12. January 2007 · Comments Off on Five Thousand Miles for a Camel · Categories: Critters, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

In the annals of the US Army, are recorded many strange and eccentric schemes and scathingly brilliant notions, but none of them quite equals the notion of a Camel Corps for sheer daft logic. It was the sort of idea which a clever “think outside the box” young officer would come up with, contemplating the millions of square miles of desolation occasionally interrupted by lonely outposts of settlements, stage stations and fortified trading posts which the United States had acquired following on the Mexican War in the mid 1840s. The country was dry, harsh, desolate… logically, what better animal to use than one which had already been used for thousands of years in just such conditions elsewhere?

The notion of using camels in the American southwest may have occurred to others, but it was one 2nd Lt. George Crossman who first raised a perfectly serious proposal for their use. One senses initially that the notion had people falling about laughing at the off-beat nuttiness of it all, and then slapping themselves on the forehead with a strange gleam in their eyes and saying, “By George, it’s a crazy idea… but it just might work!”

Crossman and other military men kicked the idea around for a couple of years; it had the backing of a senator from Mississippi, who sat on the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and was in the position to advocate in favor of an experimental use of camels by the US Army. The senator also thought “outside the box” although it would not be clear for another ten years how far outside the box he would eventually go. But Jefferson Davis was not in a position to make a study of camels, US Army for the use of (experimental) happen until he became Secretary of War in 1852. Within three years, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the purpose, and a designated ship set sail for the Mediterranean, carrying one Major Henry Wayne who had been personally charged by Secretary of War Davis with procuring camels. After a couple of false starts, a selection of 33 likely camels were purchased in Egypt. Wayne had also hired five camel drovers to care for them on the return voyage and to educate the Army personnel on the care and feeding of said camels.

The camels arrived at the port of Indianola on the Texas Gulf Coast with one more than they started with, since one of them was a pregnant female; a rather promising beginning to a project so close to Secretary Davis’ heart. The herd was removed to Camp Verde, sixty miles west of San Antonio by easy stages from Indianola, where they were eventually joined by a second shipment later that year. At a stopover in Victoria, the camels were clipped and a local woman spun yarn from the clippings and knitted a pair of socks for the President of the US out of them. Once at Camp Verde they mostly transported supplies and amused and impressed skeptics by carrying four times what a single mule bear, without visible effort. (But a lot of grumbling.) They were also used for an expedition to the Big Bend. Late in 1857, Edward F. Beale, explorer and adventurer, friend of Kit Carson and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California and Nevada took a contingent of camels on a long scout to explore the southwest along the 35th parallel, all through the vast deserts between New Mexico and California. Beale took twenty-five camels and two of the drovers, who were nicknamed Greek George, and Hi Jolly. The camels performed heroically all the way to California with Beale, and were used for a time to transport supplies from Fort. Tejon.

Alas for the demise of what looked like a brilliant solution; although it might have come to something eventually, but for the Civil War. Just about everyone who was a strong advocate for the use of camels suddenly had much greater problems to worry about than overcoming the resistance of Army muleteers and diverse other potential users. For the camels as draft animals were not readily biddable; they were even less cooperative than mules, which is saying a lot. They spat, nastily and accurately, stank to high heaven, and scared the living daylights out of horses and mules unaccustomed themselves to their presence, and generally did not endear themselves to most of the men who had to work with them. The California herd, those of them which had not been allowed to wander away, was sold mostly to small enterprises and circuses . Those camels, or their descendents who escaped into the desert southwest were spotted for decades afterwards, well into the early 20th century. Beale even took a few of them to his own ranch; a sort of camel refuge as it were. The Texas herd was also sold off or left to wander the range near Camp Verde; although according to this source, one of them found its way into the possession of an Army officer who used it to carry the baggage of his entire company all during the war. The drover, Hi Jolly eventually took a small herd of camels sold as surplus after the Civil War to the Arizona territory and used them to hall water for a time, before turning them loose. And so passed the end of an experiment, and the last of the US Army Camel Corps.

There is one small footnote to this; the story of the Red Ghost, which terrorized south-eastern Arizona Territory, for about ten years after 1883; a huge reddish camel… with the dead body of a man tied to its’ back. No one ever who he was, or how he came to be secured to the back of a camel, with knots that he could not have tied himself.

05. January 2007 · Comments Off on Ghost Town on the Gulf · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

Once there was a town on the Texas Gulf Coast, which during its hey-day— which lasted barely a half-century from start to finish—rivaled Galveston, a hundred and fifty miles east. It started as a stretch of beach along Matagorda Bay, called Indian Point, some miles to the north, selected for no other reason than it was not Galveston by a German nobleman with plans to settle a large colony of German immigrants. Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels was a leading light of what was called the Mainzer Adelsverein; a company of well-meaning nobles whose ambitions exceeded their business sense at least three to one. They had secured— or thought they had secured — a large tract of land between the Llano and Colorado rivers approximately a hundred miles west of Austin, but the truth of it was, all they had secured was the right to induce people to come and settle on it. So many settlers farming so many acres, and the backers of the Adelsverein would profit through being entitled to so many acres for themselves.

That this tract of land was unfit for traditional farming, and moreover was the stomping grounds of the Comanche and Apache tribes… peoples not generally noted in the 19th century for devotion to multi-cultural tolerance and desire to live in peace with their neighbors… these things seem to have struck Prince Karl as a mere bagatelle, an afterthought, a petty little detail that other people would take care of. The Adelsverein would earn a tidy profit by inducing people to settle on such lands as they held a license for… so no fair for other entrepreneurs to poach their immigrants, as they passed through the fleshpots of Galveston. With a fair bit of the old Teutonic spirit of organization, Prince Karl decided that the Adelsverein settlers, who had signed contracts, and sailed on Adelsverein chartered-ships would not be contaminated by crass mercantile interests or distractions; best to come straight off the trans-Atlantic transport, through a port of his own choosing, comfortably close to the most direct route north, and the way-station he had himself established to feed settlers into the Adelsverein land grant… and so it was, that his choice fell on Indian Point, soon to be christened “Karlshaven”.

Three years later, it was called Indianola, the major deep-water port and entry-point for thousands of European immigrants to Texas, as well as a couple of shipments of camels (that is another story entirely). Indianola was also the major port for supplying… among other concerns, the US Army in the West. A great road, called the Cart Road ran towards San Antonio, and south of the contentious border, to Chihuahua, Mexico supplying the interior mercantile needs of two nations . By the mid 1850s, the town relocated to a location slightly lower in elevation, but one which would let it take advantage of deeper water… and a navigation route which would favor major maritime traffic. The Morgan Lines established regular service to Indianola, which boasted two long wharves, with the Morgan ticket-office at the very end of one of them. It was called the “Queen City of the West”, shipping— among other things— rice to Europe, and in the cattle glut after the Civil War, experimented with shipping refrigerated beef and canned oysters. For a few decades, Indianola gave Galveston and New Orleans a run for the money. It changed hands a couple times during the Civil War, when life turned out to be a lot more interesting than most inhabitants of Texas had bargained for. Upon the end of that unpleasantness, Indianola looked fair to taking a rightful place in the list of great ports of the world.

But in September of 1875… September being a fateful month in those parts… a great hurricane slammed Indianola, and it’s low-laying situation left it vulnerable to storm surge. Still, there were enough left, and it was a fine deep-water port and a good strategic location; not something to be casually abandoned; so the city stalwarts rebuilt in the spirit of optimism. Eleven years later, Indianola was slammed again. To add to the horror of it all, an upset oil lamp set fire to the structure it was in. At the height of the hurricane several of the survivors taking shelter in that building were burned to death, and several nearby structures also burned. The rebuilt town was obliterated; the remnants of those long docks built for the Morgan Lines are still lying at the bottom of the bay. The city fathers sadly accepted the inevitable. There is still a bit of Indianola left; a few builtings, but mostly monuments and relics, bottles and doll heads, doorknobs and Minie balls, sad tattered reminders of what was once the Queen City of the West. Galveston inherited that place, with queenly grace; but only for a couple of decades, until that city itself took the full force of a hurricane in 1900.

04. January 2007 · Comments Off on A Little Light Classical Travel Reading · Categories: General, History, World

Found this lovely article here, about a writer who ought to be more well known in the US. I first read his books “Roumeli” and “Mani”, at the urging of my next-door neighbor in Athens, Kyria Penny. She about swooned when describing “A Time of Gifts”, and I was so enchanted when I read it that I bought the sequel “Between the Woods and the Water” in hardback and sight-unseen when it was first published. (I seem to have a first edition of it, but the dust-jacket is a little worn, and there are two dribbles of brown stain across the page edges and one edge of the book jacket)

At the age of 18 and on the budget of a pound a week, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This was in 1933; He kept a diary, and made notes, which were not written up until decades later; a third volume has been promised, but yet to be delivered.

Excellent reads… and as a side-note, Leigh Fermor had an extremely interesting time during World War II, working with Greek partisans on Crete, where he and another commando, W.Stanley Moss, kidnapped the German Army divisional commander, and spirited him off the island, a short way ahead of a massive German manhunt. This is a very good account of it, written by Moss some years afterwards.

Found courtesy of Photon Courier

28. December 2006 · Comments Off on Un-Civil War · Categories: General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game, War

“…From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean…”

In hot pursuit of my next “book”, I continue to plough through a great stack of readings, all about the German migration into Texas in the mid-19th century. Yes there is a great story there, of which practically no one outside Texas has ever heard, and given any sort of encouragement I will bore you rigid with all sorts of trivia. Like, for instance, the aristocratic patrons of the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants to Texas fell, hook, line, sinker and obscene amounts of cash to two of the biggest land swindles ever known. Three words “Fisher-Miller Grant”. That little fiasco was right on par with the sale of Manhattan Island, by a tribe that didn’t even own it. Ah, but it came out all right in the end… if the aristocratic members of the Society had possessed business acumen on par with their ambitions… well, let’s just say if that had been so, the second language of the state of Texas would not be Spanish. And it might not have joined the Union at all, but continued as an independent entity or quasi-German colony, which would have pleased a whole constellation of German princes and nobles, but really have annoyed the Confederate States, and deprived a great many Southern generals in the “late unpleasantness” circa 1861-65 of a great portion of their fire-eating, romping-stomping cavalry.

Texas joined the secession, to the heartbreak of Sam Houston, and enthusiastically entered into the whole spirit of the Confederacy… to be expected, since the Anglo (read American) settlers were mostly from southern states, and of that Scots-Irish breed of whom it has been oft-acknowledged that they were “born fighting”; Indians, British, the French or each other, whichever were most convenient at the moment. To read of the enthusiasm with which Texans volunteered to fight for the Confederacy is to wonder if it was just that they were spoiling for a fight, and the issues which impelled the secession were a minor bagatelle.

But this was not true of the considerable district around the German-settled areas around Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, all through the rolling lime-stone hills between San Antonio and Austin. This was the high country, the less-good land of hard-working farmers and small cattle ranches, solidly opposed to chattel slavery and who had opposed secession from the very beginning. They may have settled in Texas relatively recently, but they were a cohesive block, had put down deep roots, knew their rights and were prepared as stubborn and stiff-necked Americans to insist on them. If the Hill Country had been geographically contiguous with the Union at any point, doing a “West Virginia” and seceeding from the Secession would have met with solid approval.

As it was, the Hill Country Germans pretty much stood apart from the fray until a year into the war, in the spring of 1862, when the tide began to subtly shift against the Confederacy, to those who had the strategic sense to see the long picture. New Orleans was taken by the Union, whose forces began a slow progression up the Mississippi, slicing the Confederacy into two portions. Those who had been opposed to the whole secession thing were confirmed in their judgment, and those who had wavered began to wobble in the direction of loosing confidence… while the die-hard Confederates began to see the skull-grimace of death and defeat grinning at them from the corners.

Texas was put under martial law, and the supreme military commander was a foppish and overbearing little martinet named Hebert, who did much to make himself detestable to even supporters of the Confederacy. But what ignited resistance in the Hill Country, and farther north, around present-day Dallas, was the institution of conscription. Texas had poured 25,000 volunteers into the Confederate Army during the first year of the war. But volunteers were not enough, and in the spring of 1862 legislation passed which authorized the drafting of every Anglo (white) male between the age of 18 and 34… shortly thereafter, it was changed to 17 through 50. Resistance was instant and furious among Unionists. A party of 65 Unionist men from the Hill Country attempted to flee across the Rio Grande; they were ridden down by Confederate troops along the Nueces River, and half were killed outright or executed out of hand. In following weeks, another fifty men in Gillespie County, around Fredericksburg, were executed… many of them by Confederate vigilante gangs. It was said bitterly for decades afterwards, that more were killed in the Hill Country by such gangs during the Civil War than were ever killed by Indians, during the war or after it. A footnote in the history books, if even noted to begin with.

The experience of the Civil War had, I think, the effect of drawing the Texas German colonies into themselves, and emphasizing their distinct character, rather than diffusing amongst their neighbors as similar German enclaves did in the northern states. For they were long in forgetting what had been done to them, by their neighbors, and fellow Texans.

More about the German settlers, here and here, from the archives.

