“And savagery is not history: it is either the beginning of history or the end of it.”

G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

September 7 1876 was a very bad day for the Jesse James gang. I’m not sure they really had many good days; that lifestyle was never as glamorous as some films and popular culture have suggested. But if they did have such days, September 7 1876 in Northfield Minnesota wasn’t one. They were caught in a shootout while robbing a bank and lost badly. To armed citizens not the cops.

It wasn’t even much of a bank, apparently. No offense to Northfield but it wasn’t a booming metropolis and the First National Bank of Northfield had a better name than it did a balance sheet. Now possibly the gang, whose origins were as Confederate guerrillas in Missouri during the Civil War, had a grievance against a major bank shareholder, former Union general Adelbert Ames. And they wrongly thought he had recently put a big pile of cash into the bank. So it was a badly planned caper. But it got worse fast.

The gang were evidently somewhat the worse for likker when they headed for the bank early in the afternoon after lunching on fried eggs and bad hooch. Once there, three went in and murdered a clerk who refused to open the safe while five stood guard including Jesse James himself. Well, maybe stood guard isn’t the right word.

They swaggered around firing guns to scare people. And it didn’t work. Instead the locals realized a robbery was going on and some of them grabbed guns including from local hardware stores, took up good positions, and opened fire on the criminals to deadly effect. Two of the gang were killed outright and all the others wounded including those inside the bank who ran out into the battle with a few bags of nickels for their wicked pains.

The surviving gang fled. But the citizens of Minnesota pursued them and caught three and killed one. Only Frank and Jesse James got away, but without their gang. And after three peaceful years in Tennessee Jesse returned to a life of crime, dragged Frank in (apparently he was happy just farming), and on April 3, 1882, got himself shot in the back of the head while unarmed and adjusting a picture by an lowlife acquaintance named Robert Ford in return for a public reward. (Ford himself was gunned down a decade later in a makeshift saloon. Unsurprisingly.)

As for Frank James, he turned himself in in 1882, tired of a life of crime and constant running from the law. He somehow got himself acquitted by two different juries over two different offences, avoided ever being tried in Northfield, and lived until 1915, partly doing odd jobs, partly on his fame or infamy including in a Wild West show, before improbably dying peacefully at age 72.

Obviously he’d have been far better off just farming, as he eventually realized. But that’s not the main point here. The main point is that this arguably most infamous of all the Wild West criminal outfits was brought down not by the law but by armed citizens. And not some particularly ornery group of black-clad gun-fighting “citizens” with ominous nicknames like “Kid Shelleen” but just a bunch of regular folks including Swedish farmers. One innocent civilian was killed in the fight, but by a member of the James gang (apparently Cole Younger) not by one of the, well, vigilante is too strong a word. They were just regular people willing and able to defend decency and order against these vicious boozy thugs.

By the way, Northfield hosts annual “Defeat of Jesse James Days” in September. As arguably should we all.

“If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Economist Ely Devons “via economist Ronald Coase via economist Hernado de Soto” according to William Watson in National Post December 29, 2001

In my latest National Post column I say the European Union ordering Ireland to make a tax lunge at Apple shows the wisdom of the Brexit... and maybe not just for the UK.

The Washington Post reports, à propos of the lavish compensation Bill Clinton received as "honorary" chancellor of Laureate International Universities while his wife was coincidentally United States Secretary of State, that:

"In addition to his well-established career as a paid speaker, which began soon after he left the Oval Office, Bill Clinton took on new consulting work starting in 2009, at the same time Hillary Clinton assumed her post at the State Department. Laureate was the highest-paying client, but Bill Clinton signed contracts worth millions with GEMS Education, a secondary-education chain based in Dubai, as well as Shangri-La Industries and Wasserman Investment, two companies run by longtime Democratic donors. All told, with his consulting, writing and speaking fees, Bill Clinton was paid $65.4 million during Hillary Clinton’s four years as secretary of state."

The Post further notes that "The Laureate arrangement illustrates the extent to which the Clintons mixed their charitable work with their private and political lives."

Yeah. That's one way of putting it.

