Sydney Sweeney has good genes. Those five words have recently touched off a hurricane of controversy amidst the cerulean-haired gender fluids who stand ever ready to be cataclysmically offended by pretty much anything. Full disclosure–as I am happily married and she is younger than all three of my kids, my interest in this woman is, tragically, more paternal than hormonal.
This ad campaign was brilliant. I read that it generated $300 million for American Eagle jeans in a day.
Ms Sweeney stands five feet three and, admittedly, has some exceptionally laudable attributes. Although such attributes can also be had for around nine grand these days, presuming you can find the right plastic surgeon, Google claims hers are not silicone. As such, I suppose there is truth in advertising in this case. Sydney does indeed have good genes.
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Genetics
She’s hardly alone in that regard. LeBron James, Ben Carson, and Serena Williams all emerged from the womb with some mighty fine raw material as well. It is simply that Syd was blessed/cursed with pale skin and blue eyes. That automatically makes her a Left-wing dog whistle. The fact that she is a registered Republican and has made a video shooting with Taran Butler is just kerosene on that campfire. Here’s the link.
Life’s not fair. Never has been, never will be. To believe otherwise is magical thinking. LeBron, Ben, and Serena would quite literally mop the floor with me in their respective fields. However, while some folks do indeed have a genetic leg up on the rest of us, there are also some others who seem to enter the world simply cursed.
Blood and Water
Just what is it about brothers, anyway? I have two myself. We fought like wildcats when we were kids. However, nowadays, Lord help you if you raise a finger against one of them and I hear about it. Humans are weird like that.
It’s not just us. Polar bears, gorillas, tigers, and house cats…all mammalian siblings fight just to pass the time. That is likely some byproduct of the fallen nature of the universe. And then there were John and Charles Ruggles.
The Problem
Some people just come from the factory with broken genes. Prisons are filled with such folks. In the United States today, 0.7% of the American population is behind bars. That’s nearly two million souls or roughly one in every 140 adults. Ours is the highest rate of incarceration on Planet Earth. Though we have 4.2% of the world’s population, we play host to 20% of the world’s prisoners. That rate has increased by 500% since the 1970s. Why is that exactly?
Lots of really smart people have devoted their lives to studying that thorny problem. I’m not one of them. However, I did serve my time in an urban emergency room where I met some of the most fascinating criminals. The common denominator was usually just poor impulse control.
The capacity to control one’s emotions is the single greatest predictor of success in life. To use a Star Trek analogy, you want to be Spock, not Kirk. Our jails are not filled to bursting with psychopaths. There are a few, and they can be spectacular to behold. However, your typical inmate just can’t figure out when to walk away. Sprinkle that with a little unfiltered greed, and you have the recipe for something truly horrible. The Ruggles brothers were right out of central casting in that regard.
The Ruggles
The two Ruggles boys lived in the latter part of the 19th century. History has not been kind to the elder John Ruggles. Wikipedia describes him as an ex-convict and sex addict. I have no idea the basis for that second allegation. The details have been lost to time. However, I’d put my money on that aforementioned lack of impulse control.
People often died young and hard back then. John Ruggles lost his wife at a relatively early age and was never quite right afterwards. He passed his daughter off to relatives and struck out for the Sierra Nevada Mountains to take up subsistence living. After a time, his younger brother Charles began to fret about him. He then headed into the Great Unknown with the stated mission of rescuing his older brother John.
After a while spent living off the land, John Ruggles began longing for something a bit more civilized. Nice clothes and amenities require money, and he didn’t have any. When faced with such a quandary, many men would seek out gainful employment. However, that’s not the way John Ruggles rolled. Ruggles teamed up with a proper character named Arizona Pete and began robbing stage coaches. Charles finally caught up with him while he was amid this lucrative new profession.
The Fallen Nature of Man
Nobody knows what that first conversation was like. Perhaps Charles entreated his brother to renounce his evil ways and come back to help him teach Sunday School. However, it’s always easier to make things dirty than to clean them up.
