Montana Vigilantes

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Bannack, Montana (2005)

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The men who hired Henry Plummer as sheriff of Bannack, Montana, didn't know he was running the road agents they'd hired him to stop. When they figured it out, they hanged him on his own gallows in January 1864.

Bokassa fed political prisoners to his private crocodiles and lions, then had himself crowned emperor in a ceremony copying Napoleon's — in a country where per-capita income was under $400 a year.

El Paso Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire shot three men dead within eleven seconds of a gunfight starting, accidentally killing an innocent bystander in the same burst. He also killed the wrong man's dog on a separate occasion, triggering a feud.

El Cid's corpse was strapped upright on his horse Babieca and sent into battle after his death — and the Almoravid army reportedly broke and fled from a dead man.

The greatest tactical mind of his era — a man who beat Rome repeatedly — was killed by a clay roof tile hurled by an anonymous old woman from a balcony in Argos. He was 46.

The swordfish heats its own eyes and brain to 28°C above the surrounding ocean, running a biological furnace to keep vision razor-sharp at depth and speed. It is a warm-eyed predator in a cold, dark sea.

When Sasanian forces breached Dura-Europos's walls around 256 CE, they buried the city in rubble — accidentally preserving inside the walls a synagogue, a Mithraeum, and the world's oldest surviving Christian church murals.

Alfred Nobel read his own obituary—'merchant of death'—while still alive, then spent his fortune engineering the Peace Prize to rewrite his legacy. The man who perfected mass killing also endowed its antidote.

Polish salt miners 64 meters underground carved a Gothic cathedral — vaulted ceilings, chandeliers, bas-relief altarpieces — entirely from salt over 700 years. Mass is still held there; the air tastes of the walls.