07. December 2006 · Comments Off on A Day That Will Live in Infamy · Categories: History

03. December 2006 · Comments Off on Goliad · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game

The Texas Revolution in 1835 initially rather resembled the American Revolution, some sixty years before— a resemblance not lost on the American settlers in Texas. At the very beginning, both the Colonies and the Anglo-Texans were far-distant communities with a self-sufficient tradition, who had been accustomed to manage their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from the central governing authority. Colonists and Anglo-Texans started off by standing on their rights as citizens, but a heavy-handed response by the central government provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt. “Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,” summed up the attitude. The Mexican government, beset with factionalism and seeing revolt against it’s authority everywhere, sent an army to remind the Anglo-Texan settlers of who was really in charge. The rumor that among the baggage carried along in General Martin Cos’ train was 800 pairs of iron hobbles, with which to march selected Texas rebels back to Mexico did not win any friends, nor did the generals’ widely reported remarks that it was time to break up the foreign settlements in Texas. Cos’ army, which was supposed to re-establish and ensure Mexican authority was ignominiously beaten and sent packing.

Over the winter of 1835-36 a scratch Texan army of volunteers held two presidios guarding the southern approaches from another attack, while representatives of the various communities met to sort out what to do next. First, they formed a shaky provisional government, and appointed Sam Houston to command the Army. Then, in scattershot fashion, they appointed three more officers to high command; it would have been farcical, if the consequences hadn’t been so dire. With no clear command, with military companies and commanders pursuing their own various plans and strategies, the Texas settlers and companies of volunteers were not much fitted to face the terrible wrath of the Napoleon of the West and President of Mexico, strongman, caudillo and professional soldier, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He did not wait for spring, or the grass to grow tall enough, or the deep mud to dry out: he intended to punish this rebellious province with the utmost severity. Under his personal command, his army reached the Rio Grande at Laredo in mid-February, and laid siege to a tumbledown former mission garrisoned by a scratch force of volunteers… San Antonio de Valero, called simply the Alamo. But this story is about the other presidio, and another garrison of Texans and volunteers; Bahia del Espiritu Santo, or Goliad.
More »

01. December 2006 · Comments Off on The Ripples Left After A Stone Drops · Categories: General, History, Mordor, War

After the last time America declared a victory and went home…
Cambodia.
(link through “Classical Values“)

26. November 2006 · Comments Off on Another Tiny Taste of Good Stuff · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

(In gratitude for donations recieved, another sip of the good stuff, to be savored like a fine liqueur is posted: from Chapter 2 of “To Truckee’s Trail”. There was absolutely nothing happening over this last week. Thanksgiving has spread to cover the entire working week. Previous exerpts here, and here)

Chapter 2 – The Jumping-Off Place

John caught up to his wagon and Montgomery’s just outside Kanesville — a muddy and slap-together place of log cabins and flimsy tents, noisy and overwhelmingly noisome with stock pens and pigs rooting for garbage in muddy streets, as full of people as St. Joseph: Army dragoons in blue, Mexicans in black trimmed with constellations of silver buttons, nearly-naked Indians with shaved heads, sober Mormon merchants in linsey-woolsey, and emigrants like themselves with wagons full of worldly goods and children, small faces apprehensively peering out from the shelter of the wagon cover.
John took note of the stock pens, making a note as to where he should come back in the next day or so. According to Stephens they would have several weeks to rest and restock from the journey up from St. Joseph. It also amused him to overhear that the place should now be called Council Bluffs, as if that would make it any more important, or the streets less muddy.
A relief it was, to be through town, following a trampled and rutted track towards a line of low hills topped with a thin grove of trees along the river, dotted here and there with wagon tops and tents blossoming like prairie wildflowers among the thin green treetops. Rain in the morning had washed the sky clean, and the breeze smelt mostly of new grass and damp earth, only a little of wood smoke and privies, and the muddy river.
As their wagons approached the emigrant camp, children ran towards them, calling excitedly, and a tall man in a frock coat waved them down, with a beaming smile.
“Good day pilgrims,” he called. “Where bound, and where from?”
“To California, from St. Joseph, Townsend and Montgomery.”
“Oh, excellent, excellent! John Thorp, for Oregon.” Thorp walked alongside Ugly Grey, as if some invisible force plastered him there, squinting upwards at John and chattering away.
“We have nearly forty wagons assembled, for Oregon and California both. There is a good place at the top of the hill, just under the edge of the trees, next to the Patterson wagon. You can’t miss them; small wagon, with a saffron-colored cover, and many children.”
Thorp seemed uncommonly presumptuous, John thought to himself. Really, was he the boss of the camp already, advising all newcomers as to just where they should camp? Just as John decided that, yes, Thorp probably did see himself as such, the man added with studied carelessness, “Oh, and we are agreed to hold elections a week from this Sunday to elect a wagon captain as far as Fort Hall. May we count on your attendance, and your vote?”
Well, that was blunt enough; presumptuous and blunt.
“Our attendance for sure,” John shot back easily. “And for our vote, it depends on what we think of the nominees!”
He was amused at how early the politicking began, but annoyed at Thorp’s unsubtle approach, looking to scrape acquaintance and presuming on it; the man set his teeth on edge. He could see all too plain where the camp herd had been pastured for many weeks, by the look of the ground, all chopped by hooves, grazed down to the roots and fouled by manure. It said little for Thorp’s organizational capabilities. This kind of disorganization was apt to dirty water supplies and contribute much unpleasantness if they were to be camped here much longer.
Thorp waved his hat, and they moved on up the grade, as Elizabeth laughed down from the wagon-seat, “Dearest, it looks like a camp revival meeting. Will there be picnicking among the arbors, and hymn-singing, and people falling down and speaking in tongues?”
“And tediously long sermonizing? Depend on it.”
“You did not like Mr. Thorp,” Elizabeth said quietly with a sideways glance.
“Liked him little and trusted him rather less. He’s the sort who likes to look as if he is in charge, but little favors the responsibility of it or the work itself.” He answered in the same low voice, and then spurred Ugly Grey ahead a little way, looking for the wagon with a saffron-yellow cover, and a great many children.
There, right where Thorp said it would be: top of the hill, edge of the trees, the golden sun around which some smaller tents and awnings orbited, as well as a quantity of laundry and bedding flapping from lines strung between trees. John overtook a grey-beard with a limp, stumping gamely up the hill towards the Patterson camp and leading a pair of mules.
“Mr. Patterson?” John ventured, and the old man scowled.
“That’s me son-in-law. I’m Hitchcock, it’s me daughter Isabella you’re looking for. That,” he jerked his bearded chin in that direction, “is her wagon. Hers and her husband’s, that is – but he’s away in Californy, and I don’t blame him, scrawny fussbudget that she is. I’d be there too, if I’d married a woman like her. Or China, among all them heathen. Or Hades, which ‘ud be her choice.”
“John Townsend. Doctor John Townsend. We’re also California bound, ourselves and our neighbors the Montgomerys. Mr. Thorp directed us this way.”
“Did he, now,” Hitchcock scowled, muttering something un-complimentary about Thorp under his breath.
“How many others here are California bound, besides Mrs. Patterson, and yourself?” John thought it best to change the subject off of the ambitious Mr. Thorp.
“A passel of bog-trotting Papists, mostly; Murphys, Martins, and Sullivans all mixed together. Six wagons between them and fixed on California. Good folk, though, for all a’that. I also hear tell there’s an old fur-trapping man named Greenwood with his two heathen sons, looking to hire on as a wagon guide as far as the Rockies. If he’s the one I know of, he married hisself a Crow woman an’ went to live with the tribes years ago. All a’them Greenwoods can’t be mistook, look like real Injuns, they do.”
As John, and the old man approached the brow of the hill and the yellow-topped wagon, a little woman in a faded wash-dress with her sleeves rolled up and a big apron tied over all, looked up from her washtub and cried indignantly, “Pa! What are you doing with those mules? What have you gone and done?”
“Bought me a brace of ‘em, Izzy, sure and a farmer’s wife ‘ud recognize mules? I figured to invite them into the parlor for tea,” said the old man with gentle malice. “That or have them carry my traps an’ goods to Californy. I ain’t quite decided which, yet. Say hello to Doctor Townsend, Izzy, he’s goin’ with us to Californy; Doc, my daughter, Mrs. Samuel Patterson.”
Isabella Patterson appeared ready to explode from embarrassment and fury at being caught at her worst in the middle of the washing and what sounded like an ongoing family quarrel, and then being introduced to a total stranger. She swiped an errant lock of dark hair off her damp forehead as John dismounted from his horse, and took her hand in his. She looked to be a tiny, quick-moving dynamo of a woman, with abundant dark hair falling out of pins and a small and oval face, whose regular features were slightly marred by a magnificently beaky nose. She had fine eyes though, and skin like a girl’s.
“Very pleased, Mrs. Patterson,” John ventured, at his most courtly, accustomed in his medical capacity to seeing people at their worst advantage. “I shall tell Mrs. Townsend to call on your . . . camp . . . as soon as possible, since we are soon to be travel companions.”
“We shall be glad to receive her,” Isabella responded with a quick, manly hand-grasp. “As you can see, our house is very open, these days. Very open indeed!” Another one like Sarah, John thought, as he touched his hat brim; not pleased about being dragged away from her own hearth, to begin a gypsy existence beside the trail. Allen Montgomery’s team was toiling up the gentle slope towards where they stood, with Francis and his own following close behind.
“Until later, Ma’am . . . Sir.” As John led Ugly Grey towards the open place where they could set up their own camp, he could hear the two of them starting up where they had left off. Between Isabella Patterson and her father, and Allen and Sarah, he reflected wryly, there was no necessity of waiting until the Fourth of July for fireworks.
“Here we are, for the moment, at least,” he said, Ugly Grey’s reins looped over his arm, as he helped Elizabeth down from the wagon seat. “Mr. Stephens at the smithy seemed to think we’ll be camping here for about three weeks.”
“It shall be very restful, I am sure.” Elizabeth looked doubtfully towards the lively Patterson camp. It seemed there were a lot of children, romping happily and noisily amongst the clutter of tents, gear and supplies.
Then she squared her shoulders and said, “I shall have to call, I suppose, as soon as our camp is set up.”
“So you should – as others will be calling on us,” John answered, though he did not think that would be happening as soon as it did, a few minutes later as he was unsaddling Ugly Grey. He turned around to find two pair of eyes, watching him with intense and fearless interest; a bold urchin of about seven years, with a girl toddler dragging at his hand. The little one was sucking her thumb. They had dark hair, and something of the look of Isabella Patterson, and John said gravely, “Good morning, children. I am Doctor Townsend. Might I beg for an introduction?” The little girls’ eyes rounded in astonishment over the thumb stopping her mouth, but the boy launched into full spate.
“H’lo, I’m Edward Sidney Patterson, but everyone calls me Eddie, and this is my baby sister Sadie, her real name’s Sarabeth Margaret, but it don’t matter ‘cause she can’t talk yet an’ Paw-Paw Isaac says you are a real doctor an’ you’re going to Californy jus’ like us an’ Ma, an’ our Pa went out there two year agone . . . is that your horse? Pa wrote an’ tol’ us that he was settled . . . kin I help you groom him? I like horses, we used t’have horses on our farm in Ohio, but Paw-Paw Isaac tol’ Ma she should sell them an’ buy mules instead, but Ma, she said mules cost too much an’ . . .”
“Eddie,” John asked, vastly amused. “Do you ever stop talking?”
“Nossir.” Eddie shook his head decisively. He reached over and pulled his sister’s thumb out of her mouth with an almost audible pop. “Don’t suck your thumb, Sadie, Ma will give you a licking. Does your horse have a name? Ma let us name all of our teams, there’s Baldy an’ Socks an’ Spotty. An’ –”
“Here, “John handed him the curry-comb, “I’ll let you name my horse, if you give him a good combing. And keep talking, that way he’ll know where you are, and not step on you.”
Little Eddie beamed, and set to work with energy and the greatest good will in the world, even if he barely came up to Ugly Grey’s nose, while his baby sister sat in the grass and watched, thumb creeping back to her mouth again.
John walked away, hefting his saddle, remarking to Allen, who was unhitching his teams with a great rattle of chains, “On my oath, the boy’s tongue must be hinged in the middle, since it flaps so, at both ends.”
“Bold little squirt,” Allen said, with a chuckle. “Good thing he does talk so much, I’d be coming close to stepping on him myself, otherwise.”
Francis and Allen had drawn up the wagons at an angle, so they could share a campfire. Moses was setting up the tent, to complete a third side of a square around it.
“We have guests already,” he murmured to Elizabeth, as she handed a box of camp cookware down to Sarah. “Master Edward and Miss Sarabeth Patterson.” Elizabeth followed the direction of his look, and laughed, softly.
“Very forward, aren’t they? I will take them back to their mother presently . . . it will serve as a good pretext.”

