On May 31 the customers at Jasper Dobson’s speakeasy in Kiowa, Kansas, were startled to see a determined, grim-faced middle-aged woman stride through the doors. She wore the sedate outfit of a church deaconess, but Carry Nation’s attire was the only thing demure about her. With a six-foot, 175-pound frame strengthened by years of physical labor running a Texas rooming house, Nation hurled bricks and rocks in all directions to destroy the saloon’s bottles, glassware, and furnishings. She wrecked two more “joints” (as speakeasies were called) that day, and officials soon closed the rest of the dozen saloons in Kiowa, a town of eight hundred.

Nation had begun her antisaloon campaign in 1899 in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. She and her second husband, a ne’er-do-well named David Nation, had recently moved there after seven years of homesteading in the Oklahoma Territory. Frustrated at the persistence of saloons in a state that had outlawed liquor in 1880, the devout Nation stood in the doorway of a bar-room with another woman and sang hymns until the police were shamed into closing it. Within six months, according to Nation’s memoirs, she and her fellow choristers had succeeded in shutting down all seven of the town’s joints.

Having cleaned up Medicine Lodge and Kiowa (at least temporarily), Nation continued her rampage throughout Kansas and neighboring states, leaving a trail of devastation that earned her the nickname Cyclone Carry. Along the way she refined her methods of destruction. In Wichita, two days after Christmas, she supplemented the rocks and bricks with a stout iron rod. Then in Topeka the following month Nation first wielded the weapon that became her trademark, the hatchet. By the spring of 1901 she had addressed the Kansas legislature, given the governor a stern lecture, and ignited a wave of copycat violence that saw more than a hundred joints destroyed in fifty Kansas towns.

Cyclone Carry had good reason to hate liquor, for it had ruined her first marriage and killed the only man she ever loved. In 1865 the eighteen-year-old Carry had caught the eye of Dr. Charles Gloyd, a handsome boarder in her house. Her parents, knowing Gloyd’s weakness for liquor, tried to discourage their unworldly daughter, but their efforts worked no better than parental interference usually does in such cases. The two were married in 1867, and Carry soon got pregnant, but before the baby was born, she fled her drunken husband’s house. Gloyd died before little Charlien saw her first birthday.

In her role as a “direct-action temperance advocate” (as one biographer calls her), Nation relied on God to direct her and on chivalry to protect her. So strong was the taboo against a man’s hitting a woman that once, when Nation received a gentle slap from a railroad passenger whose cigar she had yanked from his mouth (another Nation obsession and one more in line with modern attitudes), The New York Times published an editorial on the incident. Some bar owners brought in women skilled at fighting—often their wives—to protect the premises when Nation came to town. (In Butte, Montana, in 1910, Nation picked the wrong saloon to raid and was soundly thrashed by its female owner.)

After a year or so or itinerant vandalism punctuated by stays in assorted jails, Carrie Nation’s “hatchetations” grew less frequent. She took more and more to the lecture circuit, where her incoherent yet vigorous rambles drew crowds that came as much to jeer as to applaud. She also appeared onstage in an adaptation of T. S. Arthur’s classic temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Wherever she went, she brought along a sack of miniature souvenir hatchets, which she sold to finance her activities. In 1909 she moved to the Arkansas hills, where she lived in a simple house she called Hatchet Hall. She died in a Kansas hospital in 1911, a few years short of seeing her long-time goal of nationwide prohibition enacted into law. A more lasting memorial could long be found in the Kansas state constitution, which until 1987 retained its absolute (though progressively weakened) ban on open saloons.

Early on the morning of June 17, Gen. Thomas Gage, governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of British forces in North America, awoke in his Boston home to learn of a serious new threat. On the Charlestown peninsula, which was connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of land, rebel soldiers were building military fortifications on a rise known today as Breed’s Hill. If left alone, they would surely fortify neighboring Bunker Hill as well. Gage conferred with his officers and decided on an immediate attack.

Although the Revolutionary War had begun two months earlier with clashes at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill was its first full-scale battle. It was also, according to the historian Mark Boatner, “one of the few in the American Revolution that is of real military interest”; most of the conflict was characterized by skirmishes, raids, surprise attacks, and strategic retreats. Indeed, the peninsula’s wide variety of terrain and installations—hills, roads, rail fence, stone wall, breastwork, and the town of Charlestown—all neatly contained in a compact area surrounded by water, can give Bunker Hill more of the flavor of a board game than of an actual battle. This has made it irresistible to armchair generals ever since.

Numerous commentators have criticized Gen. William Howe, the British field commander, for making an assault on Breed’s Hill instead of just occupying the neck of the peninsula and waiting for the Americans to surrender. Boatner contests this assessment. The tides did not favor a landing at the neck, he says, and time was of the essence. If Howe had delayed any longer, the Americans would have finished reinforcing Bunker Hill, adjacent to the neck, and been in a much better position to resist.

Covered by several warships, Howe’s men landed on the beach below Breed’s Hill around 1:00 P.M. While they ate lunch, Howe sized up the American position and summoned reinforcements. Beginning at three o’clock, the redcoats made two unsuccessful charges against the redoubt atop Breed’s Hill and a line of militia sheltering behind a rail fence to its east. Each time they were repulsed with large numbers of casualties, and each time they regrouped to charge again, over the bodies of their dead comrades.

On the third try, reinforced with four hundred fresh troops (and having finally shed their cumbersome backpacks, which weighed more than a hundred pounds), the redcoats withstood yet another withering musket volley. Then the Americans, most of them out of powder and lacking bayonets, finally abandoned their redoubt. Those at the fence followed. A small group of Americans made a stand on Bunker Hill to cover the retreat, and the weary, sweltering, and dazed redcoats chose not to pursue the fleeing rebels.

The British had won the battle, but at a cost far out of proportion to the small peninsula’s worth. Losses were about 230 dead and 850 wounded out of 2,500 engaged for the redcoats and 140 dead and 300 wounded out of perhaps 2,000 engaged for the patriots. The debacle shook the Royal Army to its highest levels, accelerated Gage’s removal, and gave commanders an exaggerated impression of the Americans’ valor and resourcefulness. It would be almost a year before the British went back on the offensive. Still, the effect on the American cause may have been even more damaging, and for the same reason. The plucky stand at Breed’s Hill left many observers believing that any group of farmers could do the same thing whenever necessary, a mistaken lesson that held back the real work of military preparation and training for far too long.

Bunker Hill (as the battle was called, since the two hills’ names were not settled) set a pattern for the remainder of the war. With rare exceptions the British would have the advantage in training, money, manpower, and equipment. If they were willing to invest enough of these resources, they would be able to overpower the makeshift Continental forces. But were they willing? In the end, no. And would the Americans’ bravery and commitment be enough to sustain them until the British gave up? In the end, with some help from France, yes.