Scottish Clan & Tartan Information Center

06/15/2026

This Day in History:

June 14, 1777 - John Adams introduced a resolution before Congress mandating a United States flag, stating, "...that the flag of the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation." This anniversary is celebrated each year in the U.S. as Flag Day.

06/15/2026

Scotland has its own order of chivalry — older, stranger, and far less known than England's equivalents.

The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle is Scotland's highest order of knighthood, with origins traditionally traced back centuries, though formally established in its modern form in 1687 by James VII. Membership is strictly limited — just sixteen knights and ladies at any time, personally chosen by the monarch, separate entirely from any government recommendation.

The order's chapel sits within St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, a small and exquisitely carved space built specifically for its ceremonies. The thistle itself — Scotland's national flower, defiant and impossible to ignore — could not be a more fitting symbol.

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Death Valley Railroad Caboose No. 100 stands as a survivor of one of the desert’s most specialized rail lines, built in 1914 to serve the borax mines above Death Valley. Constructed in July 1915 by the Seattle Car & Foundry Company, this wooden cupola caboose was the only caboose the short-line railroad ever owned. For nearly two decades, it carried conductors, tools, and weary crews along the steep, winding 20-mile run between the mines at Ryan and the connection at Death Valley Junction—replacing the legendary 20-Mule Teams with steam and steel.

In the harsh Mojave heat, Caboose 100 was both a rolling office and a mobile shelter at the end of the world. When the narrow-gauge railroad shut down in 1931, the lone caboose avoided the scrap heap and was sold to the United States Potash Railroad to haul equipment and crews to mines in New Mexico. Decades after its retirement, the historic wooden body of Caboose No. 100 still endures, preserved on the property of the old potash refinery site near Loving, New Mexico, as a rare surviving artifact of Death Valley’s early industrial history.

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🔥 Henry VIII called it persuasion. The Scots called it the Rough Wooing — a name that carries in its dark irony the full contempt of a nation for the English king who burned their abbeys and slaughtered their people in an attempt to force a marriage alliance that Scotland rejected with a ferocity that neither Henry nor his son Edward VI ever quite understood.

The Rough Wooing was a series of English military campaigns between 1544 and 1550 specifically designed to coerce Scotland into a marriage treaty between the infant Mary Queen of Scots and the future Edward VI, thereby uniting the two kingdoms under English dominance. When diplomacy failed, Henry ordered military action of deliberate and systematic destructiveness — not conquest, which would have required occupation and administration, but punishment, which only required destruction.

The Earl of Hertford's campaign of May 1544 burned Edinburgh, Holyroodhouse, and seven monasteries including Melrose, Kelso, Dryburgh, and Jedburgh — four of the great medieval abbeys of the Scottish Borders, each one a centre of centuries of learning, art, and community identity, reduced to roofless shells in a matter of days. Hertford's explicit instructions from Henry were to put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town so ruined and defaced that it may be a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lighted upon it for their falsehood and disloyalty.

Scotland refused to yield. Mary was sent to France for safety, eventually married the French Dauphin, and the entire project of English coercion failed. The burned abbeys stand to this day — roofless, beautiful, more visited now than they would have been if Hertford had never come. Melrose rose window, its tracery still visible against the Eildon Hills sky, survived the burning because stone does not burn.

Henry got nothing. Scotland got its ruins. And the ruins turned out to be magnificent.

06/14/2026

💔 He wrote it in twenty minutes. He threw it away. A fellow officer retrieved it from where it had fallen and submitted it for publication. In Flanders Fields was published in Punch magazine in December 1915 and became, within months, the most widely read poem of the First World War — and the image of red poppies among the graves that it fixed permanently in the world's imagination has never faded.

John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario in 1872 to Scottish parents — his father David McCrae had emigrated from Scotland, and the Presbyterian faith, the work ethic, and the cultural identity of his Scottish ancestry were formative presences in his upbringing. He studied medicine at the University of Toronto, served as an artillery officer in the Boer War, became a pathologist and physician of distinguished reputation, and rejoined the military in 1914 as a medical officer attached to the First Brigade Canadian Field Artillery.

At the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, his unit held positions near a burial ground that was rapidly filling with the Canadian dead of the battle — and among them was Alexis Helmer, McCrae's closest friend, killed by a shell burst on the 2nd of May. McCrae performed the burial service himself because no chaplain was available. The following day, sitting on the step of a forward observation post looking out at the graves and the poppies that had been blooming in the disturbed earth of the Ypres Salient since the first weeks of the war, he wrote the poem.

The poem's final stanza issues a charge to the living — take up our quarrel with the foe — that has been controversial since it was first read. McCrae was a doctor who had been living inside industrial-scale death for months. He meant exactly what he wrote.

He died of pneumonia and meningitis in January 1918, not yet seeing the war's end. He is buried in Wimereux, France. The poppies still bloom in Flanders.

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How the flag that flew proudly over Fort McHenry in September 1814 made its way to the Smithsonian

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Victoria Street in Edinburgh's Old Town, Scotland

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Braemar Castle - Scotland

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Every nation chooses its symbol carefully. England chose the rose. France chose the fleur-de-lis. Ireland chose the shamrock.

Scotland chose a w**d with spines sharp enough to draw blood. And that tells you everything you need to know about Scotland.

The thistle has been Scotland's national emblem since at least the 13th century, and the legend behind it is exactly the kind of story Scotland deserves. A Viking army — most likely Norse invaders — was creeping through the darkness toward a sleeping Scottish camp, moving silently to launch a surprise attack. To move faster and quieter, they had removed their boots.

One of them stepped barefoot onto a thistle.

His cry of pain woke the Scots. The attack failed. Scotland was saved — by a w**d.

Whether the story is literally true matters less than what it means. The thistle is not beautiful in the conventional sense. It doesn't ask to be admired. It simply stands its ground, armed and unbothered, and makes very clear that getting too close will cost you something.

'Nemo me impune lacessit'.

No one provokes me with impunity.

The motto of the Order of the Thistle — and perhaps the oldest truth about the Scottish character.