Hello I recently aquired a saluting cannon that supposidly saluted the troops in 1898 from Market Street from a second story window. 250 times, or rounds of blank salutes,in San Francisco. Would there be any info. out there to verify that. Perhaps newspaper article, Does anybody know exactly when The "troops came back" in town at a parade or something? Thanks alot

-- Robert Albrecht (debraupham@comcast.net), January 12, 2005

Answers

Your cannon might not have saluted the troops, but rather the war.

'Remember the Maine'. [u]250[/u] sailors perished aboard the 'Maine' when it blew up in Havana Harbor in Feb 1898. "Yellow" Journalism (developed by publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst) whipped the public into a war feeding frenzy that culminated on a symbolic patrotic day, 12 April 98. The public was informed that 27 years before, to the day, Fort Sumter had been bombarded and the American Civil War began. The following was read in newspapers across the nation:

"How patriotic Americans would like to hear the [u]cannon's[/u] reverberation on this 12th of April to avenge the slaughter of the boys in blue on board the Maine in Havana's harbor two months ago."

http:// www.humboldt.edu/~jcb10/spanwar.shtml

-- strange (stranger@yahoo.com), January 12, 2005.