Brian Klaas
speaker
544 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Feb
Brian Klaas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And all of a sudden, people realize the answer is America. And they think, okay, we've got this huge continent, these enormous what they call cloud-kissing pines in places like Connecticut. And so, you know, the settlers began to cut these trees down because, of course, they're really good for building houses. But the king wants them to build ships.
And so they have this sort of moment where the finest specimens were supposed to be reserved for the king. And they made this sort of etching onto the bark with what was called the king's mark, this broad arrow shape that was imprinted on these trees with three blows from a hatchet. And it was marked as the king's trees, right?
And of course, this produces an illicit trade because the settlers in America want to use these trees and they sort of hope they can get away with it. Now, eventually, this all comes to a sort of showdown because the resentment between the king claiming the trees and the settlers wanting them and the colonies...
They eventually have this big sort of showdown in a place called the Pine Tree Tavern in New Hampshire. This happens in April of 1772. And the king's sort of, you know, enforcer gets attacked by this violent mob. And so this spurs what's called the Pine Tree Riot. And it's the hidden story that many people don't know about that's sort of this precursor to the Boston Tea Party.
It's one of these parts of sort of an initial defiance of the crown in America. And because they were treated with a relatively light slap on the wrist, it emboldened those who wanted to sort of challenge the sort of royal power. And so it's viewed as one of these sort of catalysts of the Revolutionary War.
And when you think about this, I mean, if we sort of zoom out from what's going on here, there's this aspect in history where to tell this story, you need to have the history of sort of Doggerland, this aspect of why Britain gets cut off and becomes an island. You have to have the story of empire. You have to have the story of the sort of geography of Britain's forests.
the geography of America's forests, the colonization of America, and then this little trigger, which is the Pine Tree Riot, along with the sort of resentment and the need for trees. And all of them combine, right? And the reason I tell stories like this is because any one of these factors being different might have created a different trigger for war.
I mean, eventually you may have had the Revolutionary War anyway, but it might have started differently. And of course, one of the things that I think is really profound about this example is that the initial American Navy sailed under a white flag with a pine tree on it. And so if you look it up, you'll see this as this is the first naval flag for the United States.
And it's because of this attempt to sort of seize the American trees for the Royal Navy. And, you know, when I was writing this part of the book, I didn't have time to go into a lot of the detail. But the ripple effects of this continue because you have things like Captain Cook then goes on these expeditions and his ship breaks off the coast of Hawaii and he gets killed.
And part of that may be because they lost the supply line. It's tied to this question of supply lines for tall trees and whether you have good timber and all these things. So every story around naval history in this period is somehow linked to this question of supply lines around trees. And we sort of take for granted, okay, now let's look at the naval battle
And there's this hidden set of factors that we just totally ignore that are lurking below the surface.
This is one of my favorite stories because there may be a few people who know the first part of this story, but the second part of it I had never seen written about. I found it in a very obscure journal article, and it's just unbelievably fascinating because the fate of the United States does genuinely pivot on a complete accident involving three cigars. So this goes back to 1862.
And what you have happen is you have this person who is in the Union Army. His name is Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Regiment. And at 9 a.m. on September 13th, 1862, it's a Saturday morning. He sits down to rest, right? They're marching these long days as part of the sort of army's movements. and he sits down next to a fence row.
And he stretches himself out, and all of a sudden this thing catches his eye, and he looks at it, and it's a sheet of paper, and he unwraps it. It turns out there's three cigars inside this sheet of paper. But in the paper... What is written is it says, Confidential Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, September 9th, 1862, Special Orders 191.
And so what Barton has accidentally discovered is the marching orders of the Confederate Army, which have fallen out of a satchel of one of the messengers. And this is like the most priceless intelligence you can possibly get when you're in the middle of a war, because it's about to tell you where the Confederate Army is going.
And this, if you know the Civil War dates, September 9th, 1862, is not far before one of the most consequential battles and indeed the bloodiest day in American history of the Battle of Antietam. And so what happens basically is they sort of have this conversation in the Union Army of, OK, we found these cigars. It seems too good to be true, right?
We accidentally came across these sort of these special orders. So how do we know they're genuine? Because if we're going to move the Union Army and have the whole battle plan change based on this intelligence, we need to know this is a real order and not some sort of, you know, gambit by the Confederates to trick us. So they look at the document of the document signed by a guy named R.H. Chilton.
by command of General Robert E. Lee. So this, you know, OK, it seems plausible. And so Barton, you know, sort of sends this up the chain of command. The letters go to the Union tents and they go to a general named Alpheus S. Williams.
And outside of the tent, you know, this is one of these periods where the generals all have their sort of assistant outside the tent to sort of, you know, filter out what's worth the general's time. And the guy who was filtering this day was named Colonel Samuel Pittman. And Pittman reads this and he instantly knows that the orders are genuine. And this is the second part of the story.
This is the part that I absolutely love. So the reason Pittman knows that they're real is because we worked before he joined the army as a bank teller in Detroit, Michigan. And he was the paymaster for the U.S. Army. And as a result of that, what he had to do was process checks that were signed by people in the military.
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