Pylimitics

It’s November 30, which is not the day the gigantic Louisiana Purchase took place — that was the time in 1803 that the US purchased over 800,000 square miles of land from France, just about doubling the size of the country. But November 30, 1802 had something to do with the purchase, because it was the day in 1802, just 20 days before selling it to the US, that France got the land from Spain. Spain had traded it to France in exchange for territory in Tuscany. What was France doing trading land that’s obviously in Italy, you might ask? Particularly when the land on both sides of the trade didn’t end up in either country? It’s a very long story, and since the rest of it doesn’t have anything to do with November 30, you’ll have to look it up yourself. 

Suffice to say that the whole series of transactions, treaties, negotiations, sales, and proclamations was exactly the sort of thing Jonathan Swift was mocking when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Swift was born on November 30, and so was Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. The Louisiana Purchase was pretty important to Clemens, who was born in Missouri — which is what the Louisiana Territory was renamed in 1812. He also worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. That’s where he got his pen name, and that’s the setting for some of his most famous books. Getting control of the river and the port of New Orleans was one of the biggest motivations behind Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to spend $15 million on the purchase. And like Swift, Clemens had a good time satirizing governments and other authorities.

By the way, an odd footnote about Clemens is that he published best selling books in the 19th Century, and his last few works, including The Mysterious Stranger, were published in the 20th Century. He had written an autobiography, but left instructions not to publish it until 100 years after his death. As instructed, it was finally published in 2010 and became another best seller. So Clemens published new best-sellers in three different centuries. 

Clemens knew a lot about rural life in the late 1800s, and especially during his early career as a journalist, wrote about just about everything that went on. That included unusual people and events like those in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, published in 1865. One of the characters is Jim Smiley, who loves to gamble. He would have been busy on November 30, 1934, when the Flying Scotsman, a steam locomotive on the London and North Eastern Railway, became the first steam locomotive to officially reach 100 mph. There was a large betting pool in England where you could put money on the record being broken (or not).

The Flying Scotsman locomotive still exists. It’s been saved from being scrapped more than once by being purchased by a private individual. The first one was Alan Pegler. Pegler had the support of the Prime Minister of the UK, and managed to get permission to run the Flying Scotsman on British Railways tracks for tours and special events up until the late 1960s. Then the train was shipped to North America for a public relations tour. The tour started in Boston and chugged through New York, Washington D.C., Dallas, Montreal, and Toronto, ending up in San Francisco in 1970. 

By that time there was a problem. Pegler was broke, a new government had been formed in Britain, and they withdrew their financial support. It looked like the Flying Scotsman might have to be sold for scrap after all. But then another wealthy British rail enthusiast stepped in, bought the locomotive, and paid for it to be shipped home through the Panama Canal. It wouldn’t fit in the hold of a cargo ship, so they went to Plan B, and just welded it to the deck. After some restoration work it resumed its touring, and even ended up in Australia in 1988. Yet another rich railroad fan (who knew there were so many of these guys?) bought it in 1996, but (tell me if this sounds familiar) went bankrupt in 2003. Anyway, the National Railway Museum in York, England raised the money to buy the Flying Scotsman, and now it’s back in working condition again. If you watch the 2016 movie Thomas & Friends: The Great Race, you can see an animated version of the Flying Scotsman — and that one even talks!

It looks like November 30 has a lot to do with big projects and large amounts of money. If you really like trains, maybe consider those little model ones instead of, you know, a full-size model. But if you do go for the big one, there’s still plenty of fuel available. You can buy it from ExxonMobil, which was created out of a gigantic merger on — wouldn’t you know it — November 30, 1999.

The Flying Scotsman