Holy Shit, the Frank Slide!

The town of Frank in Alberta, Canada was founded in 1901 as part of the ever-growing network of railroad towns in the Pacific Northwest. The Canadian Pacific Railway, coupled with a nearby coal mine, made it a lucrative option for anyone who wanted to have...you know...work. And food. Those things were pretty important back then, as they are today.

Although this was always an option. (I went pretty obscure on that joke)

This particular frontier town was located in the shadow of Turtle Mountain. I say was not only because the town was eventually moved, but also because so did the goddamn mountain. Very quickly, in fact. In less than two minutes in 1903, more than 90 million tons of the mountain moved...right on top of poor Frank. The event is known as the Frank Slide, and it was one of the costliest and deadliest landslides in recorded history.

In the months leading up to the Slide, coal miners reported seeing unusual fissures in the mines. The limestone inside the mountain was cracked, and the fissures allowed water through to further erode the rock, which led to a dangerously top-heavy mountain. Stir in a bunch of mining activities and you've got yourself a disaster brewing. It got to the point where the coal was practically mining itself when the mountain finally collapsed.

Everyone agreed that it kind of took some of the reward out of the whole process

Somewhere around 600 people lived in Frank at the time of the landslide, and of them somewhere between 70 and 90 were killed. We don't know for sure, because only 18 bodies were ever found, and 6 of those were discovered years later by a crew building a road in what was probably the most terrifying manual labor they would ever perform. The actual number is probably a lot higher - there were about 50 people camping near the base of the mountain hoping to find work in the mines who weren't listed among the population of the town.

In the aftermath of the Slide, Sid Choquette got to thinking. Being a brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he had a pretty good idea of the train schedule. Checking his pocket watch and twirling his handlebar moustache worriedly (I assume), he realized that the Spokane Flyer a passenger train goddamn full of people, was overdue to arrive and had no way of knowing what had happened in Frank. The rails that were supposed to speed it along were, at this point, hindered by a two mile long pile of rubble. This is what can be referred to in layman's terms as really shitty conditions for a train ride.

The only worse conditions would be "anywhere near Sabin."

So, ignoring the rubble and choking cloud of dust, Choquette ran over a mile without stopping and got the message to the approaching at literally the last possible second. His actions saved the lives of everyone on board the train, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad was so grateful they gave him...a kindly worded letter. And $25.

CANADIAN.

You can see the results of the Frank Slide to this day:

That's mountain guts. That's what you're looking at. The guts of a mountain.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Phineas Gage!

Phineas Gage had an especially rough day at work. It was 1848 and he was a foreman on a railway construction project in Vermont. There was a big outcropping of rock in the way, so naturally Phineas decided to blow it to hell with blasting powder. It's possible that he neglected to add sand to his magic explosion powder, and as a result his day worsened significantly.

As he was packing the explosives into place with a tamping iron, the iron made a spark. If you've ever been around gunpowder and sparks, you can probably guess what the result was. It was an explosion. It drove the iron, with terrific force, back out of the hole and into Phineas Gage's face, where it created a brand new hole of its own.

It was a way less meticulously dug hole, too.

The effect of this (what surgical journals would later refer to as, I shit you not) abrupt and intrusive visitor was to literally destroy both his left eye and his left frontal lobe. Of his brain. The thing that tells the rest of your body what to do all the time. In most instances, this sort of injury is accompanied by almost instantaneous death. Not for Phineas Gage, though. He survived and even sat up on his own after a few minutes.

In fact, while the injury ultimately did lead to his death, it would take about another twelve years to get around to it. In that time, Phineas Gage became a marvel of the psychological and neurological science communities. When the tamping iron took out a chunk of his brain, it appeared to have taken most of his "how to not be an asshole" knowledge with it, so naturally Gage turned into kind of an asshole for a while.

Like this but smaller and less feline.

Which was a huge deal. It seemed to confirm suspicions that our actions are, in a way, preordained by the contents of our brains. This played right into the hands of phrenologists, a large group of charlatans who managed to convince much of the scientific community that our personality types are dictated largely by where our heads are bumpiest. The fact that Gage had a dramatic swing in his behavior after part of his brain was destroyed was pretty compelling.

Part of the "White People are Just the Greatest" branch of pseudo-science

However, a recently discovered report seems to indicate that Phineas Gage got back to his old self by the time he died of a massive seizure in 1860. Either he re-learned the social conventions that had been literally blown out the top of his head, or there was a fundamental problem with the model of phrenology. Which there obviously was, since it's been thoroughly debunked anyway.

Maybe it was just an enormous amount of stress that had caused the change. I mean, he had suffered quite a bit of trauma. That much trauma is bound to cause some disorder in his life involving stress.

HEY WAIT A SECOND WE HAVE A NAME FOR THAT KIND OF THING!

Holy shit.