilities outright.

In 1891, Mitsubishi acquired Hashima Island in the Nagasaki Prefecture, just south of Takashima Island, and started coal-mining operations there as well.

Hashima Island was nicknamed “Battleship Island.”

Mitsubishi established undersea coal mines on Hashima Island, which operated during the rapid industrialization of Japan, leading to Japan’s rise as a military power, and the time period during which Japan adopted western ideas and production methods.

Between its opening in 1890 and abandonment in 1974 when the coal reserves were depleted, Mitsubishi developed a community in order to turn Hashima Island into a coal-producing powerhouse.

This included thousands of forced laborers in the early-20th-century primarily from Korea.

More on the issue of forced labor to work the coal mines in a moment.

At the peak of its coal-mining production in 1959, there were over 5,200 people living on 16-acres, or 6.3-hectares, making it the most densely-populated place on the Earth at the time.

The First Sino-Japanese War took place between July 25th of 1894 and April 17th of 1895, between China’s Qing Dynasty and Japan’s Meiji Empire over influence in Korea, ending when the Qing government sued for peace after months of unbroken successes by the military superiority of Japan.

As a result, regional dominance in East Asia shifted from China to Japan, and Korea proclaimed its independence from China, and was lost as one of China’s Tributary states, while Taiwan became a dependency of Japan in 1895 as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War, and Japan’s first colony until the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II in September of 1945.

Then, Japan was part of an eight-nation alliance that invaded China in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion that took place between 1899 and 1901, with the aim of relieving foreign legations in Beijing that were beseiged by the Boxer militia, who were determined to remove foreign imperialism from China.

The Boxer Protocol ending the Boxer Rebellion was signed between the Qing Empire and the Eight-Nation Alliance that provided military forces to defeat the Boxer Rebellion on September 7th of 1901, and was regarded as one of the unequal treaties.

Clauses of the Boxer Protocol included the payment of 450 million taels of fine silver as an indemnity paid over 39-years to the eight nations involved in the alliance. This equates to 18,000 tonnes of silver worth USD $333-million.

Clauses also included things like the prohibition of the importation of arms and ammunition, as well as materials for the manufacture thereof, for two years, or longer if the Powers saw fit, and the destruction of Taku Forts near Tianjin, most of which had been dismantled by the eight-nation alliance during the Boxer Rebellion.

Between 1904 and 1905, the Russo-Japanese War was fought between the Russian Empire and the Japanese Empire over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and the Korean Empire.

Japan saw Russia as a rival, fearing Russian encroachment would interfere with Japanese plans to establish a sphere of influence in both places.

The name of Manchuria is said to have come into use in Europe the 1800s.

Prior to that time, the vast region depicted on this map in purple was called Chinese Tartary, and the regions in yellow were considered independent Tartary.

After negotiations between Japan and Russia broke-down in 1904, the Imperial Japanese Navy started hostilities by a night-time surprise attack on the Russian Eastern Fleet in the Russian-held port of Port Arthur on the coast of Manchuria in China on February 9th of 1904.

Japanese forces landed in Chongjin in what is now North Korea at the start of the Russo-Japanese War, and established a supply base here because of its proximity to the front-lines in Manchuria.

After the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese remained here and declared the city an open trading port in 1908 for the transport of Korean resources to Japan and as a stopping point for resources from China.

The La Perouse Strait divides the southern part of Sakhalin Island from the northern part of Hokkaido, connecting the Sea of Japan with the Sea of Okhotsk.

One of the naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War took place here, the Battle of Korsakov, in 1904, with the Japanese preventing a Russian cruiser from rejoining the Russian Fleet in Vladivostok.

The Pacific Ring of Fire passes through the Kuril Islands, which are in the vicinity. This island chain has around 100 volcanoes, with 40 being active.

All of the islands are under Russian jurisdiction, however, Japan claims the two southernmost large islands.

The Strait of Tartary divides Sakhalin Island from southeast Russia, and connects the Sea of Japan with the Sea of Okhotsk.

The 51st parallel north passes right through here, a circle of latitude that is 51-degrees north of the equatorial plane. The capital cities of London, England, and Astana, Kazakhstan, are at the same latitude as the Strait of Tartary.

An interesting aside is the 51-degree pyramid, which is the angle of each of the sides of the Great Pyramid, and whose proportions relate both to the human form and the geomancy of the earth.

The Korea Strait between Japan and Korea, of which the Tsushima Strait is the Eastern Channel, connects of the Sea of Japan with the East China Sea.

This is where the decisive naval battle took place during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, where Japan destroyed Russia’s naval fleet.

After Japan won the Battle of Tsushima, the Russo-Japanese War was concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth on September 5th of 1905, which was mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt.

With Japan’s victory in this war, the balance of power in both Asia and Europe was shifted, resulting in Japan’s emergence as a great power, and Russia’s decline in prestige and influence in Europe.

After Japan emerged as the victor of the Russo-Japanese War, imperial Japan formally annexed Korea into the Empire of Japan in 1910, and Korea was under Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945.

It is estimated that during the Japanese occupation of Korea, before and during World War II, there were as many as 7.8 million Koreans were conscripted as forced labor or soldiers during Japan’s imperial expansion.

During World War I, Japan declared war on Germany in 1914 as an ally of Great Britain, and quickly seized the German colonies in the Pacific of the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall islands.

On September 5th of 1914, the Japanese conducted the world’s first successful naval-launched air raids from the seaplane carrier Wakamiya, and on the next day, the first air-sea battle in world history took place when an aircraft launched from the Wakamiya attacked several Austro-Hungarian and German targets on sea and land.

In the years between World War I and II, the Japanese developed and launched the world’s first purpose-designed aircraft carrier, the Hosho, and then subsequently developed a fleet of aircraft carriers.

In China, the Chinese Civil War was fought off-and-on between the Nationalist Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party from 1927 to 1949.

Japan already controlled the area along the South Manchuria Railroad, and its Army further invaded Manchuria in northeast China in 1931, after what is called the false-flag Mukden incident, in which Japan claimed to have territory attacked by the Chinese and giving justification for its invasion of Manchuria.

Subsequently, in 1932, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo in China, which lasted until 1945 when Imperial Japan surrendered at the end of World War II.

The Last Qing Emperor of China, Puyi, was installed by the Japanese as the Head-of-State of Manchukuo in 1932, and he became its emperor in 1934, a position he held until the end of World War II.

Puyi was only a figurehead, with the real authority in the hands of Japanese military authorities.

Puyi’s life story was very sad, as is told in the 1987 movie “The Last Emperor” directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

By 1937, Japan had annexed territory north of Beijing, and after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, a battle between the Imperial Japanese Army and China’s National Revolutionary Army, and regarded as the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese began a full-scale invasion of China.

This led to Japanese conquests on the eastern coast of China and the occupation of Shanghai and Nanjing.

The Chinese suffered greatly in both military and civilian casualties, with an estimated 300,000 killed during the Nanjing Massacre, the mass murder of Chinese civilians, in the first six weeks of Japanese occupation, including mass rape, looting and arson.

It was considered one of the worst atrocities of World War II.

The Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party that had started in August of 1927 was put on-hold between 1937 and 1945, when the two factions united in the face of the Japanese invasion of China and establishment of its puppet-state Manchukuo.

Generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Communists gained control of mainland China in 1949, forcing the leadership of the Nationalist Republic of China to retreat to the island of Taiwan.

In September of 1940, Japan became allies with Germany and Italy in what was called the “Tripartite Pact,” also known to history as the Axis, and in April of 1941, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact.

Japan refused to withdraw from China and Indochina, and an economic embargo against Japan by the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands started in July of 1941, particularly gasoline and things like scrap metal and steel.

Hideki Tojo was the Prime Minister of Japan between 1941 and 1944, during most of the Pacific War.

Tojo supported a “preventive war” against the United States, an armed conflict initiated in the belief that, while not imminent, war was inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk.

He oversaw Japan’s decision to go to war and its conquest of much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Tojo was arrested for war crimes in September of 1945, after Japan’s unconditional surrender.

He tried to commit suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the time of his arrest, but he survived, was subsequently imprisoned, tried and executed by the end of 1948 for his crimes.

Isoroku Yamamoto was a Fleet Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II, the main sea-going component of the Imperial Navy.

Yamamoto oversaw the attack on Pearl Harbor; Battles of the Coral and Java Seas; and the Battle of Midway.

He was killed in April of 1943, apparently as the result of a targeted attack on his plane, as directed by American military leadership.

After the surprise attack by the Japanese on the U. S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7th of 1941, the United States, United Kingdom, and other Allies declared war on Japan.

Initially, the Japanese encountered successes in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, capturing Hong Kong, Malaya, Thailand, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and other Pacific Islands.

They engaged in major offensives in Burma and the Imperial Navy attacked Australia.

The tide turned in the Allies favor with the Battle of Midway in the middle of 1942, when the U. S. Navy defeated an attacking fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy, in which considerable damage was inflicted on the Japanese fleet.

While Japan did have some successes in land battles after that, from 1943 onwards, the Japanese military forces suffered major casualties and had many retreats.

Throughout the course of Japan’s military activity between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese were known for mistreatment of POWs and civilians through forced labor and brutality.

Kamikaze attacks began in October of 1944 when the war was looking bleak for Japan, part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of pilots flying suicide attacks against Allied naval vessels on the closing stages of the War in the Pacific.

These pilots would attempt to crash their aircraft, loaded with explosives into Allied ships, with an estimated 19% success rate.

Numbers included 3,800-such Japanese pilots killed, and 7,000 Allied personnel killed, as a result of these suicide attacks.

Japan was unwilling to surrender, and the tradition of dying instead of defeat, capture, and shame was deeply entrenched in its military culture.

There were three Big Three Wartime Conferences held between Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union during World War II.

The first was held in Tehran in November of 1943, and in which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin committed to open a second front against Nazi Germany, two years after the Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran in August of 1941.

The second was held in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula in February of 1945, in which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met to discuss the post-war reorganization of Germany and Europe.

The third Big Three wartime conference was held in Potsdam, Germany between between July 17th and August 2nd in 1945.

They gathered to decide how to administer Germany after its unconditional surrender nine-weeks earlier on May 8th of 1945.

Franklin Roosevelt’s death occurred on April 12th of 1945, and his Vice-President Harry S. Truman succeed him and represented the U. S. as President at the Potsdam Conference…

…and on July 28th, the new Prime Minister Clement Atlee replaced Winston Churchill as the representative for Great Britain at the Potsdam Conference.

A number of changes had occurred since the Yalta Conference that greatly affected Big Three relations in Potsdam.

By the time of the Potsdam Conference, the Soviet Union occupied central and eastern Europe – with the Red Army effectively controlling Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania – claiming this region was a legitimate sphere of Soviet influence as well as a defensive measure against future attacks.

Outcomes of the Potsdam Conference included, but was not limited to: the division of Germany and Austria into four occupation zones, with their capitals of Berlin and Vienna divided into four zones as well; the prevention of Nazi activity and preparation for the reconstruction of Germany into a democratic state; the decision to put Nazi war criminals on trial; war reparations to Allied countries; and the dismantling of Germany’s war industry.

During the same time period as the Potsdam Conference, we are told the United States successfully tested the first atomic bomb on July 16th at Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The Potsdam Declaration was issued on July 26th, an ultimatum calling for the surrender of all Japanese forces or Japan would face prompt and utter destruction.

This is what we are told in the historical narrative.

By August 5th of 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, destroying the city and killing over 70,000 people…

…and the second atomic bomb was dropped on the ship-building center of Nagasaki on August 9th, several days later, killing around the same number of people as Hiroshima.

I am not in position to say one way or another whether or not what we are told was what actually happened because I simply don’t know.

What I do know is that we have been lied to…A LOT…and that it is important to question everything we have ever been told about anything.

Then, Japan formally surrendered on August 15th of 1945, with the formal treaty signed on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2nd of 1945, and was deprived of any military capability.

The Potsdam Declaration was intended by the Big Three to be the legal basis for administering Japan after the war, and after Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Japan General Douglas MacArthur landed there in September, it served as the legal basis of the occupation’s reforms.

MacArthur established U. S. Military bases in Japan to oversee the post-war development of the country in a period of Japanese history known as the “Occupation.”

While the Emperor Hirohito was allowed to remain on the imperial throne, the Japanese constitution was completely overhauled, and the Emperor’s powers became strictly limited by law, and a parliamentary democracy was installed as the new form of government.

When the 1947 Constitution was adopted, the “State of Japan” was established, and the “Empire of Japan” was dismantled and its overseas territories lost.

Also, after the August 15th surrender of Japan in 1945, the Korean peninsula was divided at the 38th-parallel into two zones of occupation, with the Soviets administering the northern half, and Americans the southern half.

In 1948, as a result of Cold War tensions, the occupation zones became two sovereign states – socialist North Korea and capitalist South Korea.

The governments of the two new Korean states both claimed to be the only legitimate Korean government, and neither accepted the border as permanent.

This state-of-affairs led directly to the Korean War in 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th following clashes along the border and insurrections in the South.

The Korean War was one of the most destructive conflicts of modern times, with around 3,000,000 deaths due to the war, and proportionally, a larger civilian death toll than either World War II or the Viet Nam War; caused the destruction of nearly all of Korea’s major cities; and there were thousands of massacres on both sides.

The same pattern of dividing a country into two different political systems and economic systems happened in Vietnam as a result of the 1954 Geneva Conference in Switzerland, to settle unresolved issues from the Korean War and the First Indochina War in Vietnam, and attended by representatives from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, as well as from Korea and Vietnam.

The Geneva Accords established North and South Vietnam with the 17th parallel as the dividing line, and the French agreed to remove their troops from North Vietnam.

The agreement also stipulated that elections were to be held within two years to unify Vietnam under a single democratic government.

These elections never happened.

The non-Communist puppet government set up by the French in South Viet Nam refused to sign.

The United States also refused to sign on, with the belief that national elections would result in an overwhelming victory for the communist Ho Chi Minh who had so decisively defeated the French colonialists.

Within a year, the United States helped establish a new, anti-Communist government in South Viet Nam, and began giving it financial and military assistance.

The first Gulf of Tonkin incident took place on August 2nd of 1964 between ships of North Vietnam and the United States, and was an international confrontation after which the United States engaged more directly in the Vietnam War.

While there was a second Gulf of Tonkin incident alleged to have happened on August 4th of 1964, this second occurrence has long been said not to have taken place.

And there are the people who believe the first Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened either.

Whether or not the Gulf of Tonkin incidents actually happened, they were used as an excuse for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress on August 7th of 1964, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson authority to help any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be in jeopardy of Communist aggression, and was considered the legal justification for the beginning of open warfare with North Vietnam and the deployment of American troops to Southeast Asia, of which, with the institution of the draft, there were over 500,000 troops sent by 1966.

President Gerald Ford had announced the end of the Vietnam War for the United States almost eleven-years later in a speech he gave at Tulane University on April 23rd of 1975, after Congress voted against his request for a $722 million aid package for South Vietnam, though money was given for evacuation.

The Fall of Saigon took place on April 30th of 1975, with entry of North Vietnamese forces into the city, and right after the helicopters of Operation Frequent Wind evacuated Americans, at-risk South Vietnamese and third-country nationals from the capital of South Vietnam.

North and South Vietnam were subsequently reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam all the way through to the present day.

It certainly looks like Japan and other countries have been manipulated throughout our modern history by foreign interests, with events orchestrated and manipulated by unseen influencers for desired outcomes and the destruction of the original civilization and setting the stage for future events to bring us to the world we live in today.

Was Imperial Japan of the 1868 Meiji Restoration what is defined as “Controlled Opposition?”

Controlled Opposition is a strategy in which an individual, organization, or movement is covertly controlled or influenced by a 3rd-party and the controlled entity’s true purpose is something other than its publicly stated purpose.

The controlled entity serves a role of mass deception, surveillance or political/social manipulation. The controlled party is portrayed as being in opposition to the interests of the controlling party.

Who was involved in the creation of the new civilization and narrative?

Top candidates for this New World Order reset activity include Catholic orders like the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries, the Hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the Royal Houses of Europe…

…and their secret activities involved in this were carried out with the involvement of the highest echelons of secret societies including the Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Pythias, and the Skull and Bones Society.

The definition of Zionism we are most familiar with is of an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel.

But what if think Zionism was the vehicle by which the world’s Controllers, known by names such as the Illuminati, Cabal, Globalist elite, and Bilderbergers planned and executed the corporate structure for their global take-over of the world’s finances, resources and people.

They are a small number of related, elitist family bloodlines, hidden in different nationalities and religions, with elaborately-constructed plans for world domination.

We are living in a strange time of in-between right now, but I personally believe the world’s elitist controllers will not get away with all that they have done, and that their days are numbered.

Where is Hel on Earth?

In the course of doing research over the last couple of years based on viewers’ suggestions, I encountered some interesting places either with “Hel-” as a part of the name like the small archipelago off the coast of Germany known as both Heligoland and Helgoland, or actually named Hel, like Poland’s town of Hel, located on the Hel Peninsula separating the Bay of Puck from the Baltic Sea, and among other things both of the places were battle locations from the outset of and during World Wars I and II.

Based on my findings from this research, my curiousity was piqued about places named Hel on Earth and I decided to dive deeper into this subject.

My starting point for this post is Hel, the Norse goddess of the Underworld.

Hel was the daughter of the trickster god Loki and the giantess Angrboda.

Her brother Fenrir was a giant wolf, and her brother Midgardsormr, also known as Jormungand, a giant serpent.

Depicted with half-human and half-skeletal features, Hel is often referred to as the Goddess of Death…

…and the Ruler of the Dead.

Yet the goddess Hel was also considered by some in the positive light of being a “soul transformer,” helping us in our transition between life and death.

Hel’s name was the root of the English word “hell,” a place regarded as a spiritual realm of evil and suffering and perpetual fire where the wicked are punished after death.

What we are told about the goddess Hel is that she ruled over the underworld realm of the dead called Helheim, one of the nine worlds in Norse Cosmology, where we are told those who die a dishonorable death go to a land of ice without fire.

A “dishonorable” death was considered any death in which the person did not die in battle, including death from old age and illness.

We are told that “Valhalla,” said to translate from Old Norse as the “Hall of the Slain,” was a majestic hall in Asgard, a location associated with the gods and presided over by Odin.

Interesting that an immense tree named “Yggdrasil” serves as the connection between the nine worlds in Norse Cosmology.

The sacred and holy Yggdrasil, the World Tree, was said to be located at the very center of the Universe, with three roots extending far away into varying places.

One translation of the term “Askr Yggdrasil” refers to the World Tree, with “askr” meaning Ash Tree in Old Norse.

It is important to note that other translations have negative assocations.

One is that Yggdrasil means “gallows,” after “Odin’s Horse,” from which the Norse God Odin hung himself from the tree as a sacrifice.

Others have translated “Yggdrasil” from the Old Norse word “Yggr,” meaning “terror.” So then Yggdrasil becomes the “Tree of Terror” as opposed to the “Tree of Life.”

All of this information tucked away in our memory banks as myth needs to be taken into consideration when determining the true nature of this realm and the Universe, and all the ways truth has been inverted to emphasize death over life, and to demonize and cloak the actual nature of where we live and our place in the Universe.

One more thing before I move on from the goddess Hel and Norse Mythology and Cosmology.

A primary source of all of this information is said to come from the “Prose Edda,” also known as “Snorri’s Edda,” said to be an Old Norse textbook written in Iceland sometime around 1220 AD in the early 12th- century by the Icelandic scholar and historian Snorri Sturluson, and considered the fullest and most detailed source of knowledge about Norse mythology and body of myths of the northern Germanic people.

So here we have the fullest and most detailed source of knowledge of Norse mythology including a goddess named Hel who was the” Goddess of Death” and “Ruler of the Dead” from whom we get the name of hell for the place of fire and eternal suffering that the wicked go to when they die first appearing in the early 1200s.

We are told that seven manuscripts and or fragments of the “Prose Edda” survive today – six from the medieval period during the 1300s, and one is a copy of the Manuscript from the early 1600s called the “Codex Trajectinus,” housed at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands.

We are also told that Snorri Sturluson’s works provided information on persons and events in northern Europe during times when such information was scarce and hard to find.

This information factored into establishing a Norwegian national identity during the Norwegian Romantic Nationalism period in the mid-19th-Century, a movement between 1847 and 1867 in art, literature, and popular culture.

Romantic Nationalism was the form of nationalism in which the state claims its political legitimacy as a consequence of the unity of those it governs, including such factors as language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs.

This was in opposition to dynastic or imperial rule.

More to come shortly on the background in our historical narrative of what was taking place in the same time period as the emergence of Romantic Nationalism around the mid- 19th-century.

Modern Italian, considered the closest of the Romance languages to Vulgar Latin, or the spoken form of Latin from the Late Roman Republic onwards in our historical narrative, was said to have developed in Tuscany in Central Italy, and was first formalized in the early 14th-century through the work of Florentine poet, writer and philosopher Dante Alighieri, considered the “Father of the Italian Language.”

The exact year of Dante’s birth was unknown, and much about his early life and education is not known.

Dante Alighieri’s best-known work was the “Divine Comedy,” also considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature.

The “Divine Comedy” was a narrative poem believed to have been composed by Dante between 1308 and 1321, completed shortly before his death in September of 1321.

The poem has three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso – to which Dante journeys with a different guide for each, and the subject of the poem was the state of the soul after death, with Divine Justice being meted out as either due punishment or reward.

So within 100-years of the publication of Snorri Sturluson’s “Prose Edda” in Iceland bringing us concepts of a goddess named Hel meting out a mythological form of Divine Justice as punishment (Helheim) or reward (Valhalla), we have Dante Aligheri bringing us the same information albeit in the form we have come to know today as what happens to us after we die based on the state of our soul, and the modern Italian language as well.

With regards to the question in the title of this post “Where is Hel on Earth,” I am going to start with research I have done in the past which was based on viewers’ suggestions that led me to some places with “Hel” in the name.

One place that embodies this same dual nature of the word “Hel” in our world is a small archipelago of two islands in the North Sea that is known both as Heligoland and Helgoland – meaning either “Holy Land” or “Hell Land.”

These small two islands are located in what is called the Heligoland, or German, Bight in the southeastern corner of the North Sea, and has been part of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein since 1890.

The larger of the two islands has a permanent population of somewhere around 1,000 people.

The smaller of the islands is called Dune, which is not permanently inhabited, but is the location of Heligoland’s airport.

Heligoland was historically part of Denmark.

Great Britain had attacked Copenhagen in August of 1807 in what was called the “Siege of Copenhagen” during the Napoleonic Wars, using the pretext of the fear that Napoleon was going to attempt to attack the Danish-Norwegian Fleet.

Britain then proceeded to seize the Danish-Norwegian Fleet in September of 1807, assuring the use of the sea lanes in the North Sea and Baltic Sea for the British merchant fleet.

The “fleet robbery” drew Denmark-Norway into the war on the side of Napoleon.

On September 11th of 1807, Heligoland surrendered to the British Navy’s Admiral Thomas McNamara Russell, it became a center of intrigue and resistance against Napoleon.

Then, Heligoland was ceded by Denmark to Great Britain as part of the terms of the 1814, Treaty of Kiel between the United Kingdom and Sweden on the anti-French-side, and Norway and Denmark on the French-side.

The reason given for the Treaty of Kiel was to end the hostilities between the parties in the on-going Napoleonic Wars, which didn’t officially end until November of the following year, but the Treaty also officially ended the ruling Oldenburg Monarchy of Denmark-Norway when Norway was transferred to the King of Sweden.

Interesting to note the word “Hyperboreus” in this map relating to the Treaty of Kiel.

 The memory of Hyperborea has come down to us as a lost ancient land considered to have been in the general vicinity of Greenland. 

It was a fabulous world of eternal spring located in the far north, beyond the home of the north wind.  Its people were giants, with blessed and long lives untouched by war, hard work, old age and disease.

It is called a myth, but was it mythical or did it actually exist?

Hyperborea map

We are told that the main reason the British retained the small Heligoland Archipelago was to inhibit any future French naval aggression against the Scandanavian or German states, though nothing was really done to fortify it during this time.

What it did become in 1826 was a seaside spa and popular tourist destination for Europe’s upper class, and attracted artists and writers like August Heinrich Hoffman, a German poet best-known for writing “Das Lied der Deutschen” in 1841, the third verse of which became the national anthem of Germany in 1922.

It is interesting to note that August Heinrich Hoffman was also a member of the Young Germany movement, a group of German writers which existed from 1830 to 1850, a youth revolutionary progressive ideology that included socialism which was sweeping Italy, Poland, France, Ireland, and the United States during this time as well.

Giuseppe Mazzini was the Italian politician, journalist, and activist, who founded the political movement for Italian youth (under age 40) in 1831, the forerunner of these other political movements for youth.

Mazzini also became the leader of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati in 1834.

The Order’s founder, Adam Weishaupt, died in 1830 in Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, under the protection of Duke Ernest II, the brother of Prince Albert and cousin of Queen Victoria, who was also a cousin of Prince Albert.

The House of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld became the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1826, which became known to us as the House of Windsor in July 17th of 1917.

The name of the ruling Royal House of Great Britain changed from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor exactly 200 years after the premier of Handel’s “Water Music” took place for King George I on a barge on the Thames on July 17th of 1717.

Handel's Water Music Premier

King George I became the first British Monarch of the German House of Hanover on August 1st of 1714, the German composer Handel had become a British citizen in 1727.

Queen Victoria was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover.

I do find the find the performance of “Water Music” for King George I on July 17th of 1717 and the changing of the name of the ruling house of Great Britain to Windsor from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha exactly 200-years later as a significant finding because there is no doubt in my mind that we are living on an occulted timeline with numerology being part of how it was occulted.

Numerology is the study of mystical relationships between numbers, letters and patterns, and can be use with both for good and evil intentions.

Back to Heligoland/Helgoland.

Heligoland became a refuge for the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 that were responsible for taking down the old ruling houses of Europe.

The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states, and was the most widespread revolutionary wave in Europe’s history, with 50 countries being affected.

The goal was to remove the original ruling families, and ultimately replace them with a new form of government, which was ultimately controllable.

Great Britain ceded these two small islands in the southeastern part of the North Sea to the German Empire in the signing on June 1st of 1890 of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, also known as the Anglo-German Agreement of 1890.

The accord between the two countries, in addition to the Heligoland Archipelago, gave Germany control of the Caprivi Strip, a ribbon of land in the southeastern corner of Namibia, surrounded by Botswana to the South; and Angola and Zambia to the North…

…and gave access to the Zambezi River to German south-west Africa, and giving Germany control of the heartland of German East Africa.

In return for Heligoland in the North Sea and the Caprivi Strip in Africa, Germany recognized British Authority in Zanzibar, an island archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania in southern East Africa, which was a key link in British control of East Africa.

The Germans turned the islands into a major naval base, and the civilian population was evacuated during World War I.

The first naval battle of World War I, the Battle of Heligoland Bight, was fought on August 28th of 1914 between British ships and German ships.

By the end of the day, the Germans had lost three light cruisers and a torpedo boat, with three more light cruisers and torpedo boats each damaged, and 712 men killed in battle; and the British only had 35 killed, and four ships damaged – one light cruiser and three destroyers.

The battle was regarded as a great victory in Britain.

A “bight” is defined as a bay that is broad, open and shallow, or as a concave bend or curvature in a coastline, river or other geographical feature like a cliff.

Like maybe it was once land above-water once-upon-a-time?

More on this possibility shortly.

In between World Wars I and II, physicist Werner Heisenberg first came up with the equation underlying his picture of quantum mechanics while on Heligoland in the 1920s.

The Germans were also said to have fortified Heligoland, remember also known as Helgoland…

…as a sea fortress, with fortifications above-ground…

…and extensive bunker tunnels below ground, as there are 6-miles, or 10-kilometers, of tunnels, that go down five-stories, and are parallel to, and above, each other.

The second Battle of Heligoland Bight took place on December 18th of 1939, and was the first named air battle of World War II, with the Royal Air Force bombing German Navy ships, but this time the victory at the end of the day was called for the Germans, and the biggest loss for the RAF Bomber Command up to that point in World War II, with regards to which Great Britain had declared war on Germany on September 3rd of 1939, right after Germany had invaded Poland, on September 1st.

It is very interesting to note that the very first battle of the German invasion of Poland was the Battle of Hel, which took place from September 1st to October 2nd of 1939 between the invading German forces and the defending Polish forces on Poland’s Hel Peninsula, taking place primarily around the Hel Fortified Area, said to be a system of Polish fortifications constructed between World War I and World War II in the 1930s near Poland’s border with Germany.

More on the Hel Peninsula in a moment.

Between 1945 and 1952, Heligoland/Helgoland was used as a bombing range.

On April 18th of 1947, the Royal Navy detonated 6,700 metric tonnes, or almost 7,400 tons, of explosives in an attempt to destroy the island completely and remove it as a fleet base for the Germans, resulting in one of the biggest, non-nuclear explosions in history, shaking the main island down to its base and creating what is called the “Mittelland.”

On March 1st of 1952, Heligoland was returned to German control, and its former inhabitants were allowed to return after the German authorities cleared a significant quantity of undetonated ammunition and rebuilt the houses.

Today, it is once-again a holiday resort like it was back in the 19th-century, and enjoys a tax-exempt status.

What in the holy hell is really going on here??!!

One more thing before I move on. The viewer who pointed me in the direction of this place brought to my attention that the name of the southern point of Helgoland, which was “Sathurn” as seen in the 1900 map.

With regards to the subject of Heligoland/Helgoland, another viewer commented that Heligoland was indeed a sacred and holy place, and is the only place in the world that a certain type of blood red silex, or flint, can be found.

Also that Heligoland is a remnant of Doggerland, believed by some to be part of Atlantis, and that it once connected Great Britain to Continental Europe.

Perhaps now the remaining remnants of which are beneath the North Sea and part of the Heligoland Bight?

We are told that Doggerland was said to have been submerged beneath the southern North Sea 8,000 years ago after the Storegga landslide, which took place off the coast of Norway between Bergen and Trondheim, and generated a tsunami strong- enough, and high-enough, to take out what was called the “True Heart of Europe.”

But could this event have taken place much more recently than thousands of years ago by a deliberately-caused cataclysm?

Another viewer left a comment with lyrics from a song by Massive Attack in their 2010 Album, “Heligoland.”

These lyrics were from the song “Saturday Come Slow”:

In the limestone caves
In the south west lands
What towns in the kingdom
Beneath us understand?

Is Humanity under Massive Attack by dark forces antithetical to organic life and goodness intent on taking over the Earth and everything on it? 

I definitely think so.

Next I am going to take a look at Poland’s Hel Peninsula.

The Hel Peninsula is a 22-mile, or 35-kilometer, -long sandbar peninsula in the northern part of Poland separating the Bay of Puck from the Baltic Sea.

The Bay of Puck is described as a shallow western branch of the Bay of Gdansk with an average depth of 7-feet, or 2-meters, to 20-feet, or 6-meters.

It is only available for the use of small fishing boats and yachts.

Perhaps yet another place where land is submerged?

There is an abandoned and derelict “torpedo test facility” in the Bay of Puck that the Germans used for their torpedo tests.

Known locally as “Torpedownia…”

…the Germans fired their “test torpedoes” at Jastarnia and Jurata on the Polish Hel Peninsula between 1942 and 1945.

The Polish Hel Peninsula is a popular tourist destination in the present-day, with a road and railroad, and one-busline, until recently designated by the number “666,” running along the peninsula from the mainland to to the town of Hel at the furthest point.

Since June 24th of 2023, a little over a week ago from the time I am doing the research for this post, the number of the busline has been changed to “669” after public outcry.

So here we have a great example of numerology and negative and positive meanings.

The number sequence of “666” is most strongly associated with its negative occult meaning used to signify the devil, the antichrist, and evil in general.

What is less well known is that the number sequence “666” has positive meanings when you see it pop-up somewhere in your life, like the one listed here among others: Reflect – It’s time to wake-up to your higher spiritual truth.

But since we are talking about places actually named “Hel,” one more thing before I move on from here.

The Hel Peninsula and Bay of Puck are part of Poland’s Puck County.

What intrigues about the name of this place is that a “Puck” was a creature in European folklore that presented as a domestic and nature sprite, demon, or fairy.

Pucks started showing up in Shakespeare and other literature of the Early Modern Era in Europe starting in the 1500s in our historical narrative.

They were spirits that were both helpful and mischievous at the same time. For example, they would assist with chores in a household, and if something displeased them, they would undo the work they had done.

Interestingly, they still show up as characters in literature or other media to this day, like in the 2109 Amazon series “Carnival Row.”

I don’t know. Nothing would surprise me, so this just might be another connection to the subject matter of this post.

These are some other places named Hel or Hell on Earth.

There is a Hell in the Nord-Trondelag county of Norway.

Hell is located the short-distance of 16-miles, or 25-kilometers, due east of Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city.

Hell is situated on a railway junction where the longest railroad line in Norway, the Nordland Line, running between Trondheim and Bodo for a distance of 453-miles, or 729-kilometers, branches off from the Merakerbanen between Trondheim and Strolien, Sweden.

Otherwise, at a superficial glance, there is not much in Hell, Norway, the town where Hell freezes over, with the town’s name being the main tourist attraction.

But on closer examination, I found a number of interesting things, starting with the.road-racing circuit in Hell, the Lankebanen, which is used for a variety of motorsports.

The finding of the road-racing track, also called a “road-racing circuit,” led me to take a closer look at what else is in the vicinity of Hell, Norway, because I have consistently found race-tracks in close proximity to, and in geometric relationship with, airports all over the world, and one of the components I have looked at in compiling evidence for all of the infrastructure of the Earth functioning as part of a circuit board designed by the original advanced world wide civilization as a free-energy-generating grid system.

Trondheim Airport is located 1.7-miles, or 1.72-kilometers from the Hell Railroad Station, with two elliptical tracks nearby a short-distance in linear alignment to the airport, one to the northeast, and one to the southeast.

The Airport is located 3.4-miles, or 5.4-kilometers, from the Lankebanen road-racing circuit, which is slightly to the southwest of the airport.

Just to the east of the Lankebanen are two more racing circuits – one is Hell Motorsports and the other is the Lanke Travbane for horse-racing.

To put this into context, I have found the same things in cities all over the Earth, finding the exact same configuration across countries and continents.

The mouth of the snaky, S-shaped Stjordalselva River is located between Hell and Stjordalshausen.

Along with finding the same s-shaped river bends all over the world…

…I am also finding that railroads and roads typically run along these s-shaped river-bends, like the Meraker Line Railway and European Route E14 in this part of the world…

…a subject which I explored in-depth in North America not long ago, finding the co-location of railroads, rivers, canals, waterfalls, historic highways, and powerplants all across the continent in all directions.

Waterfalls on the Stjordalselva River include the Nustadfossen; Turifossen; and Dalamofossen situated around the train destination of Meraker.

Waterfalls on tributaries of the Stjordalselva River include the Storfossen and the Sonfossen.

Interesting to note there are powerplants all throughout this region…

…including the Julfoss Power Station in Hell itself.

I first encountered Trondheim doing research on a major long-distance alignment of cities and places going eastwards across Europe from Cape Farewell at the southern tip of Greenland which can be found in ” Bonanza! Correlation of Mines & Minerals to the Earth’s Grid System – Pt 2 Cape Farewell to the Maldives.”

A couple of points I wish to bring forward from this research are as follows.

The first thing is that Hell was directly on this alignment as it is a short-distance due east of Trondheim, though I was not aware of that information until I did the research for this post.

Another thing is that during World War II, Trondheim was occupied by Nazi Germany from the day that the Germans invaded neutral Norway on April 9th of 1940 on the pretext that Norway needed protection from British and French interference, and like Denmark and the Channel Islands, the Nazis occupied Norway for 5-years, until the end of the war in Europe, in May of 1945.

The last thing I want to mention is that Trondheim was originally known as Nidaros.

Trondheim is the seat of the Lutheran Diocese of Nidaros, and the Nidaros Cathedral is the national sanctuary of Norway and is the traditional location of the consecration of new kings of Norway, and is considered the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world.

It was said to have been built in the years between 1070 and 1300.

For similarity of appearance, here is a comparison of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim in the top pictures, and the Victoria Terminus Railway Station in Mumbai, which used to be Bombay, India, pictured in the bottom photos, and said to have been built by the British in India between 1878 and 1888.

When I started doing the research for Hell in Norway, I came across the Hell in Michigan, another place where Hell freezes over.

The Hell in Michigan is an unincorporated community on Lake Patterson Road, located 15-miles, or 24-kilometers, northwest of Ann Arbor, and 3-miles, or 4.8-kilometers, southwest of Pinckney.

Ann Arbor is the location of the University of Michigan, which was first established in 1817 as the “Catholepistemiad,” said to translate roughly to the “School of Universal Knowledge,” under an Act of the Michigan Territory.

The name changed to the University of Michigan by another Act of the Michigan Territory in 1821.

