Ellsworth Rosensteel

From The Great Outdoor Fight

Ellsworth Rosensteel (1861-1894) was the son of a Wealthy San Francisco banker and something of an amateur scientist. As the third son, he was expected to take up theological study, but he found it unfulfilling. He kept a small laboratory in his house where he would spend long hours entranced at his microscope. He was not much for social affairs, but he did enjoy a game of tennis every now and then. It was at the courts that he met Eileen Jenkins. They married in June of 1890.

His family's fortunes were wiped out by the Panic of 1893. Eileen's father comitted suicide by jumping off a pier. Normally this would not have been fatal but he had the (mis)fortune of landing on a tiger shark. Ellsworth was forced to seek work in the dockyards to support himself and Eileen. He still maintained his laboratory, even in the cramped tenement they now shared.

San Francisco was a rough city in those days. In January of 1894, Eileen's family ring, her only link to her father were stolen by a Pontius "Pointy" Panasewicz, the Polish sausage cook. She was distraught. Ellsworth vowed to kill him. Ellsworth was not a character given to rash actions, though. Ellsworth knew that Panasewicz intended to go to the Great Outdoor Fight again that year. He knew that deaths there were taken in stride.

Pushing his way through packed crowds to be among the 3,000 to make it to the acres, Ellsworth sprinted to the far side and waited until he spotted Panasewicz. The Pole, a five-time veteran of the fight (finishing as 113th left standing in the 1891 GOF) was busy organizing a medium-sized army of his own.

Eyewitness accounts are stunningly consistent: Ellsworth approached Panasewicz from his left quarter, and matter-of-factly punched him in the neck. The blow must have severed his spinal cord, for the big Pole fell immediately without so much as a yelp.

His nascent army was overawed by Ellsworth's surgical strike, and the longshoreman-scientist himself was more than a bit surprised. He had not hit anyone in anger since childhood. What surprised him more than Panasewicz's sudden death was how much he enjoyed it. The army offered their loyalty, and Ellsworth accepted, gladly jumping into the fray whenever fighting broke out. It is estimated that in the first day he personally took out over 60 men with a staggering 42 fatalities. Ellsworth proved so lethal a fighter that by the second day most men tried to avoid him.

Ellsworth noticed this, and ordered his men to form into groups of ten or more while he took just one body guard to watch his back. The tactic worked brilliantly, with Ellsworth chasing men into the maw of his battlegroups.

By the third day, only two armies remained, Ellsworth with 21 men and the previous year's champion, Jared Hardy, with 34. Ellsworth was strategizing with his lieutenants on how to take on the larger force when one of Hardy's men, whose name has been lost to history, attacked Ellsworth with a bowie knife. The use of makeshift weapons was frowned on in those days, but a knife was in clear violation of GOF rules. Had the man succeeded, he would surely have been disqualified. As it was, his aim was poor, and he managed only to give Ellsworth a minor cut on the shoulder blade. The attacker did not live long, and Hardy denied any involvement in the failed assassination.

If he had called for the knife attack, it would have been a serious mistake. Hardy's men, seeing the attacker move towards Ellsworth with the knife, took the opportunity to attack the main body of his troops, who they outnumbered two-to-one. In the attacking group was a newcomer to the fight, Eddie Mingle, who would go on to win the fight himself in later years. By the time Ellsworth had finished dispatching the assassin, the groups had all but annihalated one another. Ellsworth saw the opportunity to win the victory himself and waded into the tired melee, attacking friend and foe in a whirlwind of punches, kicks, and headbutts. When the dust settled, Ellsworth stood alone.

He did not savor his victory long. The wound on his shoulder went septic, and he died of blood poisoning six days later. We do not know what became of Eileen, but she sold off the lab and left San Francisco. In 1989 a notebook surfaced which may have belonged to Ellsworth. It details the study of the effects of bread mold on bacterial cultures; if this evidence is real, Ellsworth may have discovered Penicillin 34 years before Alexander Fleming. At any rate, it was too late to save himself. Who knows what advances medicine might have made had Ellsworth been treated with antibiotics.

[edit] Record

• 1893 Champion, last man standing. (deceased)