I’ve been thinking about how I choose what to write about in Happened. It’s all true (although I’m making no promises about the April 1 edition), and I find the vast majority of it on websites. My most important source is Wikipedia, mostly because there’s so much there. Like ordering too many things on Amazon.com, finding content on Wikipedia is probably a little bit too easy.

There’s another good thing about Wikipedia: when I find something wrong, I can fix it myself. Anybody can. I’ve never found a big, egregious error on a Wikipedia page, but I run across small mistakes and typos pretty often. It makes me think I may be the first visitor to some of these pages in a long time, but maybe not. If you find a mistake on a web page, do you fix it (when you can) or at least report it, if there’s a way to do that?

But even if the source material is free of errors (as far as I can tell), there are some filters cutting down the number of events I’m able to look at. The biggest filter for me is time. Happened comes out daily, and it’s not the only thing I do. It’s not even one of the main things. I devote only an hour, or at most two, to each issue. That puts a pretty low limit on the number of events I have time to review for any given day.

Another filter — and this is a big, amorphous one that affects everything in Happened — I can best describe as something like “newsworthiness.” Not everything that happens gets written down. Overall, hardly anything gets written down. The things that do have to do with wars, politicians, disasters, major inventions, and cultural events. Every once in a great while, something just very odd gets written down, too. Out of all those notable events that somebody thought to write down, some get lost. Some get forgotten. Some come in front of an editor or someone with that sort of role, and the editor decides that it wasn’t really worth writing down in the first place, so it doesn’t get published.

In the end, what I have to choose from are only the events that somebody wrote down, somebody else published, and (usually) some other person or people decided to include on a web page. Then I come along and try to find some pattern, or connection, or some way to put just a few events together to talk about as a set. But the collection of things I have to choose from is incredibly small compared to the number of things that actually happened on any given date.

They take shelter in the nearby barn.

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. Maybe this is why people turn to writing fiction, because then you can have (or be) an omniscient narrator and show how it was seeing the airplane at the country fair at the age of 9 that made Our Hero decide to become a pilot. Then when they’re forced by a bad storm to land their plane just a mile away from the fairgrounds, you can see the connection. And they take shelter in the nearby barn, which turns out to be owned by the childhood sweetheart that they’d taken to that very fair all those years ago, and the couple is, once again, linked by an airplane. After that they fall in love, marry, and set off by air for their honeymoon, when suddenly…well, you get the idea. To really see deep connections, sometimes you have to know things about people that aren’t written down.

That, in a nutshell, is why you can sometimes learn more truth from fiction — which is a lie — than you can find lying around in the real truth, which nobody wrote down. One of the real truths that people did write down comes from January 31, 1845 in what is now Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1845 there was no “Milwaukee,” but there were three little settlements on both sides of the Milwaukee River. One was Juneautown, which was founded by (and named after) Solomon Juneau. Another, right across the river, was Kilbourntown, which was founded by (and named after) Byron Kilbourn. The third, just a bit downriver, was Walker’s Point, which was —stop me if you’ve heard this before — founded by (and named after) George Walker.

One of the things people wrote down about this conjunction of settlements evidently founded by three egotists was that there was an active rivalry between them. A map issued by one founder would just show a blank space where another settlement was. When a steamship made a delivery to, say, Kilbourn town, Kilbourn’s orders were to tell the ship captain that what looked like another settlement just across the river wasn’t that at all, but was just a native trading post or something. Definitely not worth a visit.  What nobody wrote down was anything about the interior life of the three founders. It takes a particular kind of person, shaped by particular life events, to create a new town and name it after yourself. And here we had three of them in close proximity, but that’s all we really know. What they really thought of each other — or themselves, for that matter — is a mystery.

The rivalry between the founders seems to have been shared by the residents of each of the towns. There were bridges linking Juneautown to Kilbourntown, but both towns argued about who would pay for maintenance. The residents of Kilbourntown proceeded to take their tools down to the Chestnut Street bridge and take it apart. The Juneautown folks found a cannon (!) and pointed it right at Byron Kilbourn’s own house. They didn’t fire, though, supposedly because someone told them Kilbourn’s daughter had just passed away.

Instead, residents of one side voted to demolish a third bridge and use the remains to repair yet another bridge — but the bridge they were going to demolish was the favorite of the other town. Those guys found out about the plan and preemptively demolished the bridge slated for repair — as well as yet another bridge. The atmosphere grew pretty tense. People living on each side of the river regarded those on the other side as being on the wrong side, and there were fights. Eventually everything calmed down, and the Bridge War was officially over on January 31, 1846 when all three towns merged and took the collective name “Milwaukee.”

These are things an omniscient narrator would relate to us.

But what don’t we know about the Milwaukee Bridge War? How did it feel to look across the river at a whole town on the wrong side? Who dreamed up the various plans to demolish this or that bridge, and for that matter, how do you demolish a whole bridge when people on the other end of it don’t want you to? These are things an omniscient narrator would relate to us. And they would also arrange for someone with a connection to the Bridge War to wind up in Glasgow, Scotland on January 31, 1919 for another battle inside a city — this time between strikers and police. But the interior monolog of one of the strikers would certainly mention the event, exactly one year before, that the fog off the coast of Scotland had led to eight Royal Navy ships being damaged in collisions with one another. Two were sunk, and the episode was so disastrous it was named the Battle of May Island in spite of it simply being a naval exercise.

Maybe at least one of the sailors was connected in some way to World War I soldiers in the Battle of Bolimów, on January 31, 1915, when Germany first used poison gas as a weapon. That led to the Geneva Protocol, which banned such things (although to be honest, chemical weapons like that were already prohibited by treaties in 1899 and 1907). But our omniscient narrator would make things much more interesting by setting up a connection between the soldier at the Battle of Bolimów, the sailor in the Battle of May Island, and a survivor of the January 31, 1957 mid-air collision between two airplanes above Pacoima, California. Maybe it would be someone who had become a pilot because of a visit to a country fair at the age of nine?

By the way, I don’t as a rule mention anything like this here, but here is a link to a GoFundMe campaign raising money to donate to every public library in Tennessee a copy of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust. Why Tennessee? That’s where a misguided school board just banned the book.