13 May

1607 Jamestown (VA), History: English colonists landed and set up camp. It succeeded where the Lost Colony of Roanoke of 1585 failed.

1792 Tasmania, Science: There occurred the first confirmed sighting of a Tasmania Tiger. Earlier in 1642 a crewman with Dutchman Abel Tasman had found a footprint which he likened to that of tiger. In 1792 French naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière with Admiral d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition to New Holland saw one and sketched it from memory. The last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. Zoologist say the dingo killed off the Tigers on the mainland of Australia, but as the Bass Strait came to separate Tasmania from the continent, those tigers there survived.

1908 Washington DC, Politics: President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the opening address entitled “Conservation as a National Duty” at the outset of a three-day meeting at the Governors’ Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. Roosevelt designated 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations, four national game preserves, five national parks, and 18 national monuments because ‘nature is not inexhaustible.’ I have read a biography of this remarkable individual. We will not see his like again.

1923 Red Cloud, Literature: Willa Cather’s novel ‘One of Ours’ was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literature much to chagrin of ambitious rivals like Ernest Hemingway. Below is the home where her imagination flowered, and to which she often returned.

1940 London, Politics: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ said the new Prime Minister in his first speech in the House of Commons. That was Winston Churchill sending the English language into battle, as one of his severest critics grudgingly said.