5 March—Today is the 256^th anniversary of the Incident on King Street, known stateside, thanks to Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and other seditionists, as the Boston Massacre. (That was in 1770, to save you the trouble of switching smartphone screens.) In the dastardly skirmish, nine soldiers in the service of HM George III shot and killed five civilian subjects of the selfsame monarch (like it or not) and wounded several others, all of whom were among the crowd of 300 to 400 discontented colonials, known stateside as revolutionary American colonists and Patriots, who were verbally and physically harassing the soldiers just doing their job.

British troops, it seems, had been deployed to Massachusetts (then the Province of Massachusetts Bay) two years earlier to support Crown bureaucrats and functionaries in enforcing unpopular legislation enacted by Parliament back in Blighty. Sounds kind of like the ICE-related skirmishes, what with government thugs enforcing unpopular legislation and all, doesn’t it? But don’t even think of going there.

Five people died as a direct result of the bloody incident, three on the spot—Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and James Caldwell—and two from their wounds—17-year-old Samuel Maverick the next morning, and Patrick Carr a fortnight later.

If Crispus Attucks rings a bell, it’s because he’s traditionally regarded as the first casualty of the Revolutionary War. And it’s also because he was a Framingham-born black Wampanoag Indian (sorry, Native American), escaped (probably) or freed (just possibly) slave who worked as a sailor and stevedore. He often went by the alias of Michael Johnson for a pretty obvious reason.

Don’t even think of going back to Donald Trump’s unforgettable and delightful congressional testimony back in 1993 before a subcommittee on Indian—rather, Native American—gaming—i.e., genteel gambling—regulation. He commented—not inaccurately, as it happens—on the Mashantucket Pequots, who had recently opened their ludicrous Foxwoods casino that was siphoning suckers away from his own failing Atlantic City casinos: “They don’t look like Indians to me. They don’t look like Indians to Indians.”

That’s because the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation doesn’t require a specific minimum percentage of tribal blood for membership and all the perks that go with it, but instead requires proof of direct lineal descent from one of 11 ancestors listed on the 1900 or 1910 U.S. censuses. Even Donald Trump can be right.

Anyway, Paul Revere had young Henry Pelham engrave a depiction of what Pelham called “The Fruits of Arbitrary power, Or the Bloody Massacre.” But slick Revere beat the kid to the market with his own popular and profitable (but none the less patriotic, to be sure) iteration, “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King-Street Boston on March 5th, 1770.”

No surprise that Henry wasn’t too happy:

When I heard that you was cutting a plate of the late Murder, I thought it was impossible, as I knew you was not capable of doing it unless you copied it from mine and as I thought I had entrusted it in the hands of a person who had more regard to the dictates of Honour and Justice than to take the undue advantage you have done of the confidence and Trust I reposed in you. But I find I was mistaken. . . . If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act, the World will not be so. However, I leave you to reflect upon and consider of one of the most dishonorable Actions you could well be guilty of.

The bastard. And Revere’s ride was really a flop. So here are Pelham’s original and Revere’s best-selling iteration, Pelham’s on top. Many of Revere’s engravings, like this one, were hand-colored at the time by Christian Remick: