Tag: Current Fish Tales — Additional Stories

Editorial explicitly selects the 3–4 other approved stories in the current production cycle. Never apply to the Featured Fish Tale. Remove this tag from earlier cycles; retain their Fish Tales category and permanent URLs.

  • The Wire That Retired the Fastest Horse

    For eighteen months, the fastest message across much of the American West rode in a leather mail pouch on a horse. Riders changed mounts, crossed dangerous country and made speed into a national legend. Then, on October 24, 1861, the horse lost a race it could never win. A wire reached across the continent.

    The first transcontinental telegraph joined existing eastern and western networks through the interior West. Construction crews had to raise poles and string wire across immense distances, working while the United States was already at war with itself. Reaching Salt Lake City completed the link between the two sides. The result was not merely a quicker way to send business news. In a country divided by civil war, officials in California could communicate with Washington without waiting for a rider, a stagecoach or a ship.

    The National Park Service records an unusual sequence on completion day. Brigham Young sent a message from Salt Lake City to H. W. Carpentier in San Francisco, president of the Overland Telegraph Company. The first telegram to traverse the full continental route was sent from Sacramento by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Stephen J. Field to President Abraham Lincoln. Field congratulated the president and pledged California's loyalty to the Union. The message left Sacramento on the evening of October 24 and reached Lincoln the following morning, a reminder that early telegraph communication still involved human handling and delivery even after the long-distance circuit was complete.

    The Pony Express had been built to conquer the old delay. Beginning in April 1860, its relay system carried mail between Missouri and California in about ten days; an exceptionally fast run delivered news of Lincoln's election in seven days and seventeen hours. That speed demanded horses, stations, riders and extraordinary expense. Customers paid a premium for the service, but the enterprise struggled financially. Its usefulness also depended on a temporary gap: the space between telegraph lines being pushed east and west toward one another.

    On October 24, the gap closed. The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum dates the Pony Express's official end to October 26, two days later. The exact wording of some historical timelines differs on whether the service was 'discontinued' on completion day or formally ended two days afterward; the physical turning point was the completed wire. The riders did not become less brave or their route less difficult. Their advantage simply vanished when information could move as electrical signals rather than as cargo.

    The telegraph had limits of its own. Wires could break, stations required operators, and a message's final delivery still took time. But it changed the terms of distance. The celebrated image of a lone rider racing the horizon remained in American memory, while the practical work of urgent communication moved to poles, instruments and a line that crossed the country. One technology became a legend precisely because another had arrived to replace it.

    Sources

    [1] National Park Service, “The Completion of the First Transcontinental Telegraph”. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-transcontinental-telegraph.htm

    [2] Smithsonian National Postal Museum, “Pony Express—Part Two”. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/pony-express-romance-versus-reality/pony-express-part-two

    [3] Smithsonian National Postal Museum, “Moving the Mail: The Pony Express”. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/moving-the-mail-the-pony-express

  • The Last Torpedo Came Back

    A submarine can survive an enemy's gunfire, outrun a destroyer and slip through a guarded convoy. In the Formosa Strait in October 1944, the American submarine Tang did all of that. The weapon that finally destroyed her did not come from Japan. It came from Tang's own last torpedo tube.

    Under Commander Richard H. O'Kane, USS Tang had already established a formidable combat record. On an earlier patrol she had also performed a very different duty, rescuing 22 American aviators near Truk. Now, with American forces returning to the Philippines, Japanese convoys were rushing men, fuel and equipment toward the fighting. Tang's fifth patrol put her across those routes. The submarine hunted at night on the surface, where speed and radar offered advantages but enemy escorts could see and fire on her.

    During the nights of October 23 and 24, Tang pressed attacks against heavily guarded shipping. Japanese guns flashed as O'Kane maneuvered among transports, tankers and escorts. Some enemy vessels burned or stopped in the water. The crew had fired nearly its entire torpedo load. Rather than depart, Tang returned toward a damaged transport to use the last two weapons. The first ran toward its target. The second, the twenty-fourth torpedo of the patrol, broke the pattern: it surfaced, veered left and began turning back.

