Moving a Mountain?

I ran across a quote from Ernest Hemingway that I had to copy down: Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut! That was a lesson that came hard but it was a good one to learn. It was hard to save face when I said I could move mountains at night only to find the next day that all I could manage were a few shovelfuls.

I doubt whether the present presidential contenders drink much on the campaign trail, but they do seem inebriated with the attention given to them whenever they dismount their bus and start shaking hands with the crowds. So many promises get made, but those of us who have lived through lots of these campaigns know better. The reality of the office must be overwhelming to anyone who gets in there....

News from the oil patch in North Dakota keeps coming. In order to get a troublemaker out of Aspen, Colorado someone there bought him a bus ticket so he could come to North Dakota and get one of the plentiful jobs working in the oil boom. He already has had offers from a few people here to buy him a bus ticket back and get him out of here. It seems he got drunk when he got off the bus and urinated on the side of a building, so he's spent the last week in jail. He wants to go back to Aspen.

Reference to a great animated video appeared on www.northdecoder.com a couple of days ago under the blog headed "Weekenders (Year Enders?). It depicts the growth of oil drilling in NW North Dakota, and I could only think "Wow!" after watching it play to the end - it takes less than a minute.

Happy New Year!

Crescent Moon

A couple nights ago I looked into our southwestern sky and saw this crescent moon hanging in a clear sky. The sight reminded me of a time when my family and Mary's parents were riding in a car after touring some points of interest in the vicinity. Mary's mother looked up and saw this moon hanging in this orientation and said, "The old folks always said this is a dry moon. The rain sits in the curve and can't run out." I've often thought this statement is a good reason to listen to the older generation, because of the richness of the myths and legends they possess knowledge of.

The moon gets its share of attention with sayings like once in a blue moon, or he hung the moon, or barking at the moon, and if I looked hard enough I could find lots of other references to it.

The Indians referenced the moon when they gave names to the months based on the cycles of the moon. Each tribe said it differently. The Lakota called our month of February the Moon When the Trees Crack; Mandan-Hidatsa called April the Moon of the Breaking Up of Ice; Cheyenne called January the Moon of the Strong Cold and December the Moon When the Wolves Run Together; Chippewa called March the Snow Crust Moon, October the Falling Leaves Moon, and November the Freezing Moon; Apache called April the Moon of the Big Leaves; Assiniboine called June the Full Leaf Moon; etc. Seasonal and monthly cycles were powerful in the lives of primitive people. Science hadn't yet entered into their picture and they best explained their world with what they observed.

Ole always lurks in onecorner of my mind. He was asked one time which is more useful, the sun or the moon? Vell, I tink it's da moon because the moon shines at night when you want the light und the sun shines during the day when you don't need it.

Ole and Lars were walking home from the pub and Ole says to Lars, "What a bootiful night, just look at that moon up dere." Lars stops and stares at it and says, "Ole you'se wrong, dat's not the moon, dat's the sun." So they argued about that for awhile til they came on a very drunk man named Sven. "Say, help us out here. Vat's dat shining up dere? The moon or the sun?" Sven stared up high, then with crossed eyes back at them, "Beats me, I don't live around here."

The Day After Christmas

Browsing through my book shelves I pulled out a book where I had underlined several points. Curious as to why, I took some time to re-read them and now remember how I spent quite a little time musing over that book, Man's Unconquerable Mind by Gilbert Highet.

I marked one passage that stated "We are all cave men. The cave we inhabit is our own mind; and consciousness is like a tiny torch, flickering and flaring, which can at best show us only a few outlines of the cave wall..." As I write this my mind has focused on that one task. What I ate yesterday does not shoulder its way into my thoughts until, just now, I dredged it up.

This statement holds lots of truth for me, "Every human brain is filled with unused power. Out of all the billions of men and women who have lived, only a few hundred thousand have been able to employ so much of that power as to change the world. The rest have been dutiful or lazy, good or bad, sensuous or self-denying, thrifty or wasteful, cowardly or brave." Cream rises to the top.

