Tall Tales Told on Tours (PART I)
Paul Revere’s Ride
A COLLABORATIVE WORK BY ALIDA V. ORZECHOWSKI, BETH VAN DUZER, AND RICHARD SMITH OF CONCORD TOUR COMPANY
1 | The British are coming! The British are coming! Every American school-aged student knows these legendary words, but if you haven’t heard the story in a while, it goes a little something like this: On the night of April 18th, 1775, a politically radicalized silversmith with a fondness for taverns and tea parties hung two lanterns in a church tower in Boston and snuck out of the city. In a slow-motion version of an 18th c. emergency text alert, he then proceeded to thunder across the Massachusetts countryside on horseback, hollering his head off about an impending British invasion. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow certainly agreed it made a great story but it’s partly due to his enduring poetic license in The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere that many of us have come away with the mistaken impression that Mr. Revere was on a solo mission, and that he made it all the way to Concord (he wasn’t and he didn’t). 48
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More importantly, what Revere actually told people wasn’t that ‘The British are coming!’, but that the ‘regulars’ or ‘redcoats’ were out, which referred to the regular standing British Army. And while the urgency was the same, the message is actually quite different. English landowners, who made up the vast majority of colonists, considered themselves full British citizens so this unnecessary distinction would never have been used to describe the Royal Army. If today’s National Guard were deployed in Concord, no doubt we would shout lots of things but “The Americans are coming!” almost certainly wouldn’t be one of them. 2 | The Bloody Finger Speaking of King George’s Army, have you heard the tall tale of Major Pitcairn and his little finger? Well, after the British marched into Concord as per Mr. Revere’s accurate warning, Pitcairn engaged in a bit of a scuffle with a tavern owner - near what is now South Burial Ground - who was hiding
some cannon in his yard. This part we know is true, along with an account of the Major then calmly eating, drinking, and politely paying his bill at the tavern after having wrestled with its owner. But here’s where it gets murky. As the story is often told, Pitcairn left that tavern and proceeded to another (because searching for hidden munitions in rebel villages is incredibly thirsty work) and by the time he arrived at Wright’s Tavern, he was allegedly bleeding from the little finger injured in the aforementioned cannon melee. Pitcairn ordered a drink - brandy seems to be the most common libation given in the retelling, or sometimes rum but was too impatient to await a spoon with which to mix it. So, of course, he did what any of us would do, and swirled his bleeding finger around in his glass while declaring, “And so I hope to stir the damned Yankee blood ‘ere nightfall!” <insert evil laugh here> We love this story. Everyone loves this story. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to
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