* * *

From E.S. Patterson Interview, University of California Local History Archival Project 1932: “We were camping at the Bluffs, waiting for the grass to grow for about two weeks, when Doctor Townsend’s family, and Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery joined up with the emigrant camp. The Doctor was a big man, with a gentlemanly way about him. I was just a boy, but I could see he was used to being in authority. Men liked him immediately, but so did women; he could make Ma laugh. I think a lot of folk thought at first he should be elected wagon master. He and Mrs. Townsend, they brought Sadie and me back to our camp that first day . . .”

* * *

Mrs. Patterson had finished the laundry by the time John and Elizabeth walked across to the Patterson camp. Sarah was putting the finishing touches on their open-air kitchen, and Allen, Moses, and Francis were driving their cattle down to join the main camp herd. Eddie chattered nineteen to the dozen, still dragging Sadie by the hand until Elizabeth leaned down laughing and swung her capably unto her hip.
“We’re walking too fast for her, Eddie. She’s too little to keep up.”
“She’s grown too fast for me to carry like that,” Eddie retorted. “I could carry her when she was littler . . . Ma! Ma!” he called, and scampered ahead of them, “Ma, Sadie and I brung Doctor Townsend, an’ Miz Townsend, too!”
“Hello the camp!” John called, as they stepped around the corner of the Patterson’s tent. He looked sideways at Elizabeth and murmured, “What sort of etiquette is required, do you think, when there is no door to knock on to declare ones’ self?”
“Eddie my duckling,” Isabella scolded. “Where have you been and where did you take the baby off to?” She was sitting down, sorting an apron full of dandelion greens in her lap. A girl of about ten, with the same soft dark hair, helped her. “Oh, heavens above, Nancy, you finish these.” She started up from the wagon bench where she sat, as John gravely presented Elizabeth to her, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, no, please don’t rise. You look terribly busy, Mrs. Patterson. Would you permit me to help you with them? And if you could tell me where you found them, we have so felt the need of something green with our meals.”
Elizabeth set Sadie on her feet, as Isabella smiled warmly. “Oh, that would be neighborly. We did have to walk a good distance for them, since the closer fields have been so fouled!”
John looked hastily around and drew up a three-legged camp stool for his wife to settle on, and said, “If both you ladies would pardon me, young Eddie has promised to be my guide and introduce me to some of our future companions on the trail.”
“Go along then, you scamp,” Isabella addressed her son, and John bowed over her hand. “Doctor, it was a pleasure. I hope you will not be strangers.”
“Small chance, with young Eddie around,” John answered wryly and kissed Elizabeth’s cheek. “We shall return in a while, Dearest, after calling upon Eddie’s particular friends, the Murphy brothers.” Sadie was already leaning confidingly against Elizabeth.
To John’s amusement, Eddie copied his fond gesture, kissing his little sister in the same manner, and then he said confidently to John, “My bestes’ friends after Sadie are the Murphy boys . . . their Paw-Paw tells them stories, and their Uncle Jamie makes them toys. They have six wagons an’ they say they are bound for Californy. I cain’t think of a name for your horse, but he sure is . . . is . . . a splendid one . . . an’ . . .”
Eddie’s voice trailed away as he and John went down the hillside, and Isabella Patterson looked at Elizabeth and laughed.
“Warn your son that the two prettiest girls in the camp have a great many large brothers, and enough close kin to ensure that they are treated with due care and consideration. My Oliver can hardly look on Helen Murphy or Mary Sullivan without blushing as red as a girl himself, and his voice going all to squeaks.”
“My son . . . oh, you mean Moses,” Elizabeth said, as she took Sadie onto her lap. “He is rather my little brother. My husband and I have raised him as our son, since my parents died of the fever.”
“I am so sorry, then,” Isabella looked up from her lapful of greens, with a shrewd and sympathetic eye. “He looks so like you, Mrs. Townsend. Have you and the Doctor not any children between yourselves?”
Sadie curled up, a dear little weight in Elizabeth’s lap, sucking her thumb contentedly again, and Elizabeth replied, “Moses would never be ungAllent to a young lady . . . my husband has had the teaching of him since he was six years old. We have no children of our own: my husband worries for my health, you see, and he is very considerate. I have not been well . . . for some time, and there has been so much sickness up and down the river of late. It is the reason we are bound for California.”
“My man was after a better farm,” Isabella snorted. “Any excuse will do, I think, when a man gets bored and unsettled. I should know, Pa Hitchcock never stayed in one place for a year in his life, but at least he had the decency not to drag my mother and me all over creation with him.” Isabella was setting aside the tender green inner leaves into a dish at her side, “No, just you go on holding Sadie, Mrs. Townsend. Nancy and I will have these finished in two shakes. Your husband at least came up with an excuse you couldn’t argue with.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t argue with him,” Elizabeth replied. “About going west? I would rather endure hardship at his side than suffer his prolonged absence, as you have done. You must have endured so much alone, Mrs. Patterson.”
“It has been difficult, these last two years since Mr. Patterson went with the traders,” Isabella said, and Elizabeth noted with alarm that her eyes were bright with unshed tears, but that she seemed to will them not to fall. She tossed a handful of tender greens into the bowl with a little more vigor than strictly necessary. “But my boys are a help, even if they are not yet men. Oliver is seventeen, Samuel two years younger. Johnny, now, he is fourteen, but as he is near tall as Samuel, everyone thinks they are of an age.”
“You also have the assistance of your father,” Elizabeth ventured, and Isabella snorted.
“I should, seeing that it is the fault of that old vagabond! He filled my Samuel’s head with talk of California. A paradise on earth, he said it was, until nothing would content him but that he had to see it for himself. It was the very least that Pa could do, to see me and the children safely there, but he vexes me no end, always undermining my authority with the boys, and filling the children’s heads with wild stories!”
“I like Paw-Paw’s stories,” spoke up Nancy, bravely, and Isabella fluffed up like an indignant bantam hen.
“See what I mean? Mrs. Townsend and I were speaking, Nancy . . . remember, children should be seen and not heard!”
“None the less, I do envy you, Mrs. Patterson . . . oh, for heaven’s sake, just call me Elizabeth. You still have a father living, for which I envy you. Our dear parents died some ten years ago, when my husband still had a practice in Stark County and we were new-married.”
“And what would your father and mother have advised you, then?” Isabella asked, still indignant. “Would they have abetted your husband in some reckless scheme, against your own wishes?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth replied, consideringly. “I cannot imagine Papa Schallenberger talking my dear husband out of anything he had set his heart on doing: he was born in Pennsylvania, and has been moving west by degrees ever since. I imagine, though, that Papa would have advised me that my place was ever at my husband’s side. ‘Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following after you. Wherever you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge, your people will be my people’ . . .”
“So I was also told,” Isabella said, laughing shortly. “But I did not know then of the places I would be expected to go, or that I should have to find my way to them alone!”
“But you are not entirely alone! “Elizabeth took Isabella’s hands, empty at the moment of dandelion greens, in her own. “We shall be in a good company, with many stout companions, and many good friends as well; of that I am sure, for my dearest darling will make it so and I trust him completely.”
“Your good fortune, my dear Mrs. Townsend.” Isabella laughed heartily. “I do not have the luxury of such utter dependence . . . and indeed, I think it may be one such that we may set aside, once we are on the trail.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Elizabeth was baffled, and Isabella laughed again, sounding a little more kindly.
“Only that we are leaving all behind, my dear, and it might be well to be able to stand on our own feet in regards to our own preferences . . . just a fancy of mine,” she added. “Think nothing of it, Mrs. Townsend – Elizabeth. Sadie has fallen asleep . . . let me take her from you, and put her to rest in the wagon.”

From Dr. Townsend’s diary: “Arriving at the bluff encampment, we made haste to search out those others of a like mind to venture towards California. The largest part of these are relations, friends and connections of Martin Murphy, late of Irish Grove, in Holt County . . .”

When Eddie had led him into Murphy’s camp; six wagons loosely circled together under a large poplar tree, the elder Mr. Murphy had been sitting in a comfortable wooden chair with a child on each knee and half a dozen more, boys and girls together at his feet, telling them a story. Another man, of about the same age sat close by, whittling and listening to his yarn. Two younger men worked together in a circle of wood-chips and tools, mending a wheel, while a pretty, black-haired woman kneaded a great trough of bread dough. Another man, with hair the same jet-black, was scraping down a new ox-bow with a slip of broken glass.
But when Eddie shrilled, “Mister Murphy, Mister Murphy, I brung you another for California, he and his’n are camping at the top of the hill next to us, he’s a doctor for real, an’ he has a grey horse!” the older man quickly scooted the small children off his knees, saying, “’Tis enough for now, my dears, go and play . . . you too, Eddie. I need to speak with this gentleman, now.” John thought, as the children romped out towards the meadow beside the camping place, ‘and I thought there were children everywhere at the Pattersons.’
“John Townsend. Eddie tells me that you are also bound for California,” John said to the senior Mr. Martin; an older man, not as old as Hitchcock, with a soft Irish brogue barely abraded by long absence from his native soil, and shrewd brown eyes, very alive in his blunt-featured countenance.
“I’m Martin Murphy,” he held out his hand towards John, who while attempting to seem as if he wasn’t, was nonetheless sizing up their outfit and general fitness for the long journey. “And this is my old and good friend, Patrick Martin, who came away from Wexford in the same year although we did not know each other then.”
Patrick Murphy, much the same age as Martin Murphy, appeared to be a lively and muscular spark, with bright blue eyes and a nose that looked as if it had been broken several times.
He shook John’s hand with a strong grip. “Aye, says the lad, a doctor is it? Sure and we’re honored, that we are . . . at least no plagued Englishman says I to meself, seeing you come down from the hill.” He had a wicked glint in his eye, and John guessed rightly that his nose had not been broken by accident.
He returned the grip and said calmly, “My parents were English. Quakers from Norton and the family was well known locally, but they removed to Pennsylvania before I was born.”
“Capital, capital!” said Patrick with a grin. “So, you’ve risen in the world then, is it?”
“Patrick, you’d be after teasing the wrong man,” Martin chided his friend and continued, “Was it true, what young Edward was saying, you indeed are a doctor? Well, that is a blessing to have in any company. Is it true also that you are joining us? Another blessing to be sure, and are there others with you?”
“My friend and neighbor from St. Joseph, my wife, and her brother,” John answered. “My friend has been ever set on California, and so has my wife’s brother. I was convinced this last winter that it would be best for my wife’s health if we removed also.”
Old Martin looked grieved, and said, brokenly, “So, I wish we had gone sooner, and my own dear wife might have been spared. Aye, she and my boy Martin’s little girl. Such an angel she was . . . no consolation that she is now in the care of like. She should have been growing up fair and happy, playing in the fields like the little lamb that she was. We could no longer stay in such a pestilential and godless place, so we came away, all of us and our neighbors – young John Sullivan and what the sickness left to him of his family, Patrick Martin, his two lads, and his daughter Annie that married my own boy James, leaving my dear Mary Ellen and the babe behind. ”
Murphy’s voice cracked a little, and John said, “I am so sorry. So many were lost untimely in the last year or so, to the fevers – no matter what we could do.”
“Aye,” Martin Murphy recovered his voice. “And they are with Him and his angels now, no doubt on that. She was a fine, goodly woman, and blessed me with nine splendid children, four having children of their own. It is in me mind, though, that I should have listened to Father Hoecken earlier than I did. But still, to have a doctor in our party is a great relief.” He turned and called to the two younger men, “James . . . Martin, come and meet Doctor Townsend, who’s with us for California. This is James Miller, who’s married my daughter Mary and me oldest son, Martin. His wife is named Mary, also, but we call her Mary-Bee, to reduce the confusion, ye know . . .” he looked around the campsite, and remarked, “Well, they were here a minute ago.”
“They walked down to the spring for water,” said the younger Martin. He was a youthful version of his father, a grave and steady-looking man with the same level gaze.
Old Martin added, “Ye’ll know Martin’s boys when you see them, all four of them always together, and perfect imps they are, then. Dennis, come and meet the Doctor.” The man who was scraping the oxbow set it all carefully down, and Old Martin continued, “Aye, you’ll always know Patrick’s sons by the black-Irish look of them.”
“Dennis Martin.” He dusted his hands hastily on his trousers, and shook hands. “Has Pa threatened to knock you down for being an Englishman yet? He’ll get around to it.” Dennis looked to be a little older than Moses, but with his father’s black hair and startlingly blue eyes, but after Patrick’s vivid self, a paler and less colorful copy. “M’ brother Patrick and John Sullivan have gone into Kanesville to buy another yoke of oxen. They’ll be sorry to miss you this day, but I’ll guess we’ll have time to make it up on the trail.”
“My other boys went with them,” Old Martin explained. “Jamie, that’s married to Patrick’s daughter Annie, Daniel, Bernard, and Johnny. We’ve the six wagons between us, and fifteen men; a small party, to think of going all the way alone. Do ye know of any more, who might join our company for California?”
“Just one,” John answered. “A blacksmith named Stephens, camped by himself a little way down the St. Joe road.”
Old Martin and his son looked at each other, and the old man said admiringly, “Och, that’ll be another fine man to have on the journey with us . . . a blacksmith, is it? What sort of man might he be, if you don’t mind the impertinence of me asking?
“A very good one, I judge,” John replied, “But modest, even reticent in conversing about himself. But he says he had been out on the Santa Fe trails, and it contents me well to know that someone with experience such as that will join with us.”
“’Tis good to know, then.” Old Patrick looked both relieved and calculating. “Mr. Thorp, he is a foine man, for talk and all . . . but he is for Oregon, sure enough and none o’ the others so bound seem inclined to go against him. Meself, I don’t think he cares for us paddies . . .”
“Not that we care for him much.” his son added. “But the Oregoners will have him for captain, for a’ we can say about it.”
“Wait and see,” John said tranquilly. “Wait and see. In St. Joe, the men I know in the Santa Fe trade say that thirty to forty men in a company is best. Stephens told me he didn’t think the grass would be grown tall enough for us for another three weeks. There’s a little time left for others to join us, in the meantime.”