The author liked Dante and said he felt and understood the insatiable longing for knowledge. He made Ulysses say to his sailors, "as they shrank from the horror of the unknown,

Consider well the seed from which you grew:
you were not formed to live like animals
but rather to pursue virtue and knowledge."

The summation of this author's philosophy is stated powerfully in this one long passage that I remembered him writing, "Day and night, from childhood to old age, sick or well, asleep or awake, men and women think. The brain works like the heart, ceaselessly pulsing. In its three pounds of weight of tissue are recorded and stored billions upon billions of memories, habits, instincts, abilities, desires and hopes and fears, patterns and tinctures and sounds and inconceivably delicate calculations and brutishly crude urgencies, the sound of a whisper heard thirty years ago, the resolution impressed by daily practice for fifteen thousand days, the hatred cherished since childhood, the delight never experienced but incessantly imagined, the complex structure of stresses in a bridge, the exact pressure of a single finger on a single string, the development of ten thousand games of chess, the precise curve of a lip, a hill, an equation, or a flying ball, tones and shades and glooms and raptures, the faces of countless strangers, the scent of one garden, prayers, inventions, crimes, poems, jokes, tunes, sums, problems unsolved, victories long past, the fear of Hell and the love of God, the vision of a blade of grass and the vision of the sky filled with stars." He pretty well encompasses the capability of the human brain with those words.

Merry Christmas

A friend sent me the following, and I thought it good enough to pass on -

There comes a point in your life when you realize:
Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won't anymore...
And who always will.
So don't worry about people from your past,
There's a reason why they didn't make it into your future.

I'm not certain the sentiment fits the Christmas season, but it's good anyway.

I think it's unfortunate that I am always glad when Christmas is over because of the high pressure sales gimmicks that get laid on us by merchants. They convince too many people to buy things they don't need just because it's Christmas so you need to get out and spend. That's what makes the economy work, I understand, but it still gets tiring. Then the day after, Christmas is all but forgotten because sales need to be visited to get the really good deals.

We plan to have a nice Christmas anyway, and I wish the same for anyone who visits this blog post.

Napoleonic Cannon

Mary asked one day not long ago where I get my ideas to write. I replied, "Give me a spark and I'll build a fire." And now she shakes her head and tells me that is so contrived. Well, it is what it is. Anyway the cannon picture is of one of those I used to build ten years or so ago. With the help of a friendly farmer from Sisseton who turned three brass barrels for me, I built in 1/12 scale. I gave him one cannon in exchange for the other two.

Now here's where the spark came from. I just read a Bernard Cornwell historical novel titled Waterloo. Napoleon made good use of this style of cannon in his warfare and this is modelled after them. The Battle of Waterloo took place in 1815 and an interesting item for me is that this cannon was still used heavily during our Civil War. Technology developed slowly during this period. A few rifled barrel cannons did appear but the armies of both the North and South were slow to replace the Napoleonic.

Cornwell has written many historical novels and accurately portrays the periods he writes of. I took note of one passage in this story where the hero and another soldier wanted to eat between skirmishes. They stripped a metal breastplate from a dead French soldier, turned it upside down to make a kettle of it, grabbed a smear of axle grease to use as shortening, and cut a chunk of meat from a freshly killed horse, and curbed their hunger.

I don't think this is far-fetched at all. Field kitchens could not roll onto the middle of a battlefield and feed men in combat. They were on their own. A book in my library Following the Custer Trail tells of the hardships the common soldiers had in Custer's command. The officers had cooks and good rations but not so for everyone who had to subsist on hardtack, beans, salt pork, and maybe wild game if it could be found. Usually the wild game was shared with the officers and Custer's dogs. Building individual cook fires was not easy. If it rained their fuel got wet and if they depended on dried buffalo chips it would be soggy and would not ignite. It probably has not been any different for any soldiers at any other time.

Fill in the Blanks

When a building like this one is viewed from the highway, a person can only guess at the story that belongs to it. I read an interesting quote from Dee Brown, the author most famous for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who said on being a historical novelist, "Sometimes there isn't enough material. There's a story there and you can't fill it in with facts, so you let your imagination run wild."

I'm finding that I need to be a historical fiction writer when I work at my story writing. There exists a scant outline of events but little else. How else to give shape to the story? I know that in 1867 a wagon train returning to Fort Abercrombie from Fort Ransom got caught in a three day blizzard near Lisbon. That plus only a few other tidbits are all that exist regarding their being stalled. That is when I had to invent a character to carry the story along making him a veteran of the Civil War who confused the smoke of battle with the zero visibility of the storm.

I know that a few months earlier that year a large prairie fire swept down upon an encampment of half-breed Indians near Fort Ransom and killed twenty of them but spared the fort. That's about all. So the old imagination got called into play again and a story materialized.

I know that a man named Hickey lived his later years in Sheldon and died there. His obituary stated how he traveled with Major Reno as a freighter at the time of Custer's demise and probably saw a good deal of the aftermath of that battle. Boy, I think there's a big story there and am working on it now.

I know that a location in Owego Township is named Pigeon Point because of the thousands of Pigeons seen roosting there in the 1860's. I did not know they were trapped to ship to cities as a meat product and that in order to decoy them in trappers would sew shut the eyelids of a few of them to flutter about underneath the net. There's a story there, too.

If only a person uses his imagination he can fill in all the blank spots.

Norwegian Delicacy

The next door neighbor lady called a couple of days ago and invited Mary to come over and make fattigman with her. I'm sure glad she accepted the invitation because what she brought home tasted almost like those Ma used to make. No two look alike with all those crazy shapes they take on, but that just makes them interesting. Then, when coated with powdered sugar they taste mighty good!

Mary talked to my mother on the phone yesterday and learned an interesting tidbit that I think I heard once but had shoved so far back in the recesses of my mind that I never could have dredged it up. Dad's Swedish and German heritage did not include an appreciation for lefse, but my mother's, being 100% Norwegian, did. Grandma made it atop an old cook stove and it was exquisite. (This being the same cookstove I remember my grandpa strolling over to, lifting the lid in the firebox, and spitting his snoose juice into where I heard it make snap and crackle noises.) But back to the story. The first time my dad ate lefse was at my grandparents' place, and he must have liked it because he ate too much. She went on to tell how he then could not sleep that night and turned on the radio to help pass the time. It was then that they first heard the news of Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor.

A couple more Norwegian treats come to mind: rosettes and krumkake. Of the four I've mentioned I have to say lefse stands at number one on the list, but the rest take close seconds, thirds, and fourths.

To complicate matters for our Norwegian brethren they are presently experiencing a shortage of butter. Milk production is down and adding to a shortage is a new fad of a high fat, low carb diet that seems to be sweeping through Europe. It has resulted in butter smuggling, rip off prices of six times normal, and even resorting to buying from Swedish shops. I feel sorry for them!

P.S. After reading the foregoing my wife reminded me gently but forcefully that the fattigman is a German goodie, too, although known by a different name: snowballs, pigs ears,

Playing King on the Hill

This scene of a horse on a manure hill caught our attention last Sunday as we drove back from the Veterans Cemetery. Mary said it looked like the picture we have of The End of the Trail. It can be compared a bit, but the famous portrait has a defeated looking Indian sitting on the horse that doesn't look in any better health. I went back this morning to snap the picture; it is only about a half-mile south of our place.

This particular herd of horses numbers to a couple hundred or so. I don't know what plans the owners have for collecting so many in one bunch, but it could be slaughter. They could soon be slaughtered again because Congress lifted its five year old ban on funding horse meat inspections. No dollars were appropriated though to fund inspections so I don't know where that leaves the situation.

The last U. S. slaughterhouse butchering horses closed in 2007 in Illinois. If it or any others begin butchering again, animal welfare activists have promised to protest.

I have never tasted horsemeat, but apparently lots of people have. It's often been said that the French eat it. I don't know. I remember reading in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls of how there was always a pot of horsemeat stew cooking in the cave where the partisans hid out in the Spanish Civil War.

December

With the sun shining and temperature mild we drove the few miles south to the veterans cemetery to view over thirty-seven hundred wreaths placed there Saturday. In contrast to the marble headstones and the bleak winterscape, the greenery and the bright red ribbons decorate the burial ground with a colorful tribute. The activity was part of the Wreaths Across America project and was sponsored by the local unit of the Civil Air Patrol.
...
The Missouri River has not iced over yet and still flows freely, but low. A local business, the downhill ski resort, can't make artificial snow because of problems getting enough water through their pump for their snow making machines.
...
The common folks are rising up and being heard. I've lost track of how many Arab countries experienced what is being called Arab Spring where dictators have either been kicked out or still hang on only with the aid of their murderous military. The Occupy Wall Street movement continues in the USA and probably because of the milder climate the West Coast seems to be the center of it. And who could have thought that Russian people took to the streets to voice criticism of the election process in that country. 2012 might just be an interesting year!

Lefse ?

The hands of this novice lefse maker work the dough, roll it out, and throw it on the griddle. A pinch amount of cursing flavors the batch to pieces of parchment that are lefse-like and quite edible. The family cleaned up the first batch at Thanksgiving and now will get a second batch at Christmas.

A lady told this story on Lena's lefse making. Talking on the phone, Lena told her that snow was falling and was almost waist high already. The temperature dropped way below zero with an increasingly strong north wind blowing. Of course, Ole has done nothing but look through the kitchen window while she made the lefse. She said if it got much worse she may have to let him in the house.

To give my mother a little excitement, I called her as Mary had her hands in the dough and said she was doing it again. I believe she thinks we are upstarts and probably never will get it right. She always had a variation of this lefse poem hanging on her kitchen wall above the stove:

Yew tak yust ten big potatoes. Den yew cook dem til dar done. Yew add to dis sum sveet cream. And by cups it measures vun. Den yew steal tree ounce of booter, an vit two fingers, pinch sum salt. Yew beat dis werry lightly, if it ain’t goot--it iss yer own fault. Den yew roll dis tin, vit flour. Light brown on stove yew bake. Now call in all Scandihuvians tew try da fine lefse yew make.

Rye Whiskey

"It's a whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry
If I don't get rye whiskey, well, I think I will die"

Driving across the Missouri River yesterday, I turned on the Sirius satellite radio to an old country station and heard Tex Ritter's song playing which, to me, wrung out all kinds of memories. I thought of the time beside a lake in Manitoba, the name of which I cannot recall, when on a fishing trip with a friend, we shared a campground with a bunch of party-time Canadians. There was plenty of firewater to go around that night, and we were doing all right until one of them brought out a bottle of rye whiskey. Always being one who likes to try new things, I immediately stepped up to the trough and morphed into a pig . Then I probably became the life of the party and surely must have had a good time. In contrast to the line of the above lyrics, I thought, after the fun was over, that I would die because I did get it.

That was the same trip, whether it was the night before or the night of I've forgotten, that we sacked out in our tent, and I awoke during the night thinking my friend sure snored loudly. Next morning we exited to find our campsite a shambles, a bear had come in the night and helped himself to anything edible plus a few other things.

Story-telling started at the party scene, and the theme turned to bad bears. About that time one of the women stepped into an outdoor toilet. Of course, with the fear of bears in the night now planted in her head, one of the men stealthily walked up behind the toilet and gave out a fearsome growl which caused the woman to scream and burst out of the flimsy structure. A chorus of laughter and teasing welcomed her.

So long ago! Sometime in the 1960's. With a hangover giving double vision and nursing the top of my head which had blown off, we headed for home the next day. I think my friend wanted to fish another day, but alcohol does bad things to a guy. I haven't had a drink of alcohol for about 22 years.

Are We Wimpy?

