January 24 is Peanut Butter Day.
Smooth, chunky, creamy and delicious, Peanut Butter is an American favorite. Peanut butter is served as a spread on bread, toast or crackers, and used to make sandwiches. It is also used in a number of confections and candies, and cookies.
Marcellus Edson of Montreal, Canada was granted a patent for Peanut Butter in 1884. In America, John Harvey Kellogg’s Western Health Reform Institute served peanut butter to patients because they needed a food that contained a lot of protein, yet which could be eaten without chewing. At first, peanut butter was a food for wealthy people, as it became popular initially as a product served at expensive health care institutes.
Today in history: January 24: GOLD!!
On this date in 1848 a man named James Marshall found shiny metal in the tailrace of a lumber mill Marshall was building for John Sutter on the American River in Northern California. Marshall brought what he found to Sutter, and the two privately tested the metal. After the tests showed that it was gold, Sutter expressed dismay: he wanted to keep the news quiet because he feared what would happen to his plans for an agricultural empire if there were a mass search for gold.
Of course, word got out and the California Gold Rush was on. People began to arrive in great numbers from around the world. Ships from China, ships that sailed from the east coast and around the horn of South America. People travelled over land across the California Trail. Collectively, they became known as “Forty-Niners”.
San Francisco had been a tiny settlement before the rush began. When residents learned about the discovery, it at first became a ghost town of abandoned ships and businesses, but then boomed as merchants and new people arrived. The population of San Francisco exploded from perhaps about 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 full-time residents by 1850. Miners lived in tents, wood shanties, or deck cabins removed from abandoned ships.
At the time California was essentially lawless. Even though it was still considered a territory of Mexico, it was occupied by the United States Army as a result of the Mexican-American War treaty that gave possession of the territory to the US. The people living there existed under a mixture of Mexican rules, American values, and personal customs. There was no legislature, no courts, and protection or peacekeeping were services that were purchased.
As fast as miners arrived, shops set up to sell supplies. Recent studies have confirmed that merchants made far more money than the miners during the Gold Rush. Every need was catered to, every vice available. Tens of billions of modern dollars worth of gold was mined during the rush, but most of the prospectors who arrived left with little more than they had come with. John Sutter, on whose property the gold was first discovered, was ruined. His workers abandoned his farm to search for gold, and squatters took over his land and stole his crops and cattle. Native tribes were likewise pushed out.
At an unprecedented speed, towns and municipalities sprung up and were chartered, a state constitutional convention was convened, a state constitution written, elections held, and representatives sent to Washington, D.C. to negotiate the admission of California as a state. Large scale agriculture began (California’s ‘second Gold Rush”), roads were built, schools and churches came quickly into existence. The vast majority of immigrants to California were Americans, and pressure built for better communications and political connections to the rest of the United States. As a result, California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state on September 9, 1850.
Weird Fact: The Holdout
In February of 1943 Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi of the Imperial Japanese Army was
assigned to the garrison occupying the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. When American forces captured the island in the 1944 Battle of Guam, Yokoi went into hiding with nine other Japanese soldiers.
Years passed. The men drifted apart, filtering into the jungle, keeping in touch occasionally. Yokoi lived alone and survived by hunting, primarily at night. He used native plants to make clothes, bedding, and storage implements, which he carefully hid in a cave that he lived in deep in the forest.
On January 24, 1972 two men were inspecting their shrimp traps along a small river when they saw Yokoi by the water. They assumed he was from one of the nearby villages and didn’t pay him much attention. Yokoi felt threatened and attacked them. The two men were able to subdue him, and dragged him out of the jungle. Authorities soon discovered his identity, and that he had been hiding in the jungle for 28 years. He said that he had known the war was over since the early 1950s, but feared coming out because he was indoctrinated to prefer death to the great shame of being taken alive. Upon his return to Japan, he said “It is with much embarrassment that I return.”
Despite nearly 30 years in hiding, Yokoi was not the last Japanese World War II holdout. 2 more men were discovered in 1974. Teruo Nakamura, the final holdout, surrendered in Indonesia in November of 1974 after a plane spotted his jungle hut.