Chantal takes a float trip.
Month: June 2008
Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site (Colorado)
… was established on this date in 1960. The National Park Service informs us:
William and Charles Bent, along with Ceran St. Vrain, built the original fort on this site in 1833 to trade with plains Indians and trappers. The adobe fort quickly became the center of the Bent, St. Vrain Company’s expanding trade empire that included Fort St. Vrain to the north and Fort Adobe to the south, along with company stores in Mexico at Taos and Santa Fe. The primary trade was with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians for buffalo robes.
For much of its 16-year history, the fort was the only major permanent white settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements. The fort provided explorers, adventurers, and the U.S. Army a place to get needed supplies, wagon repairs, livestock, good food, water and company, rest and protection in this vast “Great American Desert.” During the war with Mexico in 1846, the fort became a staging area for Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny’s “Army of the West”. Disasters and disease caused the fort’s abandonment in 1849. Archeological excavations and original sketches, paintings and diaries were used in the fort’s reconstruction in 1976.
Bent’s Fort is east of La Junta, Colorado, on the Arkansas River, which was the border between Mexico and the United States from 1819-1848. The present fort is a reconstruction built in 1976.
Volare
[B]ut whether it’s a two-seater or a 747, any airplane is able to glide successfully sans power. Even the heaviest jetliners glide routinely during so-called idle thrust descents, and believe it or not, the glide ratio of a large jet — altitude lost to horizontal distance traveled — is usually better than that of your average private model (the one caveat being that it must accomplish this descent at a considerably higher speed).
Ask the pilot from Salon.
Above first posted here three years ago, and a fact I still find fascinating.
Easy call
My friend Donna’s 8-year-old granddaughter, Morgan, joined us Friday when we toured the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum.
Beforehand, while driving around downtown Oklahoma City we somehow got into a discussion about execution — lethal injections in particular. She was against them, Morgan said. She doesn’t even want to be a veterinarian despite loving animals, because her friend’s dog had been given a shot by a vet (euthanized). Killing people, even bad people, was killing too, she said.
Part way through the museum Morgan told her grandmother that it was “fine with me” that they executed the bomber.
They’re really better if you don’t know
NewMexiKen is reading Michael Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
McKenna was in a discussion with her grandfather about getting chickens for the farm he’d recently purchased. He told her that chickens and cows can be pets, but they could also be food.
“Where do you think chicken nuggets come from?,” he asked.
“McDonalds,” McKenna answered.
June 3rd
Larry McMurtry is 72 today. Three years ago, The Writer’s Almanac had a good essay about McMurtry, in NewMexiKen’s opinion the best to write both fiction and nonfiction about the American west since his mentor Wallace Stegner. Two years ago NewMexiKen and Dad visited McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, Texas. Here’s my report.
Tony Curtis is 83. Curtis received a leading actor Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones.
Anderson Cooper is 41.
Allen Ginsberg was born on this date in 1926.
His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words.
He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg’s [sic] first major work, Howl.
By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features.
Ginsburg’s [sic] reading of Howl was reputed to have “turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight.” It began:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
Ginsberg died in 1997.
Dr. Zaius was born on June 3rd in 1901. That’s Maurice Evans, famed stage actor, two-time Tony winner, who is perhaps most remembered for playing the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith in Planet of the Apes.
Jefferson Davis was born on June 3rd in 1808.
Mack Truck
The oldest of The Sweeties, Mack, not only plays soccer, football and swims for the club team, he runs the mile. He is seven.
His mother reports:
Mack did so great at his race yesterday. … He came in second in his age group with a time of 8:09. The kid who came in first in his age division is the kid that went by Mack when he stopped at the wrong ending line (the kid finished in 8:06). Which kills me, but doesn’t seem to matter to Mack. The kid is a second grader, so Mack finished first in first graders and younger.
. . .
He came in 19th in the race, of 163 people 18 and under.
It would have been nice if he won, because the girl he luuuuurves won the girls 7 and under. That could have been the spark that brought them together. Now she will feel superior to him (although he did beat her by more than a minute.) Actually, I think she already feels superior to him. After all, he is a boy and she is a girl.
The 31 Places to Go This Summer
The New York Times suggests 31 North American travel destinations including two in New Mexico.
Thus, here are 31 options — from river rafting in eastern Oregon to biking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire — for a great summer vacation. Not one involves the terrifying conversion of dollars into euros, many can be enjoyed without ever getting on a plane, and the road trips are ones that actually justify filling up your tank, even if the price of gas hits $5 a gallon this summer.
And she probably votes
A woman called Orem police Friday afternoon needing help because her battery died and she was locked inside her car.
When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out. She couldn’t hear the officers instructions through the rolled-up windows so she motioned to them to call her on her cell phone, according to police.
Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.
Best line of the day, so far
“Window on American Airlines plane shatters, takes out engine shortly after takeoff. Passengers charged $15 ‘skid-mark removal’ fee prior to boarding replacement plane”
Best line of the day, so far
“I should read. Reading is too hard for the dead of night. Reading has too many words in it.”
From a very amusing piece about insomnia by Jenny Allen in last week’s New Yorker.