For comparison of similarity of appearance of college architecture around the world, along with the University of Michigan on the top left, here is Korea University in Seoul on the bottom left, which was established in 1905; the University of Sydney in Australia, established in 1850; and the Trinity College of Cambridge University in England, said to have been founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII.

These are a few of many examples of the same style of architecture found all over the world for colleges and universities.

What makes more sense.

There was a universal building template used for building colleges and universities all over the world over the course of centuries.

Or…

This architecture was built by one and the same worldwide civilization.

So, just a short-distance from the world-renowned research university in Ann Arbor, the little community of Hell definitely has its own vibe going on.

You can stop at “Screams Ice Cream from Hell” for a treat if you go to the visit there.

You can even get married in Hell, if you dare, at Hell’s “Chapel of Love.”

So, what else is here besides hell-themed tourist attractions?

Well, there’s the Pinckney State Recreation Area, an 11,000-acre, or 4,452-hectare park consisting of a chain of lakes, rolling hills, and numerous outdoor recreational opportunities.

The landscape is described as a “terminal moraine area formed during the last glaciation period.”

First of all, moraine is defined as “a mass of rocks and sediments carried down and deposited by a glacier,” and terminal moraine is defined as “a moraine deposited at the point of furthest advance of a glacier or ice sheet.”

But I don’t buy what they are selling us with the glaciation and ice age explanation for places like this.

It’s hard to find a good picture looking on-line, but this view of a place on one of the hiking trails there looks like it might have something rock-solid just underneath the surface of the water.

This is where field research is so important, because when you go to a place in person and know what to look for, it can yield a treasure trove of information just waiting to be found.

Sir Charles Lyell was a Scottish geologist who was said to have demonstrated the power of known natural causes in explaining Earth’s history.

In his books, “The Principles of Geology,” published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, he presented the idea that the Earth was shaped by the same natural processes that are still operating today at similar intensities, and a s such a proponent of “Uniformitarianism,” a gradualistic view of natural laws and processes occuring at the same rate now as they have always done.

This theory was in contrast to “catastrophism,” or theory that Earth has been shaped by sudden, short-lived violent events of a worldwide nature.

At any rate, as a result of Lyell’s work, the glacial theory gained acceptance between 1839 and 1846, and we are told during that time, scientists started to recognize the existence of ice ages.

The concept of “glacial erratic” has come to be the explanation for large masses of rock that have been moved by glacier ice and lodged in glacier valleys or scattered over hills.

Examples include the rectangular Madison Boulder in New Hampshire, which is considered to be one of the largest glacial erratics in the world, at 83-feet, or 25-meters, long, and 23-feet, or 7-meters, high, and upwards of 5,000 tons, with one part of it said to be buried to a depth of up to 12-feet, or 4-meters.

It is interesting to note the number of glacial erratics that end up either perfectly balanced by themselves…

…or as a large block of stone balanced on top of smaller stones.

The same idea is called a dolmen in other parts of the world, and is considered the most common megalithic structure in Europe, believed to be a tomb or burial space.

Next, a few more places that I found that have a “Hel.”

First, there are two places in Pakistan named Hel, one in the Northwest Frontier, and the other in Kashmir.

Since it is hard to find specific information about these “Hels,” I will look at the places where they are found.

First, the North West Frontier in Pakistan, known as Waziristan.

I first encountered Waziristan several years ago tracking cities and places in alignment starting at San Francisco in California.

North and South Waziristan comprise a mountainous region of Pakistan on the country’s border with Afghanistan, and are districts of the Khyber-Pakhtunkwha Province, formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province.

Historically, the tribal people of this region were considered very tough fighters, having defeated Alexander the Great’s efforts to conquer them, and more recently in history, British efforts to take them over were not as successful as the British would have liked in the Waziristan Campaign of 1936 to 1939 as well, earning the area the nickname of “Hell’s Door-Knocker.”

The Khyber-Pakhtunkwha Province is the location of the Khyber Pass, a mountain pass in the northwest of Pakistan, and an integral part of the ancient Silk Road. A translation is “On the Khyber side of the Land of the Pashtuns.”

This is the Bab-e-Khyber, a gate that stands at the entrance to the Khyber Pass…

…said to have been constructed in 1965.

The turreted and crenellated appearance of the Bab-e-Khyber Gate brought to mind the style of architecture seen on this old Merovingian textile from France on the left, and the Cajun flag of Louisiana on the right.

The Jamrud Fort is adjacent to the Bab-e-Khyber. We are told that the foundation of the fort was laid out by the Sikh General Hari Singh Nalwa on the 18th of December in 1836, and that the fort was completed in 54-days, after Jamrud was lost to the Afghan Durrani Empire and conquered by the Sikh Empire.

This is a screenshot of the Jamrud Fort on Google Earth.

The Jamrud Electrical Grid Station is located very close to Jamrud Fort, and there is at least one other structure with the arrow pointing towards it, and possibly more, that looks like it could be connected to this grid system.

The Pashtun tribal peoples are the primary inhabitants of a region including North and South Waziristan, the Khyber-Pakhtunkwha and Balochistan Provinces of Pakistan, and the Pashtun are also found in Afghanistan, in a region regarded as Pashtunistan, split between two countries since the Durand Line border between the two countries was formed in 1893 after the second Anglo-Afghan War.

The namesake of the line, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, was a British Diplomat and Civil Servant of the British Raj.

We are told that together with the Afghan Emir, Abdur Rahman Khan, it was established to “fix the limit of their respective spheres of influence and improve diplomatic relations and trade.

Well, that certainly sounds good…but what was really going on here?

The Durand Line cuts through the Pashtunistan and Balochistan regions, politically dividing ethnic Pashtuns and Baloch, who live on both sides of the border.

But, really, why divide a people in this fashion?

The Pashtun are a tribal nation of millions of Afghani and Pakistani Muslims who also have a strong oral tradition that they are descended from a Tribe of Israel, and they refer to themselves as Bani Israel. 

Here is an example of a Pashtun textile piece showing the sacred geometric shape of a star tetrahedron in the center, also known as the Star of David…

…and Pashtun lockets with what is best known as the Star of David engraved on them.

But the Star of David is a 2-D representation of the sacred geometric shape of the Human Lightbody, known as the Merkaba.

The Earth’s controllers really did not want to us to know who and what we are, and where we come from, and among other things, hijacked the template of the Children of Israel for themselves.

The other place in Pakistan with a place named Hel is in Azad Kashmir, also known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir, a region administered as a self-governing entity, and the western portion of the larger Kashmir region, which has been disputed between Pakistan and India since 1947.

Azad Kashmir is separated from the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir by what is called the Line of Control (LoC).

Azad Kashmir has a Parliamentary form of government modelled after that of Great Britain, with a President as its Constitutional Head-of-State, while the Pakistani Prime Minister is its Chief Executive.

And are those three pyramids represented in the bottom third of the government seal?

Hmmm, I wonder.

The capital city of Azad Kashmir is Muzaffarabad, which happens to be located right in-between one of those ubiquitous s-shaped river bends that I mentioned previously.

Major earthquakes occur in Azad Kashmir from time-to-time as it is in a region where the Indian tectonic plate and the Eurasian tectonic plate meet.

One in early October of 2005 near Muzaffarabad devastated the region’s infrastructure and economy, which is still recovering, and killing 100,000 people and displacing 3-million.

The last two locations I am going to look at where the place-name of Hel comes up are both in Belgium, one in the Brabant Province, and the other in the Antwerp Province.

As was the case in Pakistan, I am having difficulty finding specific information about these two “Hels,” so I wil focus on their respective provinces instead.

Brabant was a province of Belgium from 1830 to 1995.

In 1995, it was split into the French-speaking “Walloon Brabant” and the Dutch-speaking “Flemish Brabant.”

The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created in 1815 as a result of the Congress of Vienna, and different sections of Brabant were shared between modern-day Belgium and The Netherlands.

Brabant was named after the Duchy of Brabant which was part of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist after Napoleon defeated Austrian and Imperial forces in the Battle of Austerliz on December 2nd of 1805, and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved on August 6th of 1806.

Prior to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the imperial throne of the Holy Roman Empire was occupied by the House of Habsburg.

Also called the House of Austria, the House of Habsburg was one of the most distinguished and influential royal houses of Europe.

The Habsburg male line died out in 1740 with the death of Emperor Charles VI, and as a result of the War of Austrian Succession that took place between 1740 and 1748, the Empress Maria-Theresa had to concede Habsburg lands in Austria, Spain, and Italy to other powers as part of the terms of the 1748 Treaty of Aix-La-Chappelle, which also confirmed the right of succession of the German House of Hanover to the British throne.

The Congress of Vienna was said to be one of the most important international conferences in European history.

It was a meeting of ambassadors of European states held in Vienna in Austria between 1814 and 1815 in order to remake Europe after the downfall of Napoleon.

The stated goal was to resize the main powers so they could balance each other and in this way remain at peace, and not simply to restore old boundaries.

As a result of the Congress of Vienna, France lost all of its recent conquests, while Prussia, Austria, and Russia made major territorial gains.

Most of the discussions took place in informal, face-to-face sessions among the ambassadors of Austria, Britain, France, Russia, and sometimes Prussia, with limited or no participation by other delegates.

As such, the so-called Congress of Vienna never met in plenary session, which means a session in which all members of all parties are able to attend.

After the Belgian Revolution of 1830, the southern Netherlands of Central and South Brabant became part of Belgium, and Brabant became the central province of Belgium with Brussels as its capital.

The Revolutions of 1830 took place in France, Belgium, Italy, Brazil, Poland & Switzerland, which was the same year that Bavarian Order of the Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt died in Gotha, in November.

These 1830 revolutions led to the establishment of Constitutional Monarchies, and the substitution of the concept of popular sovereignty for hereditary right.  In France, King Louis-Philippe I of the Habsburg House of Bourbon’s cadet branch of the House of Orleans, was the last King of France, until he was removed as Head-of -State in February of 1848, and marked the foundation of the French Second Republic, and subsequently sparked the Revolutions of 1848.

The 1830 revolutions in Europe also led to Leopold, the son of Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, becoming Leopold I, the first King of the Belgians, in 1831.

He had strong ties to Great Britain as he had moved there and married Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1816, second-in-line to the British throne after her father the Prince-Regent, who became King George IV.

She is recorded as having died after delivering a stillborn child a year after they were married, leaving King George IV without any legitimate grandchildren.

King George III’s son, the Prince-Regent George’s brother, Prince Edward, ended-up proposing to Leopold’s older sister Victoria, of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who were the parents of the future Queen Victoria.

King Leopold I was said to play an important role in the creation of Belgium’s first railroad in 1835 and subsequent industrialization.

We are told that Belgium was the second country in Europe to open a railway and produce locomotives, after a private rail-line opened between Stockton and Darlington in north-east England on September 27th of 1825.

The very old-looking Skerne Bridge was said to have been built in 1825 for the Stockton and Darlington Railroad, and carried the first train on opening day.

It is considered to be the oldest railway bridge in continuous use in the world.

The first stretch of the Belgian Railway network was said to have been completed between northern Brussels and Mechelen in 1835, and was the first steam passenger railway in continental Europe.

By 1836, the line to Antwerp had been completed, and by 1843, four main-lines had been added to the Belgian rail network.

There are 6,893-miles, or 11,903-kilometers, of railroad track in Belgium, which has the greatest mileage of rail per square mile in the world.

So I will end this tour of where there are locations mentioned of a ‘Hel,’ with either one “l” or two, on Earth in the Antwerp Province of Belgium and the city of Antwerp, its capital.

Antwerp Province is the northernmost province of Belgium, and borders on the North Brabant Province of the Netherlands.

Originally named the “Central Brabant Province,” after the Congress of Vienna, it was re-named “Antwerp” in 1830 after the city of Antwerp.

The Province has a transportation network of infrastructure of roads, railroads, canals and rivers, as well as the Port of Antwerp, the economic heart of the province.

The Port of Antwerp is the second-largest port in Europe, after Rotterdam in The Netherlands, and where chemical factories, like those of Bayer and BASF, and Monsanto, which was acquired by Bayer Pharmaceutics and Life Sciences Company in after gaining United States and EU regulatory approvals on June 7th of 2018 for, you guessed it – $66-billion in cash – and Monsanto’s name is no longer used…

…and the Port of Antwerp comprises the second largest Petrochemical industry cluster in the world, after Houston, Texas.

This is the Antwerp Central Rail Station, said to have been built between 1895 and 1905 to replace the original wooden station from 1836.

It was severely damaged by V-2 rockets during World War II.

During World War II, on September 4th of 1944, the British Armored 11th-Division captured the port city of Antwerp intact except for the bridges across the Albert Canal.

Apparently, the retreating Germans blew up these bridges on their way out of town.

Then on October 12th of 1944, Hitler and the German High Command exclusively focused their V-weapon missile attacks on the cities of Antwerp and London, and for a period of 175-days-and-nights, German missile-launching crews fired more than 4,000 V-1s and more than 1,000 V-2s at Greater Antwerp, and Antwerp had become known as the “City of Sudden Death.”

I am sure there is much more to find, as there always is, but I am going to end this post here.

The geographical location of “Heligoland/Helgoland” where I started this journey brought in the Napoleonic Wars; the role of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 with the goal of removing the original Royal Houses of Europe; the role of Prgressive youth movements; the origins and interconnections to all of this of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati and to the House of Saxe Saxe-Coburg and Gotha AKA Windsor.

The geographic locations of two more “Hels” in Belgium brought in more of the story about what happened after the defeat of Napoleon; how one obscure German ducal line managed to replace the original Royal Houses of Europe, and how both of these places were hammered during Europe’s World Wars of the 20th-century, along with Poland’s Hel Peninsula.

The Nazi Germans occupied Norway for almost the entirety of World War II, and the Hell there would have been centrally located and on important transportation routes.

Hell in Michigan doesn’t seem to have quite those connections, but this hell-based tourist attraction it is located quite close to a world-renowned research University and a large recreational area that I have a lot questions about what’s actually there.

Then the wars and conflicts that have taken place after dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan, the connections of the Lost Tribes of Israel found there, and the creation of conflict by dividing the Kashmir region between Pakistan and India, where places named “Hel” are found as well.

In seeking answers to the question “Where is Hel on Earth,” there certainly seem to be correlations between places with “Hel” in the name, and the hellish events of our modern history.

Of Railroads and Waterfalls and Other Physical Infrastructure of the Earth’s Grid System

There’s some kind of functional connection on the Earth’s original grid system between gorges, waterfalls, rapids, railroads, dams & reservoirs, bridges, canals, star forts, highways…and likely places where there were once giant trees.

The Controllers have also done a lot to destroy the evidence or hide it as much as they can, but the evidence is still there to find if you know where to look and how to interpret it.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide you with compelling evidence to support this assertion.

A couple of years ago, in December of 2021 to be exact, when I came across my baby book in a box at my mom’s Assisted Living apartment in Florida, I found out that my first outing at one-week-old was to Great Falls Park in Maryland.

This was an unexpected confirmation for me of a feeling I have had for awhile that I was connected to the information that I am sharing in my work from the very beginning of my life because my whole life I have been collecting pieces to the puzzle long before I was consciously aware of it.

So the Great Falls of the Potomac is the place where I am going to start my journey to provide you with compelling evidence for the connection between gorges, waterfalls, rapids, railroads, bridges, canals and star forts on the Earth’s original grid system.

I grew up in Gaithersburg and Rockville in Montgomery County Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C.

In 1974, right after the birth of my youngest brother, when I was ten, we moved to a larger home in Rockville from Gaithersburg.  I always tell people we moved as close to the affluent suburb of Potomac, Maryland, as my parents could afford. 

This house in Rockville was a short, under 20-mile, or 32-kilometer drive to the Maryland-side of Great Falls Park.

Living so close to the park growing up, I visited there more than a few times.

Access to go see the Great Falls themselves, at least when I was young, was cut off after the effects of Hurricane Agnes in 1972 destroyed the bridge going out to where you could view them from the Maryland-side.

My most vivid memories of Great Falls are of the C & O Canal that runs through the park, complete with canal locks, tavern/museum, and a variety of recreational opportunities to choose from, including hiking trails and canoeing or kayaking on the canal.

And the only time I ever skipped school was Senior Skip Day when I was in high school, and I went with some classmates to Great Falls Park, and I am pretty sure that was the only time I hiked the “Billy Goat Trail” there.

The Billy Goat Trail includes a section along the Mather Gorge, part of the C & O Canal National Historic Park, and named after the National Park Service’s first director, Stephen Mather.

A gorge or canyon are both defined as a deep cleft between escarpments or cliffs resulting from weathering or erosive activity of a river over geologic time scales.

This is an aerial image of Mather Gorge on the left and  how it looks closer to earth. 

So the spin is that this is completely natural, but the edges of the gorge look to be on the straight-and-angled-side!

The Carderock Recreation Area is part of the C & O Canal National Historic Park.

Carderock itself is a popular rock-climbing location.

Interesting to note that the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center is located in Carderock, Maryland, not far from Carderock rock, and concentrates on engineering, testing, and modelling ship and ship systems for the Navy.

Funny, I don’t remember there being a gold mine here.

Close to Rockwood Manor, too!

I have recently come into awareness of the giant trees that once existed all over the Earth and their likely relationship to the Earth Grid and mine site through the “Deeper Conversations with Chad” YouTube Channel.  Chad recently had a conversation with me, and we talked about giant trees among other shared findings coming from different perspectives. 

Now I’m wondering if this could this have once been the location of a giant tree?

Now to start bringing in other infrastructure.

Here is a Google Earth Screenshot along the Potomac River between Great Falls Park in Potomac, Maryland, showing all the infrastructure that is found along here in-between there and the Potomac River Reservoir north going through Harper’s Ferry, including the C & O Canal, the B & O Railroad, bridges, aqueducts, reservoirs, forts and batteries.

Harper’s Ferry was an infamous location during the American Civil War, and so was the Battle of Antietam in Sharpsburg, Maryland, one of its bloodiest battles.

Again, since I grew up near here, I have been to a number of these places multiple times, particularly Harper’s Ferry and Antietam.

Here’s what our historical narrative tells us.

In 1827, the State of Maryland chartered the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) Railroad, the first common carrier, and the oldest, railroad in the United States.

The first section of the B & O Railroad was said to have opened in 1830, and it was said to have reached the Ohio River in 1852, the first eastern seaboard railroad to do so.

We are told there was an intense rivalry between the B & O Railroad, and the Chesapeake & Ohio (C & O) Canal, with each project choosing the same day to break ground – on July 4th, 1828.

Both projects were said to be vying for the narrow right-of-way where the Potomac River cuts through a mountain ridge not far from Point of Rocks, Maryland, which ended up in court.

Even though after four-years the case was said to have been ruled in favor of the canal, we are told the C & O had to allow the B & O to go through there, so this is a place where the canal and the railroad run side-by-side, and that within a few years the canal was made obsolete because the railroad was so much more efficient.

And this incredible engineering feat of canals and railroads running side-by-side is found in countless other places, with examples like this one in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania…

…and this one of the Ship Canal on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.

I am going to take a look at the places between Great Falls Park in Maryland and the Potomac River Reservoir in West Virginia section by section on Google Earth.

This first section in Montgomery County was totally in my stomping grounds growing up.

The first two pins down at the bottom of the screen show the relationship and distance at the locations between the Potomac River, Great Falls and the C & O canal, and where the B & O Railroad today makes its way through Montgomery county.

Now I want to bring your attention to what was at the top left of the previous screenshot at the pins of “Monocacy Aqueduct” and “Railroad tracks.”

The Monocacy Aqueduct was said to have been built by three different contractors between 1829 and 1833.

It is the longest aqueduct on the C & O Canal, crossing over the Monocacy River before it meets the Potomac River.

This solid, stone-masonry structure has a waterway of 19-feet, or 5.8-meters at the bottom, and 20-feet, or 6.1-meters at the top.

It was used as part of the canal system for canal boat transportation, and said to have been utilized by the Union Army during the Civil War to transport war materials and troops between Maryland, Virginia, and places west.

The story goes that the Confederate Army had plans to blow up the aqueduct but were unsuccessful in doing so for a variety of reasons, from being talked out of it by the keeper of Lock 27, to not being able to drill enough holes to insert the amount of dynamite necessary to blow it up.

Another is that the Battle of Monocacy took place not far from here in Frederick County in July of 1864, and came about because Union troops were there to protect a railroad bridge at Monocacy Junction, Maryland, where it crossed the Monocacy River, as Confederate troops marched towards Washington.

On the top left is a photo of the Monocacy Railroad Junction circa 1873, and on the bottom right is a photo of the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers in Des Moines, Iowa, one of countless examples of so-called river confluences that look exactly like the Monocacy Junction, and were actually canals.

A junction is defined as a “an act of joining or adjoining things,” implying intentionality as opposed to something that just happens randomly.

An electrical junction is defined as a point or area where multiple conductors or semi-conductors make physical contact.

The next point of information here that is noteworthy is that there is another railroad junction near the Monocacy Aqueduct itself, where there is another rail-line branches off from the main B & O rail-line that runs closer to the Potomac River and C & O Canal here.

Also here the C & O Canal is hard to distinguish from the Potomac River through here.

The short Dickerson spur-line runs ends at the facilities for the Dickerson Plant and Covanta Montgomery.

The Dickerson Plant refers to the Dickerson Generating Station, an 853-megawatt electric-generating plant owned by NRG Energy.

It has a history of toxic metal releases into the Potomac River, like arsenic and mercury.

It is located next to the C & O National Historical Park, with C& O Canal Lock 27 being nearby.

Canal Locks are used to raise and lower boats between stretches of water of different levels.

The C & O Canal has 74 locks altogether along its 184.5-mile, or 297-kilometer, length.

Covanta Montgomery is the Montgomery County Resource Recovery Facility, which is a 56-megawatt incineration plant that burns municipal garbage and waste and turns it into energy.

It is served by the CSX railroad line, which brings trash from Montgomery County Central Transfer and Recycling facility in Derwood, Maryland.

In the next section, from the Monocacy Aqueduct to the train station at Point of Rocks, Maryland, the railroad tracks start to run closer to the the C & O Canal and the Potomac River, and then run side-by-side.

Starting at Noland’s Ferry , the railroad, C & O Canal, and the Potomac River start to run together right next to each other for a long-distance.

Noland’s Ferry started running in the middle of the 1700s, carrying travellers between Loudon County, Virginia, and Frederick County, Maryland.

It was said to have been used for crossing the Potomac River in both the Revolutionary War and Civil War.

This is a stone structure at the entrance to Noland’s Ferry Park…

…and Culvert 71 is located in the park at mile marker 44.04 just before you get to the historical location of Noland’s Ferry at mile marker 44.6.

Both appear to be very old….

Next we come to Point-of-Rocks, Maryland.

So, let’s take a closer look at Point of Rocks.

We are told Point of Rocks was the western terminus of the B & O Railroad from 1828 to 1832, while the B & O and C & O awaited the court decision on the hotly-contested right-of-way through here mentioned previously.

The train station here was said to have been built in Gothic Revival-style in 1873 by the B & O Railroad at the junction of the B & O Main-line running to Baltimore and the Metropolitan Branch running to Washington, DC, which had opened for passenger service in 1873.

The parking area for the C & O Canal National Historic Park is just south of the U. S. Highway 15 Truss Bridge at Point of Rocks next to the Potomac River.

The two-lane, eight-span Camelback Truss Bridge at this location connects Maryland and Virginia, and was said to have been built in 1937.

U. S. Highway 15 is a United States Numbered Highway that serves New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, and is one of the original numbered highways that was approved in 1926.

It is 792-miles, or 1,274-kilometers, in length.

More on the U. S. Numbered Highway system later in this post.

There are two locks on the C & O Canal near Point of Rocks.

Lock 28 is pictured here…

…and Lock 29 and the Lander Lockhouse are pictured here…

On the railroad’s way to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, its tracks run through a tunnel at Maryland Heights

Where the tunnel comes out on the other side, among other things, there is an advertisement for passengers for “Mennen’s Borated Talcum Toilet Powder” high up on the face of Maryland Heights said to date from early 1900s.

The Maryland Heights trail connects to the Appalachian Trail, and I remember being at this location of the tunnel as part of a group hike on the Appalachian Trail through this area when I was a teenager.

C & O Canal Lock 33 is part of the Maryland Heights Trail.

Before crossing over the Railroad bridge here over the Potomac River where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet, there’s a few places I want to take a look at on this side of the Potomac River here first on Maryland Heights – a 30-pounder battery; a 100-pounder battery; and the Naval Battery Overlook.

On the Stone Fort Loop Trail of the Maryland Heights Trail, the 30-pounder battery was said to have been the first earthen battery built by the federals in the fall of 1862, at the end of a towering plateau that perfectly commanded the summits of Bolivar and Loudoun Heights facing south.

Higher up on Maryland Heights, we come to the 100-pounder battery on the Stone Fort Loop section of the trail.

We are told this battery was recommended by a Union general in the spring of 1863 that could fire a 100-point Parrott rifle 360-degrees in all directions from its lofty location.

The Stone Fort was said to have been built by the Union Army on top of Maryland Heights during the winter of 1862 and 1863 to ward off Confederate attack along the crest.

The Naval Battery was said to have been the first Union Fortification on Maryland Heights, and quickly built in May of 1862 to protect Harper’s Ferry from Confederate attack during General Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign in the spring of 1862, and where there was a battle with Jackson’s troops in September of 1862.

The Union forces were said to have been forced to retreat and abandon the Naval Battery until they came back to Maryland Heights to build the better fortications we just saw higher up.

There’s a set of railroad bridges crossing the Potomac River at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah for two different lines.

One continues along the Potomac River and the other is a line that runs next to the Shenandoah River.

What is known as “John Brown’s Fort” sits at the confluence of the two rivers.

It was said to have been built in 1848 as a guard and fire engine house for the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry.

Master Mason John Brown was best known for the Harper’s Ferry raid on October 16th of 1859.

His plan was to raid the Federal Armory and instigate a major slave rebellion in the South, and he had no rations or escape route.

In 36-hours, troops under the command of then Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee had arrested him and his cohorts, who had withdrawn to the engine house after they had been surrounded by local citizens and militia.

While his plan was doomed from the start, John Brown’s Raid did serve to deepen the divide between the North and South in the years leading up to the Civil War.

John Brown was hung on December 2nd of 1859, less than two months after the onset of the Harper’s Ferry Raid.

Interestingly, we are told that many of the bricks of “John Brown’s Fort” were taken and sold as souvenirs…

…and that “John Brown’s Fort” was said to have been moved four times.

To Chicago, for an attraction at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; back to Harpers Ferry on the Murphy Farm in 1895; Storers College in Harpers Ferry in 1909; and back to its present, and close to its original location, by the National Park Service in 1968.

What I find interesting about finding “John Brown’s Fort” at this location is that I typically find either still-existing or historic star forts at the point of river confluences like here in Harper’s Ferry.

Examples include Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne at the “Forks of the Ohio” in Pittsburgh…

…and the historic first Camp, and later Fort, Defiance at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in Cairo, Illinois.

Before I follow the C & O Canal and B & O Railroad along the Potomac River, I just want to take a quick look at some places on the Shenandoah River-side.

Going from left-to-right along the Shenandoah River in this Google Earth Screenshot, Virginius Island; the Staircase Rapids; Shenandoah Falls, and the original site of the Shenandoah River Bridge.

We are told Virginius Island was a thriving industrial location in the first-half of the 19th-century, after Virginius Island was created by the Patowmack Company when it was constructing the Shenandoah Canal between 1806 and 1807.

Besides the railroad that ran across Virginius Island, other industries that were said to have been here including a wide-range of mills and factories. and that at its peak in 1850, there were 180 people living here in 20 houses.

Here are some of the stone ruins found today on Virginius Island.

Compare the photo on the left taken at Virginius Island in Harpers Ferry identified as “pulp factory ruins;” and on the right, ancient waterwheels found in Faiyum, Egypt.

Next, the “Staircase Rapids.”

What are called the “Staircase Rapids” run along the Shenandoah River a distance through this stretch of the river, consisting of the “Upper Staircase” and the “Lower Staircase,” towards a section of the river classified as “Shenandoah Falls.”

I’m sure I went over these rapids on a group whitewater rafting trip when I was a teenager. I was part of a very active youth group at my church where we went on all of these fun outings together.

Reflecting back on it, these were experiences I would not have otherwise had, and I am grateful that I was able to do them.

Did rapids have a function on the Earth’s grid system too?

More on this thought shortly after I finish looking at what is found around this location, and revisit the subject of rapids on the grid system and look at some other places with a similar set-up as Harpers Ferry with respect to infrastructure at these locations.

There are ruins the ruins of two historic bridges at the confluence of the two rivers – original Shenandoah River Bridge abutments and abutments for the former Bollman Bridge, another railroad bridge that was next to the two existing railroad bridges crossing the Potomac River.

The original Shenandoah River Bridge was said to have first been a wagon-road bridge and later a vehicle bridge that was completely destroyed by one of the 1936 flood, the worst of six known floods starting in 1748.

The 1936 flood crested at 36.5-feet, or 11-meters.

Along with the Shenandoah River Bridge and many businesses in the Lower Town of Harpers Ferry…

…the Bollman Railroad Bridge was completely wiped away in the same flood.

Both ruined bridges were also said to have suffered damage during the Civil War, but rebuilt for use until they were completely wiped out by the floodwaters in 1936.

Now heading up the Potomac River from the confluence of the two, the Potomac has rapids through here, as well as a Hydroelectric Power Plant.

It was said to have been built in 1888, and operated from 1899 to 1991, and was originally part of a wood pulp mill, and after a fire in 1925, operated only as a power house.

Following the Potomac River from the old power plant ruins, we soon come to Lock 34; Dam 3 ruins; and Fort Duncan.

The railroad tracks follow the Potomac River up until the river bend at the Dam 3 Ruins, and then veer off across the countryside.

The C & O Canal Lock 34 is at mile 61.5 of the canal’s towpath, just north of Harpers Ferry.

The next place we come to on the Potomac River after Lock 34 are the ruins of Dam 3, an inlet lock, Lock 35, and Lock 36 around mile 62 of the canal towpath.

Dam 3 was said to have been built in 1799 to serve the Armory at Harpers Ferry.

The dam was said to be ineffective; rebuilt once in 1820; and then in 1832, used by the C & O Canal for its purposes.

The Inlet Lock, Lock 35 and Lock 36 are in close proximity to the ruins of Dam 3.

The historical location of Fort Duncan is less than a half-mile north from the location of the Dam 3 ruins and the lock infrastructure, up a steep hill.

It was said to have been constructed by the Union Army in October of 1862 shortly after the Battle of Antietam and the Union surrender of Harper’s Ferry to the Confederate Army under the command of General Stonewall Jackson.

Its stated purpose was to guard the area around Harpers Ferry, the railroad and the canal.

The only action seen there was reported to have been a small demonstration following the Confederate General Jubal Early’s raid on Washington in 1864.

Leaving the historic location of Fort Duncan, we are heading north to the battlefield of Antietam in Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek.

I remember visiting Antietam with my family when I was young, and then went there in 2004 when visiting a friend who lives in the area, and got an up-close and personal with the Burnside Bridge because I photographed it and later painted it.

More on the Burnside Bridge in a moment.

We are told that Antietam was the deadliest one-day battle in American Military History, on September 17th of 1862, with 22,727 dead, wounded, or missing.

The battle was fought between the Confederate troops of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and the Union troops of General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

We are told Lee’s Army advanced into Maryland on September 3rd, after their victory on August 30th at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Northern Virginia.

McClellan’s troops were there to intercept them and by September 17th had the Confederate troops in defensive positions behind Antietam Creek.

After a long bloody day of fighting and death, the Union Army succeeded in turning back the Confederate invasion of Maryland, and was considered a major turning point in the war in the Union’s favor.

The Battle of Burnside Bridge took place in the afternoon that day to capture the bridge, which was dominated by a wooded bluff on the west bank and strewn with “boulders from an old quarry,” impeding the crossing of the bridge by combatants because this provided good cover.

The attempts of the Union Army troops under the command of Major-General Ambrose Burnside failed to secure the bridge and resulted in a considerable loss of life.

Compare the appearance of the Burnside Bridge on the left with that of the Sligachan Bridge on the Isle of Skye off Scotland’s northwest coast on the right.

The last section of the Potomac River and C & O Canal I am going to look at is a cluster of Hydroelectric and reservoir infrastructure to the northwest of Sharpsburg and the Antietam battlefield.

There is a series of S-shaped river bends through here that I see all over the Earth and long-believed also have a functional purpose on the Earth’s grid system…

…and you see the same S-Shaped river bends on the Mississippi River where the Battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi was said to have been fought in the Civil War that you have on the Potomac River where the Battle of Antietam was fought.

Coincidental or intentional?

The infrastructure found along the Potomac River and C & O Canal here includes the Power Plant & Dam 4 and the Potomac River Reservoir.

The Power Plant and Dam 4 is an historic hydroelectric power generation station on the Potomac River, and part of the Potomac River Reservoir.

The Power Plant is a limestone building on a high stone foundation built into the hillside. that is five-bays long and a gable-roof said to have been built in 1909.

Dam 4 was said to have originally been built starting in 1832 and completed in 1835 for the C & O Canal, and that it starting supplying hydroelectric power in 1913.

Today it is owned by the National Park Service and leased to the Potomac Edison Electric Company for electric power generation in Washington County, Maryland.

Another example of a place with the same infrastructure found at Harper’s Ferry is”The Soo,” the nickname given to the Sault Stes. Marie of Michigan and Ontario.

The Soo Locks, the largest waterway traffic system on Earth, are called the “Linchpin of the Great Lakes,” allowing ships to travel between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes. Lake Superior meets Lake Huron with a 21-foot drop in elevation.

In the two Sault Ste. Maries and in-between them, we find the same infrastructure that is found in and around Harper’s Ferry.

Canals and Locks…

…rapids called the St. Mary’s Falls, two hydroelectric powerhouses, and the Soo Locks all right next to each other…

…bridges, one for cars and one for the railroad…

…other railroad infrastructure…

…two historic forts, Old Fort Brady and New Fort Brady, now the campus of Lake Superior State University…

…and things like a historic pulp mill, all examples of infrastructure that is found at Harpers Ferry.

The same infrastructure that is found around Harpers Ferry and The Soo is also found in the Niagara Falls region between New York and Ontario along the Niagara River between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie…

…including historic Fort Niagara in Youngstown, New York, and Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario, and Fort Erie in Ontario is located across the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York, where the river meets Lake Erie.

I recently received photos from viewer JW of Inglis Falls on the Niagara Escarpment.

This is what he said in the email:

“I’m in Owen Sound Ontario. Up on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron. I’m on the Niagara Escarpment. I came to a place called Inglis Falls. I took some trails through the forest so I could get to the bottom of the falls rather than the top where the public access leads. I definitely see the evidence of ancient brickwork. It seems to be totally inaccessible. It’s at the bottom of the Cliff face but I can’t cross that River to get there because it is too dangerous.”

Is this first-hand evidence that the Niagara Escarpment was man-made?

It is interesting to note what we are told about the origin of the Niagara Escarpment.

It is the most prominent of several escarpments in the bedrock running from eastern Wisconsin north through Northern Michigan, curving around southern Ontario through the Bruce Peninsula and Manitoulin Island and other islands in northern Lake Huron, before extending eastwards across the Niagara region between Ontario and New York, and formed over millions of years ago through weather and stream erosion through rocks of different hardnesses.

That’s what they tell us, anyway!!

Also with regards to the co-location of railroad lines and hydroelectric projects, I have encountered numerous examples in past research, like the Davis Island Lock and Dam in Avalon Pennsylvania on the top left; the Wells Dam in Chelan, Washington o the top right; the John Day Dam and Umatilla Reservoir on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon; and the historic site of Celilo which was submerged by rising waters from The Dalles dam in 1957, and prior to that was the economic and cultural hub of Native Americans in the region, and said to be the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America.

On to more examples of these connections.

Next, I am going to take a look around the Tallulah Gorge and Tallulah Falls in North Georgia close to where it meets the South Carolina State Line.

A State Park since 1993, the major attractions of the park are the 1,000-foot, or 300-meter, deep Tallulah Gorge; the Tallulah River which runs along the flood of the gorge; and six major waterfalls known as the Tallulah Falls which cause the river to drop 500-feet, or 152-meters, over one-mile, or 1.6-kilometers.

This is what we are told.

In 1854, The General Assembly of the State of Georgia first enacted legislation for the construction of a railroad linking the towns of Athens and Clayton in North Georgia, and the railroad opened in sections starting in 1870, with construction of the railroad having been delayed with the outbreak of the Civil War between 1861 and 1865.

When the railroad arrived at Tallulah Falls in 1882, tourism to the area intensified, bringing thousands of people a weeks to the area.

At one time, there were seventeen restaurants and boarding houses here catering to wealthy tourists.