Nothing so quite reassured him as the sight of the way-side blacksmith driving his team up the hill a few days later as they were finishing their noonday meal under a canvas awning stretched between handy tree branches and their wagons. Moses and Allen were exuberantly planning a grand buffalo-hunting expedition once they were out on the trail, while John listened to them and smiled quietly over his book of Chesterfield’s letters, and Elizabeth mended one of Moses’ shirts. Sarah was finishing the washing-up.
As she emptied out the wash pan over the side of the bluff, she straightened and said, “Doctor John, there’s another wagon coming up from town. It looks like that blacksmith man.”
“Why so it is.” John put his book away. Stephens was quite alone, no drover and no spare stock, just the three yoke and golden-eyed Dog trailing after. At the top of the hill, John greeted him. “Stephens, you are a welcome sight. I was about to go into Kanesville and buy another horse.”
“That so?” Stephens half-smiled, clean of forge-soot, but trail-dusty. The rains had finally let up, and the roads had begun to dry out. “Am I doing you another favor, Doc?”
“I appreciate your eye . . . you’ve vastly more trail experience than I have. Or most of the others, I have discovered, since we parted.”
John introduced him to Allen and the Pattersons, and arranged to borrow Allen’s saddle horse for the afternoon, Dog being bidden to stay behind and guard Stephens’ wagon, while the two of them rode to Kanesville.
John pointed out the Murphy’s rambling camp as they passed by it. The children were playing out in the meadow nearby; soldiers and Indians, it looked like, from the willow-branch bows and arrows, and the chicken-feathers. It also appeared that Sadie and Nancy Patterson had been unenthusiastically pressed into serving as Indians.
There was Eddie, and John recognized young Martins’ sons, as alike as peas in a pod, just as their grandfather said: they had their mothers’ auburn-tinged hair, and their grandfather’s lively brown eyes, perfect stair-steps when they stood in a line. Their voices chimed together, and they often finished each others’ sentences, presenting a united front to the world, the picture of injured innocence when accused of some small childish crime.
“I’ll introduce you to them, tonight. Young Martin is the best hand with oxen that I have seen so far, very careful he is with his beasts. He doctors them himself, only asks my advice for courtesy. They’re all good folk. They’ve six wagons among them all and at least fifteen men if you count the hired teamsters and the boys who are almost grown . . . but not a one of them ever been west of the Mississippi. It was enough of an eye-opener for Montgomery and me, just bringing our wagons from St. Joseph. I know what my own limitations are.”
Stephens just looked at him, shrewdly, with those water-pale eyes. “You working on a plan, doc?”
“Yes,” John replied. “They’re holding an election for wagon-master, on Sunday . . . to elect a leader for all of us as far as to Fort Hall, and a secretary and god knows what. I’m going to nominate you. You’d be a better captain than that blowhard Thorp who’s been angling for it since we got here. I think he’s a fool and couldn’t pilot a thirsty horse to water. They’d give me the captaincy, if I wanted it, just because I’m a doctor and wear a fine coat. But I don’t want it.” He looked honestly at Stephens. “I know my own skills. I’m good at doctoring, at least I don’t kill any more of my patients than most doctors do. But I don’t want to be responsible for leading all these fine folk into the desert on the strength of my fine coat and polished boots.”
“But you’re going anyway.”
“I’d prefer to do so following you,” John answered.
“Why me, in parti’clar?”
“Because I think you’d know what you’re doing, out there . . . and you don’t want the captaincy. And that means you’re the best man to have it.”
“I ain’t a political man, Doc. I ain’t real good with folk.”
“But I am,” John replied. “Leave that part of it to me.”

In the mud and squalor of Kanesville’s pens and corrals, John followed Stephen’s lead regarding sizing up stock. “I don’t think you want more’n one extra team,” the blacksmith advised. “Take care of the ones you start with.” They disputed pleasantly over that, and the eternal question of mule versus oxen for teams.
“Mules move faster,” John argued.
“But the Injuns ‘ull steal ‘em, and leave oxen alone, mostly. ‘Sides, you can always eat oxen, if it comes to that.”
“You can eat mule.” John pointed out.
“Don’t taste so good. Hardly any flesh on ‘em.”
They leaned their elbows on the top rail of a corral full of horses; mostly browns and bays, paints and pintos, still shaggy from winter, snorting and jostling each other.
“Not much to choose from,” John said, discouraged. This lot looked too wild and unbroken. There was a pretty dapple-grey, very spirited though; he quailed at the thought of his Elizabeth riding such an unschooled mount.
“That one,” Stephens said, quietly. “The buckskin colored gelding, dark mane and tail – yonder far corner.” It was about a hand shorter than the others, a neat-featured and spry little beast, like an Indian pony.
Someone came up to the corral rail, on John’s other side, and John turned and thought in amazement at first they were Indians, silent and smelling of tobacco smoke, all three with long hair.
The oldest of them was a straight-backed and powerfully-built old man, even older than Hitchcock, for his hair had gone entirely snow white, clubbed at the back of his neck in the old-fashioned manner of the last century. He had blue eyes, clouded with cataracts. The other two, boys about Moses and Oliver’s age, had high cheekbones and Indian coloring, and wore their hair in long plaits ornamented with beads and feathers in the Indian custom. All three of them were dressed in fringed leather leggings and moccasins, and tunics of hide, and trimmed alike with leather fringe and beadwork.
John said, “Mr. Greenwood?” at the same time as Stephens said, “Caleb.” The old man merely nodded; seemingly he and Stephens were old acquaintances.
“’Lisha. Your friend?”
“Doc Townsend. Going t’ California.”
“Caleb Greenwood.” The old mountain-man shook his hand with courteous firmness, “My sons, Brittan and Johnny. You are seeking a good horse?”
“For my wife,” John said.
“Any you favor?”
“Mr. Stephens advises the little buckskin. I’d still like to see him ridden, though. They all appear quite wild.”
“Britt?” said the old man softly, with a gesture. One of the Indian boys vaulted the fence, and nonchalantly threaded his way between the fractious horses. He approached the little buckskin, and grabbed him by the nose, appearing to whisper or blow into the startled animals’ nostrils. For a moment, the two heads were close together, and then Britt seized a handful of mane, and leaped from the ground, straight onto the buckskin’s back.
For a moment, the little horse stood stock still, and then Britt nudged his ribs with moccasined heels, and leaned close against his neck and urged him into a walk, then a trot, back to a canter and then a walk again, up to the corral fence where Britt slid down, laughing, with a flash of white teeth in his dark-tanned face.
“I b’lieve you have yourself a horse for your lady wife, ” remarked the old frontiersman. “Tell her she must treat it as a pet at first and feed it apples and carrots and treats from her own hand. This one has a good heart and a sweet nature, and will carry her faithfully wherever she goes.” And as if embarrassed by so many words, he nodded courteously and strode away, trailed by his two Indian sons.
“We must hire him as the trail-guide,” said Stephens quietly, which John believed ever afterwards to be Stephens’ very first command as captain – even though he were not yet elected to that office.

* * *

Angeline Morrison Letter #2
15th of May 1844
Writ from the emigrant camp
At Council Bluffs, Iowa Territory

My dearest Angeline:
Receiv’d your kindest answer before we departed from St. Joseph; a thousand thanks for your honest recitations of events. I will feel so distant from those happy scenes, be assured that I shall cherish your letter, and read it often, especially when we have departed these shores.
We leave in a few days, with great anticipation and enthusiasm, since the grass has now grown tall enough to feed our stock. The rains have “let up” as our trail guide Mr. Greenwood says. Such a picturesque sight as he presents, as you would think he walked out of the pages of a Leatherstocking tale! He and sons are contracted to guide us as far as Fort Hall.
My Dearest has bought me a riding horse, for my use when travel in the wagon becomes too uncomfortable and walking beside it too exhausting; he remains busy these last few days before we take to the trail, with business relating to our party, and I am relieved that he is so engaged again with these public matters. Everything promises to be so new, so different, as we leave all common cares behind, but what awaits us?
I shall write to you from Fort Laramie, my dearest friend, with an account of our adventures upon this venture. Until then adieu, from
Your loving friend

Elizabeth

24. November 2006 · Comments Off on The Use of History · Categories: General, History, Pajama Game, Rant, sarcasm

Reader Mark Rosenbaum commented on one of my historical pieces this week: “Why couldn’t they tell history this well when I was in school a half century ago?” . About that same time, I ran across this story— part of the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday. Perhaps it might, in a small way, explain why people are not so enamored of history these days… at least, the sort of history taught in schools.

I can only assume that we are supposed to marvel at Mr. Morgan’s method of teaching, and his grim multi-culti sensitivity, in pounding it in relentlessly to a class of grade-schoolers that we actual or spiritual descendents of Pilgrims are “Bad, Bad People, Who Stole Everything From the Indians, and Celebrating Thanksgiving is Just As Bad as the Holocaust, Almost”. Myself, I think “Jeeze, what a dick-head!” Talk about sucking all the joy out of the room! Seriously, teachers like this was one of the reasons I gave a miss to teaching myself; and the reason for private school looking better and better when it came to Blondie. For one, the School Sisters of St. Francis did not conflate the Plymouth Colony in it’s shaky first years with three hundred years of savage conflict. Dumping on the poor Pilgrims for the Indian Wars seems to be a bit of a fallacy, as well as grandly oversimplifying history— Not to mention the fact that the Indians warred on each other with keen enjoyment and no little inventive brutality for centuries. At the very least, Mr. Morgan is a dickhead for ruining the innocent joy of children in what appears to have been a fond ritual. Having the kids dress up like Pilgrims and Indians and commemorating a peaceful feast together… dear, can’t have that, can we? It’s just too simple!

History for children ought to be simplified, but dumping a metaphorical turd in the punchbowl like that may not be the most effective way to begin teaching the nuances of it all.

Because you have to begin with teaching the history, then bring in the nuances and the highlights, as well as the lowlights, the grand stories, and events. We need our heroes, we have to know what people did, how they behaved, and why. It’s almost a primal urge… why do we still read the Iliad, of Beowulf and King Arthur, of Shakespeare’s’ kings and nobles, and Civil War generals. We need the stories of people, almost as much as we need oxygen, water, sustenance. We are driven to accounts of glorious deeds as much as of the ignoble, of disasters and adversity, wanting examples of how well, or how badly people behave in adversity, wanting to pattern our own selves against those who stood as pillars of integrity in bad times, and shining heroes in the good times. If we do not know how people in the past could survive, endure, and persevere… than how can we hope for ourselves? We would be alone, without a map, without an idea, and without hope. It would be a sort of intellectual sensory-deprivation tank, to be cut off from the past. Mr. Morgan’s chief offense, I fear, is that with the best intentions in the world, he is subtly discouraging kids from looking at history. Besides the permanently apologetic and masochistic, who truly wants to be ashamed of their ancestors, and where they came from? Yes, Mr. Morgan, about the paving material used on the approach to the underworld?

There is a theory that all this rubbishing of our heroes and heroines, and the events in our national saga being constantly painted as sordid, vile, an epic of treachery and double-dealing from the very beginning has a deliberate propose; an elaborate Marxist-Gramscian plot to render us spiritless, compliant to the leadership of some vaguely socialist cabal. It might very well be so; but tools like Mr. Morgan and his ilk may have overplayed their hand, because in spite of their tireless labors in the classroom and the upper reaches of academia and intelligentsia, people are still drawn to history on their own: to their own family memoirs, to amateur history circles, and to re-enactors’ groups of everything from mountain-man rendezvous and black-power shooting, to Civil War and Revolutionary battles, to reconstructing lifestyles and vintage clothing, and a hundred other ways of reaching out and touching the past. We cannot help ourselves, it’s an imperative; we must understand the present, and perhaps find a path through the future… in spite of educational apparatchiks like Mr. Morgan and his grim little exercise in political correctitude.

Wouldn’t it have been much more nuanced, do you think, to emphasize that on that long ago Thanksgiving, two very different peoples, whose descendents would be at each others throats for three hundred years, were yet able to join together for a great feast, to be courteous and friendly with each other, for at least a little while? Next month, I suppose Mr. Morgan will follow up by telling the kiddies that Santa Claus is an invention of the mercantile-industrial establishment.

