Material Culture

This is a patch of flax.

My Scotch-Irish Scots-Irish - Ulster Scot forbears had been looking at that plant for centuries. Ever since the English crown banned the Plantation settlers from growing wool to protect the English woolen trade, and one of the muckety-mucks in charge of Ireland imported flax seeds to keep everyone going in exchange.

Let that plant get high, harvest it, soak it a while, let it dry out all nice and crackly, smack it around a bit to break the outer shell, scrape off the crud - and you get a nice long fiber.

Spin that fiber, set it to a loom (KITTY!!!!).... and eventually you get linen cloth. Just the thing for keeping your skin from the rough of life on this ol' earth.

Now remember what I said about "scraping off the crud?"

This is the kind of stuff that's left over.

It's called "tow"

(pronounced like the things at the end of your feet, not anime characters misnamed from Chinese philosophy).

Now, there's lots of stuff you can do with tow, but one of the things the old frontiersmen used it for was cleaning.






This is a tow worm.

You wind your tow around that corkscrew lookin' thing, and with the help of some boiling water you get all the powder residue out of the barrel of your rifle gun.

That's what a tow worm is for. Just a plain, simple tool.




Unless you happen to be Jonathan Baker, and it's 1794 in the Ohio country.

In that case, a tow worm is the last thing you ever see before that little metal hook gets wrapped around your optic nerve by an angry Shawnee. Hopefully things don't go on for too long after that.

.... Hopefully.








So I just finished Mark Baker's Sons of a Trackless Forest. Very much worth reading if you can find a copy (L of VA, your ILL copy is on its way back soon, I swear!) A couple things really really struck home.

What immediately struck me was how self-limiting - indeed, self-destroying - the raw frontier era really was. "The frontier was not a place, it was a wave" as I've heard it said, and Mr. Baker's book makes that all painfully clear... and may shatter a few other precious poetic illusions along the way as well.

More on that another time.

But for now, since I just finished it along about the same time as Nathanial Philbrick's Mayflower covering through the end of King Phillip's War, and another biography of Andy Jackson, it's back to the elephant in the room when it comes to modern frontier fiction.

The settler side of our family tree did not call those of our native side "savages" for nothing. Sure the 50's westerns were absolutely one sided. But the ones these days - leastwise those I've seen - seem less a rightening of the scales that a switching of polarity.

Back to 1794.

.... you did not want to get taken alive. In the past three weeks, I've read more historical accounts ending with "... and then they were tortured to death" than I think I ever care to see again. Most of the time with just enough detail to give you nightmares.

*shiver*

There's an ongoing theme there to... the natives would attack the leaves, attempting victory often as not through sheer terror and horror. The settlers would use the same tactics used on their ancestors centuries or millenia earlier - attacking the root of the native infrastructure, pursuing a deliberate stick and carrot policy of destruction, then domination, then eventually acculturation and some degree of assimilation.

Leviathan's stomp through the ages, father of us all indeed.

I kinda think sometimes Tacitus and James Fenimore Cooper might have themselves some interesting conversations if they could ever meet.

hunh... learn something new every day.

Remember that big fuss ten or so years ago about "ohmyGod, all the honeybees are dying!" and the subsequent worries about what might happen if they did? How without bees to carry the pollen, the ecosystem would crash?

There were then no bees in Kentucky, and so our hunters generally would have had no wild honey; for bees generally keep pace with, and not much precede, the advancing settlements. Hence originated the name of English flies bestowed upon them by the Indians, who used to say to each other, when they saw a swarm of bees in the woods, "Well, brothers, it is time for us to decamp, for the white people are coming."
(Draper: 2B 184; 6 S 92-93)

(Source - The Draper Manuscripts)

I had no idea honeybees were an Old World thing. Neat. :)

clearing skies

First, like Paul mentioned. It's finally breakup.

I LOVE BREAKUP!

For the first time in almost half the year it feels like, you can walk outside, and the streets aren't covered in ice. There's lots of puddles to splash in and (if no one happens to be walking by) drive through and make BIG splashes. And best of all, the sky takes on that lovely soft blue.

Breakup is awesome.


In more mundane news... finally got the last of my packages of promised projects mailed off, and am feeling SO much lighter. Did some shopping, and stopped by one of the local hide-and-hair places.

Turns out they started selling real braintan hides - neat! Spendy as heck, but neat. I've done the process once on a little critter to see what it was like, but I've never before actually had the chance to handle *proper* braintan. Anyhow, I ended up buying a little scrap piece to bring home to play with. Interesting stuff - the texture's surprisingly different from regular critter hides, at least on a thicker piece of elk. It's got that "skin over fluffy" feel some modern packing material or....well, there's grosser analogies, but let's not go there. Anyway, interesting stuff. And it smells sooo smoky and nice.


Finally, finished Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. good overview of the early MA years from the leadup to the Plymouth landing to end of King Phillip's war, with a bit of an epilogue running through the Revolution and notable looks back on the period afterwards.

