October 26th in History: Small Gambles, Big Ripples

Looking out from this rocker today, you can see how October twenty-sixth shows us that the biggest turns in human history almost never announce themselves with a brass band. When we talked yesterday about October twenty-fifth and how the world switched tracks on a dime, we saw how sudden decisions rattle the rails, but today gives us the other half of that coin: things that looked like modest gambles or local scuffles back then, while we now see they were the quiet starting points for the world we live in right this minute. Back in eighteen twenty-five, folks along the Mohawk River figured a muddy ditch dug through mosquito swamps was just a governor's expensive vanity project, whereas sitting here now, we know it rearranged the economic geography of an entire hemisphere.

That gap between what they thought was happening in their own front yards and what actually unfolded down the line is where all the true juice of history lives. If you stood in Buffalo, New York, on the morning of October twenty-sixth, eighteen twenty-five, you would have smelled damp cedar, cold lake water, and black gunpowder. Governor DeWitt Clinton stepped aboard a packet boat named the Seneca Chief, painted green and gold, with two live eagle chicks perched on the cabin roof. For eight solid years, newspapers across the country had mocked this project as Clinton's Folly or Clinton's Ditch, laughing at the idea that men with shovels, black powder, and mule teams could cut a four-foot-deep waterway three hundred and sixty-three miles across the wilderness from Lake Erie to the Hudson River.

They had no civil engineers in America back then—not a single professional school. The surveyors learned their trade out of farm manuals and by staring through brass scopes until their eyes watered, laying out locks over limestone ridges and running wooden aqueducts right across running rivers. When the Seneca Chief slipped its hawser at nine o'clock that morning, the men in Buffalo fired a thirty-two-pound cannon. A few miles down the towpath, another gun crew heard the boom and pulled their lanyard, and another crew past them caught the sound and pulled theirs. That gunpowder telegraph traveled east across the ridge, down the Mohawk Valley, turned south at Albany, and hit New York Harbor eighty minutes later, covering five hundred miles faster than any word had ever moved between human beings in North America.

Then the harbor fort fired back, and the sound rolled all the way west again. Now, I know how that sounds. But hang on, because those folks thought they were just celebrating a handy way to ship barrels of salted pork and bushels of wheat without breaking wagon axles in the spring mud. They didn't know they were building the machine that would invent Wall Street. Before that morning, hauling a ton of freight from the Great Lakes to Manhattan cost a cool hundred dollars and took twenty days; the week the canal opened, that freight rate dropped to less than ten dollars a ton, and the trip took six days. Cities sprang up out of the stumps where the mules rested—Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Akron.

New York City had been lagging behind Philadelphia and Boston in shipping tonnage, but that ditch turned Manhattan into the funnel through which the agricultural wealth of the entire Midwest poured out into the Atlantic Ocean. You jump forward fifty-six years to another October twenty-sixth, down in the Arizona Territory in eighteen eighty-one, and you find a completely different kind of rumble. It was about three in the afternoon in Tombstone, cold and spitting sleet off the Dragoon Mountains. A thirty-three-year-old deputy town marshal named Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and a dentist from Georgia who coughed blood into his handkerchief, John Henry Holliday, walked down Fremont Street toward a vacant lot behind the O.K.

Corral. They weren't walking into a heroic movie set; they were walking into a squalid municipal turf battle over gun ordinances and stolen cattle. The local paper, the Tombstone Epitaph, had been running editorials demanding law and order because the town's merchant class was terrified that rowdy cowboys were scaring away Eastern mining capital. The Earps were Republicans tied to the town businesses and the federal government; the Clantons and McLaurys were southern Democrats who ran beef up from Mexico and didn't think much of town folks telling them they had to check their pistols at the livery stable. When Virgil saw Ike Clanton, Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury, and Frank McLaury standing in that narrow alleyway, he held up his cane and said, "Hold on, I have come to disarm you." What followed took thirty seconds.

About thirty shots were fired at a distance of barely four feet. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Virgil took a bullet through the calf, Morgan was shot through both shoulder blades, and Doc Holliday was grazed across the hip. Wyatt walked away without a scratch on his coat. At the time, Tombstone didn't treat that afternoon like the birth of an American legend. The coroner held an inquest, Ike Clanton filed murder charges against the Earps, and Judge Wells Spicer spent a month listening to conflicting testimony before deciding the Earps had acted within their legal authority as town officers. The myth machine took decades to turn that thirty-second mess into the defining standoff of the American frontier.

We look back now and see the O.K. Corral as the sunset of the Wild West, but to the people standing in the dust that afternoon, it was just a bloody, confusing municipal police action that left three boys dead on a cold Wednesday. Now, if you want to talk about things that shook the world while starting out soft and quiet, look at October twenty-sixth, nineteen eleven. Down in New Orleans, in a three-room wooden shack tucked into the Black Pearl neighborhood near the levee, Charity Clark gave birth to a baby girl named Mahalia Jackson. The house sat on Water Street, so close to the Mississippi River you could hear the paddlewheels sloshing and the long steam horns blowing for the bends.

The family was poor as dirt; sixteen people lived in that little shotgun house, and little Mahalia was born with bowed legs, what the old folks called rickets. The neighborhood doctors wanted to break the bones in her legs to reset them, but her aunt refused, wrapping them in greasy rags and letting the girl run barefoot along the riverbanks to build the muscle. She grew up listening to the sanctified singing at the Mount Moriah Baptist Church on Sundays and sneaking earfuls of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey records playing from the neighborhood speakeasies on Saturday nights. She took the gravel and sorrow of the Delta blues and married it to the soaring praise of the church choir, creating a sound nobody had ever heard before.