23. November 2006 · Comments Off on Scenic Wonders of the Trail · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(Another of the series about the Old West)

In some not inconsiderable ways, heading west along the Platte River trails might have been seen as a kind of working holiday for emigrants. While there was a lot of brute physical work involved in moving the wagons or the mule-train the requisite twelve or fifteen miles farther west each day, the charm of camping under canvas every night, and preparing meals over an open campfire twice or three times daily must have worn very thin… it may have been not much more onerous then the daily round of chores attendant on an 19th century farmstead. Add in camaraderie among the party, the fairly easy going on the first third of the trail to California or Oregon, opportunities to hunt and explore new horizons, horizons that were unimaginably wider than what they had been used to, back in Ohio or Missouri, sights that were strange and rare to ordinary farm folk.

The Platte River Valley itself was one of those striking vistas; often called the “Coast of Nebraska; it so resembled a flat, shimmering ocean, edged with sand dunes. It appeared to be somewhat below the level of the prairies they would have been crossing, since departing from Independence, St. Joe or Council Bluffs. To some emigrants it appeared like a vast, golden inland sea, stretching to the farthest horizon. But it was the highway towards the mountains beyond Fort Laramie, a month or so of fairly easy traveling… even if the river water was murky with silt, the mosquitoes a veritable plague and wood for campfires very rare.

The Coast of Nebraska offered another awe-inspiring vista; that of vast herds of buffalo. The Platte Valley was their grazing ground and watering hole. Emigrants were astounded equally by the size of the individual buffalo— which could weigh up to 2,000 pounds— and the sheer numbers. Witnesses to stampedes of buffalo herds at various times and places along the Platte noted how the very ground shook, and the sound of it was like a heavy railroad train passing close by. This was heady stuff, to someone who had spent most of their life before this, farming in Ohio, or in Missouri. But more was yet to come.
More »

17. November 2006 · Comments Off on Zen and the Hopeful Writer · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

Still waiting to hear from an agent/publisher/deus-ex-machina/whatever, regarding the book. Another couple of weeks of this, and my fingernails will be chewed off, all the way up to my elbows. All my friends counsel patience, all but one, who recommends zen detachment… and starting on another book. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, thinking on this. What on earth could I write about? What is out there that would grab me, and an audience half as thoroughly as the greatest emigrant trail epic that no one has ever heard anything about?  It made a nice change from worrying about paying the necessary bills on a combination of a pension, two part-time jobs and some blogging-for-dollars.  I loved the experience of writing that story; it took two months and a bit, going full-tilt every day that I could spend at the computer. I had set myself a target of 3,000 words, or half of a chapter a day. I already had a chapter outline, a handful of characters, the plot. all worked out; just put in the little bits, the conversation and incident, and colorful bits of description. Piece of cake.  I’ve read how hard it is to work at home, how easily distractable it can be, that everything gets in the way, and …. Oh, Blondie just asked me to mend a hole in one of her tee-shirts… where was I? Yes, things conspire to keep you fiddling around with other things, rather than buckling down to work.

Anyway, I finished it, put it around for some friends to read, did some re-writes as I found more and better background information,  took stock of various questions and critiques, rewrote it again, filled out some of the incidents, characters and relationships… and at the every end of it, I fiddled around for days on the last little rewrite. Because after that last page, that last paragraph, it would be finished. I would be done with John and Elizabeth, with Captain Stephens and his faithful Dog, the fearless little Eddie, his mother Isabella  and his baby sister… all of them. Their adventure would be over, and so would mine. I had wanted to write about them so badly that I took being laid off with the greatest good will. I’ve been reluctant to even consider full-time employment again, because… to be honest, I don’t want to think about myself as anything but a writer. I don’t really want to be doing anything but writing. I’ve spent all of my adult life spent  working in  broadcasting, and the military, or in various pink-collar administrative and office jobs because it paid, and I was mostly good at it, if not particularly interested. I kept the scribbling on the side as a private amusement, but this year it just came to a head. I want to do what it pleases me to do, and that is just that.  My mid-life crisis, as it were. My friend the zen-master sternly advises against thinking of money or acclaim… just write. You are, therefore you write… but having finished one enormously compelling story… what to do, what to do? Writing “Truckee’s Trail”  was in a weird way, rather addictive, sort of what heroin must be like. (Blondie, doing a Bette-Davis sized eye-roll: “Mom, you’ve never done heroin!).

The new book… nineteenth century America still draws me. A historical novel, then; I seem to have a knack for it, anyway. Where we Americans came from, an experience which shaped and I am convinced goes on shaping us; the frontier, of course. But something off-beat, something mostly unknown to a wider audience… something unexpected. It all came together unexpectedly as I was emailing the “zen-master”, lamenting the fact that I didn’t know anything of where I stand as far as the agent is concerned; the perfect next writing project. The Texas frontier this time and the German settlers who came and founded Fredericksburg and New Braunfels. It has everything: very cultured, forward-thinking Europeans, unhappy with the political situation after 1848… one of their leaders was a nobleman, for pete’s sake! They came all at once, and founded their little town on the edge of howling wilderness, and hashed out a treaty with the Indians, and planted gardens, and got along uneasily with the other Texans, and then…and then… and then….

That’s where the fun comes in.  I don’t know quite how I will shape the story, or who I will focus  on, but I just know there is something in it, and I’ll know it when I see it, once I’ve begun the reading. Think of the shock, the culture clash; coming from Europe, with all it’s tiny old buildings, castles and culture… and standing under the big sky, and looking around at empty hills and oak trees, and seeing… well, nothing built by man. I’m halfway convinced a fair number of European émigrés in the 19th century must have felt like hiding under a heavy piece of furniture and never coming out, except that there was nothing to go back for. What preconceptions they mist have packed with their baggage, what hopes they had, in a new land? How difficult was their adjustment to new and brutal realities on the frontier? It may even be politically current, if Mark Steyn and others are correct about a political melt-down in Europe in the near future. And it’s not much known: I was barely aware of the various German colonies in Texas until I came to live here, and I was a history junkie from the first time I began reading all Mom’s back issues of American Heritage. (Back when they were published in hard covers, and without any advertising.)Best if all, most of it is conveniently located close-by; doing descriptions will be a snap! And so will getting in touch with local enthusiasts. I have written about the German settlers before, even.  (sigh… can’t get link to work. It was  post last year called “Germantown”)

I can hardly wait to get started….  

 

 

14. November 2006 · Comments Off on Yet Another Tiny Taste of the Good Stuff · Categories: General, Home Front, Old West

 (More from my so far unpublished epic of the emigrant trail)

Some weeks later, when the Montgomery and Townsend wagons were still a little short of Kanesville, the Ugly Grey threw a shoe, and lost it in the deep mud. It had rained all morning, but now the clouds were breaking up into innocent fluffy white clumps scattered across a clear and pale sky. The two wagons had been much inconvenienced by rain, since it made the road a swampy, muddy morass, and brought the river far enough up to cover the trunks of trees on the riverbank. Francis and Allen Montgomery waded knee-deep in churned muck, and they were forced to the expedient of keeping dry firewood in the wagon, so that it would burn well enough in the evenings for Elizabeth and Sarah to cook a meal over it.John dismounted immediately, almost the minute that Ugly Grey began to favor his left rear leg, but there was no finding the missing shoe in the mud, not with the way other wagon wheels and other hoofed draft animals had turned it over and over again. Allen and Francis halted the wagons, while he did a quick search. The driver of a heavy horse-team dray wagon coming the other way saw them by the side of the road, and called out.

“What kind of trouble are you having, friend?”

“My horse lost a shoe… How far are we from Kanesville? Can you recommend us to a blacksmith there?” On the clear horizon ahead of them hung a hazy smear of wood smoke, too large for a single farmstead.

“Not far… three, four miles…  That where you’re bound?”

“For today… we mean to join an emigrant company there, for California. Did you just come from there? Do you know where they are camped?”

“Out west of town, in a grove of trees by the river, waiting for the river to go down,” Replied the drayman, slapping his reins, “And there’s a good few blacksmiths there… but there’s a man with a little forge set up half-a-mile back, if you ain’t keen on walking all the way to Kanesville.”

“Thank you, for your good words,” John tipped his hat, and told Allen and Francis, “Heard that? I’ll stop at this roadside forge, and catch up with you at the campsite.”

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10. November 2006 · Comments Off on The Birthday Message · Categories: Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, History, Military

No matter where you are, what your doing or how you feel about the Marine Corps: Happy Birthday nonetheless

The following will be read to the command on the 10th of November, 1921, and hereafter on the 10th of November of every year. Should the order not be received by the 10th of November, 1921, it will be read upon receipt.

(1) On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of Continental Congress. Since that date many thousand men have borne the name “Marine”. In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the birthday of our corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.

(2) The record of our corps is one which will bear comparison with that of the most famous military organizations in the world’s history. During 90 of the 146 years of its existence the Marine Corps has been in action against the Nation’s foes. From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war, and is the long eras of tranquility at home, generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres and in every corner of the seven seas, that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security.

(3) In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term “Marine” has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

(4) This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the corps. With it we have also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as “Soldiers of the Sea” since the founding of the Corps.

John A. Lejeune,
Major General Commandant

08. November 2006 · Comments Off on Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841 Part 2 · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(part two: part one here)

The men of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party, who had— against all advice and counsel— decided to continue on for California had much in common. They were all young, most under the age of thirty. None of them had been into the Far West until this journey, although one of them was a relative by marriage to the Sublette fur-trading family. The Kelsey brothers, Andrew and Benjamin were rough Kentucky backwoodsmen. Two of them had been schoolteachers, but all had grown up on farms, were accustomed to firearms and hunting…and hard work, of which the unknown trail would offer plenty. No less than four of them kept diaries, three of which are still in existence. The diarists themselves narrated a zesty and optimistic tale of their adventures, taking some of the edge off of the desperation that must have been felt as they blundered farther and farther into the trackless wilderness. They set off with nine wagons in the middle of August, following the Bear River towards the Great Salt Lake. They had seen a map which showed two rivers flowing west from this lake, but it seemed that was a mere fantasy on the part of the map-maker. After a week or so, they camped north of the Lake and sent two men to Fort Hall seeking additional supplies and guidance. In both they were disappointed; there were no supplies to be spared from the fort stores, and there was no guide to be hired. The only advice they could get from Fort Hall was not to go too far north, into a bandlands of steep canyons, or too far south into the sandy desert. But away to the west there was a river flowing towards the south-west. That was called then Mary’s or Ogden’s River (now the Humboldt). If they could find and follow it, it would guide them on long way.

On such sketchy advice, they continued westwards; a dry stretch around the north of the lake, until despairing, they turned north and camped at the foot of a mountain range. There was grass and water there, as they would come to know if they had not worked that out already. They traded gunpowder and bullets for some berries from friendly Indians camped nearby. At this point, they may have realized it would be better to send out scouts ahead, and party captain Bartleson and another man named Hopper rode out on a scout to look for Mary’s River. They did not return for some days, during which the party abandoned one wagon and moved gradually westward. They were probably following the tracks left by the two scouts, who did not return until eleven days were passed and they had been despaired of. Owners of two wagons hired Indian guides and went south on their own, covering two days journey, until Bartleson and Hopper returned to the reminder with word they had found a small stream that seemed to lead into the Mary’s River.

They all headed southwards across the desert, southwards again after camping at a place called Rabbit Creek. By mischance, they had missed the headwaters of a creek that emptied into the river they were searching for, and in another couple of days, the team animals began to fail. The Kelsey brothers abandoned their wagons, packing their remaining supplies onto the backs of their mules and saddle horses, and the party continued with increasing desperation, south and west, and to the north-west again, until it became clear that the wagons were a useless, dragging burden. In the middle of September the wagons were abandoned, about where present-day US Highway 40 crosses the Pequop Summit. They made packs for the mules… they tried to make packs for the oxen, who promptly bucked them off again. They set off again, giving much of what they couldn’t take to friendly Indians, and operating mostly by chance at this point, found and followed the Humboldt River. They supplied themselves by hunting and gradually and one by one, killing their draft oxen. Nancy Kelsey, the indomitable wife of Benjamin was reduced to carrying her year-old daughter, herself barefoot… and yet, as one of their comrades recollected later, “she bore the fatigues of the journey with so much heroism, patience and kindness…” She had embarked on the journey, declaring that she would rather endure hardships with her husband, than anxieties over his absence.

Gradually, as historian George Stewart put it, “their journey became one of those starvation marches so common in the history of the West”. They soldiered on through the desert, eventually finding their way over the Sierra at the Sonora Pass, only to be caught in the wilderness canyons at the headwaters of the Stanislaus River. They did not eat well until they reached the lower stretches, the gentle San Joaquin valley where the men— still well supplied with powder and shot— bagged enough deer for a feast. They arrived at a ranch nearby early in November of 1841.

They were the first party of emigrants to arrive overland, although with scarcely more than they wore on their backs, or carried. Among their numbers were included the future first mayor of San Jose, the founder of the city of Stockton, and the founder of Chico, a delegate to the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln, and two or three who were merely quietly prosperous. The very last living member of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party died in 1903 at the age of 83. Given their hairs-breadth adventures on the emigrant trail, I imagine that he, like most of his comrades would have been pleasantly surprised at having the words “natural causes” or “old age” appear anywhere in their obituaries.