Mostly I liked it... though I have to admit one thing really struck me as the author was wrapping up. See, he looks back a little wistfully on the half century between settlement as a sort of innocence lost, a diversity in how we could have been. (And I can't blame him to be honest, 'cause I've occasionally wondered what it was like in that post-war, pre-removal Cherokee period in my own old neck of the woods. )


Thing is though, he was describing it as a time of peaceful resolution of differences, and most importantly the compromise of living alongside one another.

The thing is, this notion of "compromise" seemed to be "give me half of what I want now, that's a compromise." And ten years later "give me half of what I want now, that's a compromise." And ten years later....

.. well you get the idea.




What is it about you Yankees with this "compromise" business, anyhow?
"You keep on'a using that'a word.....
;)


love much y'all.
bed time.

The Created reflects the Creator

The next time you get frustrated with something not working right online.... remember it was probably built by a hyper-caffeinated twenty something who pressed "publish" at four in the morning.

(And by the way.... if you're still using IE6, you're making web folks everywhere curl up under their desks and cry trying to make the New Shinies everyone wants not go horribly wrong for you. Please upgrade. It's for the children.)

Catching Up

First, I must apologize to y'all. Not much interesting coming from these pages of late I know.

So first, the "what's going on" update. Well, leaving aside the work hours (ugh) - like Rev. Paul mentions, we got to see the doggies run yesterday. SO FUN! I didn't make it up to Willow this year, but the Anchorage version - if not quite as deliciously Alaska - is still quite fun. And the DOGGIES are so sweet! This year we were settled up near someone who brought along their own... (was it a malmute Paul?) named Hunter who was just SO adorable. I miss living with dogs. Might need to remedy that soon.



Incidentally, for those non-Alaskans, take a closer look at those dogs pulling the sleds. They're almost universally rangier than the classic "sled dog" image. Not scrawny by any means, and certainly not grayhound - but they're hardly husky in build.

.. runners to the core. :)


In more prosaic things... I'm finally starting to see the light at the end of the "promised projects" backlog. Most of my weekends in the last month or more have been iterations of "get up, put on an audiobook or lecture, and work through the pile... then take a couple hours in the afternoon to meet friends, get some fresh air, or otherwise not go back - come home, and do it some more." I've managed since Christmas.. let's see.... a pair of pockets, a petticoat, two dolls with shifts, dresses, and aprons (still need bonnets, and to figure out how to close the dresses - possibly bead buttons), several pieces of native (ish) beadwork [don't typically do that out respect, but will for a few friends and family], and and and....

So if you (or your darling daughters. ;) ) are waiting on something from me... it's almost done.

In the mean time, may I please recommend to you The Teaching Company. Our local library has been filling the shelves with a lot of their stuff lately, and it's for the most part of good to amazing quality.

Presently, I'm in the middle of the audio version of History of Ancient Rome, and it's exceptional. The professor is quite good at spelling out which sources back up which statement, where he hits areas still under debate, and most of all - it's the first narrative I've come across that actually does a halfway decent job of spelling out the whole thing. Gibbon was interesting, but necessarily a "highlights" version that left you swimming in "wait... who is this guy, and why is he important?" moments. The History Channel thing was absysmal. (Note to video producers... if you can only score fifty reenactors, please don't even bother trying to do Cannae. You'll only embarass yourself. And them. ) But the "Great Courses" series - lots of meat on the bone.

Also highly recommended - Professor Fears' A History of Freedom. It is a narrative. It is - I think - fair, but it is not dispassionate. And I confess, I just love Professor Fears. You know That Kid? The one who sat in the corner all recess with a book? The one who played with toy soldiers well into his adulthood, loved Churchill, and just picked and picked and picked through the "soldiers of such-and-such" books?

Yeah, this is him all grown up. Nerdy, but fun.

Explicitly not recommended - A History of the US, 2nd Edition. Maybe I'll give it another go at some point, but having just gotten done with one Federalist love fest with Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, I was in no mood to put up with another. Meh.

I've tried a couple of the Ancient - Ancient world courses, and... woof. Only so many times you can hear about "people X beat up people Y" before it just gets *really* repetitive. It's also difficult because there's just not many mental hooks for me to "hang" all those facts on. Some is vaguely familiar from Sunday school, a little more from the "first three thousand years in three minutes" in public school... but not much.

Sometime we'll have to chat about that, but for now....

"According to a story in Herodotus [5th c. BC], the nature of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and the advantages and inconveniences of each, were as well understood the the time of the neighing of the horse of Darius [6th c. BC] as they are at this hour."


A Defence of the constitutions of government of the United States of America (1778)

'tain't much new under the sun, eh?


later y'all. Love much. :)



And Paul'n'Brigid - THANK YOU!
Promise I haven't forgotten or ignored you. Will write more this week for y'all. :)