Places like the Tallulah Lodge, said to be the grandest lodge at Tallulah Falls with over 100-rooms and built in the 1890s, and located one-mile, or 1.6-kilometers, south of the depot on the rim of the gorge.

The Tallulah Lodge burned down in 1916.

There was an historical fire in Tallulah Falls in 1921 that wiped out almost the entire town.

The Cliff House boasted 50-rooms and was located on the edge of the gorge across the tracks from the train depot, and was said to have been built in 1882.

When it finally burned down in 1937, all the grand hotels and boarding houses were gone.

We are told that starting in 1909, the Georgia Railway and Power Company, had scouted the Tallulah River and Gorge with its drop in elevation as the ideal place to construct a dam and hydroelectric plant in order to provide electrical power to Atlanta, and that it ended up being one of six being constructed along a 26-mile, or 42-kilometer, stretch of the Tallulah and Tugaloo Rivers with a 1,200-foot, or 366-meter, drop in elevation, between 1913 and 1927.

The construction of the dam Tallulah Falls was said to have started in 1910 with the purchase of land at the rim of the Tallulah Gorge, and completed in 1914 after the company won a legal battle to halt its activities in the Tallulah Gorge.

Here is a postcard with the Tallulah Falls Bridge on U. S. Highway 23/State Road 15 crossing right in front of the dam and the Lake Tallulah Reservoir.

The bridge was said to have been built between 1938 and 1939.

The Tallulah Falls Hydroelectric power plant is 685-feet, or 185-meters, lower than the dam.

Water from the Lake Tallulah Reservoir is directed to the power plant by a 6,666-foot, or 2,032-meter, long diversion tunnel that is 11-feet, or 3.4-meters-wide, and 14-feet, or 4.3-meters, high.

The power station located on the floor of the Tallulah Gorge below the power plant is best accessed for its workers by an incline railway.

I am starting to get curious about the U. S. Highway system, and its relationship to the Earth’s original energy grid system.

As I mentioned previously, the Tallulah Falls Bridge on U. S. Highway 23 crosses right in front of the Lake Tallulah Reservoir and Dam.

U. S. Highway 23 is a major North – South U. S. Highway between Jacksonville, Florida, and Mackinaw City, Michigan.

Mackinaw City is not far from the location of the Tahquamenon Falls State Park, where there are a series of waterfalls on the Tahquamenon River before it empties into Lake Superior in the northeastern part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the Tahquamenon Falls are even closer to “The Soo” region mentioned previously.

Was there an historical rail presence at Tahquamenon Falls?

I searched and what came up was the “Tahquamenon Falls Riverboat Tours & Toonerville Trolley.”

It is a 6 1/2-hour wilderness tour that starts at Soo Junction that includes a narrow-gauge train ride and riverboat cruise to the Falls.

This information about U. S. Highway 23 going from Florida to Michigan connected with at least two major waterfall systems and corresponding historic rail systems led me to look into the United States Numbered Highway System, or the Federal Highway System and am wondering if this was likely a part of the energy grid systemof the original civilization.

It was actually called an integrated network of roads and highways numbered within a nationwide grid across the contiguous United States that was first approved in 1926.

The map was said to be the first proposed U. S. Highway Network map, drawn up by the National Highway Association in 1913.

The red roads were delineating “Main” National Highways; the blue roads “Trunk” National Highways; and the yellow roads were “Link” National Highways to connect all the “Mains” and “Trunks.”

The Nation’s first Federal Highways would not be adopted until 1926, when the American Association of State Highway officials approved the first plans for the numbered highway system, with this section showing Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

I have blue arrows point to major cities that are the central point of at least five highways – Dallas, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; Nashville, Tennessee; and Birmingham, Alabama.

Looking just like Petersburg, south of Richmond, Virginia, as the Central point of multiple rail-lines emanating from it in all directions.

Petersburg, Richmond, and points all around here were hot spots during the Civil War.

I searched for “star circuit” and the “star-mesh transform” came up.

I don’t know if this is a match for what this was, but I am curious if these large cities as center-points in this configuration of at least five highways or rail-lines have a correlation to a type of circuitry on the Earth’s grid system.

Before I leave the State of Michigan, I am aware from past research of the Upper Montreal Falls on the Keweenaw Peninsula’s Montreal River.

These particular falls are located not far from Lac La Belle, which at one time was a railroad depot on the Keweenaw Central Rail Line, as shown in the map on the right.

On my way out to the last place that I am going to take a look at northern California, I am going to visit past research suggested by JG that I did in “Interesting Comments & Suggestions I have Received from Viewers – Volume 4.”

Several years ago, JG connected with me about correlations she had found between railroads and waterfalls in Iowa.

She sent google maps showing the locations of railroads and state parks with waterfalls, and racetracks, as well as another set of maps with more key things like the locations of powerplants, mines and sports stadiums.

I am going to focus in this post on the correlations between railroads and waterfalls that she sent me as a grouping.

Much of the part of Iowa being looked at here is where Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois meet, and is in part of what is called the “Driftless Area.”

This part of North America is called the “Driftless Area” because it was said to have been by-passed by the last glacier on the continent and lacks glacial drift.

I looked for correlations between the state parks with waterfalls and railroads starting here at the upper section of the previous Google Earth screenshot.

In the top middle, is Black Falls and Dunning’s Spring Park.

Black Falls is near Kendallville, Iowa.

For all of the following waterfalls, I am going to point out with red arrows what looks like an old wall, or old masonry, to me.

There are three waterfalls at Dunning’s Spring just southeast of Black Falls, near Decorah, Iowa…

…one of which is located near the Decorah Ice Cave, a limestone and dolomite cave that has ice on the inside even during the summer…

…as well as the falls at Siewer’s Springs near Decorah, described as “technically a spillway, but a gorgeous staircase formation….”

…and the Malanaphy Spring Falls, northwest of Decorah.

I looked for rail-related infrastructure near Decorah, which now only has Railroad Street and Railroad Avenue, with the Mediacom Communications facility sandwiched between the two…

…and what was the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Combination Depot in Decorah is now commercial space, and all the railroad tracks through here were removed in 1971.

From where Black Falls and Dunning’s Spring are at the top of the Google Earth screenshot, next I am going to go southeast of there to “Pike’s Peak State Park.

Pike’s Peak State Park in McGregor, Iowa, is situated on a 500-foot, or 150-meter, bluff overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers.

It is a recreational area that is considered one of Iowa’s premier nature destinations…

…where one of the places you can hike to is called Bridal Veil Falls.

Bridal Veil Falls is described as “a small natural waterfall that flows gracefully out of a horizontal limestone outcropping.”

Pike’s Peak State Park and McGregor, Iowa, are right next to Marquette, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, right across from Prairie de Chien, Wisconsin.

Marquette is connected to Prairie du Chien via the Marquette-Joliet Bridge, taking U. S. Route 18 from Iowa to Wisconsin.

It is a cable-supported tiered-arch bridge, with the ends of the arch supported by two abutments in the middle of the river.

U. S. Route 18 is one of the original U. S. Highways of 1926.

Its western terminus is in Orin, Wyoming, and its eastern terminus is in downtown Milwaukee.

Back in Iowa, Marquette earlier in history was known as North McGregor, and served as a railroad terminus, becoming a major railroad hub for the region in its hey-day.

Passenger service ended in 1960, and the Marquette Depot Museum and Information Service in Marquette celebrates the town’s railroad history with exhibits of historic railroad artifacts…

…though the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad, a subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Railway, still runs freight on the rail-lines through here.

Next, I am going to go due west from Marquette and McGregor over to Mason City, which is connected by the same Canadian Pacific Rail-line to Marquette.

Mason City is located on the Winnebago River, and the name of the original settlementthat was established here in 1853 was “Shibboleth.”

It was also known as Mason Grove and Masonville, until, we are told, Mason City was adopted in 1855, in honor of a founder’s son, Mason Long.

Interesting to note that the original name for the settlement, Shibboleth, is also a Freemasonic password.

The “Iowa Traction Railroad Company,” headquartered in Emery, west of Mason City, operates a short-line rail-line, that is around 10-miles, or 17-kilometers, -long freight railroad between Mason City and Clear Lake, Iowa, that interchanges in Mason City with the Canadian Pacific Railway and Union Pacific Railway.

It is electrified, which means that an electrification system supplies electric power to the railway, as opposed to an on-board power source or local fuel supply…

…and at one time was part of the electric trolley and interurban system of the region, with the charter for the trolley system expiring in August of 1936, and replaced by passenger bus service the following January.

I did find a waterfall in Mason City, though it is on private property and not in a state park.

Called the “Willow Creek Waterfall,” it can be viewed from the State Street Bridge between 1st Street NE and S. Carolina Avenue in Mason City.

The Illinois Central Railroad ran through Iowa between Sioux City and Dubuque, one of four railroads authorized by Congress via the “Act of 1856…”

…connecting that part of Iowa by rail to Chicago sometime around 1870.

Like Mason City, at one time Dubuque had an electric streetcar system, and which was retired in 1932.

Dubuque still has an operating incline railway.

The Fenelon Place Cable Car is found in Dubuque’s Cathedral Historic District, and is described as the world’s steepest, shortest scenic railway, said to have been built in 1882 for the private-use of J. K. Graves, a local banker and State Senator.

The Dubuque Railroad Bridge is currently operated by the Canadian National Railway, who purchased the Illinois Central Railroad in 1999.

It is a single-track railroad bridge that crosses the Mississippi River between Dubuque Iowa, and East Dubuque, Illinois, that has a swing-span.

The original swing bridge was said to have been built in 1868, and that it was rebuilt in 1898.

Now on to the West Coast, to the last place that I am going to take a look at in northern California, and actually my starting point in this journey of discovery that has taken me in all directions investigating railroads and waterfalls and related infrastructure.

A friend of mine sent me pictures and video of where she was staying in Dunsmuir that got my mind going in this direction and the information she sent was the “A-ha” that pulled all these things together for me in a new way.

My friend was staying at the Railroad Park Resort in Dunsmuir, at the foot of one of her favorite places, Castle Crags in Siskiyou County near Mount Shasta.

The lodging accommodations consist of 23-renovated cabooses, four cabins, 24 tent campsites…

…and the restaurant is built inside authentic vintage railroad cars.

Dunsmuir is a popular tourist destination and important railroad town located on the Upper Sacramento River.

Interstate 5 runs along the Sacramento River Canyon along with the railroad and Upper Sacramento River.

There was an historic roundhouse and turntable here, said to have been built by the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1880s, along with a depot, railyards and machine shops.

By the 1950s, so after only 70-years of existence in the historical narrative, the roundhouse and some of the other rail-related infrastructure was for all intents and purposes torn down.

The trip going north from Dunsmuir through the Sacremento River Canyon goes past several waterfalls, and the first one being the Hedge Creek Falls.

The Hedge Creek Falls are a short-walk from I-5 and Dunsmuir Avenue…and the only waterfalls open to the public.

The Mossbrae Falls are next, and not open to the public for the given reasons of 1) They are on Union Pacific Railroad-owned property; and 2) public safety concerns due to the active rail-line that runs alongside the falls.

The Mossbrae Falls are just south of the former Shasta Springs Resort, a popular summer resort in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, and the springs on the property were the original source of the water and beverages that became known as the Shasta brand of soft-drinks.

The Shasta Springs Resort was sold in the 1950s to the St. Germain Foundation, the current owners of the property and is still in use as use as a major facility by the organization.

The Siskiyou Dam and Lake Siskiyou Reservoir come next on the way into the city of Mount Shasta.

The Siskiyou Dam, known as the “Box Canyon” Dam, was said to have been completed in 1965 for flood control and a power station installed the same year for hydroelectric power, and that it opened in 1970.

The Lake Siskiyou Reservoir is formed by the Box Canyon Dam, and is 2-miles or 3-kilometers, from Mt. Shasta.

When I see photos of places like this one showing a perfect mirrored reflection of Mount Shasta, I can’t help but wonder if this is an intentional alignment of heaven and earth, and an example of “As above, So below.”

From what I am seeing, the Master Moorish Masons, the builders of the original civilization, were doing exactly that with everything they created.

Along with the same kind of infrastructure found at the Tallulah Gorge back in Georgia, Dunsmuir also had a fire problem, with big fires there in both 1903 and 1924.

Bridges in Siskiyou County include:

The Pioneer Bridge and Stone Memorial, said to have been erected in 1931 on Old Highway 99 as a tribute to the stage drivers along this pass in the 1800s.

Until largely replaced by I-5, U. S. Highway 99 was a main North-South United States Numbered Highway on the west coast from 1926 until 1964, running from Calexico, California, on the border with Mexico, to Blaine, Washington, on the Canadian border, and nicknamed among other things “The Main Street of California.”

Another historic bridge on Old Highway 99 that is now part of State Road 263 in Siskiyou County is the Dry Gulch Bridge.

I found years of both 1929 and 1930 for the completion of the concrete deck-arch bridge as a realignment and improvement of Old Highway 99 between Yreka to the River Klamath in the Shasta River Canyon.

In conclusion, I have provided examples of identical infrastructure and engineering from all across the country.

Railroads and waterfalls in particular are connected to hydroelectric power in gorges and canyons with dams and reservoirs, and the result of sophisticated, impossible-seeming, engineering feats that are totally integrated across vast distances.

How is this even possible according to the history we are taught?

And then, more often than not, this infrastructure was dismantled, abandoned, or destroyed by fire, with an unknown rail history in most places today.

All the railroad junctions I encountered brought to mind “Petticoat Junction” the television sitcom that aired between 1963 and 1970, and I looked it up to see if there might have been disclosure about railroads in the show, where they were telling us something without telling us they were telling us!

Sure enough, the action in the show centers around life at the Shady Rest Hotel, of which many of these original Old World buildings, known to us as Victorian, were converted into…

…and a spur rail line that only connects Hooterville to Pixley because it was cut off from the rest of the railroad 20 years before because a trestle was demolished, and many show plots involved a railroad executive’s attempts to cease operation and scrap the railroad that runs along it.

Sadly telling us the fate of so much railroad infrastructure which has otherwise been hidden from our awareness.

I have a project in mind to fully investigate the lost rail and canal infrastructure of where I live in north-central Arizona, particularly the Verde Valley, but I am really just getting started with it.

I now know where to focus my attention and how to piece it together because of the research in this post

I spent this Memorial Day last week looking at places along the Verde River between Cottonwood and Clarkdale, from where the Verde Canyon Railroad runs a 20-mile, or 32-kilometer, -long trip to Perkinsville as a tourist attraction.

I am bringing this up here and now because I saw an abandoned rail-line and trestle in Clarkdale that branches off from the rail-line used by the Verde Canyon Railroad.

This is the Train Depot and trains used by the tourist attraction.

Facing in the opposite direction, there are some ratty-looking old train cars on an abandoned rail-line in front of the Verde Canyon Railroad Depot in Clarkdale, surrounded by utility poles.

Here’s a view of the train trestle below the train depot in the direction of the where the abandoned train line below the main depot would have gone.

I first spotted the train trestle when I was driving on the other side of this location down towards the “Verde River Access Point TAPCO,” an historic power plant that operated from 1917 to 1958 – apparently in a river bend – in a place called “Sycamore Canyon,” yet another tree reference in a place loaded with tree references.

Not only are there a lot of tree names around here, there was historic copper, gold, and silver mining-related activity in the region in Clarkdale and its neighbor Jerome…

…and there’s even a sign going into Clarkdale displaying two large trees along with the name.

Hmmm!

And the overall appearance of the Verde, meaning “Green,” Valley region definitely does not live up to its name, though there are trees here.

Memories from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood popped into my head and the infrastructure of the “Land of Make Believe,” which I would watch on occasion with my younger brothers since I was from the Captain Kangaroo generation of children’s programming.

I now think there were hidden meanings, beyond a clever way to tell a story to young children, behind the sentient Trolley and the infrastructure of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe in this long-running children’s show.

The mention of the Niagara Escarpment as bedrock, a term in geology used to refer to solid rock in the earth’s crust that lies underneath loose material…

…brought to mind the Flintstones and their hometown of Bedrock. The original animated TV show ran for 166 episodes between 1960 and 1966, and was network televisions first animated series.

The graphic of the Flintstones’ Bedrock on the top left brought to mind Cappodocia in Turkey, on the bottom left, and on the bottom right, Holy Land USA,  said to be a theme park inspired by passages from the Bible that first opened in 1955, and was closed in 1985.

Just sayin’.

With all the railroads, electric companies and water works, the popular Parker Brothers Game “Monopoly” came to mind, a game about buying and selling properties; developing them; collecting rent; and driving opponents into bankruptcy.

The game is named after the economic concept of a monopoly, in which a single entity dominates a market.

That certainly sounds familiar!

Two more things I would like to leave you with in closing.

One is this bridge with what appears to be a solar alignment and a lot of interesting effects going on as well in the photo.

The other is this spoof from the children’s Electric Company program from the 1970s on “2001: A Space Odyssey” for contemplation about whether or not this was just a fun and creative way to teach kids past-tense verb conjugation…or disclosure about a great civilization that once existed in our past.

Incline Railways of the Past and Present

I would like to bring your attention to the subject of Incline Railways known as funiculars in this video.

This type of incline railway works like an obliquely-angled elevator, in which cables attached to a pulley-system raise- and-lower the cars along the grade.

Two cars are paired at opposite-ends and act as each other’s counterweight. As such, there is not a need for traction between the wheels and rails, and thereby allowing them to scale steep slopes, unlike traditional rail-cars.

Thing is, there used to be a lot more of them than there are now, and incline-railways were a worldwide thing.

We are told that the first railway in America was an incline-railway built in Lewiston, New York between 1762 and 1764.

It was called Montresor’s Tramway, and said to have been designed and built by British engineers at the close of the French and Indian War (1756 – 1763) to haul goods up the steep slope at the Niagara River near the Niagara Falls escarpment at Lewiston, New York.

No longer in existence, we are told it was located where the Earl W. Brydges Artpark State Park, otherwise known as the “Artpark,” is today.

Lewiston is described as the first European settlement in western New York, established in 1720.

Lewiston lies half-way between Fort Niagara in Youngstown, New York, and Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario, and Niagara Falls, a group of three falls that straddle the international border between the United States and Canada.

Further south, Fort Erie in Ontario is located across the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York, where the river meets Lake Erie.

It is interesting to note that there is an incline railway that is still operational today at Niagara Falls in Ontario, approximately 5-miles, or 8-kilometers, south of Lewiston on the Niagara River.

The Falls Incline Railway is located next to Horseshoe Falls and links “Table Rock Center” and “Journey Behind the Falls” on the Niagara Parkway with the “Fallsview Tourist Area.”

We are told it was built for the Niagara Parks Commission by the Swiss Company Von Roll, and began operating in October of 1966.

The other historic Incline Railways of the Niagara Falls region between the United States and Canada included:

The Prospect Park Incline Railway at Prospect Park in New York, said to have been built in 1845, and completely removed in 1908 after an accident killed someone.

It was then replaced by an elevator that operated between 1910 and 1960 until it closed, and replaced by the current Prospect Point Observation Tower in 1961.

Then in 1869, the Leander Colt Incline Railway was said to have been built on the Canadian-side of the Falls, near the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, but damaged and abandoned 20-years later in 1889.

Another Whirlpool Rapids Incline was said to have been built in 1876 near the Leander Colt Incline, but damaged by fire in 1934 and replaced by the “Great Gorge Trip” of the Niagara Belt-Line, a train route around Niagara Falls…

…which later became the “White Water Walk” where you can take a leisurely stroll where the Niagara Belt-Line once was.

Lastly, we are told the Clifton Incline was built in 1894 to serve the Canadian-side of the “Maid of the Mist” boat.

It closed in 1976 and reopened in 1977 as the “Maid of the Mist” Incline, and closed again in 1990.

Almost 30-years-later, in 2019, it was re-opened as the Hornblower Niagara Funicular, and operates today for Hornblower Niagara Cruises.

There were two historic incline railways that operated on the Niagara Escarpment in Hamilton, Ontario.

One was the Mount Hamilton Railway, also known as the Wentworth Street Incline, which started operation in 1895 and ended in 1936.

The other historic incline railway in Hamilton was the Hamilton and Barton, also known as the James Street Incline, first opened in 1892 and operated until 1932, when it was shut down for the given reason of financial losses.

As an interesting aside, compare the Niagara Escarpment on the left in appearance with the Endless Wall at New River Gorge State Park in West Virginia on the right.

Another Incline Railway still in operation today in Canada is the Old Quebec Funicular, located next to the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City.

It first opened in 1879. In the well-over 100-years it has been operating it has been closed and renovated twice.

The first-time was when it was severely damaged by a fire in 1945, after which time it was rebuilt and reopened in 1946.

The second-time was when a cable snapped in 1996, killing a passenger, and the funicular wasn’t reopened until 1998 as an inclined elevator, since the cars are independent of each other.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, there are two remaining incline railways, out of what was originally seventeen on Mount Washington, named the Monongahela and Duquesne Inclines.

The Monongahela Incline on Mount Washington was said to have been designed by Prussian-born engineer John Endres of Cincinnati, Ohio, and started operating in 1870.

It is the oldest continuously operating funicular in the United States.

Interesting to note that 1870, the same year the Monongahela Incline became operational in Pittsburgh, was also the same year John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler, founded the Standard Oil Company.

The Standard Oil Company was an American oil producing, transporting, refining, marketing company…and monopoly, which exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Were they making existing rail transportation infrastructure operational until they had the modes of transportation invented to replace them – specifically the introduction of gasoline-powered road transportation? 

Let’s see more of what the historical narrative has to say about these incline railways!

The Duquesne Incline was said to have been designed by Hungarian-American civil engineer Samuel Diescher.

Completed in 1877, the Duquesne Incline rises 800-feet, or 244-meters, at a 30-degree angle up Mt. Washington.

It was closed in need of repairs in 1962, but reopened the next year after local residents raised funds to restore it, and it has been completely refurbished since then and is one of Pittsburgh’s most popular tourist attractions.

Oh yeah, before we leave Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the Forks of the Ohio River for Cincinnati, Ohio, on the Ohio River, it is also interesting to note that the petroleum industry in the United States began in earnest in 1859 when Edwin Drake found oil on a piece of leased-land near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in what is now called Oil Creek State Park.

For this reason, Titusville is called the Birthplace of the Oil Industry, and for a number of years this part of Pennsylvania was the leading oil-producing region in the world.

Cincinnati had five historic incline railways.

Mount Auburn was Cincinnati’s first incline railway, which started operating in 1872.

In 1889, there was a terrible accident where a malfunction caused the car to careen down the track with 7 people in it, causing death and destruction along the way.

It was remodelled, opening again in 1890, and only operated for another 8-years. Control of it passed into the consolidated system, and it was demolished and abandoned.

Public stairs, known as the Main Street steps, replaced the Mount Auburn Incline.

In 1875, the Price Hill Incline was the next to open in Cincinnati.

It was the steepest, and shortest, of the five, and carried passengers and freight.

It was privately-owned by the Price family, and carried passengers to the Price Hill House at the top, a restaurant and entertainment venue.

The incline stopped operating in 1942.

This is where the Price Hill Incline was located.

Cincinnati’s third incline to open was the one on Mount Adams, the longest-running of the five, operating from 1876 until 1948.

The incline of 945-feet, or 288-meters, took 2 minutes and 20-seconds to go from the bottom to the top.

For almost twenty-years, from 1876 to 1895, the Highland House at the top of the incline was a destination for food and entertainment.

This was the former location of the Mount Adams Incline.

Opening the same year as the Mount Adams Incline, the Bellevue Incline, also known as the Elm Street Incline and the Clifton Inclined Plane, started operating in 1876.

It was 1,000-feet, or 305-meters ,- long and the highest in elevation of the five inclines.

The Bellevue Incline ran between the Jackson Brewery and McMicken Hall, the University of Cincinnati’s first college.

The Bellevue House opened the same year as the incline, and served Moerlein beer, and had entertainment like music and bowling.

Bellevue House unfortunately burned down in 1901 and the Incline closed 25-years later.

The fifth and last incline railway was said to have been constructed in Cincinnati in 1892.

It had no entertainment house at the top to draw passengers.

It closed in 1923, the second of the five to close-down.

Moving west across the country to look at some of the historic incline railways there, in Duluth, Minnesota, the Highland Park Tramway Line served Duluth Heights via an Incline-Railway from 1892 to 1939, which was the last piece of the electric streetcar system to be dismantled, as the rest started going away in the early 1930s.

In Iowa, the Fenelon Place Cable Car is found in Dubuque’s Cathedral Historic District, and is described as the world’s steepest, shortest scenic railway, said to have been built in 1882 for the private-use of J. K. Graves, a local banker and State Senator.

It is still in operation today.

There was an historic Incline Railway at the Royal Gorge in Canon City, Colorado.

George Cole of the Royal Gorge Bridge and Amusement Company was given credit for the design and supervision construction first of the Royal Gorge Bridge, at the time World’s Highest Suspension Bridge, composed of 2,100 strands of wire that are anchored in granite walls and suspended from four towers rising 75-feet, or 23-meters, above the roadway.

It was said to have been constructed between June and November of 1929 (which would have been the year the Great Depression began).

The bridge is contained within the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, a theme park on the edge of the gorge around both ends of the bridge, which itself was said to have been built as a park attraction and not for actual use for road transportation.

George Cole was then credited with the construction of the world’s steepest incline railway in 1931 to transport passengers from the canyon rim to its floor and back.

A wildfire in 2013 damaged the Incline Railway as well as most of the park’s buildings and aerial tram.

The park was rebuilt and reopened in 2015, but the Incline Railway was among the attractions not restored as it was destroyed beyond repair.

Like the historic railroad that once-traversed the Niagara Gorge in New York and Ontario, there is a rail-line running through the Royal Gorge in Colorado, only this one is still in operation today, year-road, between Canon City and Parkdale, Colorado.

In California, I found several historic incline railways, one of which is still in operation and others are not.

Angels Flight on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, which first operated from 1901 until 1969, is still in operation today.

We are told that it was moved a half-block south from its original location when it reopened as a tourist attraction in 1996, and has run almost continuously since then, with a few exceptions, like closing for nine-years following a fatal accident.

Angels Flight has a decidedly Moorish-looking appearance….

Court Flight also on Bunker Hill opened in 1905 and ascended 200-feet, or 61-meters, at a grade of 43-degrees. It functioned for only 39-years, closing in 1943 we are told because of low-profitability during World War II.

The Los Angeles and Mount Washington Incline Railway in Los Angeles opened in 1909.

Passengers could ride the incline railway to the top for 5-cents, and they could visit Mount Washington Hotel at the top, a grand hotel.

Alas, less than only 10-years after it opened, city inspectors determined that the railway was unsafe due to a worn cable and subsequently shut it down in 1918.

The Grand Hotel at the top of Mount Washington became the International Headquarters for Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship in 1920.

The Santa Catalina Incline Railway on the privately-owned by that time Santa Catalina Island climbed above the Avalon Amphitheater starting in 1905 as a tourist attraction, until its closure after a fire in that devastated Avalon in 1918.

Moving on to incline railways, AKA funiculars, around the world, here are more examples.

In the United Kingdom, there is history of at least 40 of them that I can find a reference to. Though quite a few of these funiculars are still in operation today, quite a few are not.

There is the water-powered Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway in North Devon, which is the highest and steepest water-powered funicular in the world, at 862-feet, or 263-meters, -long, said to have been built between 1887 and its opening in 1890.

The Clifton Rocks Railway in Bristol, England, was an underground funicular railway that first opened in March of 1893 and closed in October of 1934, and funded by George Newnes, a publisher and proprietor of the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway.

Like what we saw in Niagara Falls region with the historic funiculars at the Niagara Gorge near the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge between New York and Ontario, and in Colorado with the Royal Gorge Bridge and Incline Railway, the Clifton Rocks Railway upper station was near the Clifton Suspension bridge, and it linked to Hotwells and Bristol Harbor at the bottom of another gorge, the Avon Gorge.

The existence of the Clifton Suspension Bridge was credited to the famous prolific British civil and mechanical engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called “one of the 19th-century engineering giants.”

The Aberystwyth Cliff Railway in Aberystwyth, Wales, is the longest electric funicular in the British Isles, at 778-feet, or 237-meters-long, and the second-longest after the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway.

It first opened in August of 1896, and is still in operation today.

Kings Hall was at the top of the Aberystwyth Cliff Funicular and was a favored entertainment venue there for concerts and dances.

It had a great dance floor, and said to have been built in the Art Deco Architecture style in 1934 (which would have been between World War I and World War II).

Major band concerts were also held there, like Led Zeppelin in January of 1973 during their Strange Affinity British Tour in 1972 and 1973.

The King’s Hall was demolished in 1989, for the given reason of apparent structural weaknesses and disrepair…

…and it was replaced where it stood on the corner of Marine Terrace and Terrace Road by the King’s Hall residential flats and commercial units.

In Australia, the Cloudland Funicular ran from the Main Road straight up to the Cloudland Dance Hall in the Bowen Hills suburb of Brisbane.

The funicular was demolished in 1967.

The Cloudland Dance Hall, also known as Luna Park, was a huge thing during the 40’s when the US troops were stationed there.

Like Kings Hall in Aberystwyth, Wales, the Cloudland had a great dance floor.

Also like Kings Hall in Wales, it was demolished in the 1980s, and the Cloudland Apartments occupy the former location of this iconic landmark.

In New Zealand, the Wellington Cable Car funicular is still operational today, and first started operating in 1902.

It connects the shopping district of Lambton Quay with the suburb of Kelburn.

The line consists of a single track with a passing loop in the middle for the two cars.

The Tunel Funicular in Istanbul, Turkey, first opened in 1875, and is the second-oldest fully-underground urban railway in the world after the London Underground, which opened in 1863.

The Tunel also has a single-track with a passing loop for the two cars.

It connects the quarters of Karakoy, the modern name for the old part of the city originally known as Galata and Beyoglu, originally known as Pera.

The Tunel’s existence was credited to French engineer Eugene-Henri Gavand, who in 1867 visited Istanbul, which was then Constantinople, as a tourist, and came up with the idea of designing a funicular to help all the people who were struggling to get up-and-down the steep Yuksek Kaldirim Avenue.

It was said to have been constructed between July of 1871 and December of 1874, and officially opened in January of 1875.

I can’t find anything about Eugene-Henri Gavand except for this book attributed to him about the Tunel.

The Buda Castle Hill Funicular in Budapest, Hungary, first opened in March of 1870, the same year as the Monogahela Incline in Pittsburgh and the founding of Standard Oil, and around the same time that the construction of the Tunel in Constantinople that we are told was starting in 1871.

Part of the destruction of the Buda Castle complex during World War II, it reopened in June of 1986.

The funicular links Adam Clark Square and the Szchenyi Chain Bridge at street-level to the Buda Castle above, the palace complex of the Hungarian Kings.

The Szchenyi Chain Bridge was said to have been designed by English engineer William Tierney Clark, and built by Scottish engineer Adam Clark starting in 1840 and opening in 1849, and that it was the first permanent bridge to cross the Danube River in Hungary.

At the time of its construction, it was considered one of the modern world’s engineering wonders.

As I mentioned previously, these incline railways known as funiculars were a worldwide thing.

Other historic and present-day locations include:

Jacob’s Ladder on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.

A two-car inclined railway to carry cargo between Jamestown and the Fort was said to have been constructed in 1829 .

The power supply for the incline railway was a team of three-donkeys that rotated around a capstan connected to the cars by iron chain and pulleys.

Then in 1871, termite damage to the wooden ties of the railway led to the Royal Engineers to removing the cars, rails and associated machinery of the inclined railway.

Today, what became known as Jacob’s Ladder is a staircase leading from Jamestown, the capital city of St. Helena, up to Ladder Hill Fort and the suburb of Half Tree Hollow.

In Valparaiso, Chile, the oldest of the incline railways known as the Ascensor Concepcion, is still in operation today.

It first opened in 1883 to transport passengers from Elias Alley on the Plan de Concepcion, or the flat part of the city where public and commercial buildings are found, to the Gervasoni Promenade on Concepcion Hill.

The total railway length is 226-feet, or 60-meters, and it climbs 154-feet, or 47-meters, above sea-level at a 46-degree angle.

In Hong Kong, the Peak Tram started operating in May of 1888, and was said to be the first funicular in Asia.

Now owned and operated by Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels (HSH), it runs from Garden Road Admiralty to Victoria Peak, covering a distance of .87-miles, or 1.4-kilometers.

It is a single-track-line with a passing loop, and two curves, one at the bottom and one at the top.

There are many more examples to choose from, but here’s a couple more to leave you with before I end this post.

In India, there is an incline railway known as the “winch train” to get up to the Murugan Temple in Palani in southern India’s Tamil Nadu State.

It was said to have been first commissioned in 1966 originally to help get the elderly, sick and handicapped people to the temple at the top of the hill.

And lastly, the Penang Hill Railway that climbs Penang Hill outside of George Town in Malaysia’s Penang State.

It is a single-track railway with a passing loop that passes through a tunnel that is the steepest in the world.

The construction of the Penang Hill Railway was said to have started in 1909 and officially opened on January 1st of 1924.

The given reason for it having initially been constructed was for the British colonial community to enjoy the cooler air of Penang Hill.

As you can see from the examples provided in this video, there used to be a lot more of these inclined railways than there are now, and they were all over the world, including one on Saint Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa.

Of the Incline Railways no longer in existence, they were typically either deemed no longer profitable, unsafe, or destroyed by fire.

The same is true for historic trolley parks, most of which are long gone due primarily to fire, though a few amusement parks remain in their original locations, but without the trolley, like Camden Park in Huntingdon, West Virginia.

Of this type of incline railway still in operation today, they either operate as part of the tourist industry, or are still operating as part of the public transportation system.

It certainly appears as if those behind the reset of history didn’t want to keep any of the highly-advanced rail infrastructure found around the world that was problematic in our historical narrative unless they could profit from it or it made practical sense from a public transport sense to keep it in place.

Something to think about when trying to piece together what has taken place here without our knowledge or consent.

Seeing World History with New Eyes – 1993 to 1995

I am giving an overview of history since 1945 in this series, with an eye towards uncovering the patterns that give insight into the world we live in today, and in this part will be focusing on events that took place between 1993 and 1995.

So far, patterns uncovered since 1945 show events and people being manipulated for particular outcomes, and deceiving us about what was really going on to gain our consent…

…seeing hereditary rulers being taken down and replaced with new governments, with examples of like communist, socialist and autocratic-theocratic, leading to genocide and repression of millions of people…

…since the 1980s, multiple events seeding our collective Human consciousness with the notion we could meet a violent and horrible death, anywhere and anytime…

…and at the same experienced the rise of the personal computer, internet, and world-wide web.

Starting in the 1990s, at the same time we saw the fall of the centralized communist systems of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, we saw the rise of war and violence between different ethnic groups in the former republics of the countries, resulting in the genocide of the people…

…and the destruction of infrastructure in this civil and political warfare…

…the First Gulf War in Kuwait…

…violent weather…

…violent earthquakes…

…and airplane, and other transportation disasters as they have been occurring quite frequently from what I have been finding in the historical record in both the 1990s so far, and also in the decade of the 1980s that I looked at in the last part of the series.

I will now pick up the 1990s in 1993, where I left off.

The European Economic Community eliminated trade barriers and created a European Single Market on January 1st of 1993.

It was comprised of the 27 member states of the European Union, and the four non-member states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

It referred to the European Union as one territory without any internal borders or regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods and services, with the stated goal of guaranteeing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, also known as the “four freedoms.”

EuroNews was launched in Lyons, France, on the same day, a multilingual television news network aimed to cover news from a Pan-European perspective.

This neon-green cube has been the new EuroNews Headquarters since 2015.

I don’t know, what do you think?

It was constructed at the confluence of Lyons’ Rhone and Saone Rivers…

…which is described as being transformed into a dynamic business and commercial hub from what was a run-down and neglected area.

It almost looks as if the old masonry building is being imprisoned in the new architecture!

I can think of another city at the confluence of two rivers that was once a busy commercial hub back in the day.

This city is Cairo, the southernmost point in Illinois, which is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

Cairo is largely-abandoned today, and is considered a ghost town.

In its heyday, Cairo was an important city along the steamboat routes and railway lines. 

Fort Defiance, described as a Civil War-era fort, was located right at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

On January 3rd, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U. S. President George H. W. Bush signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, also known as START II, banning the use of Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) on Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).

Funny thing is, the treaty never really went into effect.

While it was ratified by the U. S. Senate in 1996, the Russians ratified it in 2000, and instead withdrew from the treaty in 2002.

The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) came into effect instead in June of 2003 through February of 2011.

It reduced the number of strategic warheads count for each country to 1,700 from 2,200.

The fifth-largest robbery in U. S. History took place on January 5th, which was the theft of $7.4 million stolen from the Brink’s Armored Car depot, in Rochester, New York.

