OCTOBER 5:

 1885 Battleford Saskatchewan - Itka and Man Without Blood tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang for killing farm instructor Payne on the Mosquito reserve on March 29.

1871 St. Norbert, Manitoba - Louis Riel 1844-1885 secretly returns to Manitoba to help government put down Fenian Raid; publicly thanked by Lieutenant-Governor Adams Archibald.

October 5, 1813:  Near the Thames River in Canada, American forces led by General William Henry Harrison and British-Indian forces led by Henry Proctor and Tecumseh fought a decisive battle.  Harrison's forces were much stronger.  Setting up an ambush, the British and Indian forces took up different positions.  When Harrison's forces attacked the 700 British soldiers, they caved in almost immediately.  Tecumseh's Indians, fighting in a swamp, held out until Tecumseh was killed.  At the end of the fighting, 600 British were captured, 18 were killed. Thirty-three Indians were killed; none were captured.  The American forces lost 18 men as well.

October 5, 695:  Forces under Maya King Jasaw Chan K'awiil I (Sky Rain) defeat an army from Calakmul under Maya King Yich'aak K'ak' (Fiery Claw).
 

BACKGROUND:
 

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36391-2002Sep18.html
 

Stairs Lead to Change in Mayan Story Site's Hieroglyphics Offer New Details of Great War
 

By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, September 19, 2002; Page A03
 

Balaj Chan K'awiil was born to privilege and given a kingdom, but he sold out to the enemy, defeated his former benefactors in battle and celebrated the victory by sacrificing the brother who mentored him.

This Shakespeare-like tale can be found inscribed in newly discovered Mayan hieroglyphics in the limestone stairs of a 7th-century pyramid at Dos Pilas, tucked away in the Peten rain forest of central Guatemala.

It is one of the longest Mayan texts ever found, but archaeologists say it is even more important because it provides the strongest evidence yet of a century-long superpower war that may have spawned the greatest achievements of the Maya even as it sowed the seeds of their downfall.

"What we found contradicts what was previously said, including by me," Vanderbilt University's Arthur A. Demarest said yesterday in announcing the new findings. "You know you have an important discovery when you have to start rewriting and apologizing."

The Maya, together with the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca in South America, were one of the great pre-Columbian civilizations of the New World, dominating Meso-America for more than 1,000 years until they began a rapid and somewhat mysterious decline around 800 A.D.

For years, said Demarest, co-director of the project, archaeologists thought the war of Dos Pilas against the great city-state of Tikal was a regional power struggle between Balaj Chan K'awiil and his brother, the ruler of Tikal.

But the stairs tell a different story. As an ally of Tikal, Balaj Chan K'awiil had lost an earlier war to Calakmul, Tikal's great rival. Exiled for a year, he returned to the throne of Dos Pilas, but as a Calakmul puppet. He then embarked on a 12-year war against Tikal -- which he won.

According to the hieroglyphics on the stairs, "blood was pooled, and the skulls of the people of the central place of Tikal were piled up," said Guatemalan epigrapher Federico Fahsen, a Vanderbilt colleague of Demarest and co-director of the project. One of those killed was Balaj Chan K'awiil's brother.

But that didn't end it, Demarest noted. "Tikal came roaring back and crushed Calakmul in 695," he said. Yet the prolonged struggle had so debilitated both sides that neither was ever able to establish hegemony.

Anthropologist Wendy Ashmore, of the University of California at Riverside, said recent studies have even suggested that the Calakmul- Tikal war may have lasted for centuries, and the Dos Pilas text makes this view even more attractive.

"It was like the Peloponnesian War," Demarest said. "Nobody won." Instead, he said, part of the Maya drifted into a series of continual regional wars, while other city-states competed with one another to build the most elaborate structures they could.

"It was the apogee of the Mayan Classic period, but there was a price to pay in energy," Demarest said. "In 800, it all begins to unravel -- most of the cities in the southern lowlands are abandoned, and the warfare gets out of hand."

The site of Dos Pilas is about 150 miles north of Guatemala City on the Pasion River, in a region called the Petexbatun. Under excavation for years by a Demarest-led Vanderbilt team and the Guatemalan government, archaeologists had all but finished their work by the end of the 1990s.

The current study, led by Fahsen and funded by Vanderbilt, the National Geographic Society and the Guatemalan government, began in the fall of 2001 when guards at the site reported that trees uprooted during a hurricane had exposed carved hieroglyphic steps on the central staircase of Dos Pilas' main pyramid.

"I got a small group of people together, and we went down immediately," said Fahsen, whose findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. They found a six-step staircase "covered with dirt and vegetation," and lying between two other sets of four carved stairs.

