Campaigning of the Oxus and the fall of Khiva

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Januarius MacGahan

Januarius MacGahan (1844–1878) was an American journalist and war correspondent working for the New York Herald and the London Daily News. His articles describing the massacre of Bulgarian civilians by Turkish soldiers in 1876 created public outrage in Europe, and were a major factor in preventing Britain from supporting Turkey in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-78, which led to Bulgaria gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire.

MacGahan in France, Russia and Central Asia

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MacGahan's vivid articles from the front lines describing the stunning defeat of the French Army won him a large following, and many of his dispatches to the Herald were reprinted by European newspapers. By the age of twenty-seven, he was a celebrity. When the war ended, he interviewed French leader Leon Gambetta and Victor Hugo, and, in March 1871, he hurried to Paris and was one of the first foreign correspondents to report on the uprising of the Paris Commune. He was arrested by the French military and nearly executed, and was only rescued through the intervention of the U.S. Minister to France.

In 1871 MacGahan was assigned as the Herald's correspondent to St. Petersburg. He learned Russian, mingled with the Russian military and nobility, covered the Russian tour of General William Tecumseh Sherman and met his future wife, Varvara Elgaina, whom he married in 1873.

He learned in 1873 that Russia was planning to invade the khanate of Khiva, in Central Asia. Defying a Russian ban of foreign correspondents, he crossed the Kyzyl-Kum desert on horseback and witnessed the surrender of the city of Khiva to the Russian Army. There he met a Russian Lieutenant Colonel, Mikhail Skobelev, who later became famous as Russian commander during the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-78. MacGahan described his adventures in a popular book, Campaigning on the Oxus and the fall of Khiva. (1874).

In 1874 he spent ten months in Spain, covering the Third Carlist War. In 1875 he voyaged with British explorer Sir Allan William Young on his steam yacht the HMS Pandora on an expedition to try to find the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The expedition got as far as Peel Sound in the Canadian Arctic before it met pack ice and was forced to return.

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