I looked at two big robberies in the last part of this series, the still-unsolved, largest art theft in U. S. history on March 18th of 1990, at which time twelve paintings and a Chinese Shang Dynasty vase, all together worth $100 to $300 million, were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum…

…and the City Bonds Robbery in the City of London, which took place on May 2nd of 1990, the largest robbery in world history where a courier was robbed of 301 bearer-bonds, worth 292-million pounds, and 299 of the bonds were ultimately recovered.

The City Bonds Robbery was believed to be a sophisticated global operation which involved the New York Mafia, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and Colombian drug barons.

In the Brinks Robbery, an Irish Priest in New York and an ex-guerilla fighter from Northern Ireland were eventually convicted of the robbery, for the stated reason of helping the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

On the same day as the Brinks’ Robbery, on January 5th, the MV Braer, a Liberian-registered oil tanker, ran aground at Garths Ness in northern Scotland’s Shetland Islands when it was enroute from Bergen, Norway to Quebec, Canada, loaded with 85,000-metric tonnes, or 94,000-tons of crude oil, causing oil to leak into the sea.

The reason given for the oil tanker’s grounding was that it had lost power after seawater contaminated the ship’s heavy fuel two-days earlier, when a pipeline on deck broke loose.

While there was an immediate environmental response, and work was being done to contain and clean-up the spill, it spread northward up the west side of the Shetland Islands.

So there was lots going on here related to the January 5th spill…

…when along came what became known as the Braer Storm, named after the MV Braer, on January 8th, which was the most intense extra-tropical cyclone ever recorded over the North Atlantic, the lowest low ever…

…and was the fastest-deepening, mid-latitude depression in history, with central pressure dropping 78 mbs in a 24-hour period, which resulted in what is called “Explosive Cyclogenesis,” or the explosive genesis of a cyclone, and took place just west of the Shetland Islands.

It caused severe blizzards across most of Scotland, and the final break-up of the MV Braer oil tanker.

Was it just a coincidence that the major environmental disaster of the MV Braer spilling its oil into the sea and the most intense extra-tropical cyclone ever recorded formed within days of each other in the vicinity of the Shetland Islands? Or not.

Something to think about.

The Polish Ferry Jan Heweliusz sank, as a result of hurricane-force winds, off the coast of Rugen in the Baltic Sea on January 14th, the most deadly peace-time maritime disaster involving a Polish ship, killing at least 54 of the passengers and crew.

Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd-president on January 20th.

The first World Trade Center Bombing took place on February 26th.

A truck bomb was blown-up below the North Tower of the complex, in the parking garage.

The truck contained a 1,336-lb (606 kg) urea nitrate-hydrogen, gas-enhanced device, which was said to have been intended to send the North Tower crashing into the South Tower.

This is what the U. S. State Department website says about it:

“On February 26th, a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. This event was the first indication for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) that terrorism was evolving from a regional phenomenon outside of the United States to a transnational phenomenon.

From what the State Department had it say about it, it sounds like the first World Trade Center bombing in February of 1993 marked the beginning of acts of terrorism in the United States, and took place just a little after a month after Bill Clinton took office.

The investigation into the bombing led to ties with Al-Qaeda, and in March of 1994, four men were convicted of carrying out the bombing, which killed six people and injured over 1,000.

Two days after that, on February 28th, the Waco Siege began in Texas.

The Waco Siege involved the law enforcement siege of the Mount Carmel Center compound of the Branch Davidians, located 13-miles, or 21-kilometers, northeast of Waco.

The information that is found in the historical record is that due to suspected stockpiling of illegal weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had obtained a search warrant for the compound, and arrest warrants for the group’s leader, David Koresh, and several others in the group.

When the ATF attempted to serve the warrants, a gunfight ensued, and four officers were killed along with six Branch Davidians.

With the failure of the ATF to implement the search warrant, the FBI initiated a siege of the compound.

After 51-days, the FBI resorted to a tear gas attack to force the Branch Davidians out.

What came next was a fire that engulfed the Mount Carmel Center, that was ultimately officially blamed on the Branch Davidians themselves …

…that resulted in the deaths of 81 Branch Davidians, including women and children.

On March 5th, Macedonian Palair Flight 301 on a flight to Zurich crashed shortly after take-off from Skopje, killing 83 of 97 on-board.

At the time, it was the deadliest plane crash in the history of the country.

The cause of the crash was attributed to atmospheric icing and pilot error.

On March 11th, Janet Reno was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as first female U. S. Attorney General the next day.

The Bombay bombings occurred on March 12th, killing 257 and injuring an estimated 1,400 more.

The Bombay bombings were a series of at least 12 bombings that took place in one day.

The bomb attacks started at 1:30 pm that day, when a powerful car bomb exploded in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange building.

The car bomb severely damaged the 28-story stock exchange building and other nearby buildings.

Following the bombing of the stock exchange, car and scooter bombs exploded throughout the city, and suitcase bombs were exploded at three hotels, like the Hotel Sea Rock.

The estimated number of deaths and injuries from the Bombay bombing spree were at least 257 fatalities, and 1,400 injuries.

The Great Blizzard of 1993 took place between March 13th and March 15th, bringing record snowfall all the way from Cuba to Quebec.

Also dubbed “The Storm of the Century,” it formed over the Gulf of Mexico on March 12th, and was notable for its massive size, intensity, and wide-reaching effects.

Heavy snow was reported in places like Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, and Georgia, and the storm also brought hurricane force wind-gusts and record-low barometric pressures.

The 32-year-old actor Brandon Lee’s death took place on March 31st, the son of martial artist and actor, Bruce Lee.

Brandon’s cause-of-death is cited as being shot in the abdomen by a gun with defective blank ammunition at the Wilmington movie studios on the set of “The Crow” in March of 1993.

Brandon Lee landed what was to be his breakthrough acting role in “The Crow” as the lead character, Eric Draven, a murdered musician who was resurrected by a crow, and went on to avenge the deaths of himself and his fiancee.

Brandon Lee had finished most of his scenes before his death, so the film was finished through script re-writes, a stunt-double, and digital effects, and the film was dedicated to Brandon Lee…and his fiance, Eliza Hutton.

Sounds incredibly similar to the death of the Australian actor Heath Ledger in 2008, who was said to have received inspiration for the make-up for his role as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” from Brandon Lee in “The Crow…”

…and who, at the age of 28, also died before the filming of the movie was complete, in his case from “acute-combined drug-intoxication” after he had finished filming his role a few months prior…

…and while he was in the middle of filming his last role in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”

Back to 1993.

In April & May of 1993, the Four-Corners area of the American Southwest was hit with an outbreak with the newly-recognized pulmonary Hantavirus syndrome.

This region is largely-occupied by the tribal lands including the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Zuni.

This was the first-known outbreak of Hantavirus in the United States, and said to be carried by deer-mice, and was said to have been spread through contact with “aerosolized” deer-mice droppings…

… in enclosed spaces in and around those who contracted the Hantavirus.

The Great Flood of 1993 occurred in the United States between April and October, when the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers flooded large parts of the American Midwest.

One of the most costly and devastating floods ever to occur in the United States, the cost in damages was said to be $15-billion, and the flooded area totalled around 30,000-square-miles, or 78,000-kilometers-squared.

Repetitive and persistent storms bombarded the Upper Midwest with considerable rainfall, with many areas across the north-central plains having rainfall 400 to 750% above-normal.

The Srebrenica Massacre took place in Bosnia on April 12th, at which time the Bosnian Serb Army launched an artillery attack on Srebrenica, and Bosnian Muslim enclave that believed it was under UN protection, and had numerous Bosnian muslim refugees from surrounding settlements coming there.

The artillery attack left 56 dead and 73 seriously wounded, including 14 children who were killed when an artillery shell hit a school playgorund.

Even though the UN declared Srebrenica, and several other Bosnian cities, as Safe Areas on April 16th, it was considered to be one of the most controversial decisions of the UN, and the resolutions were unclear about how these areas were to be protected in a war zone.

It led to a diplomatic crisis, and another massacre took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995, one of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II, when more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army.

On April 24th of 1993, the IRA detonated a powerful truck-bomb, loaded with fertilizer, on Bishopsgate, a major thoroughfare in the City of London, London’s financial district.

This is a view of the nearby Wormwood Street after the bomb detonated, for which there was a telephoned warning about an hour beforehand.

It took place on a Saturday, resulting in one-death, 44 injuries, and severely damaged St. Ethelburga’s, the smallest and one of the oldest churches in London…

…which has since been restored…

…and wrecked the Liverpool Street Station…

…and the NatWest Tower.

As a result of the bombing, combined with the bombing of the Baltic Exchange in the City of London the year prior, a “ring of steel” was implemented to protect the city.

Most of the Zambian National Football team died in a plane-crash in Gabon on April 27th, enroute to Dakar, Senegal, for the FIFA World Cup Qualifier against Senegal.

They were in a transport carrier of the Zambian Air Force, and the official investigation concluded that the pilot had shut down the wrong engine after an engine fire, causing the plane to lose all power when leaving the airport in Libreville, Gabon, and the plane crashed in the ocean.

On May 4th, The United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNISOM) II assumed Somalian duties after the dissolution of the US-led United Task Force (UNITAF).

UNISOM II was tasked with establishing a secure enough environment to carry out humanitarian operations by any means necessary.

The Nambjiya Mine disaster in Zamora, Ecuador took place on May 9th.

It involved a landslide that took place in a remote mining settlement in southeastern Ecuador, near Peru.

The Nambjiya Mining settlement, known as the “World’s Most Dangerous Gold Town,” is situated in a valley 2,600-meters, or 8,530-feet, above sea-level, with most of the houses built right on the tunnel entrances to the mines.

On this day, a large part of the mountain, above the mines and part of the town, collapsed, with estimates of the death toll ranging between 85 and 400, and is considered to be one of the worst mining disasters ever, even though mining was said to have continued in the settlement in the unaffected areas after the landslide.

The location of the landslide itself is an official graveyard.

The next day, on May 10th, a fire at the Kader Toy Factory fire took place in Bangkok, Thailand, killing 188 people and injuring 469. It is considered the worst industrial fire in history, with most of the victims being young women from rural Thailand. The toys, stuffed toys and plastic toys intended for export, were manufactured primarily for Disney and Mattel.

The fire exits drawn in the building plans were in fact not constructed, and the existing external doors were locked.

The fire started in the part of the building where fabrics, materials, and plastics were stored, providing fuel for the fire.

It is interesting to note that when I was investigating fire disasters back in the 1980s, locked doors were a common occurrence, with examples like the Cinema Statuto Fire in February of 1983, in Turin, Italy, that killed 64 people, and was the largest disaster in Turin since World War II, with the fire was said to have started from flames spread by an old curtain, and that the burning of the theater seats created hydrogen cyanide fumes, of which inhalation was the primary cause of death of the victims.

All but one of the theater’s emergency exits was said to have been closed and locked…

…and the Alcala 20 Nightclub in Madrid, Spain, in December of 1983, in which 82 people were killed and 27 injured, where an exit on the upper floor was locked, and a main exit to an adjoined building was closed with an iron-grille during the fire.

On May 17th, the new Pentium Processor was unveiled, the newest and fastest microprocessor created by the Intel Corporation.

There was a plane crash in Colombia, on May 19th, that killed all 132 people on-board after the aircraft collided with a mountain on approach to Medellin.

The crash was attributed to bad weather and pilot error.

Typhoon Koryn caused massive damage to the Philippines, China, and Macau between June 26th and June 28th.

It was the first typhoon, and it was a super typhoon, of the 1993 Pacific Typhoon season, which had no official bounds.

In a normal year, tropical cyclones, which can turn into typhoons, form between May and November.

In 1993, the season started in February and the last storm dissipated on January 1st of 1994.

Forty tropical cyclones formed in 1993, with 30 becoming tropical storms, 15 becoming typhoons, and 3 becoming, like Koryn, becoming super typhoon.

A typhoon, which is a tropical cyclone that forms in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, is classified as a super typhoon when it has wind-speeds of at least 120-mph, or 190-km/h.

President Bill Clinton authorized a cruise missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad on June 27th after an attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in April.

On the night of April 13th that same year, when George H. W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait City the next day to commemorate the International Coalition Victory against Iraq, Kuwaiti officials arrested 17 people in connection with a plot to kill Bush using plastic explosives hidden in a vehicle.

The authorized attacked was comprised of the launch of 23 cruise missiles by two U. S. Navy warships into downtown Baghdad, was claimed by the U. S. to hit the Iraqi intelligence Headquarters, and the Iraqis claimed that nine civilians were killed in the attack and 3 civilian houses destroyed.

Hurricane Calvin landed in Mexico on July 7th, which was 2nd hurricane on record to make landfall in Mexico. It was said to kill an estimated 30 to 40 people.

Throughout its journey along the Pacific coast of Mexico, it dropped heavy rainfall, and causing property damage, mudslides and flooding.

A magnitude 7.7 EQ hit southwest of Hokkaido on July 12th, and generated a tsunami.

The hardest hit location by these events in northern Japan was Hokkaido’s island of Okushiri, where 165 people were killed as a result of the earthquake, with the tsunami, and large landslide.

On July 26th, Asiana Airlines Flight 733 crashed into Mt. Ungeo in Haenam, South Korea, killing 68, with two survivors.

The cause was attributed to pilot error after two previously failed landing attempts because of bad weather.

The Royal Plaza Hotel at Nakha Ratchasima in Thailand collapsed on August 13th, killing 137 and injuring 227.

The collapse of the building took less than 10-seconds, which was attributed to gradual deformation from creep that weakened all the ground floor support columns.

The only part of the building left standing was the front elevator hall, which was said to have been separately built from the rest of the structure.

It was one of the most fatal and disastrous man-made accidents in Thai history, which took place only three-months after the world’s worst accidental loss-of-life fire in an industrial Building at the Kader Toy Factory in Bangkok, Thailand.

Hurricane Gert started out as large tropical cyclone that formed from a tropical wave in the Caribbean Sea, and became the 7th-named storm, and third hurricane, of the Atlantic Hurricane season.

It caused extensive flooding and mudslides throughout Central America and Mexico between September 15th and September 21st.

Hurricane Gert left behind disrupted road networks for extended periods of time, which hampered rescue missions and relief efforts in badly-flooded regions.

Damage costs amounted to $170-million, leaving private property, infrastructure, and farmland in ruins.

On September 22nd, the Big Bayou Canot Rail Disaster took place, near Mobile, Alabama, killing 47 people and injuring 103.

It involved the derailing of an Amtrak train on the CSX Transportation Big Bayou Canot Bridge after a towboat pulling heavy barges collided with the rail bridge eight-minutes earlier, causing a displacement of the span of the bridge and deformation of the rails.

It was the deadliest rail accident in Amtrak’s history, and the worst rail accident in the United States since the 1958 Newark Bay Rail accident, where 48 people were killed.

The pilot of the tugboat pulling the barges was said to have made a wrong turn in foggy conditions on the Mobile River, and entered the Big Bayou Canot; was not properly trained on how to read radar; and mistook the bridge on the radar for another tugboat.

After the accident, the pilot was not found to be criminally-liable for it.

On September 24th, the Cambodian monarchy was restored with Norodom Sihanouk as its king.

It is interesting to note that during his lifetime, Cambodia was variously called: the French Protectorate of Cambodia, until 1953; the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1953 to 1970; the Khmer Republic from 1970 to 1975; the People’s Republic of Kampuchea from 1979 to 1989; the State of Cambodia from 1989 to 1993; and again the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1993 to the present.

King Sihanouk abdicated in 2004, and the Royal Council of the Throne chose his oldest son, Norodom Sihamoni, as his successor, who is still the King of Cambodia.

King Sihamoni lived outside of Cambodia most of his life, having been educated in Czechoslovakia.

He is not married, and has no children.

Back to 1993.

A 6.2-magnitude, relatively shallow earthquake, known as the Latur Earthquake, shook Maharashtra, India, on September 30th.

As a result of the earthquake, approximately 10,000 people died; over 30,000 were injured; and around 50 villages were destroyed.

The Battle of Mogadishu, part of the broader Somali Civil War, took place between October 3rd and 4th in what was known as “Operation Gothic Serpent.”

It was also known as the “Black Hawk Down” incident.

The battle was a disaster for coalition troops and resulted in a major strategic victory for Somali National Alliance forces under the leadership of Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

The Battle of Mogadishu remains one of the most heavily devastating battles American troops ever experienced in close combat.

On October 10th, less than 3-months after the July 26th crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 733 into Mt. Ungeo in Haenam, South Korea, the South Korean Ferry Soehae capsized in the Yellow Sea, off Wido, South Korea, killing 292 of the 362 on-board, with 70 rescues.

Factors attributed to the capsizing of the ferry included: overcrowding, with 141 more passengers than safely allowed; harsh weather conditions; and a thick rope that was found wrapped around both propellor shafts, which was said to have been left behind by fishing operations.

On October 21st, a coup in Burundi resulted in the assassination of the new-elected President Melchior Ndadaye, who won the country’s presidency in a landmark, multi-party election in July of this same year.

His assassination sparked the Burundian Civil War, which we are told was the result of longstanding divisions, like in Rwanda, between the Hutus and Tutsis.

An estimated 300,000 died as a result of the Burundian Civil War, with children being used on both sides.

The German, then Belgian, colonial rulers of the region of Ruanda-Urundi, found it convenient to rule through the existing power structure, in which the Tutsis were the aristocrats & rulers.

The colonial powers fostered ethnic differences between the minority artistocratic Tutsis and majority Hutus, and Ruanda-Urundi became two countries upon independence in 1962.

Believed to be Nilotic origin, meaning indigenous to the Nile River Valley, the Tutsi people are historically a very tall people.

The Burundian Civil war lasted from October 21st of 1993 until May 15th of 2005, and the Rwandan Civil War started on October 1st of 1990, and ended on July 18th of 1994, with the end of the Rwandan genocide. More on Rwandan Genocide coming up in a close look at 1994.

The Maastricht Treaty took effect on November 1st, formally establishing the European Union.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed the legislative houses of United States, Canada, and Mexico between November 17th and November 22nd.

NAFTA created a trilateral trade bloc in North America, with the elimination or reduction of barriers to trade and investment between the three countries.

On November 20th, an international passenger flight travelling from Geneva, Switzerland to Skopje, Macedonia, crashed into Mount Trojani near Ohrid Macedonia, killing all 116 on-board, and was the deadliest plane crash in Macedonian history, taking place only a little-over eight-months since the prior deadliest place crash in Macedonian history on March 5th, 1993, as mentioned previously.

The cause of the accident was attributed to pilot error.

President Clinton signed NAFTA into law on December 8th.

On December 10th, id Software’s Doom was released, becoming a landmark title in first-person shooter video games for MS-DOS.

Players assumed the role of a space marine, named Doomguy, fighting his way through hordes of invading demons from hell.

Hmmmm.

Makes me wonder what they were trying to tell us here. Boy, if we knew then what we know now, as I really think hordes of demons is what we have all been dealing with here, without knowing it!

The next day, one-block, of three-blocks, of the Highland Towers near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, collapsed on December 11th.

The collapse buried the building’s occupants under tons of debris, with a total of 48 bodies found and two survivors.

The cause of the collapse was attributed to a major landslide caused by heavy rains that burst diversion pipes.

So far in 1993, as in the last parts of this series focusing on the 1980s and 1990s, we are seeing the same pattern of violent weather around the world…

…weather anomalies like the Great Blizzard on the East Coast and Great Flood of 1993 in the Midwest…

…earthquakes in different parts of the world…

…worst disasters ever of their kind happening one day after the other in different parts of the world…

…plane and train crashes…

…sinking ships…

…buildings just collapsing…

…civil wars…

…terrorism, and much more along these lines going on 1993.

So, what happened in 1994?

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established, on January 1st, exactly one-year to the day after the European Economic Community eliminated trade barriers and created a European Single Market as previously mentioned.

On January 14th, President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin signed the Kremlin Accords, which ended the pre-programmed aiming of nuclear missiles towards each country’s targets, and provided for the taking apart of the nuclear arsenal in the Ukraine.

The 6.7 magnitude Northridge Earthquake took place on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in Los Angeles on Monday, January 17th, leaving 57 dead, and 8,700 injured.

It was the highest-ever, instrumentality recorded earthquake in an urban area in North America.

The 1994 North American cold wave took place during January of 1994, with extreme cold events taking place between January 18th and 19th, and again between January 21st and 22nd, and 67 cold temperature records set on January 19th, with Indiana and Kentucky setting state records on that same day.

The cold wave caused an estimated 100 deaths.

On February 6th, the Markale Massacres took place in a marketplace in Sarajevo.

On this day, a 120-milimeter mortar shell hit the middle of a crowded marketplace during the Bosnian War, which was part of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, between Bosnian Serbs and forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As a result of this incident there were 68 dead and 144 injured, and it was never conclusively determined which side had fired the shell. The UN ultimately concluded that it was impossible to determine which side had fired the shell.

Baruch Goldstein, a physician who followed the far-right, ultranationalist Meir Kahane, opened fire inside the Cave of the Patriarchs, also known as the Ibrihami Mosque, in Hebron in the West Bank on February 25th, and killed 29 muslims, and injured 125 before he was beaten to death.

As a direct result of the massacre, Jewish Israelis were barred from going into major Arab communities in Hebron…and the Israel government also expelled Arabs from certain streets near Jewish settlements in Hebron, where many had homes and businesses.

On March 14th, Apple released Power Macintosh, ten-years after the release of the first Macintosh computer.

It was the first Macintosh to use the new PowerPC Microprocessors, a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), created by the 1991 Apple – IBM – Motorola Alliance.

On the same day of March 14th, the Linux Kernel version 1.0.0 was released after two-years of development by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds.

A kernel is a computer program that has complete control over everything in the system, and is in the core of the operating system.

The Linux Kernel software is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that anyone is freely-licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way.

It is deployed on a wide-variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices, personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.

Hmmm. Does this mean that something or someone has control over my computer devices at all times?

Is this what updates my computer and cell phone whether I asked for it or not?

US troops were withdrawn from Somalia on March 15th.

As part of Operation Restore Hope, they had arrived in Somalia on December 9th of 1992, and greeted by the glare of television lights, which I remember watching on TV when it happened with my husband, and we were both thinking how crazy it was that a military landing was being televised.

By the time U. S. troops were withdrawn in March of 1994, they left behind a country plagued by bandits and looters, with many Somalis needing to scavenge for survival.

The Green Ramp Disaster occurred on March 23rd, when two military aircraft collided in mid-air over Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina.

The Green Ramp was a grassy area at the end of the one of the east-west runway at the Air Force Base that was used by the Army to stage joint-operations with the Air Force.

A little after 2 pm on that fateful day, a fighter-jet conducting a simulated “flame-out,” which is the run-down of a jet engine due to the extinction of the flame in the combustion chamber, collided with a C-130 transport plane.

At an altitude of 300-feet, or 90-meters, above-ground, the nose of the fighter jet severed the right elevator of the C-130, which is what controls the aircraft’s pitch, or angle, of the wing.

The C-130 managed to land safely, but pilots of the fighter jet ended-up having to eject, and the fighter jet ended up hurtling towards the Green Ramp.

Long-story short, the burning wreckage of the fighter jet ended up directly in the area where the mass of Army paratroopers were situated.

It killed 24-members of the U. S. Army’s 82nd-Airborne Division and injured around 100.

The causes of the fatal accident were attributed to both Air Traffic Control and pilot error.

The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak occurred on March 27th, the biggest of 1994, in the southeastern United States.

It was the third notable tornado outbreak to occur on a Palm Sunday, with the first two occurring in 1920 and in 1965.

The weather system caused 29 tornadoes, killing 40 people, injuring 491, and causing $140-million in damages.

The deadliest storm of the outbreak produced an F4 tornado that devastated Piedmont, Alabama, striking three churches in mid-Palm Sunday service.

There were 20 people killed at one of the churches, Goshen United Methodist Church in Cherokee County, including the 4-year-old daughter of the pastor.

The supercell that formed this tornado tracked for 200-miles, or 322-kilometers, across north Georgia, to South Carolina.

Is it just me, or does the path of the 1994 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak mirror the goldbelt in the Southeastern United States?

The first Gold Rush in U. S. history was in North Carolina starting in 1799, and the second in north Georgia, starting in 1828.

Weird coincidence, or is something else being reflected here, like perhaps weather manipulation on a sacred day for Christianity, through the lands of the original people of North America.

On April 6th, both Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira died after surface-to-air missiles shot down the jet they both were on, after a regional summit that was held in Tanzania, as it was getting ready to land on a clear day near Kigali, Rwanda.

This event was taken as the pretext to begin the Rwandan Genocide, one of the bloodiest events of the late-20th-century, which began on April 7th.

The immediate backstory to this was the signing of the Arusha Accords in August of 1993, which was a set of accords and power-sharing agreement signed under in Arusha, Tanzania, to end the, by that time, three-year-old Rwandan Civil War, by the government of Rwanda, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

The Rwandan Civil War itself had radicalized internal opposition, and the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) embraced the Hutu Power ideology of Hutu advancement and the ethnic-cleansing of Tutsis, which led to the Rwandan Genocide.

The predominately-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was portrayed as an alien force that was intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy which was in existence until it was abolished after the Rwandan Revolution between 1959 and 1961, and replaced by the form of government of the Republic of Rwanda, which was predominantly Hutu.

It is important to note that the minority Tutsis and majority Hutus spoke the same language, had the same traditions, and inhabited the same places.

The large-scale killings of Tutsis by ethnicities began within a few hours of the death of the Rwandan President.

The Crisis Committee headed by Theoneste Bagosora, Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Defense, considered the primary organizer of the genocide, took power in the country, and according to the historical narrative, he immediately began issuing orders to kill Tutsi to Hutu paramilitary groups like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi.

The Hutu population was said to have been armed with weapons like machetes, clubs, blunt objects, etc, and prepared during the preceding months, and were said to have carried out the orders of their leaders without question as the result of a Rwandan tradition of obedience to authority.

The military pictured in this photo were French, who were sent in to rescue French citizens, and were accused of not doing enough to stop the genocide.

Also, checkpoints were set up around the Rwandan capital city of Kigali by the paramilitary groups, where anyone with Tutsi ethnicity on their national identity cards were immediately killed, as well as house-by-house searches for Tutsis living in Kigali.

During the 100-day period between April 7th and July 15th, members of the Tutsi minority group, as well as some moderate Hutus and Twa, an indigenous pygmy tribe, were massacred by what were described as soldiers, police, militia, and gangs, with death total estimates for this period of time ranging between 800,000 and 1.1 million.

We’ll see how the Rwandan Genocide ended when we get to July of this year.

Well, let’s see: the Presidents of two neighboring countries with Hutu and Tutsi populations assassinated by surface-to-air missiles as their airplane was getting ready to land at the airport of the Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali; Rwandan Hutu citizens armed with deadly weapons for months in advance; and the genocide primarily of Rwanda’s Tutsis beginning within a few hours of the President’s death.

Hmmm.

Did the beginning of these divisions start, say when the region became part of the German East Africa between 1885 and 1918, and then the divisions continued after it was handed over to Belgian Colonial Administration starting in 1916 when the region of Ruanda-Urundi was occupied by the Belgians during World War I, until so-called independence in 1961, after the Rwandan Revolution and the mysterious death of the Tutsi King Mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa of Rwanda, who he died unexpectedly in 1959 after visiting a Belgian doctor in Burundi, where he had gone for a meeting with Catholic missionaries, which sparked the beginning of the Rwandan Revolution.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is king-mwami-mutara-iii-rudahigwa.jpg

China Airlines Flight 140 crashed on April 26th while landing at Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people.

It was the deadliest accident in China Airlines’ history, which is the national carrier of Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China

Just before the routine landing of the flight, the takeoff/goaround setting on the autothrottle was somehow triggered, and the pilots’ lost control of the aircraft, which ultimately stalled and crashed. Of the 271 people on-board the plane, 264 were killed.

On April 27th, South Africa held its first multi-party elections, and the first election in which all races were allowed to vote.

The election marked the completion of a four-year process that ended Apartheid, which was the the system of institutional racism that existing in South and Southwest Africa that started in 1948.

Nelson Mandela won the election, and was sworn-in the following month, on May 10th.

On June 30th, an Airbus 330 crashed in a test flight in Toulouse, France, killing 7 people.

We are told the test was meant to test the performance of the aircraft in simulated engine failures after take-off.

The Airbus management did not expect the test to be hazardous, and were seeking to promote the plane to potential customers, and so had invited four passengers for the test flight – two Airbus executives and two Alitalia pilots.

As a result of the crash, all seven people on board were killed, and the investigation commission found that the crash was related to a long list of factors that none of which would have caused the crash in isolation.

Also on June 30th, Tropical Storm Alberto formed, and ended up producing extensive flooding over portions of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, causing 32 deaths and over a billion-dollars in damage.

It was the first tropical cyclone and named storm of the annual hurricane season.

Now back to Rwanda.

Rwandan Patriotic Front troops captured Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, on July 4th, which was considered a major breakthrough in the Rwandan Civil War as it led to the Rwandan Patriotic Front taking control of the rest of the country by July 18th.

Rwanda has been ruled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since then as a Unitary President System with a two-house Parliament since then.

Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, was first elected President in 2000, and has been Rwanda’s President ever since.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on July 5th, which started out as an on-line bookstore, when he was on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle.

Bezos was named the wealthiest man in modern history when his net-worth increased to $150-billion in 2018,and he was the world’s first centribillionaire on the “Forbes Wealth Index,” in which he has a net-worth of 1-billion units in any given currency.

On July 18th, a suicide bombing targeting the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA )in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 and injuring 100s.

The bombing was Argentina’s largest terrorist attack to date.

The bomber drove a Renault van full of 275 kilograms, or 606 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosive mixture in the Jewish Community Center building in the commercial area of Buenos Aires.

No suspects have been convicted of the bombing, and while Iran has been suspected as having a role, no definitive action has never been taken.

The release of the IBM Simon Smartphone took place on August 16th, and was the first commercially available smartphone and distributed by BellSouth Cellular Corporation.

It was a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), or hand-held PC that functioned as a personal information manager, and had a battery that lasted only an hour.

On August 31st, the Provisional Irish Republican Army announced a conditional cessation of military operations after 25-years of violence and terror, which held for 18-months, with the exception of a few politically-motivated killings here and there, until February of 1996.

USAir Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell Township on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport on September 8th, killing all 132 on-board, and was the deadliest air disaster in Pennsylvania history.

As a result of the severity of the crash impact, the bodies of the passengers and crew were severely fragmented, leading investigators to declare the site a biohazard.

After the longest investigation in FAA history, lasting four-and-a-half-years, it was determined that a rudder malfunction caused the plane to crash.

The U. S. staged what has been termed “bloodless” invasion of Haiti to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power on September 19th, code-named “Operation Uphold Democracy.”

It was designed to remove the military regime installed after the “coup d’etat” in 1991 that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide after having been elected at the end of 1991, and in-office for only a few months.

A diplomatic American delegation comprised of Former President Jimmy Carter; Sen. Sam Nunn; and retired General Colin Powell met with General Raoul Cedras, the military leader in charge of the government.

He apparently agreed to step-down with the threat of a U. S. military forced-entry invasion, after he was shown a video-feed of U. S. Special Forces, like the 82nd Airborne being readied to go, unless he complied immediately.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned to Haiti in October of 1994 after 3-years of exile, and while there was a change of authority ceremony between President Bill Clinton and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in March of 1995, a U. S. troops under the UN remained in Haiti until 1996, and some kind of UN-Peacekeeping force remained in place until 2000.

On September 28th, the MS Estonia ferry sank in the Baltic Sea, killing almost 900 people, with 139 rescues.

It was one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th-century.

According to the official report of the disaster, the bow-door had separated from the vessel, pulling the ramp ajar, rapidly flooding the vessel that was already listing from poor cargo distribution.

The power failed; search and rescue was inhibited; and a full-scale emergency wasn’t declared for an hour-and-a-half.

In what sounds like Keystone-Cops-level incompetence, the official report criticized the passive-attitude of the crew, failing to notice that water was entering the vehicle deck, delaying the alarm, and providing minimal guidance from the bridge.

World Wide Web Consortium founded and led by Tim Berners Lee became the main international standards organization for the WWW on October 1st.

It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lab, with funding from the European Commission and DARPA.

The consortium is comprised of member organizations that maintain full-time staff to work together in the development of World Wide Web standards.

A rainfall event between November 4th and 6th caused flooding in the Piedmont region of Italy that killed an estimated 77 people…

…after one-third of the rain that falls in one year fell in a 72-hour period, and caused $14.5 billion in damages.

The Brazuole Bridge bombing took place on November 7th.

It involved the explosion of a bomb around 7 am underneath this bridge in Lithuania on the Vilnuius-Kaunas Railway shortly before two passenger trains were scheduled to cross the bridge.

We are told a rail disaster was avoided because one of the trains was warned by a local resident, and slowed down in time to cross the bridge on the side that was relatively undamaged, and alerted the other train in time for it to stop before it got to the bridge.

No one has ever been charged in connection with the bombing, though it was alleged that members of the Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces was behind the bombing, after a stand-off occurred between some of its members and the Lithuanian government in 1993.

Also on November 7th, the WXYC student radio station at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill provided the world’s first internet radio broadcast.

Hurricane Gordon hit Central America, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Southeastern US on November 8th, causing 1,152 fatalities and $594 million in damages.

It was a long-lived, as it finally dissipated on November 21st, and was the last hurricane of the season in 1994.

Notice the curvy, looping track of the Hurricane Gordon.

Damage was the heaviest in Haiti, where the storm dropped 14-inches, or 360-mm, of rain in 24-hours, resulting in extensive landslides and flooding that destroyed 3,500 houses and damaged another 11,000 or so more, and killed over 1,000 people.

Interesting that this extreme weather devastation in Haiti took place the month following the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Boris Yeltsin ordered troops into Chechyna on December 11th, thereby starting the first Chechen War, which lasted until August 31st of 1996.

Russian federal forces attempted to seize the mountainous country of Chechyna, but were ultimately set-back by Chechen guerilla warfare, leading to the cease-fire in 1996 and Yeltsin signing a Peace Treaty with the Chechens the following year.

The Battle of Grozny in the First Chechen War in which Russian forces captured Grozny after two-months of heavy fighting, however, caused enormous destruction and casualties amongst the civilian population, and was the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since World War II.

Why was all of this happening to this small republic?

The reason we are given is that the Chechens wanted their independence from Russian Federation, the name given to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The initial release of the Netscape Navigator 1.0 web-browser by Netscape Communications Corportion was on December 15th.

It was the world’s first commercially-developed web browser.

So like in 1993, we are seeing the same patterns of major hurricanes and tornado outbreaks…

…weather anomalies like the North American Cold Wave and the excessive rainfall causing the destructive flooding in Italy’s Piedmont Region and in Haiti…

…earthquakes like the Los Angeles Northridge Earthquake, the highest-ever, instrumentality recorded earthquake in an urban area in North America…

…more plane crashes, like USAir Flight 427 in Pennsylvania; China Airlines Flight 140 in Japan, and the Green Ramp Disaster in North Carolina and Airbus 330 crash in France, both of which had emergency situation flight training going on at the time of the deadly incidents…

…near train crashes, like the narrowly-averted train disaster in Lithuania with the Brazuole bridge bombing minutes before the trains’ scheduled arrival, unlike the Amtrak train crash at Big Bayou Canot in 1993, where the incident causing the bridge collapsed also happened minutes before the train wreck…

…and again in 1994, like 1993, we see sinking ships, like the MS Estonia Ferry, one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th-century…

…massacres in different places…

…out-and-out genocide for one-hundred days in Rwanda…

…along with civil wars and other wars…

…and major bombings like the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

More of the same kinds of thing that we saw in 1993…

…in addition to the progress that we saw being made in 1994 in relationship to the development of the PC, Internet, and mobile phone…

…and on-line business models and services.

So, now let’s take a look and see what happened in 1995.

Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established on January 1st, to replace the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had been established in 1948.

Negotiated and signed trade Agreements by the bulk of the world’s trading nations that serve as the legal ground-rules for international commerce are at the heart of the WTO.

On January 17th, the 6.9-magnitude Kobe, also known as the Great Hanshin, Earthquake struck southern Japan. Aftershocks of the earthquake lasted for days, with 74 of them being strong enough to feel.

Close to 6,500 people lost their lives as a result of the earthquake, with approximately 4,600 from the major city of Kobe, with the epicenter of the earthquake being 12-miles, or 20-kilometers, from the center of the city center.

Irreparable damage from the earthquake included nearly 400,000 buildings; numerous elevated road and rail bridges; the majority of the quays in the port Kobe at 120, the total of which had numbered 150; caused 300 fires; and disrupted water, electricity, and gas service.

The fires in Kobe incinerated the equivalent of 70 U. S. city-blocks.

Here are some examples of what the historical architecture looked like in Kobe.

On February 13th, twenty-one Bosnian Serb commanders were charged with Crimes against Humanity in the United Nations.

The Serkadji Prison Mutiny took place, in what was formerly known as the Barberousse Prison, in Algeria between February 21st and 23rd.