When Mahalia moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, working as a maid and a laundress for five dollars a week, gospel music wasn't considered concert hall material. It belonged inside storefront churches with sawdust floors. Yet that little girl with the bowed legs from Water Street carried that voice all the way to Carnegie Hall, to European concert tours, and into the living rooms of millions. And when August twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three rolled around, and Doctor Martin Luther King Junior was delivering his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, stalling a bit on his prepared text, it was Mahalia Jackson sitting behind him who leaned forward and shouted: "Tell them about the dream, Martin!

Tell them about the dream!" She had seen him preach that sermon in Detroit months earlier, and she knew what the crowd needed to hear. Doctor King pushed his notes aside, looked out over that quarter-million people, and began the passage that reshaped the moral conscience of a nation. All of that trace-chains back to a tiny wooden house on October twenty-sixth in nineteen eleven, where a little girl with crooked legs learned to fill her lungs with river air. You can track that same pattern across the ocean, too. On October twenty-sixth, nineteen fifty-one, the British election returns came in, and seventy-six-year-old Winston Churchill walked back into Ten Downing Street as Prime Minister.

Six years earlier, right after Nazi Germany surrendered, the British public had voted him out of office in a staggering landslide. They loved him as a bulldog for the war, but they wanted Clement Attlee's Labour Party to build the National Health Service and rebuild their bombed-out towns. Churchill spent those six years in the political wilderness, painting watercolors, writing his memoirs, and warning the world about an iron curtain falling across Europe. When he won that slim majority in October nineteen fifty-one, the old-timers thought they were seeing a grand restoration of Victorian imperial strength. From where we sit today, we can see it was nothing of the sort.

Churchill's second term wasn't the revival of an empire; it was the managed, bittersweet twilight of one. King George the Sixth died just three months later, the young Queen Elizabeth took the throne, rationing from the war dragged on for eggs and butter, and Britain had to adjust to a world where two new superpowers called the shots. Churchill thought he was stepping back up to the switchboard of world destiny; what he actually did was preside over the gentle closing down of an old order, proving that even the most stubborn giant cannot drag the calendar backward. Then there is the quietest miracle of all, and it happened on October twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-seven, in a dusty port town called Merca on the coast of Somalia.

A twenty-three-year-old hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin checked into a medical clinic with a high fever and a blistery rash on his arms. Two weeks earlier, Maalin had climbed into a Land Cruiser to guide two small children who were infected with variola minor—smallpox—to the local isolation camp. The trip took only fifteen minutes. Maalin was supposed to be vaccinated; he worked in a hospital, after all. But he had avoided the needle because he had heard vaccination was painful. When the rash broke out, local health workers realized what was looking them in the face. They immediately notified the World Health Organization team led by an American physician named Donald Henderson.

The field workers traced every single person Maalin had talked to, walked past, or served food to over the preceding two weeks—fifty-four thousand people were screened, and two hundred and twenty-nine close contacts were placed under round-the-clock quarantine. Ali Maow Maalin recovered completely. And his case turned out to be the very last naturally occurring case of smallpox anywhere on planet Earth. For at least three thousand years, that virus had killed kings, emperors, farmers, and children by the hundreds of millions. It scarred Pharaoh Ramses the Fifth, it wiped out entire civilizations across the Americas, and in the twentieth century alone, it snuffed out over three hundred million lives.

Yet on that hot Wednesday afternoon in Somalia, the chain of human transmission that had stretched unbroken since the dawn of agriculture finally snapped. It didn't end with a thunderclap; it ended because a young hospital cook got sick, some diligent workers tracked down his neighbors, and humanity held its collective breath until the virus ran out of human bodies to jump into. When you look back on these moments from ten years down the road—or fifty, or two hundred—the thing that jumps out at you isn't how tidy they look in the books. It's how close every single one of them came to tumbling off the trestle. The Erie Canal was within a hair of failing before it ever hit Rochester.

In eighteen nineteen, the canal diggers struck the Montezuma Marshes, a stinking cedar bog where over a thousand men collapsed with malaria and swamp fever in a single summer, shutting down construction entirely while the legislature in Albany threatened to pull the funding. If a few stubborn contractors hadn't figured out how to dig through that muck in the dead of winter when the ground froze solid, the canal might have died as a half-dug ditch, and New York Harbor might never have grown into the empire port of the continent. That thirty-second skirmish in Tombstone hung on the twitch of a single trigger finger. If Virgil Earp had waited ten more minutes to round up his brothers, or if Frank McLaury had left his horse tied up outside the town limits, those men likely would have drifted back out to the ranches, and the Earps would be forgotten footnote constables in the territorial archives rather than the center of an American mythology that spawned hundreds of books and movies.

And think about Ali Maow Maalin in Somalia. If that hospital cook had hopped on a coastal bus to Mogadishu while his fever was climbing, rather than checking into the local clinic, that ancient killer might have flared through crowded city markets, overwhelmed the surveillance ring, and slipped back into the general population for another decade of misery. We can see the evidence of this around us right now, even if we aren't naming it yet. We sit in our present moment convinced that our big, loud arguments and our splashiest headlines are the things future generations will look back on as the turning points. We argue about the noise on the surface.

But history tells us that the real hinges are almost always forged in the things we treat as ordinary workaday business: a trench being dug through the woods, an argument about town bylaws, a gospel record pressed on cheap vinyl, or a doctor checking the skin of a hospital cook. Looking back from ten years in our own future, people will likely shake their heads at what we thought was crucial today, just like we grin at the folks who thought the Erie Canal was an absurd boondoggle or that Churchill could bring back the British Empire by sheer force of personality. The outcomes we take for granted weren't inevitable at all; they were fragile, contested, and balanced on a rail that could have tipped either way.

The old tracks run where men laid the gravel and drove the spikes, but the river underneath keeps carving its own path, steady and unbothered by the timetable. Well. That is about the size of it.