Best anecdote of the day, so far
[Michael Seidenberg] was very pleased, and it moved him to relate a story from the dark period, not too long ago, when he was selling books on the street. “Once, a couple stopped,” he recalled. “And the man asked his girlfriend, ‘Do you want a book?’ She said, ‘No, I already have a book.’ ”
From a brief item about Seidenberg in The New Yorker.
Washita ‘Battlefield’ Misnamed
Yesterday we visited the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site. This is the location of Black Kettle’s village of Southern Cheyenne at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma). On November 27, 1868, the 7th Cavalry attacked the village just before dawn. (This event is portrayed in the movie Little Big Man.)
Here is what took place, as described by James Welch in Killing Custer:
Just before midnight, they crawled to the edge of a bluff which overlooked a river valley. One of the scouts announced he could smell smoke. The other heard a dog bark. Custer could not see anything, and he did not smell smoke or hear the dog. But in the quiet moments of listening, he heard a baby cry. He had found his Indians.
Custer divided his command into four detachments, which would surround the village, north, south, east, and west, and wait for dawn. On his command, they would charge from the four directions.
At first light, Custer turned to the band leader and directed him “to give us ‘Garry Owen’ [his favorite song]. At once the rollicking notes of that familiar marching and fighting air sounded forth through the valley, and in a moment were re-echoed back from the opposite sides by the loud and continued cheers of the men of the other detachments, who, true to their orders, were there and in readiness to pounce upon the Indians the moment the attack began. In this manner the battle of the Washita commenced.”
The “battle” in the village was short, barely fifteen minutes. The soldiers drove the people from their lodges barefoot and half naked, shooting them in the open. Many of the warriors managed to reach the trees, where they began to return fire; a few of them escaped, but after a couple of hours, the firing ceased and 103 Cheyennes lay dead in the snow and mud. Custer reported that they were fighting men, but others said that ninety-two of them were women, children, and old people. Black Kettle, the sixty-seven-year-old leader of the band, and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who had survived nine gunshot wounds at the Massacre of Sand Creek four years before, had been shot in the back as they attempted to cross the Lodge Pole or Washita River. Their bodies, trampled and covered with mud, were found in the shallow water by the survivors.
The soldiers seized everything in the village—guns, bows and arrows, decorated clothing, sacred shields, tobacco, dried meat, dried berries, robes, and fifty-one lodges—and burned it. In addition, they captured 875 horses and mules. Custer gave the order to slaughter these animals by cutting their throats, but the horses feared whiteman smell and shied away, and after several attempts, the men grew tired. Custer gave the order to shoot the animals instead. Custer himself slaughtered camp dogs. Then the 7th Cavalry took its captives, mostly women and children and old ones, and headed north to its base of operations, Camp Supply.
Custer’s attack on the village of Southern Cheyennes was hailed as a great victory in the Indian wars.
[The National Park Service says “approximately 30 to 60 Cheyenne” were killed.]
It wasn’t a battle and isn’t a historic battlefield. It was state-sponsored terrorism and should be renamed a national memorial.
Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
Eighty-four years ago today the United States declared: “That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.”
Until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Indians occupied an unusual status under federal law. Some had acquired citizenship by marrying white men. Others received citizenship through military service, by receipt of allotments, or through special treaties or special statutes. But many were still not citizens, and they were barred from the ordinary processes of naturalization open to foreigners. Congress took what some saw as the final step on June 2, 1924 and granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.
The granting of citizenship was not a response to some universal petition by American Indian groups. Rather, it was a move by the federal government to absorb Indians into the mainstream of American life. No doubt Indian participation in World War I accelerated the granting of citizenship to all Indians, but it seems more likely to have been the logical extension and culmination of the assimilation policy. After all, Native Americans had demonstrated their ability to assimilate into the general military society. There were no segregated Indian units as there were for African Americans. Some members of the white society declared that the Indians had successfully passed the assimilation test during wartime, and thus they deserved the rewards of citizenship.
Source: NebraskaStudies.org
It was 24 years before every state enabled Indian citizens to vote.
The states that set the most stringent restrictions on voter eligibility were Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. These states required that voters be not only citizens, but residents and taxpayers as well. In Arizona, the state supreme court in Porter v. Hall, decided in 1928, ruled that Indians should be disqualified from voting because they were under “federal guardianship,” a status construed by the court to be synonymous with “persons under disability.” This decision stood for twenty years until the court finally reversed itself in Harrison v. Laveen.
Source: Encyclopedia of North American Indians
Must See
NewMexiKen had been to the Oklahoma City Memorial before — it’s a well-done and moving tribute to those who lost their lives — and to the survivors and rescuers — in 1995’s terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. This album has photos I took in 2006 (you may click any image to enlarge).
This trip I also took in the adjacent Oklahoma City Memorial Museum and I urge you to add this to your list of places to see. Without losing sight of the human tragedy — or sensationalizing it — the museum tells the story of the bombing, the rescue and aftermath, the news coverage, the investigation and convictions, and the memorial itself. All of it is very well done — and fascinating.
I also encourage you to revisit the Memorial at night when the chairs representing each of the victims are lighted. Click image for larger version.
Been Away
NewMexiKen was away seeing the face of changing Middle America.
Photo taken June 1st in Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Click for larger version.