Apparently the immediate cause of the mutiny was a recently-appointed guard who supplied prisoners with four guns and three hand-grenades, after a prior escape attempt failed.

After killing four prison guards, the mutineer prisoners started opening cell doors, and after security forces stormed the prison, somewhere between 96 and 110 prisoners were killed, with eight later being executed for their part in the mutiny.

On February 26th, the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank, Barings, collapsed on February 26th.

Barings was founded in 1762 by Francis and John Baring in order to provide service to the huge expansion of world trade that was coming into being in the latter-half of the 18th-century.

The first offices of the bank were located in Cheapside in the City of London, the historic and modern financial center of London.

The cause of the crash of the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank was apparently a rogue securities broker in Singapore by the name of Nick Leeson, who allegedly lost somewhere around $1.4 billion in unauthorized trades in futures contracts on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and he was arrested for his crimes days later, on March 2nd.

Leeson was in Changji prison in Singapore until 1999, when he was released from his sentence early.

While in prison, he published an autobiography detailing his crimes in 1996, called “Rogue Trader.”

Among other achievements since his release from prison in 1999, Nick Leeson held a senior management role as Chief Executive Officer for Galway United, an Irish association football club in the League of Ireland, a position which he resigned in 2011 when the club suffered financial difficulties…

…and has been a regular guest on the after-dinner and keynote speaking circuit.

Nick Leeson is listed as having a net worth of $3 million.

Not bad for a guy that confessed to, was convicted of, and served prison time, for securities fraud of a magnitude that took out Barings Bank!

The Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attack took place on March 20th.

In five coordinated attacks carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo personality cult movement led by Shoko Asahara, the perpetrators of the attacks released sarin gas, a chemical warfare agent classified as a nerve agent, on three lines of the Tokyo Metro during rush hour, killing 14 people and injuring in some fashion approximately 6,500 people.

The subway lines that were attacked served the part of Tokyo that houses the Japanese Parliament.

Police arrested senior members and leaders of Aum Shinrikyo after the attacks in a raid in May of 1995, several of whom were sentenced to death and later executed in 2018, including the cult founder Shoko Asahara.

On March 31st, TAROM, the flag-carrier airline of Romania, Flight 371 from Bucharest to Brussels crashed in after entering a nose-down dive after take-off in Bucharest, killing all sixty people on-board.

The cause of the crash was attributed to the captain losing consciousness, and unable to communicate with his co-pilots, and auto-throttle failure.

The Samashki Massacre took place on April 7th during the First Chechen War, in which Russian troops were reported by 128 eyewitnesses as engaging in a “cleansing operation” in which there are estimates as high as 300 of civilians killed in the village of Samashki.

They were said to have arbitrarily shot civilians and burned down houses with flame-throwers, among other things.

On April 19th, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murragh Federal building in Oklahoma City took place.

Called the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U. S. history, we are told it was carried out by anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh, who was helped by his friend Terry Nichols, in retaliation for the federal siege of Ruby Ridge in 1992, and the federal Waco Siege, which ended in the deadly fire of the Branch Davidian compound on April 19th in 1993.

As the official story goes, McVeigh planned for the bombing to take place on the second anniversary of the fire that ended the siege in Waco, and selected the Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City because it met his criteria of housing at least two federal law enforcement agencies.

McVeigh and Nichols stockpiled the materials they needed to manufacture the fertilizer bomb, including forty-one 50-pound, or 23-kilogram, bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer; seven crates of tovex explosives; shock tubing; 500 electric blasting caps; and ANFO, which is ammonium nitrate fuel oil.

Several days before the bombing, McVeigh rented a Ryder truck under an assumed name, and he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City, where they parked McVeigh’s getaway car a few blocks from the Federal building, a 1977 Mercury Marquis which is now an exhibit at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.

What we are told is that McVeigh and Nichols drove to pick up the bomb materials from storage Kansas and drove to a state park in Kansas to build the truck bomb, filling 13 barrels each with 500 lbs, or 230 kilograms, of mixed chemicals, using plastic buckets and a bathroom scale, and added the explosive devices needed to the truck in order to detonate the bomb.

The next day, McVeigh drove the Ryder Truck to Oklahoma City at dawn, and parked it at the building’s drop-off zone for the daycare center after having lit timed fuses, and headed towards his getaway vehicle after getting rid of the keys to the truck.

The Ryder rental truck that contained 4,800-pounds, or 2,200-kilograms, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture, detonated in front of the north side of the building at 9:02 am, creating a 30-foot, or 9.1-meter, and 8-foot-deep, or 2.4-meter crater on NW 5th Street next to the building, and the blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings in a 4-block radius, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, resulting in 168 deaths, including children in the daycare center, and injuring hundreds more.

McVeigh was arrested within an hour-and-a-half of the explosion, as he was pulled over for driving a car without a license plate, and arrested for having a concealed weapon.

The subsequent investigation into his connection to the Oklahoma City bombing ultimately led to McVeigh’s conviction and death sentence, and Terry Nichols’ conviction and life sentence.

McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in June of 2001.

There was a gas explosion at a subway construction site on April 28th in Daegu, South Korea.

At least 101 people were killed, including 42 middle school students, with estimates of around 200 people injured.

The gas explosion was said to have result from construction workers accidently drilleing 31 holes through a grout curtain into a gas pipeline, resulting in gas leakages into the construction site that went through a sewer, and the explosion was caused by an unknown fire at the site, creating a 164-foot, or 50-meter, high pillar of fire.

The private parking lot on the construction site collapsed, and 60 buildings and 152 cars were damaged as a result of the explosion.

Established in 1985, the funding for the National Science Foundation Network, or NSFNET, was stopped by the U. S. Government on April 30th, making the internet totally privatized.

The NSFNET backbone service was no longer central, but still remained central to the infrastructure of the expanding internet.

On May 10th, a runaway locomotive fell into an elevator shaft in the Vaal Reefs, a gold mine near the town Orkney in the northwest South Africa.

History’s worst elevator disaster ever, the locomotive landed on the elevator cage carrying miners, causing it to plunge 1,500-feet, or 460-meters, to the bottom of the shaft, and resulted in the deaths of 104 miners.

The 7.0 Neftegorsk Earthquake struck northern Sakhalin island on May 28th.

The most catastrophic earthquake in the known history of Russia, the earthquake resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 people in the oil town of Neftegorsk, over half of the population, and almost all of the deaths were from the collapse of residential buildings.

On June 29th, the Sampoong Department store collapsed in Seoul.

It was the deadliest peacetime disaster in South Korean history, killing 502 people and injuring 937, and the deadliest modern building collapse until the 9/11 Collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

The cause of the collapse was attributed to structural overload and punching shear, which is defined as a phenomenon where a concentrated force on a slab causes a “shear failure cone” that punches through…

…and ultimately primarily blamed on the ignorance, negligence and greed of Lee Joon, the chairman of the Sampoong Group’s constuction division and store owner, and his son Lee Han-Sang, the CEO of the department store , both of whom served prison time for criminal negligence in their alleged roles in the collapse of the building.

The second Srebrenica massacre took place in Bosnia on July 11th, in which upwards of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys native to Bosnia were killed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladic.

The last major battle of the War for Croation Independence was Operation Storm, major operations of which took place between August 4th and 7th, and follow-up operations between August 8th through 14th.

NATO and the United States were also involved in Operation Storm, the largest land-battle in Europe since World War II, and was called a decisive victory for the Croatian Army and a strategic victory for the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the forces of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) by the time it was over.

We are told that 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs of the area formerly held by the RSK had fled, and that a variety of crimes were committed against the Serbs who remained there by Croatian forces.

Later, three Croatian generals were tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for war crimes in what was called a joint criminal enterprise to force the Serb population out of Croatia.

On August 7th, the Chilean government declared a State of Emergency with respect to what became known as the “White Earthquake” in southern Chile.

The “White Earthquake” was a weather event involving intense winds, cold, snowfall and rain that primarily caused widespread agricultural and structural damage and great disruption to the lives of the people living there, with only a few human deaths reported, though the lives of hundreds thousands of sheep were lost or left in critical condition, with the most heavily impacted area shown in red on this map of Chile.

On September 3rd, eBay, the multinational e-commerce corporation, was founded as AuctionWeb in California by French-born, Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, and it soon became the first online auction site allowing person-to-person transactions…

…and on September 9th, SONY entered the video game market with the release of Playstation.

Interestingly, Sony, the name of a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan…

…was also the acronym for Standard Oil of New York, founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870.

A commuter train slammed into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, on October 25th, killing seven students.

The school bus, driven by a substitute driver, was stopped at a traffic light, with the rear portion of the bus hanging over railroad tracks when it was struck by a commuter train heading to Chicago.

It was one of the worst grade-crossing accidents in U. S. History.

The cause was attributed to bus driver misjudgment and traffic signal timing issues with the railroad, which were supposed to be coordinated with the highway traffic signal.

On the very next day, October 26th, there were two disasters in the world.

One was an avalanche that struck the village of Flateyri, Iceland, destroying 17 houses, and in the process killing twenty people. Twenty-one people managed to escape these houses after the avalanche and four were rescued alive.

The same day as the avalanche in Iceland, there was a fire in the Baku Metro, the capital of Azerbaijan.

It resulted in what has been called the world’s worst deadliest subway disaster, killing 289 people, including 28 children.

It was said to have been caused by an electrical malfunction, though the possibility of deliberate sabotage was not excluded.

On November 1st, all participants in the Bosnian Civil Wars began the peace negotiation process, with the Presidents of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia meeting with US, British, French, German, and Russian officials at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

Typhoon Angela, also known as Rosing, which dissipated on November 7th, had left parts of the Philippines devastated on a track that started out as a tropical disturbance in the Marshall Islands pn October 25th, and moved west, turning into a super-tycoon by November 1st before it hit the Philippines.

Typhoon Angela wreaked havoc over the regions of metropolitan Manila, Calabarzon, and Bicol, and when all was said and done with the Typhoon, it had caused over 10-billion Philippine Pesos in damages, destroying over 96,000 houses, as well as bridges and roads.

Angela was one of the most intense typhoons ever recorded.

On November 16th, a UN tribunal charged Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb Commander Ratko Mladic with genocide and Crimes against Humanity during the Bosnian War.

The Dayton Agreement ending the Bosnian War was reached on November 21st, and signed on November 24th.

It created a single sovereign state known as Bosnia Herzegovina, composed of the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska, or Serb Republic, and the Croat-Bosniak populated Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On November 22nd, there was an earthquake, with the epicenter in the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba, the narrow body of water that separates Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula from the western border of Saudi Arabia.

At least eight deaths and thirty injuries were reported as a result of the earthquake, and damage to buildings occurred in places like coastal cities of Eilat, Israel; Aqaba, Jordan; and Nuweiba, Egypt.

American Airlines Flight 965 crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia on December 20th, with the cause of the crash was attributed to pilot error.

Killing 151 of 155 passengers and all eight crew members on-board, it was the deadliest aviation accident in Colombia’s history, and the deadliest air disaster involving a U. S. airline since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

So, once again in 1995, as seen in this video in the previous two years of 1993 and 1994, we have seen recurring patterns of major earthquakes in different parts of the world, in this case Japan, Russia, and the Sinai region in the Middle East…

…a super typhoon wreaking havoc in the Philippines and the same in Chile with weather-event called a “White Earthquake…”

…more plane crashes…

…more massacres and genocide…

…more terrorist attacks…

…many other disasters…

…and more internet, on-line business model, and video game development milestones.

One more thing to mention before I end this post, bringing “Seeing World History with New Eyes” up to the year of 1995, is a curious pattern that has emerged in my research of the 1990s thus far.

Starting with the Baltic Exchange Bombing in the City of London in 1992, I am consistently finding the use of truck-fertilizer bombs in terrorist attacks that are incredibly destructive when detonated.

The Baltic Exchange Bombing in April of 1992 was the biggest on mainland Britain since World War II, and caused extensive damage to the Baltic Exchange building and its surroundings.

Same thing happened again in the City of London the following year as mentioned earlier in this video, a truck fertilizer bomb detonated this time in Bishopsgate, exactly a year and two-weeks after the Baltic Exchange bombing.

This bombing led to the implementation of the “Ring of Steel” around the City of London.

Earlier in 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing in February involved the detonation of a truck fertilizer bomb parked below the North Tower.

The bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Building in Buenos Aires in July of 1994 involved a suicide bomber driving a van full of 275 kilograms, or 606 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosive mixture in the Jewish Community Center building in the commercial area of Buenos Aires, for which there suspects but no convictions…

…and the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995 involving a truck fertilizer bomb in which the primary accused was arrested within an hour-and-a-half of the bombing, and who was executed several years later.

Why did truck fertilizer bombs become a thing in these terrorist attacks?

How did the terrorists have access to the quantities of materials and know-how needed to construct a bomb that creates this kind of devastation?

This graphic shows the occurrence of ammonium nitrate disasters since 1900…

…including the storage-silo explosion involving ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Oppau, Germany in 1921…

…the ship carrying the ammonium nitrate chemical that exploded in Texas City in Galveston Bay in 1947, the deadliest industrial accident in U. S. History…

…the 2004 explosion of a train carrying ammonium nitrate in Neyshabur, Iran…

…the 2015 explosion in Tianjin, China, of a storage warehouse…

…and the 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.

Is there something else going on with these apparently randomly occurring ammonium nitrate explosions in different places around the world over the years, and if there is, is there a connection to the truck fertilizer bombings that I have identified so far, starting in the 1990s?

Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall – Henry Clay and Lewis Cass

I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other in this new series called “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol.”

In the first segment of this series, I paired Michigan’s Gerald Ford, a former President of the United States, and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America; and in the second segment, I paired Dr. Norman Borlaug, Ph.D, often called the “Father of the Green Revolution; and Colorado’s Dr. Florence R. Sabin, M.D, remembered as a pioneer for women in science; and in the last segment I paired Louisiana’s controversial Governor, Huey P. Long, and Alabama’s Helen Keller, a deaf-blind woman who gain prominence as an American author, lecturer, political activist, and disability rights activist.

In this segment, I am pairing Henry Clay, described as an attorney and statesman from Kentucky, and Lewis Cass, described as an American military officer, politician and statesman from Michigan.

They were both contemporaries and major players in historical events during the time period in American history between Henry Clay’s birth in 1777 and death in 1852; a; and the birth of Lewis Cass in 1782 and his death in 1866.

I am taking an in-depth look at who is represented in that National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Capitol building in Washington, DC, in a series which I am approximately halfway through in which sculptures of prominent American historical figures are housed, two for each state.

My attention was drawn to it as worth investigating because I encountered two historical figures in my research who are represented in the National Statuary hall – Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit Missionary and Cattle rancher, for Arizona, and Mother Joseph Pariseau, who we are told was a Catholic sister and self-taught architect, for Washington State.

The appearance of these two historical characters in the National Statuary Hall made wonder who else was chosen to be represented there and what could possibly be going on here.

Henry Clay represents the State of Kentucky in the National Statuary Hall.

Henry Clay was an attorney and statesman, who served in both houses of Congress; as the ninth U. S. Secretary of State; ran for U. S. President three times; and helped establish both the Whig Party and the Republican Party.

Henry Clay was born in April of 1777 at the Clay Homestead in Hanover County, Virginia, the 7th of 9 children born to the Baptist minister John Clay and his wife Elizabeth.

His father died in 1781, and his mother subsequently remarried, to Captain Henry Watkins, a successful planter.

When Watkins moved the family to Kentucky in 1791, Henry Clay remained in Virginia.

He ended up becoming a clerk at the Virginia Court of Chancery, where he got the attention of George Wythe, a professor at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, signer of the Declaration of Independence, mentor of Thomas Jefferson, and judge on Virginia’s High Court of Chancery.

Wythe chose Clay to be his secretary, a position he held for four years.

During this time, Wythe influenced Clay’s view that the United States could help spread freedom around the world.

Clay finished his legal studies with Virginia Attorney General Robert Brooke; was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 1797; and moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he set up his law practice.

Henry Clay married Lucretia Hart in April of 1799, the daughter of Colonel Thomas Hart, a prominent businessman and early settler of Kentucky, and they lived at first in downtown Lexington.

We are told the Clays started building Ashland, a plantation outside of Lexington, in 1804.

Ashland encompassed over 500 acres (or 200 hectares), on which Henry Clay’s slaves planted crops of corn, wheat, rye, and hemp, the chief crop of Kentucky’s Bluegrass region.

He also imported Arabian horses, Maltese Donkeys, and Hereford Cattle as livestock.

The Maltese donkeys were one of the large breeds of donkeys bred by Henry Clay, and George Washington among others, to produce the American Mammoth Jackstock to be used as work animals.

Shortly after arriving in Kentucky, Henry Clay entered politics, and was a member of the what was called the “Democratic-Republican Party,” also known as the “Jeffersonian Republican Party,” that championed republicanism, agrarianism, political equality, and expansionism.

He clashed with state “Democratic-Republican Party” leaders over a state constitutional convention.

Clay was an advocate for direct election of public officials and the gradual emancipation of slavery in Kentucky.

The 1799 Kentucky Constitution included direct election of public officials, but not Clay’s plan for gradual emancipation, and instead retained the pro-slavery provisions of the original Kentucky Constitution of 1792, under which Kentucky was accepted as the 15th State admitted to the Union by the U. S. Congress.

Clay won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1803, where he was quite active, among other things initiating the partisan gerrymander of Kentucky’s electoral college districts, which insured that Kentucky’s electors voted for Thomas Jefferson in the 1804 presidential election.

Clay’s influence in Kentucky politics was such that the Kentucky Legislature elected him to the U. S. Senate in 1806, which he served in for two-months before returning to Kentucky, at which time he was elected as Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives.

In 1810, Henry Clay was selected by the Kentucky Legislature to fill the U. S. Senate seat left vacant by the resignation of Buckner Thruston to become a federal judge.

Clay quickly became a “War Hawk,” favoring expansionist policies.

He was a fierce critic of British attacks on American shipping and supported going to war against Great Britain…

…and advocated for the annexation of Spanish West Florida.

Henry Clay was elected as Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives for the 12th Congress, held between March 4th of 1811 and March 4th of 1813.

Both Houses of Congress had a Democratic-Republican Majority in the 12th Congress.

Historical events that took place during the 12th Congress included:

The Battle of Tippecanoe fought on November 7th of 1811 in Battle Ground, Indiana, where William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumseh’s forces of a confederacy of tribes opposed to European-American settlement of the American Frontier…

…the New Madrid Earthquake on December 16th of 1811…

…Louisiana was admitted to the Union as the 18th state on April 30th of 1812…

…the War of 1812 began when the United States declared war on Great Britain on June 18th of 1812…

…Detroit surrendered to the British on August 16th of 1812…

…and the Battle of Queenston Heights in Upper Canada took place on October 13th of 1812, the first major battle in the War of 1812, resulting in a British victory.

Altogether, Henry Clay was elected to seven terms in the House of Representatives, and was elected Speaker of the House six times.

Henry Clay’s first run for the Presidency of the United States was in the 1824 election.

There were five candidates representing the Democratic-Republican Party, including Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson.

Clay fell behind in state electoral votes, effectively knocking him out of the race, and he threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, who was elected President by the House of Representatives, and Henry Clay became Adams’ Secretary of State.

Followers of John Quincy Adams became known as National Republicans, and followers of Andrew Jackson became known as Democrats, and Andrew Jackson won the 1928 Presidential election.

It was during the Jackson Administration that the U. S. Congress authorized, and the President signed into law, the Indian Removal Act of 1831, which authorized the administration to relocate Native Americans to land west of the Mississippi River, something which Henry Clay was opposed to.

Henry Clay returned to Federal office in 1831, when he won election in the Kentucky Legislature to the U. S. Senate, and with Adams’ defeat in the 1928, Clay became the leader of the National Republicans, who nominated Clay for President in the 1832 election.

Jackson, a popular sitting President, won re-election.

Several of the things that happened during the second Jackson Administration revolved around banking and financial matters.

One of the policies pursued by President Jackson and has Secretary of the Treasury, Roger Taney, involved removing all federal deposits from the national bank and placing them in state-chartered banks, a policy seen as illegal by many since federal law required the president to deposit federal revenue in the national bank so long as it was stable.

This policy of removing deposits united Jackson’s opponents into one political party, which became known as the Whig Party, which had been the name of an earlier British political party opposed to absolute monarchy.

The American Whig Party base consisted of wealthy businessmen, professionals, and large planters.

Clay chose not to run in the 1836 election because of the death of one of his daughters, and the Whigs were not organized enough to nominate a single candidate.

Despite the presence of multiple Whig candidates, Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, won the 1836 presidential election.

Van Buren’s Presidency was negatively impacted by the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that touched off a depression until the mid-1840s.

Clay and other Whigs argued that Jackson’s policies had encouraged speculation and caused the panic.

As the 1840 Presidential election came closer, many thought the Whigs would gain the presidency because of the economic crisis.

Though Henry Clay ran in this election, he faced a number of issues facing his electability, and the Whig party member William Henry Harrison was elected that year.

Harrison had the shortest presidency in U. S. history, dying from pneumonia 31-days after his inauguration in 1841.

Harrison was succeeded by his Vice-President, John Tyler, another Whig.

Tyler disappointed his fellow Whigs by not signing a bill to reestablish the National Bank, an important part of the Whig Party platform, and they ended up voting to expel him from the party.

Clay won the Whig presidential nomination in 1844, and faced Democrat candidate James Polk, who won the election that year.

Henry Clay returned to his career as an attorney after the election of 1844.

The Mexican-American War started in 1846 over the disputed border region between Mexico and Texas.

Clay gave a speech in November of 1847 in which he was highly critical of the war and attacked President Polk for fomenting the conflict with Mexico.

Also, by 1847 General Zachary Taylor, who commanded American forces during the war, emerged as one of the Whig candidates for the Presidency.

Henry Clay announced his candidacy for the nomination in April of 1848.

Taylor ended up winning the Whig nomination at the 1848 Whig National Convention, and the ultimately the Presidency that year, with Millard Fillmore as his running mate.

Interesting to note that Zachary Taylor died in July of 1850, allegedly after consuming copious amounts of raw fruit and iced milk at a July 4th fundraising event at the Washington Monument, became severely ill with a digestive ailment, dying several days later, and Millard Fillmore became president.

Henry Clay accepted re-election to the U. S. Senate in 1849, and was directly involved in formulating the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of U. S. territories gained as a result of the Mexican-American War.

Henry Clay died from tuberculosis in June of 1852 in his room at the National Hotel in Washington, DC.

The National Hotel building was demolished in 1942.

Henry Clay was the first person to lie in-state in the U. S. Capitol Rotunda.

The remains of Henry Clay and his wife Lucretia are encased in marble in the mausoleum in the center of the Lexington Cemetery, with the 120-foot, or the 37-meter, -high Henry Clay Memorial towering above the mausoleum.

Some interesting points of information I found in researching Henry Clay.

One was that he was a Master Mason.

Another was that Henry Clay’s cousin was another influential 19th-Century Kentucky politician Cassius Marcellus Clay…

…the namesake of Cassius Marcellus Clay, better known to history as the famous 20th-century boxer Muhammed Ali, who was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.

No indication there was a direct connection, just that the more recent Cassius Marcellus Clay was named after the famous 19th-century Kentuckian, but definitely find this to be interesting nonetheless.

Lewis Cass represents the State of Michigan in the Statuary Hall.

Lewis Cass, an American military officer, politician and statesman, was a U. S. Senator for Michigan and served in the cabinets of two Presidents, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan.

Cass was born in October of 1782 in Exeter, New Hampshire, near the end of the Revolutionary War.

His father Jonathan was an officer who had fought under George Washington at the Battle of Bunker Hill which took place in June of 1775.

This illustrated view of the Bunker Hill Monument was circa 1848, and said to have been built between 1824 and 1843, and credited to the architect Solomon Willard as the first monumental obelisk erected in the United States.

Cass attended the Phillips-Exeter Academy, established in 1781 by Elizabeth and John Phillips, a wealthy merchant and banker of the time.

His nephew, Samuel Phillips Jr, had established the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1778, making it the oldest incorporated school in the United States.

These two schools have educated several generations of the Establishment and prominent American politicians.

The Cass family moved to Marietta, Ohio, in 1800.

Marietta was the first permanent U. S. settlement in the newly established Northwest Territory, which was created in 1787, and the nation’s first post-colonial organized incorporated territory.

The Northwest Indian War took place in this region between 1786 and 1795 between the United States and the Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of Native Americans of the Great Lakes area.

The Territory had been granted to the United States by Great Britain as part of the Treaty of Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War.

The area had previously been prohibited to new settlements, and was inhabited by numerous Native American peoples.

The British maintained a military presence and supported the Native American military campaign.

While the Northwestern Confederacy had some early victories, they were ultimately defeated, with the final battle being the “Battle of Fallen Timbers” in August of 1794 in Maumee, Ohio, which took place after General Anthony Wayne’s Army had destroyed every Native American settlement on its way to the battle.

Outcomes were the 1794 Jay Treaty, named for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, the main negotiator with Great Britain.

As a result, the British withdrew from the Northwest Territory, but it laid the groundwork for later conflicts, not only with Great Britain, but also angering France and bitterly dividing Americans into pro-Treaty Federalists and anti-Treaty Jeffersonian Republicans.

The 1795 Greenville Treaty that followed forced the displacement of Native Americans from most of Ohio, in return for cash and promises fair treatment, and the land was opened for white American settlement.

Lewis Cass studied law in Marietta under Return Meigs, Jr, who among other accomplishments, became the first Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court in 1803, and Cass started his law practice in Zanesville, Ohio.

Cass was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1806, and the following year, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as the U. S. Marshal for Ohio, the oldest U. S. Federal Law Enforcement Agency having been established by the Judiciary Act of 1789 during President George Washington’s administration to assist federal courts in their law enforcement functions.

Cass joined the Freemasons as an Entered Apprentice, the first degree of Freemasonry, at a lodge in Marietta in 1803 , and by May of 1804, he achieved the Master Mason degree, the third-degree of Freemasonry.

He was a charter member of the Lodge of Amity No. 5 in Zanesville, admitted in June of 1805…

…and was one of the founders of the Grand Lodge of Ohio in January of 1808, serving as its Grand Master multiple years.

During the War of 1812, Cass rose through the officer ranks to become a Brigadier General in the U. S. Army in March of 1813.

He took part in the Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown near Chatham, Ontario, and today’s Moravian on the Thames First Nation reserve, a branch of the Lenape who were converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania, one of the oldest Protestant denominations.

At the time of the battle, the community of this First Nation, known as the Christian Munsee, was burned to the ground and rebuilt at its current location.

The Battle of the Thames in Ontario was an American victory in the War of 1812 against Tecumseh’s Confederacy, a confederation of Native people’s from the Great Lakes region, and their British allies.

As a result of the battle, Tecumseh was killed, his confederacy fell apart, and the British lost control of southwestern Ontario.

Cass was appointed as the Governor of the Michigan Territory by President James Madison in October of 1813, a position in which he served until 1831.

During this time, he travelled frequently to negotiate treaties with Native American tribes in Michigan, in which they ceded substantial amounts of land.

Cass was one of two commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Fort Meigs, also called the Treaty of the Maumee Rapids, resulting the ceding of nearly all the remaining lands in northwestern Ohio, and parts of Indiana and Michigan, of the Wyandot, Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa, helping to open up Michigan to settlement by white Americans.

In return, land was allocated for reservations and financial compensation via annuities of various amounts for different lengths of time.

Other examples of the involvement of Lewis Cass with these land-acquiring treaties included, the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw with the chiefs and members of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Tribes, in which they ceded 6-million acres of land, for which they were promised up to $1,000/year forever, and hunting and fishing rights on the land.

Cass was also involved with the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, in which he travelled to Chicago to try and get more land from tribal nations in Michigan.

As a result of this treaty, more Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa tribes ceded land – this time nearly 5-million acres of the Lower Peninsula .

In return, they were promised about $10,000 in trade goods, $6,500 in coins, and a 20-year payment valued at about $150,000.

And where did all these treaties land them, like the Potawatomi?

A very long way from home!!!

Cass resigned as the Governor of Michigan in 1831 to become President Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War, a position he would hold for the next 5-years.

As President Jackson’s Secretary of War, Cass was central in implementing the Indian Removal policy of the Jackson administration after Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830.

The Indian Removal Act was directed specifically at the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States – the Cherokee, Creeks, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw – though it also affected tribes in Ohio, Illinois and other areas east of the Mississippi River.

Most were forced to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

Cass was appointed as the U. S. Minister to France by President Jackson, starting in 1836, and he held this position until 1842.

Then in 1844, Cass stood as a Democratic candidate for the Presidential nomination, but lost the nomination that year to James Polk, who defeated the Whig candidate Henry Clay to became the 11th President of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1849.

Cass was then elected by the Michigan State Legislature in 1845 to serve as its United States Senator, a position he held until 1848 when he resigned in order to pursue an unsuccessful run for President that year.

He was a leading supporter of the Popular Sovereignty doctrine, which held that the American citizens of a territory should decide whether or not to permit slavery there as a middle position on the slavery issue.

Popular sovereignty was applied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in 1854, but was most notable for stoking national tensions over slavery on the road to the American Civil War and leading to “Bleeding Kansas,” a series of violent confrontations between 1854 and 1859 over a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the Proposed state of Kansas.

After his loss to Zachary Taylor in the 1848 election, Cass was returned to the
U. S. Senate by the Michigan State Legislature, serving from 1849 to 1857.

He ran and lost for President a third-time in 1852, losing the Democratic nomination that year to Franklin Pierce, who became the 14th U. S. President.

A few years later, in March of 1857, President James Buchanan appointed an elderly Lewis Cass to serve as the Secretary of State in his administration around the same time he was retiring from the Senate.

During his term of service as Secretary of State, Cass delegated most of his responsibilities either to an Assistant Secretary of State or to the President, though he was involved in negotiating a final settlement to the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which limited U. S. and British control of Latin American Countries.

Cass died in June of 1866 in Detroit, and was buried in the Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan’s oldest continuously operating non-denominational cemetery, having been dedicated in October of 1846.

Interesting to see so many classical-looking stone masonry tombs in Elmwood that are entombed in the earth surrounding them.

Descendents of Lewis Cass included great-grandson Augustus Cass Canfield, long-time President and Chairman of the Harper & Brothers Publishing Company (later known as Harper & Row)…

…and grandson Lewis Cass Ledyard, a New York City lawyer, personal counsel to financier J. P. Morgan, and a President of the New York Bar Association.

I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other, as mentioned at the beginning of this post.

In this pairing, Henry Clay and Lewis Cass were both acknowledged Freemasons…

…both men served as Secretary of State, Henry Clay during the administration of President John Quincy Adams, and Lewis Cass during the administration of President James Buchanan…

…and both men unsuccessfully ran for President three times, Henry Clay in 1824, 1832, and 1844; and Lewis Cass in 1844, 1848, and 1852.

The next unlikely pairing from the National Statuary Hall that I am going to showcase for things in common is Dr. John Gorrie for Florida and William King for Maine.

Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol – Huey P. Long and Helen Keller

In this new series called “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol,” I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other.

I am pairing Louisiana’s controversial Governor, Huey P. Long, and Alabama’s Helen Keller, a deaf-blind woman who gain prominence as an American author, lecturer, political activist, and disability rights activist, in this segment.

In the first segment of this series, I paired Michigan’s Gerald Ford, a former President of the United States, and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America; and in the second segment, I paired Dr. Norman Borlaug, Ph.D, often called the “Father of the Green Revolution; and Colorado’s Dr. Florence R. Sabin, M.D, remembered as a pioneer for women in science.

A statue of Huey Pierce Long is in the National Statuary Hall representing the State of Louisiana.

Huey Pierce Long, Jr, was an American politician, serving as Louisiana’s Governor and as United States Senator. 

He was  assassinated in 1935.

Nicknamed “the Kingfish,” he rose to prominence during the Great Depression as a left-wing populist in the Democratic party who was critical of President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which Long didn’t think was radical enough.

Huey Long was born in August of 1893 near Winnfield, Louisiana, the seat of Winn Parish.

His family lived in a comfortable farmhouse, and were well-off compared to others in Winnfield.

In the 1890s, Winn Parish was a bastion of the Populist Party, a left-wing political party that emphasized the idea of “the People” versus “the Establishment.”

In the 1912 election, citizens of Winn Parish voted more for Socialist candidate for President Eugene V. Debs than any other candidate.

When Long was in high school, he and his friends formed a secret society, with a mission to “run things, laying down certain rules the students would have to follow.”

Cautioned by his teachers to obey the school’s rules, some of the rebellious things Long did included distributing a flyer that criticized his teachers and the necessity of a recently-mandated fourth year of secondary education, and successfully petitioning to fire the principal, though he never finished high school.

And even though he won a full academic scholarship to Louisiana State University, his family couldn’t afford to cover his books or living expenses, so he became a travelling salesman instead.

In 1911, at the urging of his mother, he attended seminary classes Oklahoma Baptist University, but only for one semester because it didn’t suit him.

Then, in 1912, he attended the University of Oklahoma College of Law in for a semester, where apparently his grades were poor because he was distracted by the gambling houses when he was attending classes there.

While working as a salesman, Long met his future wife Rose McConnell, who he married in 1913, at a baking contest he promoted to sell Cottolene Shortening, a brand of shortening made of beef suet and cottonseed oil that was produced in the U. S. from 1868 until the early 20th-century, the first mass-produced and mass-marketed alternative to lard, a natural cooking fat derived from rendered pig fat.

Long enrolled in the Tulane Law School in 1914, concentrating on the courses necessary for the bar exam.

He passed the bar, and received his license to practice law in 1915.

Long established his private law practice in Winnfield in 1915, where he represented poor plaintiff’s, mostly in Workers’ Compensation cases.

In 1918, he entered the race to serve on one of the three-seats on the Louisiana Railroad Commission.

His message to the voters throughout his career as an elected official, in a nutshell, was that he was a warrior from and for the people, battling the giants of Wall Street, with too much of America’s wealth being concentrated in too few hands.

He won by just over 600 votes.

While serving on the commission, he forced utilities to lower rates; ordered railroads to service to small towns; and demanded Standard Oil to stop importing Mexican crude oil and use more oil from Louisiana.

Long became chairman of the commission in 1922, known by then as the “Public Service Commission.”

Huey Long announced his candidacy for Louisiana governor in August of 1923.

He campaigned throughout the state, as well as in rural areas disenfranchised by the Louisiana political establishment, known as the “Old Regulars.”

He did not make it past the primary that year, even though received 31% of the vote from the electorate and carried 28 parishes, more than his opponents.

It was the only election Long ever lost.

Long spent the next four years building his political organization and reputation.

Also, Government mismanagement as a result of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 from the people affected by it aided Huey Long.

The most destructive river flood in U. S. history, it was estimated to cost upwards of $1 billion in damages, and caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom joined the “Great Migration,” also known as the “Black Migration,” from the rural south to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest, that took place roughly between 1910 and 1970.

He launched his second campaign for governor in 1927, using the slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”

Among other things, he used trucks with loudspeakers and radio commercials in his campaign.

He won the 1928 election for governor with 96.1% of the vote in the general election, and was the youngest governor elected in state history at the age of 35.

Upon entering office on May 21st of 1928, Long fired hundreds of opponents in the state bureaucracy at all levels, and replaced them with patronage appointments of his political supporters, who were expected to pay a portion of their salary into his campaign fund.

This was his office in the Old Louisiana Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, said to have been built under his supervision in 1930, and inspired to resemble the White House in Washington, DC.

It is now an historic house museum under the stewardship of an organization called “Preserve Louisiana.

The previous Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, the Knox Mansion said to have been built in 1857, was demolished by convicts from the State Penitentiary under the direction of Huey Long.

After Long had strengthened his control over the state political apparatus, he proceeded to push bills through the state legislature to fulfill campaign promises using aggressive tactics to ensure their passage.

Long met considerable resistance from legislators after calling the legislature into special session in 1929 in order to enact a 5-cent per barrel tax on refined oil production, and his opponents introduced an impeachment resolution against him with nineteen charges listed.

He was ultimately impeached on eight-of-the-nineteen charges in the Louisiana House but avoided conviction in the Senate, in which conviction required a two-thirds majority, particularly when fifteen Senators signed a statement pledging to vote not-guilty regardless of the evidence.

In March of 1930, Long established his own newspaper, called the “Louisiana Progress,” which promoted his political aims and attacked his opponents.

The newspaper was renamed “The American Progress” in 1935, and went national to promote Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program and his ambitions for running for President in 1936.

Not long after his impeachment proceedings, Long announced his candidacy for the U. S. Senate in the 1930 Democratic Primary.

By this time, Huey Long was known as “the Kingfish,” a name he bestowed upon himself after an “Amos ‘n’ Andy” character from the radio show which first aired in 1928, and was later turned into a television series from 1951 to 1953.

The Kingfish in “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was a man whose life revolved around his lodge, the Mystic Knights of the Sea.

The radio show had black characters, but was created, written, and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who also happened to be Freemasons and Shriners.

Long won the Senate seat for a term that started while he was still Governor of Louisiana.

This led to a showdown between Long, and his Lieutenant-Governor Paul Cyr, who declared himself the State’s legitimate Governor in October of 1931, and who threatened to undo Long’s reforms.

Using a combination of the Louisiana National Guard and the Louisiana Supreme Court, Long successfully prevented Cyr from claiming the Governorship because he had vacated the Lieutenant-Governorship and had the court eject Cyr, making Long both Governor and Senator-elect.

He was able to concentrate his power into a political machine, and continued his practice of a patronage system placing his supporters into positions of influence and power.

Long’s opponents argued that he became the dictator of Louisiana.

Long’s legacy as Governor of Louisiana was said to be his creation of an unprecedented public works program resulting in the construction of roads, bridges, hospitals, schools and state buildings, which would have taken place during the Great Depression.

Infrastructure attributed to Huey Long includes:

The Huey P. Long Bridge, a cantilevered, steel through-truss bridge carrying six-lanes of U.S. 90 and two-tracks of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad across the Mississippi River, said to have been constructed between January of 1933 and December of 1935…

…the Field House at Louisiana State University, said to have been constructed in 1932 with a post office, ballroom, gymnasium, and the largest swimming pool in the United States at the time…

…the swimming pool of which was abandoned after the Natatorium for the LSU swim teams was completed in 1985…

…and the new Louisiana State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, said to have been constructed between 1930 and 1931, and inaugurated in May of 1932.

The Louisiana State Capitol Building in the middle brings to mind Moscow State University on the left, said to have been built in the Stalinist Architectural style between 1947 and 1953, and on the right, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, said to have been built starting in 1922, and opening in 1932.

Long continued to effectively maintain control of Louisiana as Senator, and by 1935, his consolidation of power led to those in opposition to him forming what was called the “Square Deal Association” in January of 1935, which included two former governors and the Mayor of New Orleans.

On January 25th of 1935, armed “Square Dealers” seized the East Baton Rouge Parish Courthouse.

In response, Long had the Governor, his long-time friend and supporter, Oscar Allen, call in the National Guard and declare Martial Law, banning public gatherings of more than two people and forbidding criticism of state officials.

The Square Dealers left the courthouse, and the only resulting incident was a brief armed skirmish at the airport, leaving one person wounded but no fatalities.

In the summer of 1935, Long called for two special legislative sessions, which passed laws further centralizing Long’s control over the state, and which stripped away the remaining powers of the Mayor of New Orleans.

On September 8th of 1935, Long was at the State Capitol to pass a bill that would gerrymander the district of an opponent, Judge Benjamin Pavy.

After the bill passed, Long was shot in the torso at close range, according to the official narrative, by a lone gunman, Baton Rouge physician Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of Judge Pavy.

Dr. Weiss was immediately shot by Long’s body-guards, with his autopsy findings showing that he was shot over 60 times.

Long’s funeral was held in Baton Rouge on September 12th, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance, and he was buried on the grounds of the Louisiana State Capitol complex and memorialized by a statue of him directly facing the State Capitol building on his gravesite.

So, here we have a man who was beloved by the People for his anti-establishment rhetoric, and hated by his enemies, whose ambition for power was dictatorial in nature and whose platform was radical socialism, even though he was called a “Populist member of the Democratic Party,” and was also credited with monumental building projects as part of his legacy.

Something seems very fishy about this man and his whole story, leading to more questions than answers.

Who was this guy?

Travelling salesman, turned attorney, turned politician, turned virtual dictator?

What was really going on here?

I mean, doesn’t he even loo like he is telling a fish story in this photo of him?

Telling a “fish story” is slang for an improbable, boastful tale after the tendency of fishermen to exaggerate the size of the fish they have either caught or lost.

Helen Keller is one of the two statues representing the State of Alabama.

Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing after becoming ill at the age of 19-months.

Helen Keller was born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880 at a home still standing today called “Ivy Green.”

Tuscumbia is the county seat of Colbert County.

Tuscumbia was the traditional territory of the Chickasaw people, one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeastern United States that were relocated by the U. S. Government to the Oklahoma Territory during the 1830s.

Until the age of 7, Helen communicated by home signs.

Her mother sent her and her father to Baltimore in 1886 to see an ENT specialist, who referred them to Alexander Graham Bell, who referred them to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston, who sent Anne Sullivan to work with Helen at her home in Alabama, and who became her teacher and life-long companion Ann Sullivan, and taught her how to speak, read, and write.

Helen physically attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, starting in 1888…

…and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston in 1890, founded in 1869 and the oldest public day-school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in the United States…

…and the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York from 1894 to 1896.

Helen Keller gained admittance to Harvard’s Radcliffe College in 1900, and graduated in 1904 as the first blind-and-deaf woman to receive a Bachelor of Arts Degree.

It was during the time that Helen Keller was attending Radcliffe College that she met the Standard Oil magnate, industrialist, and financier Henry Huttleston Rogers through her admirer Mark Twain, and Rogers and his wife paid for Helen’s education there.

She also corresponded with the Austrian Jewish philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was credited with discovering her literary talent.

Wilhelm Jerusalem wrote a psychological study in 1890 on Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American child to gain an education in the English language, and who gained celebrity status after meeting Charles Dickens in 1842, and he wrote about her in “American Notes.”

It is important to note that the famous American author who admired Helen Keller, Mark Twain, was a member of the Bohemian Club of Bohemian Grove fame…

…and the famous British author Charles Dickens wrote a lot of books about orphans and workhouses.

Helen Keller learned to speak, and for the rest her life gave speeches and lectures, becoming a world famous speaker and author.

She travelled to twenty-five different countries, and gave motivational speeches, in particular about deaf people’s conditions.

In 1909, Helen Keller became a member of the Socialist Party, and in 1912 she joined the IWW.

She supported Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist candidate for President of the United States, in his presidential campaigns.

The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, was founded in 1905 in Chicago by people like Eugene V. Debs, and Bill Haywood, an active Socialist and Marxist.

The IWW was founded at a convention in Chicago of 200 Socialists, Marxists, and Anarchists

The IWW contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism with industrial democracy.

In 1915, the Helen Keller International organization for research in vision, health, and nutrition, was founded by her and George A. Kessler, a businessman known as the “Champagne King,” who owned a wine import company.

Notably, George A. Kessler was one of the 761 survivors of the 1,960 people on-board the RMS Lusitania when it sank during World War I in May of 1915 after having been torpedoed by a German U-Boat.

Helen Keller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Helen Keller died in her sleep on June 1st of 1968 at her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Her funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and her ashes said to be buried next to her constant companion Anne Sullivan in a crypt in the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea at the National Cathedral.

As mentioned previously, I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other.

In this pairing, Huey P. Long and Helen Keller both had far left-learning political views.

Huey P. Long’s ambition for power was dictatorial in nature and his platform was radical socialism, even though he was called a “Populist member of the Democratic Party,” and Helen Keller was an active member of the Socialist Party.

Huey Long’s home parish of Winn Parish was a Populist Bastion that strongly supported the Socialist candidate of Eugene V. Debs in the 1912 election, and Helen Keller was also a strong supporter of his presidential candidacy as well.

And both Huey P. Long and Helen Keller had a connection to Standard Oil, albeit Huey Long’s connection was adversarial with his demand to Standard Oil to stop importing Mexican crude oil and use more oil from Louisiana when he was on the Louisiana Railroad Commission, and Helen Keller was the beneficiary of Henry Huttleston Rogers, the Standard Oil Magnate, paying for her college education.

The next unlikely pairing from the National Statuary Hall that I am going to showcase for things in common is Henry Clay for Kentucky and Lewis Cass for Michigan.

Snapshots from the Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol – Norman Borlaug and Florence R. Sabin

I have decided to showcase unlikely pairs of historical figures who have things in common with each other in the National Statuary Hall in this new series, “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol.”

In this segment, I am pairing Iowa’s Dr. Norman Borlaug, Ph.D, often called the “Father of the Green Revolution; and Colorado’s Dr. Florence R. Sabin, M.D, remembered as a pioneer for women in science.

In the first segment, I paired Michigan’s Gerald Ford, a former President of the United States, and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America.

I am currently approximately half-way through a series in which I am taking an in-depth look at who is represented in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC, in which sculptures of prominent American historical figures are housed, two for each state.

First, Norman Borlaug, one of the two statues representing the State of Iowa in the National Statuary Hall.

The other was Iowa’s Civil War Governor, Samuel J. Kirkwood.

Dr. Norman Borlaug was an American Agriculturalist who led initiatives around the world that lead to significant increases in agricultural production, we are told, known as “The Green Revolution.”

Norman Borlaug was born in March of 1914 on his Norwegian great-grandparents’ farm in the Norwegian-American community of Saude, Iowa, in Chickasaw County.

Borlaug worked on the family farm west of Protivin, Iowa, from the ages of 7 to 19, raising things like corn, oats and livestock.

He attended the one-room New Oregon #8 rural school in Howard County, Iowa, through the 8th-grade, a building that is owned by the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation as part of his legacy.

For the remainder of his secondary-education he attended Cresco High School, excelling in athletics.

He received his higher education at the University of Minnesota, where he received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Forestry in 1937, a Master of Science degree in 1940, and a Ph.D in plant pathology and genetics in 1942.

Borlaug was employed as a microbiologist by DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, between 1942 and 1944, where it was planned he would lead research in agricultural bacteriocides, fungicides and preservatives.

With the entry of the U. S. into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th of 1941, his lab instead was converted to conduct research for the U. S. Military, like the development of glue that resisted corrosion in the warm salt water of the Pacific; camouflage; canteen disinfectants; DDT to control Malaria; and insulation for small electronics.

The Mexican President Avila Camacho, elected in 1940, wanted to augment Mexico’s industrialization and economic growth, and the U. S. Vice-President Henry Wallace, who saw this as beneficial to the interests of the United States, persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to work with the Mexican government in agricultural development.

They in turn contacted leading agronomists who proposed the Office of Special Studies within the Mexican Government to be directed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and staffed by Mexican and American scientists focusing on soil development; maize and wheat production and plant pathology.

Borlaug was tapped to be the head of the newly established Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico, a position which he took over as a geneticist and plant pathologist after he finished his wartime service with DuPont in 1944.

In 1964, he was made the Director of the International Wheat Improvement Program at El Batan on the outskirts of Mexico City, as part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (or CIMMYT), the funding for which was provided by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Mexican Government.

Interesting to note that Borlaug felt that pesticides, like DDT, had more benefits than drawbacks, and advocated for their continued use.

Borlaug retired as Director of the CIMMYT in 1979, though stayed on as a Senior Consultant and continued to be involved in research in plant research.

He started teaching and doing research at Texas A & M University in 1984, and was the holder of the Eugene Butler Endowed Chair in Agricultural Biotechnology, for which he advocated the use of as he had for the use of pesticides, in spite of heavy criticism.

Norman Borlaug died at the age of 95 in September of 2009 in Dallas.

There is a memorial to him outside of the city of Obregon, at CIMMYT’s Experiment Station in Mexico’s Sonora State, where there are miles and miles of cultivated land, where tractors plow the land, airplanes spray pesticides on the crops; mechanical harvesters reap the wheat; trucks carry the crops to town from where they are shipped around the world.

Among other awards in recognition for his achievements, Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970; the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977; and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2006.

It is interesting to note that the old Des Moines Public Library Building has been the Norman E. Borlaug/World Food Prize Hall of Laureates for the World Food Prize since 1973, an international award recognizing the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world.

The old Des Moines Public Library Building was said to have been constructed in 1903, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

The World Food Prize is awarded here in October of every year and the World Food Prize Foundation is endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

It is also interesting to note that in Norman Borlaug’s home state of Iowa, Power Pollen is located in Ankeny.

Power Pollen’s mission statement is to preserve and enhance crop productivity by enabling superior pollination systems.

Well, that sounds great, but when I was looking for information on Power Pollen, I encountered the information that in 2021, Power Pollen announced a commercial license agreement with Bayer Pharmaceuticals designed to help corn seed production.

And what’s wrong with that picture?

Monsanto was acquired by the German multinational Bayer Pharmaceutics and Life Sciences Company after gaining United States and EU regulatory approvals on June 7th of 2018 for $66-billion in cash, and Monsanto’s name is no longer used.

Next, Dr. Florence R. Sabin is one of the two statues representing the State of Colorado.

The other is NASA astronaut Jack Swigert.

Dr. Florence R. Sabin was an American medical scientist.

As a pioneer for women in science, she was the first woman to become a professor at a medical college in the Department of Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1902…

…the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1925…

…and the first woman to head a department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1925, when she became head of the Department of Cellular Studies and where her research focused on the lymphatic system; blood vessels & cells; and tuberculosis.

The Rockefeller University was founded in 1901 by John D. Rockefeller, and was America’s first biomedical institute.

Florence R. Sabin was born in Central City, Colorado, in 1871, to a mining engineer father and schoolteacher mother.

Her mother died in 1878, and she and her sister went to live with their uncle in Chicago, before moving to live with their grandparents in Vermont.

In 1885, she enrolled in the Vermont Academy at Saxton River, where she was able to develop her interest in science.

She attended Smith College in Massachusetts, and graduated in 1893 with her Bachelor’s degree.

In 1896, Sabin enrolled in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which had opened in 1893, and she graduated in 1900.

Her two major projects were on producing a 3D model of a newborn’s brain stem, which became the focus of the 1901 textbook “An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain,” and the second was on the development of the lymphatic system in the embryo.

In her retirement, she became involved in Public Health in the State of Colorado at the invitation of the Governor at the time.

Among other things, as a result of her work, the “Sabin Health Laws” were passed, modernizing public health care in Colorado by providing more beds to treat Tuberculosis, which led to a reduction in the number of cases.

Florence R. Sabin died at the age of 81 in October of 1953, and her remains were interred in the Fairmount Mausoleum at the Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other in this “Snapshots from the Statuary Hall” series.

In this pairing, Dr. Norman Borlaug and Dr. Florence R. Sabin both worked under the auspices of the Rockefellers in their careers, and both researched and taught in their respective academic fields at the University Level.

The next unlikely pairing from the National Statuary Hall that I am going to showcase for things in common is Huey P. Long for Louisiana and Helen Keller for Alabama.

Bonanza! The Correlation of Mines & Minerals to the Earth’s Grid System – Part 2 Cape Farewell, Greenland to the Maldives

In the first part of the series, I tracked an alignment looking for mines and mineral occurrences starting at Cape Farewell in Greenland; through northern Labrador and northern Quebec; the Belcher Islands and the James Bay region of the Hudson Bay; southwestern Ontario; the Northwest Angle of Minnesota; North Dakota; Montana; Idaho; Nevada; the Sierra Nevadas and San Francisco in California; in the Pacific through the Big Island of Hawaii, the Republic of Kiribati and the Solomon Islands; Australia; Cape Town in South Africa; Brazil; Venezuela; Colombia; Panama; Nicaragua; Honduras; Belize, and Mexico, ending at Merida, the southern apex of the star tetrahedron, which I believe is the terminus of the Earth’s grid system.

I chose Cape Farewell at the southern tip of Greenland as my starting point for this two-part series because it sits on an alignment that globally connects with two different sides of the North American Star Tetrahedron.

I found it early in 2016 by connecting the dots when I noticed major cities in North America that were lining up in straight lines.

I extended the lines out, wrote down the cities and places that were in linear or circular alignment in spreadsheets, and got an amazing tour of the world of places I had never heard of after looking at countless images, and hours and hours of drone videos,  and seeing the same signature and hand of design, from ancient to modern, all over the Earth.  

In this post, I am going to cover mining and mineral findings along an alignment going in the other direction from Cape Farewell.

Cape Farewell is the southernmost point of Greenland.

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, the Nalunaq Gold Mine, Greenland’s first gold mine, opened in 2004 at the Inuit community of Nanortalik and the first mine developed in Greenland in over 30-years.

A narrow-vein, high-grade gold deposit, the Crew Gold Exploration company was the first to mine it for approximately 4-years, producing 308,000 ounces of gold.

Before World War II, Greenland was a tightly controlled colony of Denmark, otherwise closed off to the world.

After Denmark fell to the Germans in April of 1940, the United States established numerous and extensive facilities for air and sea traffic in Greenland, among other things.

Denmark was occupied by the Nazi Germans from 1940 to 1945. The headquarters of the Danish SS Unit was the massive Danish Freemasonic Lodge.

Apparently the chief concern by the United States and other interested parties in 1940 was to secure the strategically important supply of cryolite at Ivittuit, also at the southern tip of Greenland.

Ivittuut was one of the few places in the world so far discovered to have what is called naturally-occurring cryolite, which is an important agent in modern aluminum extraction.

Cryolite was discovered here in 1794, and it was mined until production was stopped in 1987 after synthetic cryolite was developed and reserves depleted.

The town of Ivittuut was abandoned soon afterwards.

Cryolite is an aluminum oxide mineral used in the electrolytic processing of Bauxite, an aluminum-rich oxide ore.

Aluminum is a chemical element with the symbol “Al” and the atomic number of 13.

It is a silvery-white, soft, non-magnetic and ductile metal in the boron group, and the Earth’s most abundant metal.

Due to its low density and ability to resist corrosion, aluminum and its alloys are vital to the aerospace industry, as well as other transportation and building industries.

From Cape Farewell, the next place we come to are the Faroe Islands are a North Atlantic archipelago located 200-miles, or 320-kilometers, north of Scotland, and about half-way between Iceland and Norway.

Like Greenland, the Faroe Islands are an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

In our historical narrative, we are told that between 1450 AD and 1814 AD, The Faroe Islands were part of the Union of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, also known as the Oldenburg Monarchy.

We are told the Oldenburg Monarchy had long-remained neutral in the Napoleonic Wars.

Britain was said to have feared that Napoleon would attempt to conquer the Danish-Norwegian naval fleet, and used that as a pretext to attack Copenhagen in what became known as the Seige of Copenhagen in August of 1807, and Britain seized the naval fleet in September of 1807.

This also assured the use of the sea lanes in the North Sea and Baltic Sea for the British merchant fleet.

Then in 1814, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Treaty of Kiel, between the United Kingdom and Sweden on the anti-French-side, and Norway and Denmark on the French-side, dissolved the Oldenburg Monarchy by transferring Norway to the King of Sweden.

The King of Denmark retained the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland.

I find it interesting to notice the word “Hyperboreus” in this map associated with the 1814 Treaty of Kiel.

Legendary Hyperborea, a lost ancient land and fabulous world of eternal spring, was said to be located in the Far North, and Tthe Nazis believed there was a connection to the origins of the Aryan race with Hyperborea. 

At any rate, the Faroe Islands are one of the classic zeolite localities of the world.

Zeolites are minerals with very small pores, composed primarily of aluminum, silicon, and oxygen, and used commercially as absorbents and catalysts.

Zeolites found on the Faroe Islands include, but are not limited to, different varieties of Stilbites…

…as well as a zeolite called Thomsonite, a silicate material, which are rock-forming minerals made up of silicate groups.

This example of Thomsonite is called Farolite.

Here are some of the sights found on the Faroe Islands.

While we are told the etymology of the name of these islands came from possibly an Old Norse word for “sheep” or the Swedish verb “fara,” meaning to travel, it is interesting to note that at least in the Romance languages, the word for lighthouse includes the root sound of “Far”:

Italian – Faro…

…Spanish – Faro…

…French – Phare…

…Portuguese – Farol…

…and Romanian – Far.

This is the Tower of Hercules, a lighthouse on Faro Island in A Coruna, Spain, which is located on the northwest coast of Spain in Galicia.

And phonetically, “Faro” sounds like the word “Pharaoh,” which we are told was the common title for monarchs of ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty, starting in 3,150 BC, up to the annexation of Egypt by the Roman Empire in 30 BC.

Are they telling us something without telling us they are telling us?

From the Faroe Islands, we cross the Norwegian Sea to Trondheim, Norway’s third most populous urban area, and fourth most populous municipality.

One of the historical name of Trondheim is Nidaros, with the city of Trondheim having been established in 1838.

It is located at the mouth of what is called the River Nidelva…

…but which looks distinctly canal-like to me.

Trondheim is the seat of the Lutheran Diocese of Nidaros, and the Nidaros Cathedral is the national sanctuary of Norway and is the traditional location of the consecration of new kings of Norway, and is considered the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world.

It was said to have been built in the years between 1070 and 1300.

Just for similarity of appearances, here are the Nidaros Catheral in Trondheim in the top pictures, and the Victoria Terminus Railway Station in Mumbai, which used to be Bombay, India, pictured in the bottom photos, and said to have been built by the British in India between 1878 and 1888.

Nidaros Cathedral was said to have been constructed with the soapstone from a medieval soapstone underground quarry called Bakkaunet, close to the city center of old Trondheim, much of which has been destroyed by modern development.

There is considerable mining activity today in Norway, including but not limited to, the precious metals gold, silver, and platinum group elements.

The Headquarters of the Norwegian Directorate of Mining with the Commissioner of Mines at Svalbard is located in Trondheim.

In the area surrounding Trondheim today, the active mining is primarily for limestone and aggregate, which is a broad category of coarse- to medium-grained particulate matter used in construction in the form of sand, gravel, and crushed stone.

Nickel deposits are located northeast of Trondheim…

…and copper/zinc/gold deposits are located southeast of Trondheim at Roros-Tydal.

As a matter of fact, Roros has long been known for its copper mining industry, with the Roros Copper Works said to date back to 1646.

Rich deposits of copper ore were discovered here, which was said to have led to a golden age for the community in the 18th-century on the left, compared for similarity in appearance on the right with Jerome, an old copper mining town in Arizona.

In World War II in Norway, Germany invaded neutral Norway in 1940 on the pretext that Norway needed protection from British and French interference, and like Denmark, the Nazis occupied Norway for 5-years, until 1945.

These were other reasons given for Germany’s invasion of Norway: strategically, to secure ice-free harbors from which its naval forces could seek to control the North Atlantic; to secure the availability of iron ore from mines Sweden through the ice-free port of Narvik; to pre-empt a British and French invasion with the same purpose; and to reinforce the propaganda of a “Germanic empire.”

There are two iron ore mines in Lapland, in northern Sweden.

One is Kiruna, the largest and most modern underground iron ore mine in the world.

Kiruna first opened in 1898.

Iron ore is also mined at Gallivare.

The Iron Ore Line, a 247-mile, or 398-kilometer, long railway connects Kiruna and Gallivare to Narvik.

The Iron Ore Line was said to have opened in 1888.

I am quite sure there were other reasons the Nazis were there related to the original advanced civilization, but our true history has been completely removed from the historical record.

It is only available in what is not written, in architecture like Norway’s National Theater in the background of this photo.

Who were the Nazis, really? Certainly not friends of Humanity.

Were they defeated in World War II as we have been taught?

Or did they continue on to this day without our knowledge in a hidden form?

From Trondheim, the alignment next crosses the Scandinavian Mountains, also known as the Kjolen Mountains, which run through the Scandinavian Peninsula.

The highest peak in Norway is Galdhopiggen, southwest of Trondheim.

It’s name is said to mean “Home of the Giants.”

We have never been given any other information that would provide another explanation, so we accept that its natural as the only possible explanation.

Next on the alignment from Trondheim across these mountains is Sundsvall, a port by the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland.

It is the seat of Sundsvall Municipality in Vasternorrland County.

Sundsvall was said to have been chartered in 1621, and that Swedish industrialism started there in 1849 when the Tunadal Sawmill brought a steam-engine-driven saw.

It is still a center of the Swedish forestry industry.

We are told that Sundsvall has burned down and been rebuilt four times.

The last time it burned down was on June 25th of 1888, allegedly due to a spark from a steamship.

Two other Swedish cities were said to have burned the same day – Umea and Lilla Edet – from what we are told were unusually windy conditions.

Then we are told, after the fire, the decision was made to rebuild Sundsvall using stone.

Sundsvall’s city center was nicknamed the Stenstaden, or the “Stone City.”

At any rate, on the subject of mining and minerals, the Saxberget Mine is one of the mines in the Vasternorrland County of which Sundsvall is a part, in which not only copper, lead, silver, and zinc is mined…

…these minerals are as well.

There are also four other active mines in Vasternorrland County, including mines for gold, copper, and zinc.

Sweden had a different experience from Norway and Denmark during World War II.

We are told Sweden was successfully able to maintain its policy of neutrality during the entirety of World War II.

Keeping its neutrality translated to allowing the Germans to transport the 163rd Infantry Division in 1941, along with heavy weapons, from Norway to Finland; allowing German soldiers to use the railway when on leave between these two countries; and selling iron ore to Germany throughout the war.

For the Allies, Sweden shared military intelligence, and helped to train soldiers from Norway and Denmark, to enable them to be used for the liberation of their home countries; and allowed the Allies to use Swedish air bases between 1944 and 1945.

It sounds like Sweden’s definition of neutrality was having no problem working for both sides.

From Sundsvall, we cross the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden & Finland, and is the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea.

The land surrounding the Gulf of Bothnia is heavily-forested, which are logged and transported for milling.

This gulf is also important for the shipping of oil to the coastal cities and ores to steel mills.

The Aland Islands are a group of approximately 500 islands located at the entrance of the Gulf of Bothnia.

The islands are an autonomous, Swedish-speaking, province of Finland.

It is a favorite destination of people who like to climb boulders.

When I see these “boulders” on the left, I see ancient masonry, which also reminds me of Red Rock Canyon in Hinton, Oklahoma, just west of Oklahoma City and south of I-40, on the right.

The alignment next enters Vaasa, a city on the west coast of Finland, and the capital of the Ostrobothnia region of Finland.

Both Finnish and Swedish are spoken here.

It was said to have been founded in 1606, and named after the House of Vasa, an early modern royal house founded in 1523 in Sweden.

We are told the mainly wooden and densely built town was almost completely destroyed by fire in 1852, and that out of 379 buildings only 24 privately-owned buildings survived, including what was the Court of Appeals, said to have been built in 1775 and now the Church of Korsholm…

…and these stone ruins are said to be of St. Mary’s church where the fire was in Old Vaasa.

The fire was said to have started in a barn owned by a district court judge by a visitor who fell asleep in the barn and dropped his pipe in the dry hay.

Finland is one of the leading mining countries in Europe, and the mining industry plays a very important role in Finland, along with its future growth potential.

On this map, there are four mines around the alignment as it leaves Vaasa.

One is #5, which is mined for zinc, sulphur, copper, silver, gold and iron.

The next is #6, mined primarily for phosphorus and mica.

Also # 7, mined for copper, zinc, gold, silver, nickel and cobalt.

And #8 is mined for gold.

Finland’s role in World War II was similar to Sweden, but slightly different.

It openly participated in the war initially as an Axis power between 1939 and 1944, allied with Germany, Japan and Italy, and then switched sides until the end of the war to the Allies, the grouping of the victorious countries of World War II, against the Axis Powers.

This is a photo of Finnish soldiers raising their flag at the war’s end at the Three-Country Cairn, which marks where the international borders of Finland, Sweden, and Norway meet.

By the end of the war, Finland had ceded nearly 10% of its territory, including its fourth-largest city, Vyborg, to the Soviet Union, as well as pay a large amount of war reparations to them.

As a result of the territorial loss, we are told all of the East Karelians abandoned their homes, and relocated to areas that remained within the borders of Finland.

Karelia is described as an area of historical significance for Finland, Russia, the former Soviet Union, and Sweden, and since 1945 divided between Finland and the Northwestern Russian Federation…

Next we arrive at Archangelsk, in the north of European Russia, or Archangel in English.

The city’s coat-of-arms display Archangel Michael defeating the devil, and the legend states that the victory took place near where the city stands, and that Michael still stands watch over the city.

Archangelsk was the chief seaport of medieval and early modern Russia, until 1703, when it was replaced by Saint Petersburg.

This is a portrait I found of Tsar Ivan III, also known to history as Ivan the Great.

He was said to have brought the Archangelsk area back into the Grand Duchy of Moscow in 1478.

As far as mining goes, I found the Grib Diamond Mine in Archangelsk Oblast, one of the largest diamond mines in Russia and in the world.

It has estimated reserves of 98.5 million carats of diamonds, and annual production capacity of 3.62 million carats.

This map shows the locations of Soviet forced labor camps of the Gulag.

Most of them served mining, timber and construction works.

From Archangelsk, the alignment crosses the Yamal Peninsula, located in northwest Siberia.

The Yamal Peninsula holds Russia’s biggest gas reserves… 

…and gas production facilities are actively evolving there, as well as infrastructure such as gas-pipeline and bridges.

Natural gas is a hydrocarbon, a compound which consists of hydrogen and carbon.

It is used as a fuel source for heating and cooking, and electricity generation, as well as for vehicles, and used in the manufacture of plastics, and other commercially important chemicals.

The Obskaya-Bovanenkovo Railway there, owned and operated by the Russian gas corporation Gazprom, is the world’s northernmost railway.

The Yamal Peninsula has been in the news in recent years because of the appearance of huge sinkholes, starting with one that appeared in 2014.  By 2015, five more had developed.

Hearing about the appearance of sink holes here several years ago is where I first heard about this place.

I Wonder if the ground underneath it had been mined?

It’s appearance looks somewhat similar to an open-pit mine.

The next places we come to on the alignment are Dudinka and Norilsk in Krasnodar Krai, which is a federal subject of Russia within the Siberian Federal District.

Dudinka processes and sends cargo via Norilsk Railway to the Norilsk Mining and Shipping Factory, as well as shipping non-ferrous metals, coal and ore.

Non-ferrous refers to metals other than iron or steel.

Norilsk and the surrounding area is heavily engaged in the mining industry.

Norilsk is the world’s northernmost city with a population of more than 100,000, with permanent inhabitants at 175,000, and the second-largest city inside the Arctic Circle.

The official founding date of Norilsk is 1935, and then it was expanded as a settlement for the Norilsk mining-metallurgic complex, and then subsequently became the center of the Norillag system of Gulag forced-labor camps, which existed from June of 1935 to August of 1956.

The nickel deposits of Norilsk-Talnakh are the largest known nickel-copper-palladium deposits in the world.

The smelting of the nickel ore is directly responsible for severe pollution, typically coming in the form of acid rain or smog, and some estimate the 1% of the world’s sulphur dioxide emission comes from Norilsk’s nickel mines.

The next place we come to is Tiksi, an urban locality in the Sakha Republic on the shore of the Buor-Khaya Gulf of the Laptev Sea, southeast of the delta of the Lena River.

When I first tracked this alignment several years ago, I came across information about the Lena River Pillars, so they have been in my awareness for awhile.

They are called a natural rock formation, with alternating layers of limestone, marlstone, dolomite, and slate.

The Lena Pillars Nature Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2012.

Keep the Lena Pillars in mind when we come to some places further down on the alignment.

Tiksi serves as one of the principal ports for access to the Laptev Sea.

Modern Tiksi was said to have been founded in 1933, and since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, its population has considerably declined, and many of its apartment blocks are abandoned.

Silver and tin are listed on this map as being in the region surrounding Tiksi.

Tin is a chemical element with the symbol “Sn” and the atomic number of 50.

It is a silvery metal that characteristically has a faint yellow hue, and is soft enough to be cut without much force.

In modern times, tin is used for tin/lead soft solders, which are 60% tin…

…and in the manufacture of electrically conducting films of indium tin oxide in optoelectronics, which is the study of and application of electronic devices having to do with lighting.

Other uses are corrosion-resistant tin-plating in steel…

…and it is widely used for food-packaging.

Next, the alignment crosses into the Chukchi, also known as Chukotka, Peninsula, the easternmost peninsula of Asia, where I found the Kupol Gold mine.

The mine is situated over the Kayemraveem ore belt, which contains both high-quality gold and silver.

The mineral deposits are estimated to hold 4.4 million ounces of gold and 54.2 million ounces of silver, on top of 1.72 million inferred ounces of gold, and 22.2 million inferred ounces of silver.

Inferred deposits mean that the ore is not necessarily accessible due to geological obstacles.

The alignment exits Russia at Uelen, a small settlement just south of the Arctic Circle in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the Russian Far East.

Located near Cape Dezhnev, where the Bering Sea meets the Chukchi Sea, it is the easternmost settlement in Russia…and all of Eurasia.

The Chukchi Sea forms part of the Arctic Ocean, bordered in the east by northwestern Alaska and in the west by northeastern Siberia.

Estimates of oil and gas reserves on the U. S. portion of the Continental Shelf, including both the Chukchi and the neighboring Beaufort Sea, range up to 30 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

The U. S. government began offering oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea in the 1980s, but little exploration and no development occurred on them, and all the older leases expired.

There is significant opposition to exploration and drilling here.

The Diomede Islands are located in the middle of the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.

The island of Big Diomede belongs to Russia, and Little Diomede to the United States.

In spite of their proximity to each other, they are separated by the International Date Line, and Big Diomede is 21 hours ahead of Little Diomede, almost a day.

They are described as rocky, mesa-like islands.

Next we come to Nome, located on the southern Seward Peninsula coast of Alaska on the Norton Sound of the Bering Sea.

The most populous city in Alaska at one time, Nome was incorporated in April of 1901, shortly after gold was discovered on Anvil Creek there in 1898 by “three lucky Swedes.”

News of the discovery was said to have reached the outside world that winter, and that by 1899, had a population of 10,000 people.

The area was first organized as the “Nome Mining District.”

Also in 1899, gold was found in the beach sands for dozens of miles along the coast at Nome, spurring the stampede to new heights.

In 1899, Charles D. Lane founded the Wild Goose Mining and Trading Company…

…for which he was said to have built the Wild Goose Railroad, which ran from Nome to Dexter Discovery, and by 1908 to the village of Shelton.

Charles D. Lane, a millionaire mine owner, was recognized as a founder of Nome.

He was born in Palmyra, Missouri, in 1840, and moved to California with his father in 1852.

He got involved in the mining industry, developing successful mines in Idaho, California, and Arizona, before hearing of the first gold strike in Nome in 1898.

Gold mining has been a major source of employment and revenue for Nome through to the present day.

We come to McGrath next…

…which sits in the middle of a snaky, s-shaped river bend of the Kuskokwim River shown in the top photo, the same shape that I find in rivers all over the world, like the Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on the bottom left; the River Thames in London, England in the bottom middle; and the Yellow River in China on the bottom right.

In 1906, gold was discovered in what became the Ophir Creek Mines in the Innoko Mining District, the first of many mining claims and sites throughout this region, besides what became known as Ophir.

Since McGrath was the northernmost point on the Kuskokwim River accessible by large riverboats, it became a regional supply center, and from 1911 to 1920, hundreds of people went to the Ophir Gold District by way of dog sled, or on foot.

We next come to Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, located in Southcentral Alaska…

…at the terminus of the Cook Inlet, between the Knik Arm to the North and Turnagain Arm to the South.

The Cook Inlet was named for the English explorer, Captain James Cook…

…who sailed into it in 1778 when he was looking for the Northwest Passage.

Gold was discovered in Anchorage in the 1880s, and was said to have turned the region into a mining area overnight.

This is an Alaskan gold nugget.

Over the following years, several mines were established in the area producing hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold, with Anchorage becoming an active gold mining center.

The Crow Creek Mine, in the Girdwood section of Anchorage, is one of the best known hydraulic gold mines in Alaska.

Hydraulic mining involves delivering water through a nozzle at high-pressure against the gravel deposits.

These deposits, or slurries, were then passed on to large sluice boxes, which separated all the gold from the deposits.

The Crow Creek Mine is family-owned; still in production; and allows visitors to pan for gold.

The next place we come to is Juneau, the capital city of Alaska.

It is located in the Gastineau Channel…

…and the Alaskan Panhandle, the southeastern portion of Alaska, bordered to the east by the northern part of British Columbia.

Juneau is unique as a state capital for not having roads connecting it to the rest of the state. All transportation-related activities are by air and sea only.

Vehicles are transported to Juneau by barge or the Alaska Marine Highway Ferry System, which serves communities in Southeast Alaska with no road access, and also transport people and freight.

The city is said to be named after a gold prospector from Quebec named Joe Juneau.

What we are told is that after the California Gold Rush, miners migrated up the Pacific coast in search of other gold deposits.

In 1880, mining engineer George Pilz from Sitka, which was formerly under Russian rule, offered a reward to any local native Alaskan who could lead him to gold-bearing ore.

Pilz received information that prompted him to direct prospectors Joe Juneau and Richard Harris to the Gastineau Channel to Snow Slide Gulch at the head of Gold Creek, where they found nuggets as big as “peas and beans.”

Shortly thereafter a mining camp sprang up, and shortly after that, so many people came looking for gold, that the camp became a village.

This is said to be a photo of Juneau in 1887.

Major mining operations in the Juneau Mining District prior to World War II included the Treadwell Mine, owned and operated by a man named John Treadwell, southeast of Juneau on Douglas Island.