Say, is that battered wreck the Victoria? Hip hip hooray. Where’s the boss? Oh dear. Dead on the other side of the world. So why the cheering? Because the Victoria was, on September 6 of 1522, the first ship ever to complete a trip all the way around the world.

We call it the Magellan expedition. And perhaps rightly so, even though he personally expired part-way through, like most of those who set out with him. In Magellan’s case the cause of death, on April 27, 1521, was being repeatedly hit by sharp things by Lapu-Lapu’s warriors in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines. But the voyage was his idea after all so it makes sense to call it the Magellan expedition rather than the Elcano expedition for the last captain standing, on the deck of Victoria on September 6 1522.

The expedition, and Magellan’s fate, certainly indicate the courage it took to be part of the so-called Voyages of Discovery. This name has come in for much derision in recent years on the grounds that what Europeans discovered already had people living in it. Whaddaya mean, you “discovered” my house? I’ve been here for years. But they did discover much about how one part of the world connected to another and how to get there half-alive that was unsuspected by, say, Lapu-Lapu, who had no more idea there was a Europe than he did that anybody could possibly object to chronic low-grade warfare as a way of life. (Incidentally he’s now a national hero in the Philippines with several monuments and his image is used by the Philippine National Police and the Bureau of Fire Protection. But virtually nothing is known about his life including what his real name was or when and how he died.)

One problem with the PC fuss about “Voyages of Discovery” is that it tends to whitewash the conduct of anyone on the wrong end of them. The Noble Savage myth lives on, with suitably updated terminology. But the inhabitants of Mactan, or of North America, would cheerfully have conquered and mistreated everybody else if they’d been able to. The Europeans, in fact, had more qualms about it than most, part of the dynamism of an open society that explains why it was them “discovering” the Philippines not the other way around. But I digress.

The point is that taking part in these things took incredible bravery whatever its other qualities. If you’re wondering why the Victoria, an 85-ton “carrack,” whatever that might be, was the first ship, in the singular, to get all the way around the globe, it’s because the Concepcion, Santiago and Magellan’s flagship Trinidad were all shipwrecked or scuttled while San Antonio deserted during the horrendous trip through the “Strait of Magellan” between the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego. I like the chutzpah of deserting with a ship instead of from one. And I do understand that discretion is sometimes the better part of valour. Though of course you could stay in Seville and die too.

Magellan started out with roughly 265 men. Victoria staggered home with just 18 of her original 42 or perhaps 43 although some of the others, from that ship and the expedition generally, deserted rather than taking the standard route of dying, from disease, wounds or by execution after a mutiny in Patagonia, including the slow capital punishment method of marooning the captain of San Antonio, an accountant by profession, who was dumped on some desolate island along with a priest and some biscuits and never heard from again. No. I would assume not.

After the Battle of Maclan in which Magellan perished, the survivors were invited to a banquet by the guy they’d been fighting for, Rajah Humabon of Cebu, who naturally had most of them poisoned or otherwise killed including both the new leaders. You’re welcome.

The pilot of Victoria somehow survived, and became its captain until he was deposed. He doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry of his own, but his name does not feature on the short list of those still alive when Victoria limped into Seville Harbour and the pages of history. From which she limped out again in 1570, vanishing with all hands somewhere in the Atlantic.

At least they built a replica in 1992 and another in 2011. Because you do have to admire the guts it took to get all the way around the world or die trying. Even if all else being equal you’d rather admire it from the dock than the deck.

So long, guys. Good luck with, you know, the typhoons, dysentery, treacherous allies, rocks, currents and stuff.

P.S. A carrack turns out to be a three- or four-masted sailing ship, a mainstay of the Voyages of Discovery. All Magellan’s ships were carracks except Santiago which was a caravel, a nimble vessel with triangular or “lateen” sails.

“As for being remembered, well, I always thought that was an odd question. I don’t want to be remembered for anything other than what I’m trying to do right now: be a person of some honesty and integrity and reasonable intelligence, who loves his work, makes a lot of friends, and maybe does some good with young people.”

Bo Schembechler and Mitch Albom BO

In my latest National Post column I say that it’s time to turn our backs on computer modeling of the economy and look at people instead… like Adam Smith.