The hieroglyphs on the sides had already been deciphered, but "it was like having fragments of a story," Fahsen said. "Knowing that the Maya liked symmetry," the team was soon able to unearth two additional steps on both of the side staircases, making a total of 18 inscribed steps.

It turned out that Fahsen had the whole story, and it took him about three months to decipher it, a process made easier in recent years with the aid of new dictionaries and hieroglyph catalogues. Dos Pilas Mayan is similar to the modern-day Cholon group of languages spoken by indigenous Guatemalans in the Peten.

The stairs describe the founding of Dos Pilas in 629 by Tikal and the installation there of Balaj Chan K'awiil, then only 4 years old, as king-to-be. Tikal is about 70 miles northeast of Dos Pilas. The ruler of Tikal was Balaj Chan K'awiil's brother.

There was no decent farmland at Dos Pilas, but the city commanded commercial traffic on the Pasion River, described by Demarest as " the Mayan superhighway."

"From the beginning Dos Pilas was a predatory state, founded by Tikal as a military base and put in a secure spot from which to attack other centers and stabilize the area," Demarest said.

As a young man, Balaj Chan K'awiil served Tikal well but made the mistake of going to war against Calakmul at the height of the superpower rivalry. Calakmul is in southern Mexico, about 70 miles north of Tikal.

Balaj Chan K'awiil lost the war, was captured, went into exile for a year, then returned as Calakmul's puppet king. The story of the stairs ends in 682 with Balaj Chan K'awiil, triumphant after destroying Tikal and executing his brother, and doing a victory dance.
 

© 2002 The Washington Post Company
 

*****
 

From http://www.mesoweb.com/reports/Dos_Pilas.html
 

Recently discovered additions to the hieroglyphic stairways of Dos Pilas, Guatemala, have added substantially to our understanding of Maya history, as reported today in a front-page article in the New York Times. The find was also discussed in the science section of today's Washington Post and in an online press release by National Geographic.

A complete report on the discovery by Guatemalan epigrapher Federico Fahsen was posted on the Web earlier this week.

Four hieroglyphic stairways were already known from Dos Pilas, a site near Lake Petexbatun and the vital Pasión River drainage in Guatemala. A tree uprooted by last year's hurricane is said to have revealed a new central section of Hieroglyphic Stairway 2. Shortly thereafter, archaeologists from Guatemala's Institute of Anthropology and History, acting on a hunch, uncovered further stairs from the east and west sides of the same monument.

The single most important fact revealed by the new inscriptions is that the king of Calakmul attacked Dos Pilas. This unexpected piece of information has a dramatic impact on our understanding of one of the most vivid chapters in the political history recorded by the ancient Maya.

It was already known from Hieroglyphic Stairway 4 and the extant portions of Hieroglyphic Stairway 2 that B'alaj Chan K'awiil of Dos Pilas was the vassal of the king of Calakmul and that both Calakmul and Dos Pilas had warred against Nuun Ujol Chaak, the king of Tikal. This together with the fact that rulers of Dos Pilas and Tikal identified themselves with the same "emblem glyph" led scholars to deduce that Dos Pilas was founded by a breakaway faction of Tikal nobility under the auspices of Calakmul during the turbulent era following Calakmul's defeat of Tikal in AD 562.

That Calakmul was intially antagonistic to Dos Pilas and that B'alaj Chan K'awiil only swore fealty to Tikal's enemy at some point after the founding of Dos Pilas materially affects our understanding of the circumstances surrounding that foundation. As Fahsen conjectures,

The possibility that the Dos Pilas polity was deliberately founded as a safe haven for the Tikal royal lineage since the defeat of 562 or because [of] the family need to secure a sourthern flank in the region is very strong since Tikal's interest in the southwest Petén was strong during that time (online report).

The picture remains clouded, however, as the new inscriptions also record the death of a Tikal lord in what may be a belligerent action by B'alaj Chan K'awiil against Tikal several years before the Calakmul attack on Dos Pilas.

The report in the New York Times correctly situates Dos Pilas in the context of the epic struggle for dominance between the "superpowers" Tikal and Calakmul and their subordinate city-states, a conceptual model first advanced by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube. The National Geographic press release is somewhat misleading in this regard.

Martin and Grube (2000:42-43, 56-7) have viewed Dos Pilas in the context of the struggle between Tikal and Calakmul, based on the previously known evidence. In general, their model is supported by hierarchical relationship expressions in the inscriptions. For instance, the ruler of a given site is described as being the yajaw (literally "his lord") of the ruler of another, superordinate site. This very expression describes B'alaj Chan K'awiil's relationship to the king of Calakmul on Dos Pilas Hieroglyphic Stairway 4, as was known long before the discovery of the latest inscriptions.