In its time, it was the largest hard-rock gold mine in the world, employing 2,000 people, and producing over 3-million Troy ounces of gold between 1881 and 1922.

He operated a stamp mill, pictured here circa 1908, which mined gold by way of a mill machine that crushed ore by pounding rather than grinding for either further processing or extraction of metallic ores.

The next place we come to on the alignment is Whitehorse, the capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory.

It was named after the White Horse Rapids, near Miles Canyon.

These rapids, and the Miles Canyon, provided a significant challenge to gold-seekers heading to the Klondike gold rush.

The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of northern Yukon between 1896 and 1899.

Same kind of story as the other places I have mentioned – as soon as word about the discovery of gold in the Klondike reached Seattle and San Francisco, it triggered a stampede of prospectors, immortalized in photos like this of the long-line waiting to cross the Chilkoot Pass, a high-mountain pass between the Boundary Ranges of the Coast Mountains between Alaska and British Columbia.

Miles Canyon is also one of the places I had in mind when I shared the pictures of the Lena River Pillars previously in this post.

These are called the Miles Canyon Basalts.

We are told they are a package of rocks that include various exposures of basaltic lava flows and cones that erupted and flowed across an ancient, pre-glacial landscape in south-central Yukon.

Again, because we are given no other possible explanation as to how they came into existence, we accept this information as the only explanation.

The Minto Mine is an open-pit copper and gold mine located 149-miles, or 240-kilometers, north of Whitehorse, beginning production in 2007…

…and there are numerous mining claims in the Yukon Territory as well.

The next place we come to on the alignment is Dawson Creek, a city near the eastern edge of the Peace River Regional District of British Columbia.

The city of Dawson Creek received its name from the Dawson Creek that flows through here, which was named after the surveyor George Mercer Dawson, when he and his team came through in 1879.

Dawson Creek became a regional center after the western terminus of the Northern Alberta Railways was extended there in 1932.

The community grew rapidly in 1942, when the U. S. Army used the rail terminus as a shipment point during the construction of the Alaska Highway, and it is the starting point of the Alaska Highway.

The Peace River Region of which Dawson Creek is a part has an extensive coal-mining industry, centered in the municipality of Tumbler Ridge.

There are at least five major mining projects here, with the Murray River Mine developed starting in 2017 as an underground metallurgical coal mine.

Metallurgical coal, or coking coal, is a grade of coal that can be used to produce good-quality-coke, which is used as an essential fuel and reactant in the blast furnace process for primary steel-making.

Next we come to Edmonton, the capital city of the Province of Alberta.

Edmonton is North America’s northernmost metropolitan area, with a population of over 1-million.

Edmonton is also the northern apex of the North American Star Tetrahedron that I found in 2016, which was the starting point of all of my research work.

Known as the “Gateway to the North,” Edmonton is the staging area for large-scale oil sands projects in northern Alberta…

…and large-scale diamond-mining operations in the Northwest Territories.

The next place on the alignment is Saskatoon on the South Saskatchewan River, and the largest city in the Province of Saskatchewan.

The city has nine river crossings, and is nicknamed “Paris of the Prairie”…

…and notable architecture like the Delta Bessborough Hotel, also known as the “Castle on the River,” said to have been built for and opened in 1935 for Canadian National Hotels, a division of Canadian National Railway.

We are told that the founding of Saskatoon started with the purchase of 21-sections of land straddling the South Saskatchewan River by the Toronto-based Temperance Colonization Society in 1882, for the purposes of setting-up a dry community in the prairie.

The first settlers were said to have arrived by railway from Ontario to Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, then complete the final leg to what became Saskatoon by horse-drawn cart, as the railway had yet to be completed to Saskatoon.

Saskatoon lies on a long, rich belt of rich potassic chernozem, which is a rich, black-colored soil containing a high-percentage of humus, or amorphous organic soil material, and high-percentages of phosphoric acids, phosphorus, and ammonia.

It is very fertile, and can produce high agricultural yields.

It was said to have been first identified and named by Russian geologist and soil scientist Vasily Dokuchaev in 1883, when he was studying the tall-grass steppe, or prairie, of European Russia.

Kimberlite, a rare, blue-tinged, coarse-ground intrusive igneous rock sometimes containing diamonds…

…was first discovered in the Sturgeon Lake area of northwestern Saskatchewan in 1988.

In 2016, DeBeers tested for kimberlite targets in the Northwest Athabaska Kimberlite Project, but ended its search when drill-test results from several targets did not yield expected results.

The DeBeers Group, an international corporation that specializes in all aspects of the diamond industry, was founded in 1888 by British businessman, Cecil Rhodes.

The Athabasca Basin is best known for its substantial uranium deposits.

Next, the alignment crosses Winnipeg, the capital and largest city of the Province of Manitoba, located on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.

The city is named for the nearby Lake Winnipeg…

…which has the largest watershed of any lake in Canada, receiving water from four U. S. states, and four Canadian provinces.

Lord Selkirk, a Scottish philanthropist, was involved with the first permanent settlement by sponsoring immigrant settlements in Canada starting in 1811 at what was known as the Red River Colony.

He purchased the land from the Hudson Bay Company, and surveyed the river lots for immigrant settlement.

We are told Winnipeg developed rapidly after the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1881…

…and became a transportation hub, including having electric streetcars at one time, according to this historical postcard, among other things.

Manitoba is home to several active mines, one of which is in Flin Flon, Manitoba, on the provincial border with Saskatchewan.

It has high-grade zinc and copper deposits in what is called a VMS, or “Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide” deposit.

Manitoba also produces 100% of Canada’s cesium, lithium, and tantalum, minerals used in such things as electronics, specialized batteries, and jet engine components.

Cesium is a chemical element with the symbol “Cs” and atomic number of 55.

It is a silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 83.3-degrees Fahrenheit, or 28.5-degrees Celsius, one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at near room temperature.

It has a wide range of applications in the production of electricity, in electronics, and in chemistry.

Tantalum is a chemical element with the symbol “Ta” and the atomic number of 73.

It is a rare, hard, blue-gray lustrous metal that is highly resistant to corrosion.

The chemical inertness of tantalum makes it a valuable substance for laboratory and electronic equipment and as a substitute for platinum.

We come now to Thunder Bay, Ontario, on this alignment.

Thunder Bay is the seat of the Thunder Bay District in Ontario and is located at the head of Lake Superior. 

We have crossed into the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, also known as the Laurentian Plateau.

It is called one of the world’s largest geologic continental shelves, of exposed precambrian igneous and high-grade metamorphic rock that forms the ancient geological core of North America. 

So I want to share some photos with you of what it looks like with all those nice straight edges, angles, and flat stone surfaces.

This picture was taken at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park near Thunder Bay.

There are several places of interest in the vicinity of Thunder Bay.

One is Ouimet Canyon is thirty-seven miles, or sixty kilometers, northeast of the city of Thunder Bay.

This is another place I would like to bring to your attention for its similarity to the Lena River Pillars and Miles Canyon Basalts.

There are also Amethyst Mines close to the alignment as it goes through the Thunder Bay District.

These are Thunder Bay amethysts, with hematite inclusions showing up as the red colorations in the amethyst points.

Next we come to Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

While geographically it is very close to Grand Portage in Minnesota, it is part of the State of Michigan.

It is the only national park in Michigan, and the only island national park in the United States.

Isle Royale was known for its ancient copper mines dating at least back to the Bronze Age, and considered the purest copper in the world.

Next we come to Sudbury, officially Greater Sudbury, the largest city in Northern Ontario, a geographic and administrative region of Ontario, but is administered as a Unitary authority, and not part of any district, county or regional municipality.

We are told the Sudbury region was inhabited by the Ojibwe, an Anishanaabe people of the Algonquin Group, for 9,000-years.

We are told a large tract of land, including what is now Sudbury, was signed over to the British Crown in 1850, by the local chiefs, as part of the Robinson-Huron Treaty.

In return, the Crown pledged to pay an annuity to these First Nations people, originally set at $1.60 per treaty member, and it was last increased to $4 in 1874, where it is fixed to this day.

Reservations were also established as result of this Treaty.

We are told nickel, and copper, ore was discovered in Sudbury in 1883, the same year as its founding, during the construction of the transcontinental railway.

The Jesuits arrived here in 1883, the same year the railroad was coming through, and established the Sainte-Ann-des-Pins Mission.

The Murray Mine, where there was a high concentration of nickel-copper ore, was said to have been the first mine established in 1883, apparently “discovered” by a blacksmith in the railway construction gang.

It was mined during different periods of time between 1883 and 1971.

The people who live in Greater Sudbury live in an urban core, with many smaller communities scattered around 330 lakes…

… and among rock-hills said to have been blackened by the historical smelting that took place here.

In its history, Sudbury has been a major world leader in nickel mining.

Mining and mining-related industries dominated the economy here for much of the 20th-century, and has expanded to emerge as the major retail, economic, health, and educational center for northeastern Ontario.

The Lake Superior Provincial Park is northwest of Sudbury, and one of the largest provincial parks in Ontario.

On the left is a photo of Katherine Cove at Lake Superior Provincial Park, compared for similarity of appearance with Lake Arcadia in Edmond, Oklahoma, in the middle, and the Gulf of Bothnia on the right, on the alignment earlier in this post, between Sweden and Finland.

The stone steps and walls pictured here are also at Lake Superior Provincial Park.

Not too far from the northern end of Lake Superior Provincial Park, and the Township of Wawa, there are numerous mining concerns, including gold…

…and historical mining for iron ore at the defunct Helen Mine and Magpie Mine.

Starting in 1900, the Helen Mine was owned and mined by…

…Francis Clergue, an American businessman who became the leading industrialist of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, who was said to have been responsible for…

…the building of the Algoma Central Railway, which was chartered in 1899…

…and starting in 1902, was said to have built a large refinery and steel mill in Sault Ste. Marie, where the ore was shipped after it opened in 1904.

We are told that a large iron deposit was discovered north of the Helen Mine in 1909.

The land was purchased by the Algoma Steel Company, and the Magpie Mine was commercially developed, in production between 1914 and 1926.

Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, is on the south bank of the Ottawa River on Ontario’s border with Quebec, with Gatineau on the other side of the river in Quebec.

We are told that it was founded as Bytown in 1826, which was marked by a sod-turning, and a letter from Governor-General Dalhousie which authorized Lt. Col. John By to divide up the town into lots.

We are told Bytown came about as a direct result of the construction of the Rideau Canal, which was said to have been built by Lt. Col. By, and opened in 1832…

…and Bytown was said to have grown because of the Ottawa River timber trade.

Bytown was incorporated as a town on January 1st of 1850, and this was superseded by the incorporation of the city of Ottawa on January 1st of 1855.

This is a depiction of Lower Town in Ottawa in 1855.

Lower Town is said to be the oldest part of the city.

Our history tells us that on New Year’s Eve of 1857, Queen Victoria was presented with the responsibility of choosing the location for the permanent capital of Canada, with Ottawa being described as a small, frontier town.

The Parliament buildings were said to have been constructed between 1859 and 1866, in an architectural style called Gothic Revival.

This a view of Parliament Hill from the Rideau Canal.

We are told the first gold was discovered at Eldorado in 1866, southwest of Ottawa.

That year, we are told that prospector Marcus Powell was in a 15-foot, or 5-meter, deep hole on a hill, whacking away at a seam of copper with a pick-axe and shovel, when he broke into a cave.

Years later, he described the cave as being “12-feet-long, six-feet-wide and six-feet-high,” or “4-meters-long, 2-meters-wide and 2-meters-high.”

The rush was on when he said the largest nugget was the size of a butternut…

…and the cave walls as dripping with golden leaves.

Pictured here is a wall at the Rosia Montana Gold Mines in western Transylvania in Romania, located in a region known as the “Golden Quadrilateral”…

A quadrilateral is a geometric 4-sided figure.

Next we come to Burlington, the largest city in the state of Vermont, and located 45-miles, or 72-kilometers, south of Vermont’s border with the Canadian province of Quebec.

We are told the town’s position on Lake Champlain helped it develop into a Port of Entry and center for trade…

…after the completion of the Champlain Canal in 1823, which connects Lake Champlain with the Hudson River system…

…New York’s Erie Canal in 1825…

…and the Chambly Canal along the Richelieu River in Quebec in 1843, part of a waterway that connects the St. Lawrence River with the Hudson River in New York.

Steamboats connected freight and passengers with the Rutland and Burlington Railroad, which was said to have been chartered to build in 1843…

… and the Vermont Central Railroad, also said to have been chartered in 1843.

Again, the historical narrative we have been given in no way explains the existence of all of these massive long-distance engineering projects, which then seeks to inform us, after putting forth all that effort to build them, that in most cases, canals became obsolete as transportation arteries because the railways were so much more efficient.

At any rate, Burlington became a transportation hub and manufacturing center for the region, and it was incorporated in 1865, which was the same year the American Civil War ended.

This brings me to mining in Vermont.

For one, gold prospecting has been happening in Vermont since the “Vermont Gold Rush” of the 19th-century.

Apparently a San Francisco 49er-miner named Matthew Kennedy discovered gold at Buffalo Creek in Plymouth, Vermont, and by 1855, a gold rush was underway in Plymouth and nearby Bridgewater, both of which are close to Rutland, of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad.

We are told the exact same thing happened in Vermont that we are told about the other gold rushes: one person found gold, then another, and soon people were swarming to the brooks and rivers of Vermont with dreams of getting rich.

Apparently each year, more gold is revealed from erosion all over the state, with the most well-known site still being Buffalo Creek near Plymouth, where the whole thing was said to have started.

Starting in the early 19th-century, high-quality marble deposits were found in Rutland, and in the 1830s, a large-deposit of nearly solid marble was found in West Rutland.

We are told that by the 1840s, small firms had begun excavations, but that marble quarries proved profitable only after the arrival of the railroad in 1851.

Marble is a type of limestone used as a stone building material since antiquity, like in the Pantheon in Rome pictured here.

The Pantheon was said to have been built as a Roman Temple between 113 AD and 125 AD.

Rutland went on to become one of the world’s leading marble producers when, we are told, the marble quarries of Carrara in Italy became largely unworkable because of their extreme depth.

Inside Proctor Mountain in Danby, Vermont, which is south of Rutland, in Rutland County…

…is the Vermont Danby Quarry, the world’s largest underground marble quarry, from where ten different types of marble are extracted.

This is what the Vermont Danby Quarry looks like:

The stone in marble quarries like this one already has the appearance of being pre-existing huge stone rectangular blocks.

Other examples showing this are the marble quarries of Carrara in Italy…

…at this marble quarry in Afyon, Turkey…

…and this one in Victoria Brazil.

Dorset Mountain is part of the Taconic Mountains, a major range of peaks running along the eastern border of New York State, northwest Connecticut, western Massachusetts, north to central-western Vermont.

These are pictures of the Taconic Ramble State Park…

…in Hubbardton, Vermont, northwest of Rutland.

There is also slate mining in the Taconic Mountains, notably in the Lake Bomoseen Region, notable for extensive slate-quarrying operations.

Located within Bomoseen State Park are the remnants of slate quarries, like the operation at Cedar Mountain pictured here in this historical post card.

The slate quarries here provided slate to the West Castleton Railroad and Slate Company, which started operations in the 1850s.

Slate is a fine-grained rock formed by the metamorphosis of clay and shale that tends to split along parallel cleavage planes, usually at an angle to the planes of stratification, and used for things like roofing material and writing surfaces.

The “Pharaoh Lake Wilderness Area” is near Lake Bomoseen.

This is the Rock Pond Mine at Pharaoh Lake, at some point in time a graphite mine.

Graphite is a crystalline form of the element carbon, with atoms arranged in a hexagonal structure.

It is used in steel production, pencils, lubricants, and electronics, and converts to diamond under high temperatures and pressures.

Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, is next on the alignment.

It is the least populous state capital in the United States.

The city center of Montpelier is described as being in a flat clay zone, surrounded by hills and granite ledges, with the Winooski River flowing along the south edge of downtown Montpelier.

Here are the Winooski River Houses in Montpelier, built right on top of old stonemasonry.

Montpelier was incorporated as a village in 1818, and the town developed into a center for manufacturing, especially after the Central Vermont Railway opened in Montpelier on June 20, 1849.

We are told the layout of the main streets paralleling the rivers was in place by 1858, and that the downtown street pattern has changed very little since that time.

In 1895, Montpelier was incorporated as a city.

In Graniteville, southeast of Montpelier…

…we find the Rock of Ages Quarry, with the same big blocks of stone going on.

It is the world’s largest, deep-hole dimension granite quarry, and provides memorials of all kinds, as well as granite for precision machine bases.

Granite is an igneous rock with 20% – 60% quartz by volume, as well as other crystalline minerals, and can be a variety of different colors, depending on their mineralogy.

Like marble, granite has been used as a stone building material since antiquity.

The famous aqueduct of Segovia in Spain was made from granite.

Besides the massive stone quarry industry, there are 266 mines of different types listed in Vermont.

The next place we come to on the alignment is Haverhill in New Hampshire, and the county seat of Grafton County.

It includes the villages of Woodsville, Pike, and North Haverhill, Haverhill Corner, and the district of Mountain Lakes.

It was said to have been incorporated in 1763, and that by 1859, had 2,405 inhabitants…and three grist-mills; twelve saw-mills; a paper mill; a large tannery; a carriage manufacturer; an iron foundary; seven shoe factories; a printing office; and several mechanic shops.

Here is an historic depiction of Woodsville in Haverhill…

…and, as well, Woodsville was once an important railroad center.

A railway supply enterprise was said to have been developed there by saw-mill operator John Woods, after the establishment of the Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroad, which was said to have opened in Woodsville in 1853, and was where the railroad established its division offices and a branch repair shop.

Haverhill is the location of the Bedell Bridge State Historic Site, which was the location of the second-longest covered bridge in the country, and which was unfortunately, we are told, destroyed by wind in 1979.

All that remains are the stone piers of the bridge in the Connecticut River.

There are 76 mines in Grafton County, out of the 260 listed for New Hampshire as a whole.

Most of the gold-bearing water in New Hampshire is found in the northern and western parts of the state, although scattered gold deposits have been found across the state in limited quantities.

As a matter of fact, gold fever never really took off here after a gold rush in the 1860s because the discoveries here paled in comparison to all of the other gold- rush places.

New Hampshire is known, however, as a fantastic state for rock hounds, with an abundance of valuable gems and minerals, including, but not limited to amethyst…

…aquamarine…

…and the state gemstone, smoky quartz.

Next we come to Portland, the largest city in the state of Maine, and the seat of Cumberland County.

It is the largest metropolitan area in northern New England, with the Greater Portland metro area having over a 500,000 people, which is one-third of Maine’s total population.

The Port of Portland is the largest tonnage seaport in New England.

The Old Port is a district of Portland, known for its cobblestone streets, 19th-century brick buildings…

…and its fishing piers.

So…when did Portland first come into being?

We are told there was an attempt to establish a colony there in 1623 by English naval captain, writer, and explorer Christopher Levett, when he was granted 6,000 acres, or 2,400 hectares, to establish a settlement at what was known as Casco Bay.

He was said to have built a stone house, left a company of ten men, and departed for England to write a book in order to bolster the settlement, but the settlement failed within a year, and the fate of the men unknown.

Fort Levett on Cushing Island in Casco Bay was named for him, a U. S. Army fort said to have been built beginning in 1898.

Fort Levett was part of the Harbor Defenses of Portland, a U. S. Army Coast Artillery Corps Harbor Defense Command, active between 1895 and 1950, and which also included Fort Baldwin, said to have been constructed between 1905 and 1912…

…Fort Popham, said to have been commissioned in 1857, and built starting in 1861…

…Fort Scammel, which was said to have been built in 1808…

…and Fort Gorges, among others.

Fort Gorges was said to have been built between 1858 and 1864.

Like Vermont, there is a great deal of rock-quarrying in Maine.

The granite which was used to build Fort Popham, for example, was said to have come from quarries on the nearby Fox Islands in Casco Bay.

This is the old granite quarry at Vinalhaven, a small town on the larger of the two Fox Islands.

The Millennium Granite Quarry and Stoneworks is just south of Portland, in Wells, Maine.

It has been mined for centuries…

…and provides superior, soft-pink granite.

The first commercial gemstone mine was discovered in 1821 near Paris, Maine, when two young men found tourmalines that were lying on the ground, and then later the same year, gem-quality red and green tourmalines were found in a nearby rock ledge.

Many world-class tourmalines have been mined here, and is the official state gemstone.

…but there are other gemstone found in Maine as well, like citrine…

…and rose quartz, among others.

Next, we come to the Canary Islands, an island group and the southernmost autonomous community of Spain in the Atlantic Ocean.

Historically, the Canary Islands have been considered a bridge between Africa, North America, South America, and Europe.

Mount Teide, a volcano on the island of Tenerife, is the highest point in Spain, and the highest point above sea-level in the islands of the Atlantic.

Teide Observatory , a major international astronomical observatory, is located on the slopes of the mountain.

Although the peak of Teide seems to not have a completely regular shape, this is the projection of its shadow.

With regards to mining and mineral occurrences in the Canary Islands, this is what I found.

On the island of La Gomera in the Valle Gran Rey, a place where this interesting terracing is going on…

…there was a gold mine in a mountain being worked secretly…

…and where there was high-quality gold to be found, with the potential for more to be discovered throughout the area.

Like in the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic between the tip of Greenland and Norway, zeolites are found in the Canary Islands.

Again, zeolites are microporous, aluminosilicate minerals commonly used industrially as commercial absorbents and catalysts.

Here is an example of a Stilbite zeolite that was found on the island of Gran Canaria at the Barranco de Agaete, said to have steep walls lined with stilbite.

The Canary Islands are said to be of volcanic origin, and have been visited by researchers from the very beginning of the 19th-century, including Alexander von Humboldt in 1799, a Prussian naturalist and explorer, who was said to have climbed the Teide volcano, before heading off to study Venezuela…

…and in 1815, the German geologist and paleontologist Leopold von Buch visited the Canary Islands, where he primarily studied the production and activities of volcanoes.

Von Buch studied with Alexander von Humboldt at the Freiburg School of Mining, and was considered a founder of modern geology.

The next place on the alignment we come to is Laayoune, the capital of Western Sahara.

Western Sahara is a disputed territory, and classified as a non-self-governing territory by the U.N.

It is claimed by, and de facto administered by Morocco, in on-going dispute with the native inhabitants, the Sahrawis, who want self-governance.

The Western Sahara is composed of the geographic regions that include Rio de Oro (meaning “River of Gold” in Spanish).

This is what the landscape there looks like today.

We are told that Rio de Oro became a Spanish protectorate in 1884 as a result of the Berlin Conference.

The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885 was organized by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany’s sudden appearance as an imperial power.

The outcome of the “General Act of the Berlin Conference” can be seen as the formalization of the “Scramble for Africa,” also known as the “Partition of Africa” or the “Conquest of Africa,” was the invasion, occupation, and division of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period between 1884 and 1914, the year in which World War I started.

The period of history known as New Imperialism is characterized as a period of colonial expansion by European powers, the United States, and Japan during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I am sure this was a motive…

…but there was also a rich and proud heritage of Africa and its people that has been removed from the collective awareness that was replaced with something quite different from what it originally was.

Mansa Musa, the King of Mali between 1312 and 1337….but has the general population ever heard of him?

Mansa Musa was one of the richest men in World history, if not the richest. One of his titles was “Lord of the Mines of Wangara.”

During his reign, Mali may have been the largest producer in the world of gold.

Does this immense wealth fit the historical narrative we have been given about this part of the world?

At any rate, Laayoune is said to have been founded in 1938, and is a hub for phosphate mining in the region.

Vast phosphate deposits are mined at Bu Craa, southeast of Laayoune, where abundant, pure phosphate deposits lie near the surface.

It produces about 2.5 million tons of phosphates each year.

Aided by the longest conveyor belt in the world, which travels 61-miles, or 98-kilometers, phosphates are shipped from Bu Craa to Laayoune…

…where ships transport it around the world.

Phosphate, a form of the chemical element of phosphorus, and along with nitrogen, is a necessary component of the synthetic fertilizer needed for the world’s agricultural sector.

Abalessa, in Algeria’s Tamanrasset Province in southern Algeria, is the next place we come to on this alignment.

It is the former capital of the Ahaggar, or Hoggar, Mountains, a highland region in the central Sahara, along the Tropic of Cancer.

Abalessa is famous for the Tin Hinan Tomb, the 1,500-year-old monumental grave, we are told, built for the Tuareg matriarch, Tin Hinan.

She was believed to have lived between the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.

Women have a high status in the matriarchal and ancient Tuareg society. Among other things, primarily women own livestock, and other movable property, while personal property can be inherited by both women and men.

The Tuareg Shield, from which are told the Ahaggar Mountains were formed, is a host for world-class gold deposits, with at least 600 gold occurrences having been identified…

…and is part of the 3,000-kilometer, or 1864-mile, long Pan-African, Trans-Saharan belt that was believed by some geologists to have been one of the most important orogenic systems leading to the formation of the Gondwana Supercontinent.

Orogenic means events that cause distinctive structural phenomena related to tectonic activity, affecting rocks and crusts in particular region, happening within a specific period, in this case said to have been during the end of the Neoproterozoic era, the unit of geological time said to have been between 1,000-million years ago, and 541-million years ago.

Next we come to Bilma, an oasis town in east Niger…

…known for its salt and natron production through the salt pans there…

…and from which salt cones are made, sold for livestock use throughout western Africa.

Salt is a crystalline compound of sodium chloride and widely used, for example, for seasoning food and in food preservation…

…and natron, a sodium bicarbonate component of salt, and historically used as well as a cleaning product for home and body.

Natron refers to Wadi el Natrun, or Natron Valley, in Egypt, from which natron was mined by the ancient Egyptians…

…for the burial rites of mummification.

The symbol for the chemical element sodium is “Na” was derived from natron, and its atomic number is 11.

Sodium is a soft, silvery-white, highly-reactive metal, however, the free metal does not occur in nature and must be prepared from compounds.

Sodium is an essential element for all animals and some plants.

By means of the sodium-potassium pump, living human cells pump three sodium ions out of the cell in exchange for two potassium ions pumped in.

In nerve cells, the electrical charge across the cell membrane enables transmission of the nerve impulse – an action process – when the charge dissipates, and sodium plays a key role in this.

One more thing before moving from here is that Bilma is primarily inhabited by the Kanuri people.

The Kanuri people are described as the  African people that founded the powerful pre-colonial Kanem-Borno Empire.

The Kanem Empire was said to have existed from 730 AD to 1380 AD…

…and then continued as the Bornu Empire until 1900.

The next place on the alignment is Biltine, the capital of the Wadi Fira region of Chad, formerly known as the Biltine Prefecture.

Chad is a land-locked country in north-central Africa.

France conquered the territory in 1920, and incorporated it as part of French Equatorial Africa, a French colonial empire that lasted from 1900 until 1960.

Since its independence in 1960, Chad has been plagued by political violence, and is one of the poorest countries in the world, with most of its inhabitants living in poverty as subsistence herders and farmers.

The Zaghawa people are described as a central African Muslim ethnic group of eastern Chad and western Sudan, and as nomads who obtain their livelihood through herding cattle, camels and sheep and harvesting wild grains.

Interestingly, it is said that in the Girgam, the royal history of the Kanem-Bornu Empire I mentioned previously, refers to the Zaghawa people as the Duguwa, the line of kings of the Kanem Empire prior to the rise of the Islamic Seyfawa dynasty in 1086 AD.

In 1851, a copy of the Girgam was given by a local associated with the Seyfawa Dynasty of the Kanem-Bornu Empire to Heinrich Barth, an Arabic-speaking German explorer of Africa, and he published a translation of it in 1852.

He travelled throughout Africa between 1850 and 1855, establishing friendships with rulers ands scholars, and carefully documenting the details of the cultures he visited.

And it was the Germans who organized the Berlin Conference in 1884 that carved up the continent of Africa between the European colonial powers?

Could there possibly be a connection between these occurrences?

Important to note that Chad has sizeable reserves of crude oil, which is the country’s primary source of export earnings.

Also, Wadi Fira region of which Biltine is the capital is reported to have large deposits of gold-bearing quartz, as well as deposits of natron, uranium, silver and diamonds.

Most of the mining in Chad is small-scale due to the lack of foreign investment because of political and cultural instability.

The next place we come to on the alignment is El Obeid, the capital of the state of North Kurdufan in Sudan.

El Obeid is a terminus of Sudan Railways.

Sudan has 2,935-miles, or 4,725-kilometers, of narrow-gauge, single-track railways that serve the northern and central part of the country, with construction of the railroad said to have first started in 1878.

There is an oil refinery in El Obeid…

…that is part of Sudan’s oil industry.

As of 2016, Sudan held 5-billion barrels of proven oil reserves, ranking 23rd in the world.

Also, there are more than 40,000 gold-mining sites, and about 60 gold-processing companies operating in Sudan.

It looks like Sudan’s resources have been developed in a way that Chad’s has not, in spite of both countries having the same issue of political and cultural instability since independence from Britain in 1956.

Sudan was the historical location of the Kingdom of Kush…

…with its capital being Meroe, situated on the east bank of the Nile River in Sudan.

Now we come to Gonder, a city and district in Ethiopia.

It previously served as the capital of the Ethiopian Empire, and holds the remains of numerous royal castles, including those of the Fasil Ghebbi, the home of the Ethiopian emperors.

The Solomonic dynasty, also known as the House of Solomon, is the former ruling dynasty of the Ethiopian Empire.

Its members were lineal descendents of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through their son Menelik I, the first Emperor of Ethiopia.

Haile Selassie was the last Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974…

…at which time he was deposed in a coup, and a one-party communist state was established in Ethiopia in March of 1975.

Ethiopia became a Federal Democratic Republic in 1991.

Ethiopia uses the ancient Ge’ez script, one of the oldest alphabets still in use in the world, and when I saw the script pictured here, it immediately brought to mind a few others.

This is Ge’ez script on the top left, compared with the Armenian alphabet on the top right, Norse runes on the bottom left, and Vril on the bottom right.

It would not surprise me to learn that these are scripts of the original language, Vril, which was connected to the Ancients and their mastery of how to harness natural energy to create amazing things.

And…yes…there is mining in Ethiopia, including but not limited to gemstones like diamond and sapphire, industrial minerals, gold and tantalum.

Tantulum is a chemical element with the symbol “Ta,” and atomic number of 73.

It is a rare, hard, blue-gray metal that is highly-corrosion resistant, and is considered a technology-critical element.

Next we come to Hargeysa, Somalia, in Somaliland in the Horn of Africa.

The Horn of Africa is the peninsula that is the easternmost projection of the continent, and referred to in ancient and medieval times as Barbara, and denotes the region containing Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

This is a map showing oil concessions in Somaliland circa 2007.

There have been exploratory geological surveys done here, but the mining industry is new and looking for developers.

Around Hargeysa, the mineral resources include sodium, copper, tin and gypsum in the region as well.

Gypsum is a soft, sulphate mineral…

…and is the main component of many forms of plaster, drywall, and blackboard chalk, but has many other uses as well.

The last place I want to look at on this alignment are the Maldives, an island republic in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Indian subcontinent.

Now at first glance, you wouldn’t associate mining with a place that looks like this.

This is the capital of the island nation of the Maldives, Male, on Male Atoll.

But I did find mining activity ~ coral mining!

Coral mining can take place anywhere coral is available in a convenient location, usually occurring at low tide, and is done by either using dynamite…or iron bars to manually to retrieve the coral by breaking-up the larger corals into smaller pieces that can easily be carried to shore.

However it is extracted, the results are loss of biodiversity, and erosion and land retreat.

The most common use of coral is to turn it into limestone or a cement substitute for use as a building material…

…but it can also be used to make calcium substitutes, which are then used to produce lime…

…and coral calcium is also marketed as a nutritional supplement.

Coral reefs are formed by colonies of coral polyps held together by calcium carbonate, a chemical compound which includes calcium, carbon, and oxygen.

Calcium is a chemical element with the symbol “Ca” and the atomic number of 20.

It is an alkaline earth metal, and the fifth most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and the third most abundant metal after iron and aluminum.

In addition to many industrial uses, calcium is the most abundant metal, and the 5th-most abundant element, in the human body.

I could continue on looking into places on this alignment, but I am going to stop here because I have more than made my point about the correlation of mining and minerals on this long-distance alignment, along which I have found something related at every data point that I had on my spreadsheet.

I do want to share my thoughts on my findings and tie them into related topics.

Chemical elements form the basis of all life and the processes of creation.

Chemical elements are essential minerals for the processes of the cells of our body and making sure everything works and stays in balance, critical parts of us and everything in physical form existence.

Which brings up the question – so how exactly does Spirit become Matter?

Chemistry is currently defined as the branch of science that deals with the identification of the substances of which matter is composed; the investigation of their properties and the ways in which they interact, combine, and change; and the use of these processes to form new substances.

Alchemy is currently defined as the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter, and concerned particularly with converting base metals into gold.

Khem was the ancient name of Egypt.

What if Egypt means much more than what we have come to know as one geographical location on the Earth?

Just leaving this concept I found in my research here for consideration as well.

This is a good place to mention monoatomic gold and red mercury.

Monoatomic gold is known to strengthen one’s immune system through the boosting of red blood cells, and an overall vast increase to the speed of cell regeneration.

It is a superconductor, and when ingested into the body, it influences cellular structure to become superconductive as well.

In looking up red mercury, I came across Cinnabar.

Cinnabar is a compound of mercury, sulphur, and salt, or otherwise known as a salt of mercury sulfide.

The symbol for the chemical element mercury is “Hg” from the Greek word meaning “liquid silver,” with the atomic number of 80.

The Ancients used cinnabar and mercury as a sacred substance, an elixir of life, and as a medicine…even though mercury in any form is poisonous.

There are also questions about why large quantities of mercury were in three chambers underneath the Quetzelcoatl – Feathered Serpent pyramid at Teotihuacan in Mexico.

I have been referring to the Periodic Table of the Elements that I remember learning about in high school through this series, the current form of which was first published in 1923, and circulated to schools at that time.

I didn’t know about the Russell Periodic Chart of the Elements, published in 1926, until quite recently.

In this periodic chart, elements are standing waves over a period of time.

The concept that it is based on is that time is continuously being formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of electromagnetic radiation (EMR), forming a universal process of spherical symmetry, forming spiral patterns, with each element of the periodic table having a set position forming the curvature of these spirals…

…and are organized in octaves.

There is one more concept that I would like to tie into this subject for consideration.

Several years ago, I read a book by Gregg Braden entitled “The God Code.”

On the book’s back cover he writes “A coded message has been found within the molecules of life, deep within the DNA in each cell of our bodies. Though a remarkable discoverlinking biblical alphabets to our genetic code, the ‘language of life’ may now be read as the ancient letters of a timeless message.”

In Ancient Hebrew, God’s sacred name is reveal as 4 letters – Yod (Y) He (H) Vau (V) He (H), and is referred to as the Tetragrammaton.

What Gregg Braden found preserved through his deep study of ancient records were instructions that allows us to substitute the elements that form our DNA with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and in so doing, we are able to translate the language of life and read a message.

All life is formed as combinations of four DNA bases – Adenine (A); Thymine (T), Guanine (G); and Cytosine (C) – which arrange themselves into precise pairs (G – C) and (A – T) to produce the blue print of life.

Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is linked with a very specific number value.

The study of these relationships is known as gematria.

He explains that the key to translating the code of DNA into a meaningful language is to apply the discovery that converts elements to letters.

Based upon their matching values, hydrogen becomes the Hebrew letter Yod; nitrogen becomes the letter He; oxygen becomes the letter Vau; and carbon becomes the letter Gimel.

He further explains that by substituting modern elements for the ancient letters, although we share the first three leters of our Creator’s name, the fourth letter of our chemical name – “carbon” – sets us apart from God and makes us “real” in our world.

He says as “YH” forms one-half of God’s name and the name coded into our cells, and that by substituting these words into our genetic code, we are now able to illustrate how the literal name of God forms the message “God/Eternal within the Body” in our DNA.

With regards to the correlation of the mines & minerals that I have consistently found all along this long distance alignment, I have come to believe that when the ancient Master Builders constructed the Earth’s Grid System, everything on that grid system was precisely placed for a specific reason and/or function, such as chemical elements being placed in certain places and relationships to each other as circuit elements.

Through travelling this long-distance alignment, I am seeing a hidden pattern of widespread environmental, and in many places cultural, devastation around mining activity, with little or no accountability on the part of the mining companies for the damage they cause to the environment and the local communities.

They provide jobs in many cases for only a short time, and then leave the people with nothing, and the people that have nothing destroy their environment to get the little bit they can mine to sell in order to make some money.

The Ancient Ones mined, but they mined for what they needed, and not for profit, and not until mineral resources were completely depleted.

Not only that, the examples of the cruelty and inhumanity of forced labor in mines in places like the Gulag, by far not the only example.

