Neither Paul Revere nor William Dawes received news of the Regulars' advance by signal lanterns. In his classic "Paul Revere's Ride," published in 1861, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow exercised considerable poetic license with his legendary "One if by land, two if by sea" drama. Revere, "impatient to mount and ride," pats his horse, gazes across the landscape, and stamps the earth, fretfully passing the time for sixteen lines until he finally spots two lanterns in the steeple of Old North Church. Twenty years ago David Hackett Fischer laid this tale to rest, but the take-away from Fischer's meticulous deconstruction of the legend, in popular accounts and several modern textbooks, is merely that Revere did not ride alone: Dawes rode as well, they say, and some even mention Samuel Prescott.