06. November 2006 · Comments Off on Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841 · Categories: General, Good God, History, Old West, Pajama Game

The westward movement of Americans rolled west of the Appalachians and hung up for a decade or two on the barrier of the Mississippi-Missouri. It was almost an interior sea-coast, the barrier between the settled lands, and the un-peopled and tree-less desert beyond, populated by wild Indians. To be sure, there were scattered enclaves, as far-distant as the stars in the age of “shanks’ mare” and team animals hitched to wagons, or led in a pack-train: far California, equally distant Oregon, the pueblos of Santa Fe, and Texas. And men in exploring parties, or on trade had ventured out to the ends of the known continent… and by the winter of 1840 there were reports of what had been found. Letters, rumor, common talk among the newspapers, and meeting-places had put the temptation and the possibility in peoples’ minds, to the point where an emigrating society had been formed over that winter. The members had pledged to meet, all suitably outfitted and supplied on the 9th of May, 1841 at a rendezvous twenty miles west of Independence, on the first leg of the Santa Fe Trail, intent for California, although none of them had at the time any clear idea of where to go, in order to get there.

A handful of wagons, two or three at a time straggled into the meeting place, at Sapling Grove, in the early weeks of May, until there were about thirty-five men, which was considered a suitable size of the party. There were, in addition to the men, ten children and five women: three wives, the widowed sister of one of them, and a single unmarried woman, and it would appear that none of them had been into the far West before. They had a vague notion of the latitude of San Francisco Bay, and perhaps were dithering for some days over whether to follow the long- established Santa Fe Trail, or the slight track which wandered off in the direction of the fur-trading post at Fort Laramie and from there on to Oregon. While they were still making up their minds, a small party of Jesuit missionaries led by the legendary Father Pierre De Smet and bound for Ft. Hall, in the Oregon territory arrived. The Jesuits had hired the equally legendary mountain man, Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick as their guide, and the California party attached themselves to this party, no doubt with a certain amount of relief. Sufficient to the days’ travel were the evils thereof, and the Jesuits and “Broken Hand” would accompany them for the first thousand miles.

They left on the 12th of May, after electing one John Bartleson as nominal captain… but like the Stephens-Townsend Party of three years later, seemed to have functioned more or less as a company of equals. They moved slowly for the first few days, having gotten word that another wagon and a small party of men was trying to catch up to them; ten days later, they did so. Among the late-comers was Joseph Chiles, who would eventually cross and recross the California trail many times over the following fifteen years. Another three days later, the party was joined by a single elderly horseman, traveling alone, penniless and without weapons, trusting in the protection of the God he served, the Methodist Rev. Joseph Williams. The Reverend Williams had taken it into his head to go forth and minister to the heathen Indians. Arriving at Sapling Grove to find the party already gone, he had ridden alone through the wilderness to join them. Whether this was an act of jaw-dropping naivety, or saintliness is a matter of perspective.

Under the stern direction of Fitzpatrick, the party reached Fort Laramie after 42 days of hard travel. The party traveled in a mixture of conveyances and teams: The Jesuits in four mule-drawn carts and a single small wagon, then eight emigrant wagons drawn by horse and mule teams, then a half-dozen drawn by ox teams. The cracking pace set by the mule carts meant many exhausting hours in harness for the slower oxen, which a single day of rest at Ft. Laramie did nothing to make up for. And supplies were already running short. They hunted for buffalo along the valley of the Sweetwater, and met up with a party of 60 trappers on the Green River, who told them flat-out that it was impossible to take wagons over the mountains and desert and mountains again to California. At that point a small group of seven men packed it in and headed back to Missouri, and all but thirty one men and Mrs. Nancy Kelsey decided to carry on with the trail towards Ft. Hall and Oregon.

Their further adventures are well-documented, as there were four diarists among them. A fair proportion of them became successful and pillars of their respective communities in later life, although one of them, Talbot Greene later turned out to be an embezzler escaping the authorities. He was pleasant, well-liked and trusted by the others, serving as their doctor, and carried with him to California a large chunk of lead. No one could fathom why he needed quite so much of this commodity; even then, it was considered bad from to pry too much into others’ personal affairs.

(To be continued)

05. November 2006 · Comments Off on 231! Hoooorah! · Categories: Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, History, Military

Reader and fellow mil-blog webmaster Will Donaldson reminded me this week… as of Sgt/Cpl Blondie wouldn’t have done so already… that the USMC ball and anniversary celebrations are this week. More information on all matters USMC at this link!

A USMC ring-tone? Mmmm. OK.

01. November 2006 · Comments Off on The Jumping-Off Places · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(Yet another in my interminable series about the 19th Century emigrant trail)

These were the places where the trails all began: the trails that lead to Oregon, to the Mormon colonies in Utah, to California, and before them, into the fur-trapping wildernesses in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, and the commercial trade to Santa Fe.

Five towns, all along a 200-mile stretch of the Missouri River; many of which have long-since outgrown their original footprint as a river-boat landing on the edge between civilization and wilderness, leaving only the smallest traces here and there among a century and a half of building up and sprawling outwards. The modern towns of Kansas City, Weston-Leavenworth, St. Joseph, Nebraska City and Council Bluffs-Omaha, were the places where the journey began. They were once rowdy, muddy, enormously crowded in those months when the emigrant, exploring, or trading parties were preparing to set out. Primitive, bursting with excitement, overrun with emigrants and stock pens, the crossroads where merchants sold everything necessary for the great journey, the very crossroads of the west; Indians and mountain men, Santa Fe merchants and soldiers, emigrants, missionaries and foreigners passed each other in the spaces between buildings that did duty as streets. They were the inland coast, from which the emigrants looked out upon the sea of grass and made preparations.
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28. October 2006 · Comments Off on Another Taste of the Good Stuff · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West

In gratitude for donations recieved from readers, following last weeks’ “bleg”, a portion of Chapter 1 of the latest “book”… which even now is completed and sits on a literary agents’ desk awaiting a decision over wether he will choose to take it on, or not

Chapter One – Preparations and Partings

Third November, 1843… With a heavy heart and much trepidation, I am resov’d to leave this place, and remove to California, first for the sake of my Dearest Darling….

Under a pool of golden lamplight in the silent bedroom, John Townsend carefully uncorked the bottle of ink in his portable writing desk, balanced across his knees, and wrote in his tiny, careful hand:
“I fear for her health above all else. She has a delicate constitution, and cannot bear another cold winter, or disease-wracked summer such as this last without permanent impairment. Moses has been all talk this year past about the marvels of fabled California and it’s wonderfully mild and temperate climate. He is impatient for emigration and adventure and swears hourly to embark upon it, in company with Allan and Sarah M. I think it is the talk of impetuous youth but he is of that age to venture upon such bold enterprise. Of late though, I have begun to believe that such transportation may be my Dearest Darling’s only hope of recovery to full health. In any case, she would not bear the thought of Moses’ attempting such a perilous journey himself and would fret herself into an early grave…” John crossed out the last three words, and wrote in “a decline…”

On the bedside table, a full kettle simmered over a burning spirit lamp. Steam hissed from the spout. John set aside the writing desk. A heavy blanket was tented over the head of the bedstead, and the head and shoulders of the woman sleeping fitfully underneath, a basin of water settled onto a pillow close to her head, a basin in which floated a few drops of camphor oil, their efficacy nearly spent with the cooling of the water. John emptied the basin into the slops jar, and filled it again with steaming water, and a fresh installment of camphor droplets.
John regarded her face, sheened with sweat and still flushed pink with the remnants of fever, or maybe the heat of healing steam under the blanket tent that lent a spurious look of health to Elizabeth’s face. Her blond hair and the neck of her high-buttoned nightgown were soaked with the sweat of a broken fever. He bent an ear towards her breathing; easy, without the gasp and wheeze that frightened him down to his soul with the threat, that her weak chest and frail constitution might take his Elizabeth away from him and leave him alone in this world. He put back the blanket over his wife’s face, and the newly-steaming bowl of water, and caught a glimpse of himself in the dressing-table mirror; a broad-shouldered man with a merry, and bluntly pugnacious face. His neck-cloth was loosened, and the fine broadcloth coat that his Elizabeth insisted that he always wear, being that he was a doctor, and had a position to keep up, set aside. His hair also stuck up in rebellious points and curls; he had run his hands through it too often during this latest crisis.

Someone tapped cautiously on the bedroom door and after a moment, opened it just wide enough to look around.
“Mose, boy, you should be in bed. It’s past two in the morning,” John chided his brother in law. Young Moses hesitated in the doorway, a gawky boy of seventeen not quite grown to his own strength, young enough to look heartbreakingly like his older sister with the same oval features and fair coloring.
“You’re still awake, Doctor John,” Moses said, trying so hard to sound gruff and manly “Is she better?”
“She’s sleeping easily; I think the crisis is past. I sent Mrs. Montgomery off to her own home hours since. ” John often had to speak comfortable and reassuring words to frightened relatives; sometimes they were the words that they wanted to hear and sometimes as it was now, the plain truth. John was glad of that for Moses’ sake. Not only was his Elizabeth a dear sister but next thing to a mother to Moses, since their parents had died ten years ago in one of the fever epidemics that swept Stark County, in Ohio. They were but newly married then, but the best established of all the Schallenberger’s children, and so Moses was left to them, a boy of six years and all but a flesh and blood son.

“Until next time,” Moses stepped a little into the bedroom, and looked at John, eye to eye. “This miasma, these epidemics of fever; Mr. Marsh writes about the climate in California, being bountifully temperate and healthy. If we could but remove her from them…”
“I know, Moses. I read the same letters, and hear the same idle talk.” John kept his voice low, and rubbed his forehead. His eyes felt like they were full of sand. “But it is a long, dangerous journey, and to a foreign country, at that.”

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23. October 2006 · Comments Off on 50 Years Ago, Today… · Categories: General, History

When I was a child, someone gave my sister a boxed book-set. I was the reader in the family, and I devoured them. They were hard-cover selections of Readers’ Digest articles. Each book had a theme (Courage, Endeavour, and two others that escape me, just now). In one of them, I read for the first time of the Hungarian Revolution. I don’t think that was ever covered in any history class I took throughout my 17 years of schooling (my history classes rarely made it to WWII by the end of the school year).

This morning, I opened up my link to the Opinion-Journal online, and the first title in their content list is The Hungarian Revolution: impotent, poignant, personal.

My generation had the Tiananmen Square Protest. But fifty years ago today, it was the Hungarian Revolution. And like Tiananmen Square, it was doomed.

Oh, it didn’t seem doomed, at first. The entire city of Budapest seemed to fill the streets, the public square. 8-12 hours they stood there, chanting, stamping their feet, clapping. They wanted the Russians to go home, the Soviet star on the parliament to be turned off. The star was darkened, but the Russians didn’t go home.

For 13 days, the Revolution progressed. The first Soviet tanks abandoned their orders, and joined the people. Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader, said Hungary wanted to leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union announced in Pravda that it was considering entering into negotiations “…on the question of the presence of Soviet troops on the territory of Hungary.” (source) The same day the article was published, Oct 31, the Soviets decided the needed to respond more strongly, and moved more tank units into the region.

By Nov 7, it was over. The Soviets installed a new Prime Minister, and promised safe passage to Nagy, who had sought refuge in the Yugoslavian Embassy. When Nagy left the Embassy, he was arrested and taken to Romania, where he was eventually tried for treason.

Remember them today… those heroes of yesterday, whose blood ran in the streets of their hometown.

Remember them, and their courage, and honor their memory.

“October 23, 1956, is a day that will live forever in the annals of free men and nations. It was a day of courage, conscience and triumph. No other day since history began has shown more clearly the eternal unquenchability of man’s desire to be free, whatever the odds against success, whatever the sacrifice required.”
– John F. Kennedy, on the first anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution.

17. October 2006 · Comments Off on The Things They Carried · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

(Part 2 of an intermidable series about the 19th Century emigrant trail to California and Oregon. I have finished revisions to my initial draft of the book in which an agent is interested. I am filling in the time until I hear what he thinks of it all with this sort of thing. I’ll try and force myself to write something vicious and cogent about Korean Nukes or the upcoming election silly season, but I’m afraid my heart is really with this. Deal.)

There is a single photograph of the interior of a covered wagon in one of my reference books; but from the jumble of items within, I would guess it to be an emigrant wagon from a period rather later than the 1840ies. It seems to contain rather a jumble of furniture: an upholstered wing chair, a spinning wheel, a very elaborate trunk fitted out with a number of smaller drawers for silverware: the trunk is open, displaying a fine mid-Victorian assembly of knives and silverware. There are a couple of inlaid boxes— portable desks or sewing tables, what appears to be the head and footboard to a Jenny Lind bed, a butter churn and a lighted kerosene lantern hanging from the center, mid-peak of the inside. The series of hoops holding up the canvas cover is reinforced with a pair of horizontal lathes along the sides of the wagon, from which hang an number of articles of clothing; some dresses, a shirt, a baby’s dress and a couple of sunbonnets. This may be a wagon in which a family lived during their journey, late in the days of the emigrant trail. In this wagon interior, there is very little glimpse of what a typical emigrant wagon would have had to have carried in the opening days of the trails to Oregon and California, when the only possible means of re-supply along the way, other than hunting and gathering, were at Ft. Laramie and Ft. Hall.