Those responsible for wiping out the memory of the original advanced Human civilization knew about the earth’s grid system, and capitalized on it, at the same time removing the existence of this civilization and grid system from collective awareness.

This is a picture of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

I look forward to digging deeper into this subject as there is much more to bring to light as this series only scratches the surface of what there is to find about Earth’s Hidden History, Ancient Advanced Civilization, and what has been taking place here without our awareness.

Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol – Gerald Ford and Jefferson Davis

I am currently approximately half-way through a series in which I am taking an in-depth look at who is represented in that National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Capitol building in Washington, DC, in which sculptures of prominent American historical figures are housed, two for each state.

My attention was drawn to it as worth investigating because I encountered two historical figures in my research who are represented in the National Statuary hall – Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit Missionary and Cattle rancher, for Arizona, and Mother Joseph Pariseau, who we are told was a Catholic sister and self-taught architect, for Washington State.

The appearance of these two in the National Statuary Hall made me go “Hmmm,” and I wondered who else was chosen to be represented there and what could possibly be going on here.

I have decided to showcase unlikely pairs of historical figures in the statuary hall who have things in common with each other in this new “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol,” series, and I am starting with U.S. President Gerald Ford, and President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

First, Gerald Ford.

Gerald Ford was the only U. S. President from Michigan, and represents the State of Michigan in the National Statuary Hall, along with Lewis Cass.

Ford was never elected to the office of President or Vice-President.

He was the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives when he was nominated to be President of the United States after the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

He was defeated for a full-term by Jimmy Carter in 1976.

He was born Leslie Lynch King Jr in July of 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska, where his parents lived in the home of his paternal grandparents on Woolworth Avenue.

His mother separated from his father shortly after his birth due to domestic abuse.

His paternal grandfather, Charles Henry King, a prominent businessman and banker in Omaha, also founded several cities in Wyoming and Nebraska, building up related businesses, banks, and freight operations with the westward expansion of the railroad.

King’s wealth was estimated to have been up to $20 million, and he was known as the wealthiest man in Wyoming.

The future President’s mother moved in with her parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and two-and-a-half years later married Gerald Rudolff Ford, a salesman in a family-owned paint and varnish company.

Though not formally adopted, Gerald Ford’s name change was formalized in 1935.

He attended Grand Rapids High School, where he was captain of the football team.

He went on to become a star player for the University of Michigan football team.

After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1935 with a bachelor’s degree in Economics, Ford turned down several offers to play professional football to become a boxing coach and assistant football coach at Yale University, and applied to the law school there.

Initially Ford was denied admission to the Yale Law School because of his full-time coaching responsibilities, but was admitted in the spring of 1938.

At the same time he was attending the Yale Law School, he was became the head coach of Yale’s Junior Varsity football team and worked as a male model for a couple of modelling agencies.

Ford graduated from the Yale Law School in 1948, and was admitted to the Michigan Bar.

He opened his law practice in Grand Rapids Michigan in May of 1941, with his friend Philip W. Buchen, who later became White House Counsel during the Ford Administration.

Ford enlisted in the Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th of 1941.

In April of 1942, he received a commission as a 2nd-Lieutenant in the U. S. Naval Reserve.

He was initially sent for instruction to the V-5 Flight Instructors School at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and then assigned to instruct at the Navy Preflight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and coached all nine sports that were offered there.

While in Chapel Hill, he was promoted to Lieutenant, and by the end of World War II, had attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and had served on-board the carrier USS Monterey in the Pacific Theater.

He was honorably discharged from the Navy in February of 1946.

Ford returned to Grand Rapids in 1946, and became active in Republican politics, successfully running for the U. S. Congress for the first time in 1948, and subsequently serving as a member of the U. S. Congress holding Michigan’s 5th Congressional District seat from 1949 to 1973.

His time in Congress was known for its modesty, and he saw himself as a negotiator and reconciler.

President Johnson appointed Gerald Ford to the Warren Commission, which was set-up on November 29th of 1963 to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

The Warren Commission concluded in its final report presented to President Johnson on September 24th of 1964 that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Oswald acted alone.

Gerald Ford became the House Minority Leader in 1965, after the Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson was elected President in 1964.

He was encouraged to run for the position by a Republican Caucus known as the “Young Turks,” which included Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Congressman from Illinois’ 13th Congressional District at the time.

Rumsfeld later became Secretary of Defense in both the Ford and George W. Bush Administrations.

The Johnson Administration was able to pass a series of social programs in 1964 and 1965 known as the “Great Society” with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate.

These included programs that addressed things like education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation.

With criticism of the Johnson Administration’s handling of the Vietnam War growing, the mid-term elections in 1966 brought about a 47-seat swing to the Republicans in Congress.

This was not enough to give Republicans the majority, but it did give Ford at the Minority Leader the opportunity to prevent the passage of further Great Society programs, and Ford was openly critical of the Vietnam War.

Ford was nominated, and became Vice-President in 1973 after his nomination passed the House and Senate, after the sitting Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, resigned after pleading no-contest to a count of tax evasion stemming from his time as Governor of Maryland.

The Watergate Scandal was unfolding as Ford became Richard Nixon’s Vice-President, and after Nixon’s resignation from the Office of President on August 9th of 1974, Gerald Ford automatically became the 38th President of the United States.

And President Gerald Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson, to be his Vice-President, and Rockefeller’s nomination passed the House and the Senate.

President Ford issued Proclamation 4311 on September 8th of 1974, in which he fully and unconditionally pardoned Richard Nixon for any crimes he might have committed while President of the United States.

While many believe Ford lost the 1976 Presidential Election because of the controversial pardon, in 2001, Gerald Ford received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation for his pardon of Nixon.

Ford inherited Nixon’s Cabinet when he first took office.

He replaced all of Nixon’s cabinet members except for Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger and Secretary of the Treasury, William E. Simon.

Ford selected George H. W. Bush as the Chief of the U. S. Liaison Office to the People’s Republic of China in 1974 and then Director of the CIA in late 1975.

Ford’s first Chief of Staff was Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney became Ford’s Chief of Staff after Rumsfeld became the youngest Secretary of Defense in 1975.

During the years of Gerald Ford’s Presidency between August 9th of 1974 and January 20th of 1977, here are some of the things that happened:

The Economic Policy Board was created by Executive Order on September 30th of 1974 in response to concern about the economy and rising inflation.

The Economic Policy Board was created to oversee the formulation, coordination and implementation of all economic policies to combat rising grocery prices, eroding purchasing power, rising cost of doing business and unemployment.

A month later, in October of 1974, President Ford went to the American public with his WIN, or Whip Inflation Now, Program, encouraging people to wear WIN buttons, and to curb their spending and consumption.

Controlling public spending was seen as a way to rein in inflation.

It is interesting to note that the U. S. sank into the worst recession since the Great Depression during this time, and unemployment had reached 9% by May of 1975.

Special Education was established in the United States when Ford signed the “Education for All Handicapped Children Act” in 1975.

In November of 1975, President Ford attended the first meeting of the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations, also known as G7, where he secured membership for Canada.

Also in November of 1975, Ford adopted the global human population control recommendations of National Security Study Memorandum 200, also known as the Kissinger Report, a National Security Directive completed on December 10th of 1974 by the United States Security Council under the direction of Henry Kissinger, on the initial order of President Nixon.

The Memorandum and policies developed from it were seen as a way the U. S. could use population control to: 1) Limit the political power of undeveloped nations; 2) ensure the easy extraction of foreign natural resources; 3) prevent young anti-establishment individuals from being born; and 4) protect American businesses from interference from nations seeking to support their growing populations.

President Ford had announced the end of the Vietnam War for the United States in a speech he gave at Tulane University on April 23rd of 1975, after Congress voted against his request for a $722 million aid package for South Vietnam, though money was given for evacuation.

The Fall of Saigon took place on April 30th of 1975, with entry of North Vietnamese forces into the city, and right after the helicopters of Operation Frequent Wind evacuated Americans, at-risk South Vietnamese and third-country nationals from the capital of South Vietnam.

Swine Flu showed up in February of 1976, when an Army recruit at Fort Dix mysteriously died, and four other soldiers were hospitalized.

Soon after, Public Health officials in the Ford Administration urged that every person in the United States be vaccinated for swine flu, but the program was cancelled in December of 1976 after approximately 25% of the population had been vaccinated.

After Ford lost the 1976 Presidential Election to Jimmy Carter, he stayed active in public life in a variety of ways.

He died on December 26th of 2006 at home in Rancho Mirage, California, from end-stage Coronary Artery Disease.

After lying in-state in the Rotunda on December 30th of 2006, and a funeral for him held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, he was interred at his Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Hmmm.

The unelected President Gerald Ford was known for his unassuming and conciliatory manner.

But could “Unassuming Jerry” have been selected for the Presidency with another agenda hidden from view, while the Nation and the World was distracted with the Watergate Scandal and Hearings?

Did in fact the short-lived Ford Administration bring together the major players of the New World Order under the auspices of the U. S. Presidency in order to solidify and advance the New World Order Agenda for its future progression?

I did a Freemason search on President Ford, and sure enough, it came back positive.

Not only was he a 33rd-Degree Freemason in the Scottish Rite, while he was in the Oval Office, he received the degrees of York Rite Freemasonry

The highest order of the York Rite is the Knights Templar.

 I couldn’t confirm that Ford was a Knight Templar, but I did find him in their February 2003 magazine.

The other historical figure I am going to be showcasing in this particular pairing is Jefferson Davis.

Jefferson Davis represents the State of Mississippi in the Statuary Hall, along with James Z. George.

Davis represented Mississippi as a Democrat in the United States Senate and House of Representatives before the American Civil War, and he was President of the Confederate States during the Civil War, between 1861 and 1865.

He had served as Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857 during the Administration of President Franklin Pierce.

Jefferson Davis was born in Fairview, Kentucky, on the family homestead in June of 1808, and was the youngest of ten children. He was named after the President at the time, Thomas Jefferson.

The Jefferson Davis State Historic Site is a Kentucky State Park that commemorates his birthplace.

It is very interesting to note that a 351-foot, or 107-meter, – tall obelisk commemorating Davis is located there.

This obelisk is the fourth-tallest monument in the United States; the tallest, unreinforced concrete structure in the world, and the world’s tallest concrete obelisk.

We are told the idea of a monument for Davis was said to have been proposed by former Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr, at a reunion in 1907 of the First Kentucky Brigade, also known to history as the “Orphan Brigade.”

Its nickname of “Orphan Brigade” was said to have come from one of its Commander, General Hanson Breckinridge, riding among the survivors after the 1862 Battle of Stones River in Middle Tennessee, where the Brigade suffered heavy casualties, saying repeatedly, “My poor orphans! My poor orphans!”

The Brigade saw fighting during the entirety of the American Civil War, including being Confederate combatants against the Union Army General Sherman’s March to the Sea, which took place from Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in November 15th of 1864 to his capture of Savannah, Georgia, on December 21st of 1864.

General Sherman’s forces followed a scorched earth policy of destroying not only military targets, but also industry, infrastructure, and civilian property.

Well, well, well…what do we have here?

It sure looks like General Sherman was a Freemason!

The construction of the massive obelisk monument to Davis was said to have started in 1917 and completed in 1924.

Jefferson’s father, Samuel Davis, served in the American Revolutionary War, and received a land grant near Washington, Georgia, for his service.

Interesting to note that Washington, Georgia, is where the Confederacy voted to dissolve itself, bringing the American Civil War to an end. More on this later.

The family moved from the family homestead in Georgia when Jefferson was two-years-old, ending up near Woodville, Mississippi, where his father operated a small cotton plantation called Rosemont, and was President Davis’ family home until 1895.

In 1816, when Davis was 8-years-old, his father sent him to a Catholic Preparatory School in Springfield, Kentucky run by the Dominicans called Saint Thomas College.

Today called the St. Rose Priory Church, this religious house was first founded by Dominican friars as a college around 1808, and was the first Catholic educational institution west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Davis returned to Mississippi in 1818, where he studied first at Jefferson College in Washington, Mississippi…

…and then after attending the Wilkinson Academy near Woodville, Mississippi for 5 years, he attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, starting in 1823.

His father Samuel died while he was here, who had already sold the Rosemont Plantation to his eldest son Joseph because of debt.

Joseph E. Davis already owned land on the Mississippi River in what became known as Davis Bend, Mississippi, and is now called Davis Island.

Joseph had established the Hurricane Plantation there between 1824 and 1827 as a “model cooperative slave community” after studying utopian socialist ideas of Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer, with Joseph’s stated goal being the achievement of a higher-functioning and profitable slave community by provision of decent care and opportunties for self-governance.

More on the Davis Bend Plantations of Joseph and Jefferson Davis shortly.

Davis Bend, known today as Davis Island, is 50-miles, or 81-kilometers south of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River.

Joseph E. Davis was 23-years older than Jefferson, and took on being the role of a surrogate father to him after their father Samuel’s death.

In 1824, Joseph secured an appointment for Jefferson at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.

Jefferson Davis was continually getting into disciplinary trouble there for drunk and disorderly conduct while he was there, but managed to graduate 23rd in a class of 33.

The newly-commissioned Second-Lieutenant Jefferson was assigned to the 1st Infantry Regiment, and his duty stations were at Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and Fort Winnebago, the middle of three fortifications along the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway that included Fort Crawford and Fort Howard in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Forts Crawford and Howard were said to have been built during the War of 1812 to protect the important trade route of the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River from British invasion.

Fort Winnebago was said to have been built in 1828 in an effort to keep peace between white settlers and the regions Native American tribes following the 1827 Winnebago War, which ended quickly after a portion of the Winnebago had risen up in reaction to a wave of lead miners trespassing on their land.

As a result of the war, the Winnebago, also known as the Ho-Chunk, were compelled to cede the lead mining region to the United States.

It is interesting to note that the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway is a lock, dam and canal system that was said to have been built in the mid-19th-century, and used for transportation until the coming of the railroad made it obsolete.

We are told use of the waterway was never substantial, and it slowly died out, and the lock system on the Lower Fox River between Lake Winnebago and Green Bay was closed in 1983 to prevent the upstream spread of invasive species like lamprey.

Jefferson Davis was ill with pneumonia during the Black Hawk War in March of 1832, in which the Sauk leader Black Hawk and a group of Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo were attempting to reclaim land sold to the United States in the disputed 1804 Treaty of St. Louis.

They were defeated at the Battle of Wisconsin Heights on July 21st of 1832…

…and the Battle of Bad Axe near present-day Victory, Wisconsin, on August 1st and 2nd of 1832, which has been called a massacre since the 1850s.

Black Hawk was soon taken prisoner, and the end of the Black Hawk War opened up much of Illinois and Wisconsin for further settlement.

It also gave impetus to the United States policy of Indian Removal, where Native American tribes were pressured to sell their lands and move to reservations west of the Mississippi River.

Though absent on furlough for the Black Hawk War, Jefferson Davis was said to have had the duty of escorting Black Hawk for detention at the Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis.

Davis returned to Ft. Crawford in January of 1833, from which he was reassigned by his commanding officer Colonel and future U. S. President Zachary Taylor that spring after Davis wanted to marry Taylor’s daughter, and Taylor said no.

He was assigned to the United States Regiment of Dragoons, which was formed by an Act of Congress on March 2nd of 1833 to patrol the frontier as a result of the Black Hawk War.

He was promoted to First Lieutenant, and assigned to Fort Gibson in the Arkansas Territory, the furthest west military post at the time in the United States.

It was here that Davis was court-martialed in February of 1835 for insubordination.

Though acquitted, he requested a furlough, and resigned from the U. S. Army at the age of 26 in June of 1835.

Upon returning to Mississippi after Davis resigned from the Army, he decided to become a planter.

His brother Joseph provided him with 800 acres, or 320 hectares of land at Davis Bend, and he started cultivating cotton at what became known as Brierfield Plantation.

Davis had kept in touch with Sarah Taylor, Zachary Taylor’s daughter, and he finally gave his consent to their marriage.

They were married  at Beechland, a home said to have been built in 1812, near Jeffersontown, Kentucky, in June of 1835.

In August of 1835, the newlyweds travelled to the Locust Grove Plantation of his sister Anna Smith in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, where they both contracted severe cases of malaria.

Sarah subsequently died on September 15th of 1835 at the age of 21, and was buried at the Locust Grove Cemetery.

Jefferson Davis gradually improved.

Interesting to note the presence of the River Bend Nuclear Power Plant and Louisiana State Penitentiary in West Feliciana Parish.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola and the Alcatraz of the South, it is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States.

Also, one of the south’s earliest railroads ran from St. Francisville, the Parish Seat, to Woodville, Mississippi, where the Davis Family Homestead Rosemont was located.

All these findings pique my interest, and I wonder if this area was a power node of some sort on the Earth’s original energy grid system.

In the years following Sarah’s death, Jefferson developed the Brierfield Plantation and with the help of his brother, Joseph, became increasingly involved in politics, with their particular concern about national efforts to limit slavery in new territories.

His political career started in 1840, when he attended a Democratic Party meeting in Vicksburg, and served as a delegate to the state party convention in Jackson, and he served again as a delegate in 1842.

He lost the election for the State House of Representatives for Warren County in November of 1843.

In 1844, he was chosen to be a convention delegate again, and he was selected as one of Mississippi’s six Presidential electors for the 1844 Presidential Election.

At the same time this was happening, he met 18-year-old Varina Banks Howell, the daughter of New Jersey Governor Richard Howell, to whom he delivered the invitation from his brother Joseph to stay at the Hurricane Plantation for the Christmas Season.

They were married in February of 1845.

Davis ran for election to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1845, and won the election.

He was a strong advocate, among other things for States’ rights, political powers which are held for state governments rather than the federal government.

The Mexican-American War started on April 25th of 1846 during Davis’ Congressional term.

The State of Mississippi raised the First Mississippi Regiment, a volunteer unit, for the U. S. Army, and Davis was interested in joining it if he could be its commanding officer.

He was ultimately elected as its colonel, and while not resigning his seat in the House, he left a resignation letter with his brother to be used at the appropriate time.

Davis was able to get new percussion rifles for his unit as a favor returned by President James Polk for Davis’ support of Polk’s Walker Tariff, a decision which was not supported by the Commanding General of the U. S. forces, Winfield Scott because the new rifle had not been sufficiently tested.

The percussion rifle became known to history as the “Mississippi Rifle,” and his unit as the “Mississippi Rifles.”

Davis distinguished himself during the Mexican-American War during the Battle of Monterrey, where he led a charge that took the Fort Teneria.

Davis took a leave of two-months to return to Mississippi, and learned that his brother Joseph had submitted his letter of resignation from Congress.

He returned to the Mexican-American War, and fought in the Battle of Buena Vista, which took place in February of 1847.

While his tactics stopped a flanking attack by Mexican forces before they could collapse the American line, he was wounded in the heel.

Upon his return to the States, Davis declined a federal commission as a Brigadier General from President Polk, but accepted an appointment by Mississippi Governor Albert G. Brown to fill a vacancy in the U. S. Senate.

Davis took his seat in the Senate in December of 1847, and he established himself right away as an advocate of the South and its expansion into the territories of the West.

Davis was against the Wilmot Proviso, which was an 1846 proposal in the U. S. Congress to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War.

He asserted that only states had sovereignty and not territories, arguing that territories were the common property of the United States and that Americans who owned slaves had a right to move into territories with their slaves.

The conflict over the Wilmot Proviso was one of the major events leading to the American Civil War.

Davis was reelected to the Senate in 1849, where he became the spokesman for the South.

He was opposed to the Compromise of 1850, which was a package of five separate bills passed by Congress which defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the Mexican-American War.

The compromise was designed by Whig Senator Henry Clay and Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas, with the support of President Millard Fillmore, who had taken office with the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor from an unknown digestive ailment in July of 1850 after serving only 16-months in office.

Jefferson Davis, who opposed the Compromise of 1850, resigned from his Senate seat in the fall of 1851 to run for Mississippi Governor on a States’ Rights platform.

He lost the election and though he no longer held political office, he turned down the reappointment to his Senate seat by the outgoing Governor.

He remained politically active by attending the 1852 Democratic Convention and campaigning that year for both Franklin Pierce and William R. King, with Franklin Pierce becoming the 14th President of the United States.

Jefferson Davis became Secretary of War in the Pierce Administration in March of 1853.

We are told that as Secretary of War, Davis advocated for a transcontinental railroad was needed for national defense, and he was given the task of overseeing the Pacific Railroad Surveys to determine the best of four possible routes after the U. S. Congress appropriated $150,000 on March 3rd of 1853, and authorized Davis to find the most practical and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific Railroad Surveys, a series of explorations of the American West between 1853 and 1857 with the stated purpose of finding and documenting possible routes for a transcontinental railroad across North America.

There were five surveys conducted: the Northern Pacific Survey between the 47th-parallel north and the 49th-parallel north from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Puget Sound; the Central Pacific Survey between the 37th-parallel North and the 39th-parallel North from St. Louis, Missouri, to San Francisco, California; the Southern Pacific Survey along the 35th parallel north from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, California; the Southern Pacific Survey across Texas to San Diego, California; and along the Pacific Coast from San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington.

All were carried out under the direction of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the future President of the Confederacy.

We are told the volumes of information that were produced from these surveys were considered to constitute the singlemost important contemporary source of knowledge on western geography and history, and that there value was greatly enhanced by beautifully-illustrated color plates showing the scenery, native inhabitants & fauna and flora of the West.

Let’s take a look at some of the definitions of survey.

Perhaps the most commonly used in our modern culture is the definition of survey which involves a brief interview with someone, for example, with a specific set of questions related to a particular topic to get their feedback.

Then there is the perspective of the definition of survey regarding civil engineering and the activities involved in the planning and execution of surveys gathering information related to all aspects of engineering projects, which is the definition implied in the driving force behind the Pacific Railroad Surveys.

But what about other definitions of survey that might be in play here?

Perhaps, more like some of the definitions shown here – a short descriptive summary; the act of looking or seeing or observing; considering in a comprehensive way; holding a review; and a detailed critical inspection, and not the kind of surveying for civil engineering projects seen in the previous slide as we have been led to believe through historical omission.

What if the Pacific Railroad Surveys were undertaken to explore a ruined landscape surveying, as in “looking at and observing,” everything, including pre-existing rail infrastructure in order to restore it to use once again?

What if the deserts in North America weren’t always deserts?

Other things that Jefferson Davis was credited with during his tenure as Secretary of War:

He promoted the Gadsden Purchase in December of 1853, in which the United States purchased what became southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico…

…overseeing the building of public works infrastructure in Washington, DC, including, but not limited to the Washington Aqueduct, construction of which was said to have started in 1853 under the supervision of Montgomery Meigs and the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers…

…and Davis was involved in getting the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in 1854 by allowing President Pierce to endorse it before it came up for a vote.

This Act created the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, and repealed the limits on slavery that had been placed on the expansion of slavery in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and allowed for popular sovereignty, with the citizens of the new territory deciding its slaveholding status.

The passage of this bill led directly to violence in the Kansas Territory, producing a violent uprising known as “Bleeding Kansas” when pro-slavery and anti-slavery activists flooded into the new territories seeking to sway the vote.

Master Mason John Brown, best known for his 1859 ill-fated raid in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia was involved in events of “Bleeding Kansas.”

The same month that Davis was re-elected for the Senate after his term as Secretary of War was over, in March of 1857, the Supreme Court Ruled in the Dred Scott Case that slavery could not be barred in any territory.

When Jefferson Davis returned to the Senate, which reconvened in November of 1857, the session opened with a debate on the Lecompton Constitution, the second of four constitutions proposed by Kansas, that would have allowed Kansas to have been admitted to the Union as a slave state.

It did not pass because a leading Democratic Senator in the North, Stephen Douglas, believed it did not represent the true will of the people of Kansas, and further undermined the alliance between northern and southern Democrats.

In early 1858, Davis had a severe illness involving the inflammation of his left eye which threatened the loss of his eye.

After spending seven weeks in bed, he went up to Portland, Maine, to recover his health in the summer of 1858.

While Davis was there, he received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, for his contributions as an army officer, Secretary of War, and as a U. S. Representative and Senator.

Davis also felt well enough to give speeches in Maine, Boston, and New York.

These speeches emphasized the common heritage of Americans and the importance of supporting the U. S. Constitution.

His speeches angered some states’ rights supporters in the South, so he clarified his comments when he returned to Mississippi that he felt positive about the benefits of the Union, but also that he felt the Union could be dissolved if states’ rights were violated by one section of the country imposing its will on the other.

Davis presented a series of resolutions in the Senate in February of 1860 defining the relationship between the states under the Constitution, and he included what he called the Constitutional right of Americans bringing slaves into territories, and these resolutions were seen as setting the Democratic platform for the election that year.

The Democratic Convention vote was split between the Democratic nominee from the North, Stephen Douglas, and from the South, John Breckinridge, and Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election.

On December 20th of 1860, the State of South Carolina seceded from the Union, and Mississippi followed with the same course of action on January 9th of 1861.

Davis resigned from the Senate on January 21st of 1861, after delivering a speech to the Senate calling it the saddest day of his life, and returned to Mississippi.

Davis notified the Mississippi Governor John C. Pettus that he was available to serve the State, and he was appointed a Major-General in the Army of Mississippi on January 27th of 1861.

Shortly thereafter, however, on February 10th, he received word that he had been unanimously elected to the provisional Presidency of the Confederacy by a constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama, with Alexander H. Stephens as his Vice-President. I learned about Stephens because his statue is one of the two representing Georgia in the National Statuary Hall.

They were provisionally inaugurated on February 18th, and the Confederate Administration was housed in Montgomery’s Exchange Hotel.

We are told that as the southern states seceded, all but four forts had been taken over by state authorities.

Those exceptions were Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on the top left; Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, on the top right; and on the bottom left and right in Key West, Fort Zachary Taylor and Fort Jefferson, which is the largest brick masonry structure in the Americas.

All four of these forts were said to have been built after the War of 1812 as a coastal protection from naval invasion…

…in the same way the historical narrative tells us that the Palmerston Forts on the Isle of Wight were a group of forts and associated structures that were built during the Victorian Era in response to a perceived threat of French invasion.

They are called the Palmerston Forts due to their association with Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister from 1859 to 1865 who was said to have promoted the idea.

There were approximately 20 of these Palmerston structures along the west and east coast of the Isle of Wight, like Fort Victoria.

The Confederate Congress advised Davis in February of 1861 to send a commission to the U. S. Congress to negotiate the settlement of the disagreements between the Confederate States and the federal government of the United States, including the federal evacuation of these forts.

President Lincoln refused to meet with the Confederate Commission, but they were able to informally meet with Secretary of State William Seward and Supreme Court Justice John Campbell, with Seward hinting without assurance that Fort Sumter would be evacuated.

During this time, President Davis appointed General Beauregard to command the Confederate troops in Charleston.

When Davis was informed that President Lincoln had ordered the resupply of Fort Sumter, he gave the order to General Beauregard to demand the immediate surrender of the fort or destroy it.

In the early morning of April 12th of 1861,when the commanding officer of Fort Sumter refused to surrender, the bombardment of the fort by Confederate forces began.

The fort surrendered on April 14th, with no deaths having resulted from the bombardment according to what we are told, and the American Civil war had begun, with President Lincoln calling for 75,000 volunteer troops, and four more states joined the Confederacy – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

Jefferson Davis was the Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Army, and his military leadership reported directly to him.

In 1861, the major fighting in the East began after a Union Army advanced into Northern Virginia in July, and was defeated at Manassas in the Battle of Bull Run by two Confederate forces, one under the leadership of General Beauregard and the other under General Johnston.

Also in 1861, the Confederacy lost the State of Kentucky, which had wanted to remain neutral until a Confederate Army occupied Columbus, Kentucky, which was supported by President Davis, and Kentucky requested aid from the Union.

Interesting to note that Columbus Kentucky is located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, very close to Cairo, Illinois, in a part of the country nicknamed “Little Egypt.”

The Confederate Army was said to have constructed a fort in Columbus, which it is interesting to note will be in the path of totality for the 2024 total solar eclipse as it is close to Carbondale, Illinois, the crossing point of both the 2017 & 2024 solar eclipses…

…and is also close to the Giant City State Park in Makanda, Illinois, just south of Carbondale, and also on the solar eclipse path of totality.

It is also interesting to note that a primary attraction at the Columbus-Belmont State Park, the historical location of the fort, are the remains of a mile-long giant chain and its anchor estimated to weigh between 4- to- 6-tons that was constructed under the direction of Confederate General Leonidas Polk, we are told, in 1861 that stretched across the Mississippi River between the fortification in Columbus, and Camp Johnson in Belmont, Missouri.

This defensive strategy didn’t work too well, as by March 3rd of 1862, Union troops under then Brigadier-General Ulysses S. Grant occupied the area and took down most of the chain.

This was after Forts Donelson and Henry in Tennessee were captured by Union Forces in February of 1862.

All of this led to the collapse of Confederate defenses, and in the Spring of 1862, not only Kentucky, but also Memphis and Nashville were lost to the Confederacy, as well as control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.

Jefferson Davis was formally inaugurated as President of the Confederacy on February 22nd of 1862.

Davis vetoed a bill in March of 1862 to create a Commander-in-Chief for the Confederate Army, though he selected General Robert E. Lee to be his military advisor.

In March of 1862, the Union Army began a major attack on the Virginia Peninsula, where Hampton Roads is located, and 75-miles, or 121-miles, from Richmond.

General Albert S. Johnston commanded the Confederate Army near Richmond and did not follow the command to take a stand at Yorktown, Virginia, and instead withdrew from the Peninula to engage in battle with the Union Army under the command of General George McClellan at what became known as the “Battle of Seven Pines” or the “Battle of Fair Oaks Station on May 31st and June 1st of 1862.

Johnston had the men in his army protecting the defensive works of Richmond.

McClellan’s Army of the Potomac had used the Richmond and York River Railroad to bring in heavy siege artillery to the outskirts of Richmond just prior to the battle.

We are told the result of the battle was inconclusive, and the closest advance of Union forces to Richmond in this offensive.

It was the largest battle in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War up until that time.

It also resulted in injury to General Albert S. Johnston, leading to his replacement by General Robert E. Lee as the Confederate Commander

General Robert E. Lee led what was known as the Seven Days Battles, called a Confederate Victory, from June 25th to July 1st of 1862, near Richmond which drove General McClellan’s Union Army away from Richmond and into a retreat down the Virginia Peninsula ending the Peninsula Campaign, though McClellan’s troops landed at Harrison’s Landing in Virginia on the James River, protected by Union gunboats.

In August of 1862, Lee’s troops triumphed over a Union Army trying to move into Manassas, Virginia, at the Second Battle of Bull Run…

…but Lee withdrew from Maryland after a stalemate at the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862, though a major turning point in the Union’s favor.

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln on January 1st, in which he changed by executive order the legal status of the slaves in Confederate States to free.

Jefferson Davis saw this as the desire of the North to destroy the South, and as an incitement to rebellion of the enslaved people of the South.

Davis addressed the Confederate Congress, saying the emancipation proclamation was a crime against humanity that would be reviled throughout history.

General Lee had broken up a Union invasion into Virginia in May of 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville…

…but lost a big one at the Battle of Gettysburg between July 1st and July 3rd of 1863, when General Lee’s troops invaded Pennsylvania.

The Battle of Gettysburg had the largest number of casualties during the war, and described as the Civil War’s turning point along with the Union victory following the Siege of Vicksburg in Mississippi, which took place between May 18th and July 4th of 1863.

I mentioned previously that Vicksburg was a short distance north of the Davis plantations just north of Davis Bend.

Vicksburg was the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, and cut-off the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department from the rest of the Confederate States.

In past research, I have already found a lot of anomalies here.

First, the Siege of Vicksburg and its aftermath.

We are told that after the Vicksburg National Military Park was established in 1899, the nation’s leading architects and sculptors were commissioned to honor the soldiers and sailors from their respective states that fought in the Vicksburg campaign, leading it to be called the “Art Park of the World” with more than 1,400 monuments found throughout the park.

Like the Mississippi Memorial…

…the Michigan Memorial…

…and the Illinois State Memorial.

The Shirley House is said to be the only-surviving wartime structure inside the Vicksburg National Military Park.

This is a wartime picture of the Shirley House circa 1863, with what is described as the camp of the 45th Illinois Infantry behind it.

But there are things going on in this photo that don’t make sense to me.

Why all the digging and entrances?

Apparently during the Siege of Vicksburg, the people of the city dug caves into the sides of hills to get out of harm’s way from the hail of iron that was coming their way from Union forces.

But why do the caves in Vicksburg look like the 49er gold-mines in California’s Gold Rush country?

This photo was notated as Union soldiers on the lawn of the Warren County Courthouse after the siege.

It was said to have been constructed between 1858 and 1860.

Interesting to note the contrast between the size of the soldiers and that of the courthouse.

Considered to be Vicksburg’s most historic structure, a museum is operated within the old courthouse today.

The mud-flooded-looking Washington Hotel in Vicksburg was said to have been used as a military hospital during the Civil War.

There was a castle in Vicksburg which was said to have been built in the 1850s, including a moat, but it was destroyed by the Union Army and the site turned into an artillery battery.

Then there is the Trans-Mississippi Department.

Edmund Kirby Smith was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded its Trans-Mississippi Department between 1863 and 1865, and represents the State of Florida in the National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Congress.

The Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate States Army was comprised of Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, western Louisiania, Arizona Territory and Indian Territory.

After the Union forces captured Vicksburg, Mississippi and Port Hudson in Louisiana…

…Edmund Kirby Smith’s forces were cut off from the Confederate Capital of Richmond, Virginia.

As a result of being cut-off from Richmond, Smith commanded and administered a nearly independent area of the Confederacy, and the whole region became known as “Kirby Smithdom.”

What was really going on here during that time?

After all, this was the heart of the ancient Washitaw Empire of North America, that most people have never heard of it because it was removed from our collective awareness.

At any rate, in our historical narrative, the Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department on May 26th of 1865 on board the U. S. S. Fort Jackson on Galveston Bay in Texas to the Union Major General Edward Canby, approximately eight-weeks after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia.

Though Davis tried to find ways to continue fighting, the Confederate Government was officially dissolved on May 5th of 1865 in Washington, Georgia.

Davis was captured by Union soldiers where he was camped out near Irwinville, Georgia, four-days later.

Jefferson Davis was imprisoned at Fort Monroe on the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula at Hampton Roads.

Davis was released on bail posted by wealthy friends like Cornelius Vanderbilt after two-years, and he and his family relocated to Lennoxville, Quebec.

President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation at Christmas in 1868 granting amnesty and pardon to Davis, and all participants in the rebellion.

Jefferson Davis died on December 6th of 1889 in New Orleans, where his body lay in-state at the New Orleans City Hall.

The funeral held for him in New Orleans was said to have been one of the largest funerals held in the South, and the procession attended by an estimated 200,000 people.

His remains were ultimately interred at the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

I tried to find out if Jefferson Davis was a Freemason, and received some results in my initial search, from others and Davis himself, saying that he himself was not a mason.

But I did find this picture of Jefferson Davis with his right hand fully-tucked into his jacket in an internet search, which is the masonic hand sign signifying “Master of the Second Veil…”

…and, like President Gerald Ford, President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was prominently featured in the “Knight Templar” Magazine.

There were Freemasons on both sides of the conflict, like this illustration signifying masonic brotherhood between Confederate Brigadier General Lewis Armistead and Union Captain Winfield Hancock at Gettysburg.

I found the same thing when I was researching Samuel Adams for Massachusetts in the National Statuary Hal.

He was called the “Father of the American Revolution,” and there were Masonic brethren on boths sides of the conflict and also involved at a high level.

I found Samuel Adams mentioned as a Freemason in an article from June of 2009 on the antiquesandhearts.com website about the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts celebrating 275 years of brotherhood.

The article mentioned things like the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston being the unofficial Headquarters of the American Revolution…

…as well as being the meeting place for the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, which had purchased the Green Dragon Tavern in 1764, and used it as a meeting place until 1818.

Also mentioned in this article is that it was the origin point for the Boston Tea Party participants and Paul Revere’s midnight Ride, as well as mentioning that there were Freemasons among the British soldiers occupying Boston, which are called “Brethren.”

So, who’s their loyalty really to?

Are the Freemasons actually playing both ends against the middle in a massive deception to bring in the New World Order agenda…

…using the stolen legacy of the real Master Masons?

I definitely think so ~ there is absolutely no doubt in my mind!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, in this “Snapshots from the Statuary Hall” series, I am going to be showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other.

In this pairing, Gerald Ford and Jefferson Davis were both featured on the cover of the “Knight Templar” Magazine, with Gerald Ford being a known Freemason and Jefferson Davis being a covert Freemason…

…Gerald Ford unconditionally pardoned Richard Nixon and Jefferson Davis was unconditionally pardoned by President Andrew Johnson…

…and both men were President, albeit one of the United States, and one of the Confederate States.

The next unlikely pairing that I am going to showcase for things in common in “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol” is Norman Borlaug for Iowa and Florence R. Sabin for Colorado.