    The crew saw the danger almost immediately. O'Kane ordered emergency maneuvers, but a submarine at close range could not simply disappear from a torpedo's path. Roughly twenty seconds after launch, the weapon struck Tang. The blast flooded her after compartments, and the submarine settled on the bottom about 180 feet below the surface. Men on the bridge were thrown into the sea. Others remained alive in the forward compartments, where survival now depended on a far more difficult operation than any attack they had carried out.

    The trapped sailors prepared to escape through a forward hatch using Momsen Lung breathing apparatus. Enemy depth charges delayed them; an electrical fire added heat and smoke. Navy loss records describe thirteen men leaving the forward compartment, but only five of those escapees were eventually rescued. Four others survived from the bridge or conning tower. The nine men picked up by a Japanese escort, including O'Kane, became prisoners of war. Seventy-eight Tang crewmen died.

    The Japanese vessel that collected the survivors also carried men from ships Tang had attacked. The Americans were beaten after their rescue and endured captivity until the war ended. O'Kane later received the Medal of Honor, while Tang's combat totals were revised as historians compared wartime claims with Japanese records. None of those later calculations changed the cruel sequence of her loss: a final shot, a sudden circle, and an American submarine struck by the weapon it had just fired. The crew's underwater escape remains one of the rare documented successes of the Momsen Lung in wartime.

    Sources

    [1] U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “H-038-2: Leyte Gulf in Detail”. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-038/h-038-2.html

    [2] U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “Tang (SS 306),” United States Submarine Losses. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/united-states-submarine-losses/tang-ss-306.html

    [3] U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “Tang (SS-306)”. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-topic/ships/submarines/tang-ss-306.html

  • The Birthday Present at the Bottom of Niagara

    A woman approached Niagara Falls on her sixty-third birthday with a plan that depended on surviving a plunge inside a barrel. She was not trying to become a professional daredevil. She was trying to escape financial insecurity. On October 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor would survive the falls and discover that survival was the easier half of her scheme.

    Taylor had worked as a teacher and moved through several American cities after being widowed. By 1901 she was short of money and looking for a way to secure her future. Niagara had already attracted performers willing to challenge its rapids and gorge, but a journey over the great Horseshoe Falls itself offered an even more sensational claim. Taylor planned to be the first person to ride over the falls in a barrel and live. She also understated her age in publicity, presenting herself as younger than she was.

    The equipment was neither a toy nor a guarantee. A specially constructed oak barrel was strengthened with iron, lined with cushioning and fitted with a harness. Air could be pumped in before the opening was sealed. Before Taylor risked the ride, a cat was sent over the falls in the barrel and survived. Accounts differ on the animal's injuries and on the precise test date, but the experiment persuaded Taylor that her container might withstand the drop. It did not settle what the force of the water would do to a person inside.

    On her birthday, helpers placed Taylor in the barrel upstream of the Horseshoe Falls and sealed it. The Niagara River took control. The container drifted toward the brink, disappeared over the cascade and entered the violent water below. Accounts describe a journey lasting roughly twenty minutes before the barrel was recovered. When rescuers opened it, Taylor was alive, shaken and injured mainly by a cut to her head. She had accomplished the dangerous feat that promoters could now sell as a marvel.

    But the hoped-for fortune did not follow. Taylor received attention, photographs and opportunities to recount the event, yet she struggled to turn her fame into lasting income. Her barrel itself became part of the commercial dispute: later accounts describe a manager taking the object she needed as proof and a prop for appearances. She sold souvenirs and posed for tourist photographs near the falls. The notoriety survived far better than the money did.

    Taylor died in 1921 after years of financial difficulty. Her burial in Niagara Falls places her among the people remembered for daring exploits at the river. The stunt was a triumph of survival, not of business planning, and its publicity could not make the economics work. More than a century later, the enduring image is a barrel emerging from the water with its passenger alive. The less familiar ending belongs to the woman who had wagered that one extraordinary day would provide for all the ordinary days afterward.

    Sources

    [1] New York State Parks, “Remembering the Queen of the Mist”. https://nystateparks.blog/2021/01/12/remembering-the-queen-of-the-mist/

    [2] Niagara Falls USA, “Niagara Falls Daredevils”. https://www.niagarafallsusa.com/planning-tools/about-niagara-falls/history/daredevils/

    [3] Smithsonian Magazine, “October Anniversaries”. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/october-anniversaries-4-72394275/