Good morning, Whitewater.
Tuesday’s spring primary in Whitewater isn’t really in the spring, but it is likely to take place on a relatively mild day of thirty-four degrees and cloudy skies. Sunrise is 6:49 and sunset 5:27, for 10h 38m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Fire and Rescue Task Force meets tonight at 7 PM.
On this day in 1923, Egyptologist Howard Carter formally enters Tutankhamun’s Tomb:
On 4 November 1922, Howard Carter’s excavation group found steps that Carter hoped led to Tutankhamun‘s tomb (subsequently designated KV62) (the tomb that would be considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings).
He wired Lord Carnarvon to come, and on 26 November 1922, with Carnarvon, Carnarvon’s daughter and others in attendance, Carter made the “tiny breach in the top left hand corner” of the doorway (with a chisel his grandmother had given him for his 17th birthday.) He was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He did not yet know whether it was “a tomb or merely a cache”, but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. When Carnarvon asked “Can you see anything?”, Carter replied with the famous words: “Yes, wonderful things!”[10]
The next several months were spent cataloging the contents of the antechamber under the “often stressful” supervision of Pierre Lacau, director general of theDepartment of Antiquities of Egypt.[11] On 16 February 1923, Carter opened the sealed doorway, and found that it did indeed lead to a burial chamber, and he got his first glimpse of the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. All of these discoveries were eagerly covered by the world’s press, but most of their representatives were kept in their hotels; only H. V. Morton was allowed on the scene, and his vivid descriptions helped to cement Carter’s reputation with the British public.
Carter’s own notes and photographic evidence indicate that he, Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn Herbert entered the burial chamber shortly after the tomb’s discovery and before the official opening.[12]
On this day in 1862, Gen. Grant is victorious at the Battle of Fort Donelson:
The Battle of Fort Donelson was fought from February 11 to 16, 1862, in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. The Union capture of the Confederate fort near the Tennessee–Kentucky border opened the Cumberland River, an important avenue for the invasion of the South. The Union’s success also elevated Brig. Gen.Ulysses S. Grant from an obscure and largely unproven leader to the rank of major general, and earned him the nickname of “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
The battle followed the Union capture of Fort Henry on February 6. Grant moved his army 12 miles (19 km) overland to Fort Donelson on February 12 and 13 and conducted several small probing attacks. (Although the name was not yet in use, the troops serving under Grant were the nucleus of the Union’s Army of the Tennessee.[4]) On February 14, Union gunboats under Flag OfficerAndrew H. Foote attempted to reduce the fort with gunfire, but were forced to withdraw after sustaining heavy damage from Fort Donelson’s water batteries.
On February 15, with the fort surrounded, the Confederates, commanded by Brig. Gen. John B. Floyd, launched a surprise attack against Grant’s army in an attempt to open an escape route to Nashville, Tennessee. Grant, who was away from the battlefield at the start of the attack, arrived to rally his men and counterattack. Despite achieving partial success and opening the way for a retreat, Floyd lost his nerve and ordered his men back to the fort. The following morning, Floyd and his second-in-command, Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, relinquished command to Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner(later Governor of Kentucky), who agreed to accept Grant’s terms of unconditional surrender.
Today’s Puzzle from JigZone is a butterfly: