On this day in 1912, a riot broke out in Grabow, Louisiana when gunfire was exchanged between organizing lumber workers and private gunmen hired by the Galloway Lumber Company, just one event in the Louisiana-Texas Lumber War. The clash left three union workers and one company gunman dead, wounding an estimated fifty more.
The event took place in the context of workers in the sawmill town of Grabow joining the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (shown), a branch of the Lumber Workers Industrial Union (LWIU), itself affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
On July 7th, 1912, the union workers held a series of rallies at several different company towns, including Bon Ami and Carson, alongside Grabow.
The group that went to Grabow, around 200 people, spontaneously decided to hold a rally with several speeches - labor leader Arthur L. Emerson spoke on top of a wagon to roughly 25 non-union men, plus the additional union men who had come with him.
Shots began between these workers and a group of four others, including Galloway Lumber owner John Galloway, in the local mill office, all of whom had later been found to be drinking before the incident. It is not known for certain which group fired first. Three union men were killed alongside one member of the private company security force. Approximately 50 more were wounded.
Over the next few days, more than more than 60 workers were taken into custody by police. Although the mill owner himself was arrested, he was released without charges soon afterward. Sixty-five of the timber workers' group were brought up on charges ranging from inciting a riot to murder.
The IWW worked to aid the incarcerated workers, with "Big Bill" Haywood fundraising for their legal fund. The trial lasted until November 8th, and its jury returned a not guilty verdict for all of the union men. All of those arrested were set free.
Although they had limited success in Louisiana, the LWIU successfully organized later, winning an eight-hour day and vastly improved working conditions in the Pacific Northwest after a 1917 strike. Today, there is a historical marker at the site of the riot, located on what is now the property of DeRidder Airport, Louisiana.
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IM BUGGING OUT
WTF IS THIS KANJI????
Here's me trying to copy paste it on here:
Just tried three different Japanese and one Traditional Chinese dictionary with no success. Must be something very obscure.
Might help to know where you found this, if possible. The character you pasted is in Unicode's Private Use Area, so it's not a standard character, and that's why it's not rendering properly on Hexbear—no standard font is going to have a corresponding glyph to represent it. It could be an archaic form or even a neologism, but I'm by no means an expert in either PUA usage nor hanzi/kanji so I'm just spitballing here.
It was in a text message from a Japanese coworker. The text was in English, but this character was randomly at the end of the last text. Maybe it was a typo. It's also not a character in their name.
I found it!!
Okay, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just going to the Wiktionary page for 仙 and seeing that your mystery character is listed as a derived character, but that's hindsight speaking.
I thought about it a bit, and I realized that if you were able to see it rendered, there's no way it was actually a PUA character, so that was a red herring. After unsuccessfully searching in a few online dictionaries, it dawned on me that I could just look at the master list of Unicode characters. Mind you, there are nearly ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND CJK characters in Unicode, so I couldn't exactly skim over them. Luckily, on the Unihan Database Lookup page they provide a helpful radical search tool. I rarely search by radicals, so I was a bit confused when I clicked on 3-stroke radicals and couldn't find the water one used in the character, 氵—turns out that abbreviated radicals are still categorized with the stroke count of the original radical, which in this case is 4 strokes for 水. Once I figured that out, though, all I had to was select the radical, set the minimum and maximum additional strokes to 5 (since that's how many strokes are in the non-radical component, 仙), and then scan through the ~200 characters in the results. And...bingo!
𣳈
I'm gonna be real—I still don't really know what this character is. From this page and this page I was able to learn that it's part of the Hong Kong Character Supplementary Set (and this character in particular is part of the Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B), and some pages only gave a Cantonese reading for it, so if I had to guess, it's probably part of a place name or used in personal names in Hong Kong. Seems to show up a lot as part of the two-character compound (?) 潮𣳈, but it's hard for me to understand more than that not speaking a lick of Chinese.
Also...none of this explains how or why a Japanese person would randomly produce this character with a standard Japanese IME. Still wish I could solve that mystery.
Ok so this is going to be really disappointing, but I asked my coworker about it and they don't know the Kanji either. What they actually sent was an thumbs-up emoji and it somehow got converted to that kanji in my text app. Extremely confusing
I actually did consider an encoding/decoding error as a possibility! I remember like 10 years ago my phone had a bug where all my text messages were showing up as garbled Chinese characters. Not sure why that particular emoji would become this random character, though. I doubt you're as interested in this as I am, but if you wanted to investigate a bit more you could download another text messaging app (e.g. QUIK SMS on Android) and see if it renders the text message any differently.
I'm not disappointed—I love going down these little research rabbit holes! I learned a few new facts and discovered some useful resources that I can employ in the future, so it was well worth the detour.
water person mountain
hope this helps