The greatest part of the goods carried in a typical emigrant wagon was food. Assuming a six-month long journey, an early guidebook writer advised 200 lbs of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of coffee, 20 of sugar and 10 of salt per each adult, at a minimum; a schedule providing a monotonous diet on variants of bread, bacon and coffee, three meals a day. More elaborate checklists afforded a little more variety, not to mention edibility, suggesting such things as dried, chipped beef, rice, tea, dried beans, molasses, dried codfish, dried fruit, baking soda, vinegar, cheese, cream of tarter, pickles, mustard, ginger, corn-meal, hard-tack, and well-smoked hams. Common sense suggests that all sorts of light-weight preserved foods and epicurian luxuries would have been included also, to ward off the boredom of bread/bacon/coffee. Canned food was a science still in the experimental stage then… and such things were expensive and heavy, and seldom included. A number of resourceful families brought along milk cows, and thus had milk and butter for at least the first half of the trail. Recommended kitchen gear included an iron cooking kettle, fry-pan, coffee pot, and tin camp plates, cups, spoons and forks, and considering that coffee featured a s a major food group, a coffee grinder. Small stoves were sometimes brought along, but more usually discarded as an unnecessary weight.

Prior to the great Gold Rush stampede over the trail in 1849, it was possible for those parties which included some experienced frontier hands to eke out their foodstuffs with hunting alongside the trail; buffalo, antelope, sage hen, and from gathering various berries and plums from thickets along the rivers, wild peas, wild onions, and various sorts of greens. Nutritional science may have been only dimly understood, but most emigrants (or at least their wives) had a good grasp on the prevention of scurvy, dysentery and other food related ailments.

Other necessary gear for the wagon itself: water barrels, chains, 100 feet of heavy rope, and spare parts to replace that which was most readily broken, such as tongues, kingbolts, axels and wheel spokes, although such added to the weight, and some emigrants preferred to take a chance on being able to find suitable wood to make a replacement along the trail. The wagon itself was too small for more than two adults or a couple of children to sleep comfortably in, so the overflow would need to be accommodated by a tent, and blankets spread out within them.

Since they would be on their own, as far as repairs of anything at all would be concerned, a veritable tool shop was advised: knives, a whetstone, ax, hammer, hatchet, shoves, saw, gimlet, scissors and sewing supplies to repair canvas and clothing, nails, tacks, thread, beeswax and tallow, twine, washbasins and water buckets. Some comforts were not omitted; candles and lanterns, patent medicines, extra clothing; most emigrants wore the same work clothes they would have worn for a day of work on the farm, or a day out hunting, and perhaps, tucked away in a small corner, some small cherished luxury, a favorite book or a bit of china. Men with a trade took the tools necessary to practice it. Every party also took arms and ammunition, although as it would turn out, most had much less use for them than they had expected.

And as it also turned out, even with all the preparations and supplies, a fair number of the early emigrants arrived in California or Oregon on foot, with little more than what they stood up in, thanks to the difficulties of the trail. Having eaten just about all of their food supplies, jettisoned the non-essential gear, lost their oxen and animals to bad water and the cruelties of the desert, and abandoned their wagons in the desert or high in the Sierras, or along the Snake River… they arrived in the place where they wished to be, carrying their children… and thought it had all been a fair exchange.

Later comment added from B. D. who’s comment kept being eaten:

“1) The way to make butter on the trail is to fasten a churn on the side of a wagon, just above a wheel. The jitters and jolts of an unsprung wagon churn butter admirably well.

Not surprisingly, many emigrants walked as they could.

2) Gunshot deaths on the trail were a side effect of hunting, because one never knew when an antelope would appear. Emigrants would load the rifle and hang it up within easy reach, and in regards to the above jolting… well, gunshot deaths on the trail were pretty common, and most of them were accidents.

The End of the Oregon Trail Center in Oregon City is a neat little place that is designed to look like three huge wagons— they can even take the canvas-like covers off in the winter. (Real roofs are below.) The opening presentation is quite nice, thouogh of a type that raised more questions than it answered (“Bullet wounds were the third most common type of death on the trail.” Yeah? What are #1 and #2?) The second bit is a multimedia presentation that my mother liked and I found exceptionally silly, as it read more like a propaganda film than, say, Ken Burns’ Civil War series. I highly recommend the place regardless, because its virtues overcome its faults, and I wish that other parts of the Trail had similar centers, each dealing with the specifics of life at that point. “

14. October 2006 · Comments Off on Heading West · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

The average so-called “western” movie or television series only very rarely gives a true idea of what it must have been like to take to the emigrant trail in the 1840ies and 50ies. Most westerns are set in a time-period from the end of the Civil war to about 1885, an overwhelming proportion have a cattle-ranch setting, sometimes a setting in the wild and woolly mining camps. The popular culture vision of the “old west” tends to warp our imagining of the 19th century in general, in that it puts in place people and technologies that were just not there until well after the Civil War. The latter part of that century was already looking forward to what would become the twentieth, and to extend what we commonly accept as a given about the late 19th century backwards to previous decades is give a short shift to the vision and sheer stubborn courage of the 1840ies wagon train emigrants, and to underestimate considerably the challenges they would have faced.

In 1840, there is no telegraph system in the West, and would not be for a decade or so, for the system itself was still under development. Ocean-going vessels are powered by the force of wind in their sails. News and the mail travels at the speed of a horse, a canal boat, or maybe a steam boat on the navigable rivers, although there have been some limited rail beds built, and serviced by steam locomotives for about ten years. But all those are back east. There are factories, of course… most of them powered by watermills. Other than that, power is supplied by animals, or the backs of humans. The first half of the century for most Americans is more like the century before, than the century afterwards.

There are no vast cattle ranches in that West. Gold will not be discovered until the end of the decade. What wealth came out of the West in the early decades of that century came in the form of beaver pelts… but the fashions have changed, and by 1840 there is no demand for them. There is no mail service; messages travel erratically. There is hardly anything representing the Federal government west of the Mississippi, only the occasional Army-authorized exploring party, and an American consul in such outposts as Yerba Buena. It is a six-month long sea-voyage around the Horn to reach the western coast of the continent. There are a scattering of trading posts and Mexican pueblos between the Mississippi-Missouri and the Sierra Nevada, served by enterprising merchants and fur-trading combines. Great caravans leave every year, but they are commercial enterprises, and their trail lies across mostly open and mostly level country. Little that they know and practice can be made use of by an emigrant outfitting a wagon to follow the trail towards the Oregon settlements or to fabled California.
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11. October 2006 · Comments Off on The Fort at La Ramie · Categories: General, History, Old West, Pajama Game

Once upon a time in the west, there was a pleasant piece of land, of open meadows broken by stands of trees on the headwaters of the North Platte River by the foot of a range of dark hills, in the present state of Wyoming. A creek flowed into the North Platte, just there, where in the very early days of the North American fur trade a French-Canadian trapper named Jaques La Ramee was supposed to have been killed by hostile natives and his body thrown into it. So the little stream and the place where it joined the Platte became known as the Laramie River, and the confluence as the Laramie Fork, or in the alternate spelling of the era “Laremais’ Point”.

Those streams drained a rich and profitable area for trappers, and many of the mountain men, as the hunters and trappers of beaver pelts were called in the early 19th century were issued licenses to trap in the uplands and to trade their takings there. In 1834 a stockade fort built of logs was established there, by William Sublette… he and two other men in the founding party had the first name of William, and so the place was dubbed “Fort William”. It had not escaped Sublette’s attention that not only was the location on the route into the rich fur-trapping lands in the western mountains, but also on the trail south to Taos. A year later the interest in the newly-established trading post passed into the hands of the American Fur Company, later Pierre Chouteau & Co. Ft. William was described several years later as a quadrangle with block houses at diagonal corners, where Indians camped in great numbers, bringing animal skins to trade for cloth, tobacco, beads and alcohol… and where the whole enterprise came under the sniffy disapproval of various missionaries, even as what sketchy hospitality available was welcomed, somewhat grudgingly, I fancy.

Early in the 1840ies a rival trading establishment, Ft. Platte was constructed close by, and the competition in combination with the rotting of Ft. William’s stockade walls inspired Chouteau’s company to build a new adobe fort on higher ground, which the explorer John Fremont described as having more the air of a military construction: it was whitewashed adobe brick, with fifteen-foot tall walls, which formed a quadrangle entirely lined with houses. There were two entrances, the main one guarded by square towers loop-holed with firing positions. Most of the residents of the fort were described as French traders and their Sioux wives, for the Sioux tribes came to Laramie to trade and socialize. It was originally called Ft. John, but became known as Ft Laramie. Ft. Platte was described by Francis Parkman as being deserted in 1846, for by then the glory days of the fur brigades were over, and the days of the emigrant trains had begun with the Bidwell-Bartleson Party five years previous.

Every year after 1841, the wagons of emigrants on the Oregon Trail, and those who chose to take the turn-off to California at Fort. Hall, roughly three hundred miles or so farther west passed by the frontier trading station, coming thicker and faster. Every year there were more and more white-topped wagons splashing through the North Platte on the road from Council Bluffs which ran north of the Platte, or coming up the road that followed the south bank of the Platte from Ft. Kearny, from St. Joe, from Independence and Westport and the other “jumping-off” places along the Missouri River, until the tide of 49ers, seeking gold in the placer mines of California swept all the remnants of the sleepy-nine-months-of-the-year fur-trading station. It was bought by the Army in 1849. The adobe trader post, called “The Old Fort” formed the south edge of the fort parade ground, until demolition and replacement by officers’ quarters in 1870.

But until the deluge of the Gold Rush, it was a welcome outpost, marking one-third of the journey to the golden lands of California, or the rich farm country of Oregon, the gateway between the easy travel along the Platte, to the harsher challenge over the backbone of the Rockies, and the South Pass. Given the timetable of the seasons and the trail, an emigrant company should have reached the confluence of South Platte and Laramie Creek in late June, and might have, in earlier years camped among the skin lodges of the Sioux tribes among the cottonwoods and willow thickets below the whitewashed walls of Old Laramie, in uneasy amity with the Tribes. They might have expected to trade there, for pemmican and dried buffalo meat, for baskets and moccasins and Indian ponies, to look with expressions of pious horror, or genuine intellectual curiosity on Indian graves, air-buried on scaffolds in the trees, to meet and trade with the “Other” and then to continue on their own way, with a lot of mutual incomprehension; two wildly different tribes sliding past each other on the grease of commerce.

(The party that I have written a book about passed through Ft. Laramie in 1844. This is the first of a continuing series of meditations about the emigrant trails and the pre-Civil War Old West… a territory which is familiar to us is some ways, and yet totally unfamiliar.) BTW, I am still looking for an interested publisher. Yeah, there is one interested, but what’s the old saying about all one’s eggs in a single basket? Yeah, that one

08. October 2006 · Comments Off on From Ignorance Into the Light · Categories: History, Iran

I have been unable to stop thinking of Sgt. Mom’s recent post suggesting that the outrageous behavior we have seen from the many who are so aggrieved at any insult to the Muslim faith is based on some inner realization that they are losing power and relevance. I was particularly impressed with the link that addressed the issue of whether the Koran, in its present form, accurately depicts the original visions said to have been revealed to Muhammed. This is significant because the followers of Islam insist upon a very literal interpretation of their holy book – an interpretation that would seem to defy the premise that it is a religion of peace and tolerance (a premise that is well supported both in recent and in distant history). The author suggests that the book in its present form is perhaps as accurate a reflection as one would see if the message was passed via 150 – 200 years of playing the game “telephone”. He points out that this does not render the religion irrelevant, rather, that it should be subject to a scholarly review of the type that changed our perception of Christian teachings after the dark ages. It seems to me that this is the key to preventing the final gasp of mankind due to the clash of civilizations currently being incited by Mahmoud Ahmednejad and his ilk. Such scholarly reviews seem to be moving forward, albeit in very quite way.

While in Washington D.C. on business last week, the hotel where I stayed (Capital Hilton – sucky Internet service but nice location) hosted a conference attended by editors of a number of major newspapers (L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.). While unwinding at the bar Thursday evening, I met a number of these editors and we engaged in some lively discussion related to the print media vs. web logs. I deliberately steered the conversation toward the above point, asking them why this sort of perspective can only be found on-line. I pointed out that, given the importance of the issues surrounding this, it would be more helpful to bring it into the light than the continual hand wringing about the “Arab Street” response to the most recent slight or perceived slight. Although they were polite and at least made some effort to consider my point, the general response was unsurprising – “How could you, a blogger for God’s sake, deign to tell us how to do our business?”. I did collect some business cards, and plan to follow up (and be a nuisance if need be). Don’t be overly optimistic that the quality of coverage of these issues is likely to change though. I heard that the L.A. Times publisher was fired the very next day for his refusal to make staff cuts. Given the staffing choices that his successor must make, I would bet that they’ll choose editors inclined to publish the lame progressive liberal crap that we have come to know and love over storoes that would offer insightful commentary that illuminates the issues of our time.

