Stiffness sets into my joints so that my body tells me of my age even though my brain still does not recognize it. Somebody has said “At the threshold of old age it will take only a few steps to walk through and enter the room.” The day will probably come when I will go to a doctor and he will say he has both good news and bad news. I will say, “Lay it on me, Doc. What’s the bad news?” He’ll say, “You have Alzheimer’s!” After gulping, I’ll say, “Good heavens! What’s the good news?” “You can go home and forget about it.”
Then I’ll put a bumper sticker on my car that says “I’m speeding because I have to get there before I forget where I’m going.”
…
I suppose I should write about the past since there is more and more of it, and I’ll never run out of material. In Winnipeg we visited a graveyard adjacent to the St. Boniface Cathedral; in it rest the remains of one Louis Riel, known as the leader of the Metis, named thus because they were part-Indian and part-Frenchmen. They felt they were encroached upon by the government of Canada which wanted to claim the lands they had been living on for years. It interests me because the Metis, by the hundreds, drove the ox-cart trails which I am presently studying. It is significant to me because the period of the Metis’ unrest and outright rebellion was 1869-70, a fact which coincides with the ox-cart freighting taking place in the part of the state where I was born and raised. From Riel’s life I am gleaning lots of information regarding the people and culture of the drovers who cut deep ruts through the prairie and forded the Sheyenne River to get to Fort Ransom.
A timeline of the years 1867-1870 reveals several events pertaining to transportation: the golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah; transcontinental rail service began; the Suez Canal opened; first railroad bridge across the Missouri at Kansas City; construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began; etc. plus one more interesting one. In June of 1867 2000 Chinese workers on the western railroad struck because they had not been paid in weeks. They also demanded the whippings stop and that hours spent in hot tunnels be limited to eight hours a day. The Central Pacific manager cut off the strikers’ food supply and threatened to fire the workers. The strike collapsed after a week.