This is indeed a timeless truism. You add a cup full of wine to a vat full of sewage, and you get sewage. You add a cup full of sewage to a vat full of wine, and you also get sewage. In the case of John and Charles Ruggles, the wayward brother soon talked his sibling into joining him on his criminal forays. On 10 May 1892, they robbed the Weaverville Stage. They got away clean but didn’t get much. They needed a bigger score.
The Ruggles Brothers Hit Again
Two days after the first robbery that netted them about nothing, the two brothers set an ambush at the top of a hill some five miles north of Redding, California. I couldn’t find any reference to Arizona Pete. I guess he had reformed, resigned, been killed, or something similar.
By now, the Ruggles boys had refined their tactics. The location they had chosen ensured that the horses pulling the stage would be tired. At first, everything went according to plan.
John stepped out in front of the stage and forced the driver, a man named Johnny Boyce, to stop and throw down the strong box at gunpoint. However, this stage company was not run by imbeciles. They had been robbed before. As Charles approached the side of the coach, a guard inside named Amos Montgomery caught him solidly in the face and neck with a hefty charge of buckshot. Curiously, Amos Montgomery went by the nickname “Buck.” That’s when everything went all pear-shaped.
Chaos
This resulted in a most frenetic exchange of gunfire. A passenger named George Suhr was wounded alongside Johnny Boyce and Buck Montgomery. Montgomery crawled out of the stage only to have the elder Ruggles shoot him through the back and kill him. Boyce, hurt though he was, spurred on his team and got the stage out of the kill zone. John purportedly bid his grievously wounded brother Charles a tearful farewell and split with the cash.
Once Boyce got his stage into town, the local law formed a posse and made haste for the scene of the crime. There, they found Charles all bloody and gross but not as bad off as originally feared. He was remanded to the Redding jail, where he gradually recovered from his wounds.
Wells Fargo detective John Thacker put the screws to the wounded criminal, who promptly gave up his brother. This is not unreasonable considering the elder sibling had essentially run off with the money and left him to die. Wells Fargo put a $1,100 bounty on his head.
John had gone to lay low with an aunt who turned him in when she heard the details of the crime. He was arrested without incident while eating in a restaurant in Woodland, California. In short order, John was extradited to Redding, where he was thrilled to discover that his brother was unexpectedly still above ground.
Women are Just Freaking Crazy
The Ruggles kids were fine-looking lads. A local official was quoted as having said, “While in jail, the handsome brothers were fed and pampered by local ladies who brought flower bouquets, cakes, fruits, and even offers of marriage…” After a lifetime’s worth of effort, I swear I will never comprehend the human female.
All this was more than the local guys could stand. The Ruggles brothers were given a trial date of 28 July 1892. However, four days prior, somewhere between 40 and 75 armed, masked vigilantes assaulted the jail, blew open the safe containing the keys with explosives, and dragged the two criminals outside. John offered up the location of the loot in exchange for his brother’s life, but the crowd was not in a negotiating mood. The mob hanged them both from a derrick on the corner of Shasta Street. Nobody was prosecuted for the killings.
That same local official said, “The recent sentimental attitude of a number of women toward the prisoners as well as the line of defense adopted by their counsel, who has been evidently endeavoring to implicate Messenger [Amos “Buck”] Montgomery as a party to the crime, had been denounced by a number of persons in the county and it is believed the lynching was due to those causes.”
Denouement
The allegations of complicity on the part of Buck Montgomery were baseless. The Ruggles’ take from the robbery was around $5,000 in gold, which was never recovered. It’s still out there somewhere. John claimed to have hidden the stash on the bottom of nearby Middle Creek with some sort of bobber on top to mark its location. I’m certain folks have since gone looking.
The locals were fairly pleased with the outcome. The neighborhood newspaper said, “It was a disagreeable job, but under the circumstances appeared to be necessary for the public good and is an example to the courts.” At the time of their violent deaths, Charles was 22 and John 33. With the crystalline clarity of hindsight, I suppose the Ruggles brothers just had bad genes.