07. October 2006 · Comments Off on Curious Facts You Might Not Have Known · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game

….About the trans-Mississippi West, and the emigrant trails generally

In the interests of my latest �book� I have spent a couple of weeks immersed in a number of books about the American West, and the California and Oregon emigrant trails. The first draft has been completed, actually, and revised, copyrights applied for, and it sits even now on the desk of an agent who is going to read it over and decide if he wants to represent me. Yes, I am chewing my fingernails down to my knuckles, why do you ask?

A couple of friends are reading it also, with an eye towards giving me critical and helpful feedback, so I�ll be able to sit down in another week or so and revise again, add in some more details, descriptions and fill out some of the various characters; hence the heavy reading and research schedule (and light blogging of late).

I have encountered all sorts of amusing things that either I didn�t know, or knew vaguely of, or that are not generally known, except by local historians and enthusiasts. Some of these may come as a great surprise to those who know only of the 19th Century American West through TV shows and movies. Such as:

A flock of sheep was taken along the Oregon Trail in the early 1840ies. And in 1847 a large wagon of nursery stock: approximately 700 live young plants, of various types of fruit and nut trees, and vines. This at a time when it still generally took at least five months to cross two thirds of the North American continent.

Up until the time of the �49 Gold Rush, emigrants to California and Oregon were� well, generally rather bourgeois. The cost of a wagon, stock animals and six months of food supplies tended to sieve out those who couldn�t afford such, unless they chose to work their passage as a teamster or drover.

They also tended to be teetotalers and fairly law-abiding, although one early party to California (Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841) did include an embezzler, escaping attention of the law in New York. His comrades did wonder a bit about the heavy lump of metal that he was at such pains to carry along with him. One did not need quite that much lead shot.

Other than disease… most emigrant deaths were caused by accidents with loaded firearms… and drownding.

There was hardly any trouble with the Indians, until well after the Gold Rush. A bit of petty thievery here and there, which was more of an annoyance than anything else. There is only one instance of a wagon train being attacked directly by Indians on the Oregon-California trail before about 1860. There was quite a lot of Indian-emigrant commerce going on during the 1840ies and 50ies and several tribes actually ran river ferries, at either end of the trails.

The emigrant wagons were pulled mostly by teams of oxen. Not horses. Sometimes mules, but mules cost three times as much as an ox ; and you could always eat the ox, if you got desperate. Three to four pair of oxen per wagon, usually� and the wagon usually carried about 3/4th of a ton to one ton of supplies and gear. Think on this the next time you watch a so-called emigrant wagon in a TV western bounce along, hitched to a single pair of horses.

The Mormon emigrants to the Utah settlements pushed handcarts; small, two-wheeled handcarts. And walked from Council Bluffs to the Salt Lake Valley. But they were organized, and had a lot of assistance and supply channels set up by the LDS church� the only group of emigrants who did.

Emigrant companies formed up and then elected their leaders. Another leader could always be elected, if the first one didn�t work out. Companies often split apart, once on the trail, too.

Quite early on, organized rescue parties began going out from the established communities in Oregon and California in the late fall and early winter bringing water, food, and assistance to emigrants who had broken down, or run out of food on the worst parts of the trail, in the Humboldt Sink, or along the Snake River.

In the 19th century popular wisdom had it that the high plains and the Rocky Mountains were extremely healthy locations: clean, dry air, pure water, and there were a fair number of invalids who came West for reasons of their health. Francis Parkman was only the most famous of them. A large portion of a party in the early 1840ies were in fact, invalids hoping to recover their health in this particularly strenuous fashion.

A teenaged boy, stranded in the Sierras at present-day Donner Lake over the winter of 1844-45 diverted himself with the contents of his brother-in-law�s small library of books, finding particular consolation in a volume of Lord Byron�s poetry, and Lord Chesterfield�s �Letters�. : – o

In California as of 1845, there were 850 foreign males registered as residents, an increase from 150 in 1830: emigrants, deserters from sailing ships, merchants and traders. They seem to have all known each other, or known of each other.

The Russians had an official presence and a small trading post, north of San Francisco, until they pulled up stakes and sold the lot, and a brass cannon too, to John Sutter. They may still be a little sore about this. I remember seeing a Soviet-era English textbook which claimed that they had found gold�. And the perfidious Yankees had stolen it all from them.

There was gold found in California well before 1849. The family of the man who pulled up a wild onion to have with his luncheon tortillas, and found a gold nugget in the roots of it did very well out of this discovery, but had the sense to keep it quiet.

Well, are you amused?

(Comments fixed 10-10: add any other curious and little known facts you may know of in comments
Sgt. Mom)

02. October 2006 · Comments Off on ROP, Part 2 · Categories: General, Good God, GWOT, History, Pajama Game

So, what is it with Islam, these days; Is it really thriving like the green bay tree? Or might the Islamic faith militant, exemplified by Bin Laden and his merry chums, sympathizers and apologists be ridden by a secret terror of their own – that Islam is not growing, powerful, and omnipotent, but flawed at the root, and dying by degrees – a dangerous-looking but essentially hollow show, like the pufferfish? Is it a hollow faith, crumbling by insidious degrees, as it’s commonly assumed tenents are being examined in the spirit of skeptical scholarship? The ferocious reaction to any departure from orthodoxy suggests that the most fanatical believers may fear so, very deeply. Even the scholar of linguistics, Christoph Luxemberg, in his study of influences of the Aramaic language on the Koran must publish under a pseudonym – for his suggestion that translations of the Koran must consider the Aramaic in teasing out exact meanings is as explosive as what devotees of the Prophet strap about themselves, or pack into automobiles as their response to the insults of another extant belief system. And again, the violent response suggests that something more is going on here, something deep and dangerous – but the very violence of the response is enough to make a curious person wonder why? Why so touchy?

Last week on NPR they ran another one of those poor-mouthing stories about the sad plight of Hispanic female converts to Islam and how they must cope with family disapproval, and—horrors! How people look at them funny when they wear a headscarf! NPR seems to love this sort of story, they bang on (and on, and on and on!) about the Poor Muslim having to Cope In Heartlessly Hostile America about as often as they do about the Poor Palestinians Having to Cope with the Brutal Israeli Occupation, demanding our sympathies as if their listening audience were some sort of psychic ATM; swipe the story-card through the slot, here’s another twenty bucks worth of Sympathy for the Chosen Victim Class. I’d love to hear a story, for once, about Amish or Mennonite women having to cope with people giving them the eye-brow lifted look because of their somewhat distinctive and defiantly old-fashioned dress-sense, but that’s just me. And I am also left to wonder – what about converts from Islam? I googled that, this weekend “Islam+converts+from” and got a couple of stories and a query “Do you mean ‘Converts to Islam?'”

Well, no, I meant exactly what I typed in – but considering that conversion from Islam means a death sentence as an apostate – talk about a story that most major news media don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole, and a subject which converts would also prefer to remain untouched. Since exposure as a convert means the death penalty for apostasy, one can hardly blame converts from Islam for being extremely circumspect. Missionaries and ministers to converts also must feel the same need for a similarly subterranean profile but there are still a trickle of accounts and witnesses, mostly from religious organizations. One story which intrigued me when I first read it some years ago was about conversions to Christianity among the Berbers of Algeria – that very quietly, many local Berbers were rejecting Islam as a horrific death cult; in fact, reclaiming their heritage as Christians, which they had been up until the Muslim conquests of the 8th century. (St. Augustine’s mother, St. Monica was a Berber Christian.)

There was the briefly famous Afghan convert, and a handful of others, leaving one to wonder how many other converts there are in the shadows, seeking no notice of themselves for fear of being murdered. One also wonders how many outwardly conforming Muslims have quietly declared apostasy in their hearts, going through the outward motions for the sake of their families and a bit of peace and quiet, or have moved to another city, or country and just let the whole thing lapse. There’s probably no way to work out the numbers, but it is food for thought.

Especially since life under a strict Wahabi Islamic rule seems desperately unappealing: Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban and Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors looked more like sort of religious concentration camp, with every pleasure in life, small and large being banned, constrained and forced underground. No wonder that only those who are allowed to exercise power over their fellows seem to look on it with any affection.

This is only a speculation, a working out of various themes and memes in my own mind. But it is different way to look at the whole structure of Islam, and a way to account for the hostility on display every time the followers of the Prophet feel disregarded and to have been offended. It could be that the disproportionate reactions are those of frightened men who feel power trickling out of their fingers, like grains of a handful of sand.

27. September 2006 · Comments Off on Green Stamps · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Memoir, Pajama Game

I don’t know what brought it on, remembering green stamps and blue stamps, and those thin little books that you glued them in to… possibly emptying all those receipts from the grocery store out of my purse, especially those wadded up ones that accumulate down at the bottom. Heck, is that one from the hair-cut place where if you bring in the last receipt again they give you a dollar off? Maybe I had been reading one of Lilek’s little musings about paper ephemera, and it all came together; the memory of Granny Jessie folding her receipts and a long perforated block of green S & H stamps neatly into her purse, and all those times when we were considered slightly older and more responsible, and dispatched to Don’s Market on Rosemead (about a block south of the intersection of Rosemead and Colorado Boulevard) which had had Granny Jessie’s grocery-buying custom for the best part of three decades, with a couple of dollars for some small item, and strict orders to bring back the change and the stamps.

When was the last time I ever saw a block or a string of trading stamps? Mom didn’t patronize grocery stores that offered them, but Granny Jessie did, and most likely Granny Dodie did also. It must have been sometime in the early seventies; by the time I came back to the States to live for good, trading stamps had gone the way of home milk delivery and those wire baskets with glass milk bottles that used to sit on front porches across the last. Which is to say, along with the dodo and passenger pigeon, except in certain very rare neighborhoods. They were a customer rebate scheme dreamed up early in the century just now over, intended to build customer loyalty, and keep the regular customers coming back, again and again and again. That description fit Granny Jessie to a tee. She patronized the same grocery and department store, the same shoe store, the same church and the same doctor for most of her long adult life, from the time she and Grandpa Jim married in the early twenties, until she went to live in Long Beach, in the Gold Star Mother’s home, fifty years later. According to this entry, they were given out mostly by grocery stores, department stores and gas stations. There were several different kinds, and colors of them. I remember S & H Green, and another sort which was blue; both were about an inch long, half an inch wide, perfed and gummed, and given out at the rate of a single stamp for every ten cents spent.

I do remember Granny Jessie sometimes had great long sheets of them, which must have come from Hertels’ on Colorado, where she had an account for as many years as she was a customer of Don’s Market. And Grandpa Jim must have gotten strings and blocks of them when he bought gas for the ancient Plymouth sedan which he had to sell after being rumbled by the local traffic cop when he made a left-hand turn from Colorado Boulevard onto South Lotus Avenue… from the right-hand lane of Colorado Boulevard. Grandpa Jim’s indignantly voiced plea that he had performed the turn in that manner every day for nearly thirty years cut no ice with the Pasadena constabulary, especially when they discovered that his license was several years expired and he was nearly blind, anyway.

Back to the trading stamps…. They had to be dampened and pasted into the pages of thin little books, so many a page, which was nice and easy when it meant the long sheets, earned when Granny Jessie had spent a lot on groceries and Christmas presents, but was not so easy when you had to paste the little strings and small blocks of stamps gleaned from many small purchases. This was rather finicky and tedious work, which may be why Grannie Jessie saved it all up for JP and I to do, when we came for a visit. She had a great lot of empty stamp books and a bundle of stamps in a drawer in the kitchen hutch. It would be our job, to sit down at the kitchen table with a damp sponge set onto an old china saucer, and fit stamps onto the pages of the blank book. This meant working in several months worth of stamps, tearing off the large blocks at the perfs, and fitting together the smaller quantities in order to completely fill in the page.

And this was entirely worthwhile from Grannie Jessie’s point of view, because the filled books could be taken around to the S & H Green Stamp store…. Which was, I think, on Rosemead, close to Don’s Market, and redeem the filled books for various bits of consumer merchandise; plates and saucepans, serving dishes, appliances large and small, furniture large and small. I have a distinct memory of Granny Jessie saving up her filled Green Stamp books for some rather substantial piece of household fittings, a television even. Probably much of what passed for luxury goods in the tiny white house on South Lotus, with the enormous oak tree in the front yard, came from Granny Jessie’s careful collection of stamps.

Mom had no truck with them at all, though; she was of the opinion that the stores that offered them were more expensive than those which didn’t, and Mom shopped on a strictly lowest-price-available agenda, no fancy fripperies like Green Stamps need apply for Mom’s household dollar. And furthermore, she had no time to fiddle around with pasting stamps into a book… and that is probably what led to the decline and fall of the whole scheme, although it does linger in several different and less cumbersome formats.

25. September 2006 · Comments Off on An Obit · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, GWOT, History, Military, War

One of the original military female “old breed”. Wish I had known her, but I didn’t. A Reservist. Exactly my age. A “first” in a lot of respects, according to this.

Link courtesy of “Rantburg“.