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TIL Travelers on the Oregon and Mormon Trails would stop at the Little Sandy Creek in Wyoming. Depending on the season and route, this was the last water for almost 40 miles. So many left without enough water for animals that the trail became strewn with abandoned wagons, carcasses and gravesites.

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epn74 TIL in 2006, a mother and son were convicted of trying to extort money from Cracker Barrel by claiming they found a dead mouse in her soup. Charges were filed after a necropsy showed the mouse had no soup in its lungs and had not been cooked, signs that it was dropped into the soup after its death.
9YpPX TIL the 'dementia village' in the Netherlands is a nursing home disguised to look like the outside world
ZpRDo TIL The 2001 film The Cat’s Meow, starring Kirsten Dunst, dramatizes the scandalous 1924 death of film mogul Thomas Ince on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. With Charlie Chaplin allegedly flirting with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies, many believe Hearst meant to shoot Chaplin—but hit Ince instead.
9WeD TIL that the FBI assigned a team to Sacha Baron Cohen during the filming of Borat due to numerous reports of a “Middle eastern man traveling the Midwest in an ice cream truck.”
neEe7 TIL 11,000 women were breaking Nazi codes in America during WWII. Among them was Elizebeth Friedman who cracked at least 3 Enigma machines and dozens of different radio circuits to decipher more than 4,000 Nazi messages saving millions of lives. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for it.