My mother related this story over the telephone yesterday, it being her deceased sister's birthday, December 4, 1923. Come Christmas Eve three weeks later her parents bundled her up to ride in the horse and sleigh to her grandma and grandpa's house. I can't remember the distance or direction they would have traveled, but at any rate, it would be beyond us now to consider it.

I still remember an incident planted in my five year old head: it was 1947, with my brother only a few months old, and we traveled 11, maybe 12 miles south of Sheldon to visit an uncle's family. My grandma and another uncle accompanied us, and on the return trip home, a blizzard caught us near the Sheyenne River, forcing us to spend the night at the Pemberthy farm. Next morning Dad and his brother walked home, and several hours later Dad returned with a team of horses pulling the hayrack mounted on sled runners. We must have bundled up because I don't remember being cold, even though the distance was about 6 miles.

1947 was a cold, deep snow winter, the winter of my grandpa's death. In order to attend his funeral the uncle living 12 miles south had to ride up on horseback to attend the service.

Those years after World War II found the country struggling to modernize and move forward, but remnants of old ways remained that people could draw from when necessary.

A movie on my must-see list is due to open around Christmas, War Horse. Set in World War I, it tells of a boy's horse that was sold by his father to the military. A great demand for horses and mules existed during this time to be trained as cavalry mounts or draft animals to pull artillery, supply wagons, ambulances, etc. Of course, the boy goes on a search to find his horse; I hope he is successful. My grandpa who fought in WWI told of how it bothered him to hear the screams of the wounded animals, of which hundreds of thousands were killed. A rodeo horse I am interested in, Tipperary, was rejected as too wild to tame by French military buyers who came to the Dakotas and Montana during that time. The demand for these animals was very great.

Dusting Off an Old One

I don't know if the following poem has ever been circulated for others to read, but it's an early one, and I've always liked it.

I drove through
after the snow and the wind
made the cow paths
on the hillsides
look like layers of corduroy.

Then, snows from old winters
began to drift
in my mind,
and I remembered

when
the house and the barn
shouldered the white winds
that rattled windows and
wailed through the eaves,

when
the township hired
Loomer's tracked Cat
to scratch canyons
through blocked roads
and open a route
to town and school,

when
Dad broke a horse
to harness by letting
her buck and struggle
in a deep bank
behind the barn until
she began to yield
to the pressure on the bit,

when
Grandpa died and storm-whipped
drifts built, then blocked
the way to the funeral,
so some flew in,
Russell rode up on horseback,
and the county plow
opened a way for Dad,

when
the party line told
Ma that Grandma needed
potatoes and decided the big
boy I was could walk
the blocked mile through
long, blue drifts
to take a few to her
where I was invited in
but declined
due to the long walk
to return,

when
the undergone,
unmentioned, uncounted or forgotten
storms piled up in layers of memory
like the drifts in the ditch
and shelterbelt
so that I can't sort
them out until I
get to the point

when
Brandon was born and
his soon-mother said it's
time to become the parents
we've wanted to be, and
we got in the car and it
got stuck in the snow
piled at the side of the house
in the flowerbed, and I
floored the Hornet's foot feed
until it burned and melted
the snow under its wheels
and gained the grip
and the noise
it needed
to wake the neighbors,
and we were off
to Fargo to make
a family of three.

The Sky's the Limit

There is so much I don't know and never can hope to know. Back in the days of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle it was possible to know all the knowledge there was to know. They could wear the title of a sage. No one can hope to approach that distinction in the present day, but those who do possess a wide knowledge in many areas can be called polymath, an interesting word meaning one who possesses an encyclopedic mass of facts and figures and knows what they mean.

A much smaller brain is punching the keys on this computer, but it is one who finds learning different things to be interesting anyway. Governmental affairs involve lots of trickery that often takes us by surprise when we discover them. We are hearing reports of long-time residents in oil country becoming ill when they didn't used to. They blame the obvious new thing that has been introduced into their environment: chemicals used in the fracking process to get the oil out of the ground. The oil companies don't say what those chemicals consists of, and this is why.

The Bush/Cheney Energy Bill of 2005 exempts companies from disclosing the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing and bypasses the Environmental Protection Agency. It is called the Halliburton Loophole. Never again will I question the necessity of having the EPA to look after affairs of this type. Big money is talking here. Where is the talk of developing new sources of energy to power our cars and trucks. I haven't heard anything about that lately. Too much cash to be made first!

Energy Concerns

That North Dakota is experiencing an energy boom is almost an understatement. $$$ signs float in the air, grow on trees, and spread themselves throughout the country on the wings of birds. All one needs to do is pluck his share and stuff it into his pocket. But another story begins to emerge of negative aspects affecting people, too. Except for the landowners collecting a lease payment, not too many people are excited about the wind farms sprouting like weeds throughout the countryside. Twenty coal trains per day roaring through our cities blocking traffic at crossings and blowing their whistles don't endear themselves to the people's peace. Heavy truck traffic pounding the rural roads to dusty, sometimes muddy destruction makes the locals swear. Now the process of "fracking"is attracting attention. Just what is that stuff the oilmen pump underground to release the treasure, and what are the long-term dangers?

When I attended public school in my hometown a long-handled water pump behind a gas station across the street beckoned us to quench our thirst after a long noon hour of playing ball. It tasted oily, but we drank it anyway. The business went through many owners and it was always thought that much of the oil they changed in cars got dumped into a hole.

The moneymen complain about the Environmental Protection Agency and how it hinders their development of various enterprises around the country. If what they are doing does not harm the environment then maybe they shouldn't be criticizing the work done by that agency. The front page of the Sunday Bismarck Tribune headlined several articles: 1.Some companies disclose fracking recipe . . . 2.Helms expects EPA action to interrupt drilling momentum . . . 3.Bakken Watch flip side to fracking.

The last headline may be the one that keeps everyone honest. A lady activist in Bismarck, Kris Kitko, maintains a web site called www.bakkenwatch.org. The Tribune reported that "Kitko said the state was wrong to allocate $1 million to legally fend off a move by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to regulate fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act." She was quoted as saying, "We're appalled that the state would rather spend that money to keep the EPA out...If it's safe, what are they afraid of?"

I suspect we will be hearing much more from the watchdogs.

Poet and His Hunting

Last night we attended a poetry reading given by Timothy Murphy who lives just a bit south of Fargo and has investments in farming interests around that area. The Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation has taken a liking to his poetry, enough so to publish his work. Many of his poems center around his love of hunting pheasants with his dog. He was born in Hibbing, Mn, the son of two college professors who lived in an apartment above Zimmerman's store. His mother told Murphy that she would pay young Bobby Zimmerman a dime to push his carriage around. "Mother, don't you know who that was?" It was Bob Dylan.

The foreward to his book Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder was written by Clay Jenkinson who told of going hunting with Murphy around the Lisbon area for the purpose of making a video of the poet as a hunter. That Murphy is a serious hunter can be shown with Jenkinson's story: "I trudged behind him through 10 inches of snow for two or three miles while he worked his mayhem. When I fell through the ice of a slough and got my leg wet up to my pelvis, a dangerous accident on a seriously cold day in December on the treeless Great Plains, he made it clear that I could walk back to the car to get warm if I wished, but that I would be making that walk alone. I lurched after him with one pant leg frozen like the tin woodman. You get so few moments like this in a lifetime: nothing would have induced me to weasel back to the car ." Murphy is in his early 60's, and I have to presume he has shot many birds in his lifetime.

Hosts for the event were Sheila Schafer and Betty Mills. It just so happened that Betty Mills was featured today on the Daily Dakotan series that started running about North Dakota personalities. Her story can be found by opening YouTube and searching for the Daily Dakotan.

Some wonderful smells have started coming from our kitchen today. Mary scurries around getting things prepared. The boys and their families will be home and we will eat well.

The Way They Used to Do It

When I go back a hundred years I read these things in the local paper. Local farmers lose several head of stock from rabies. The aftermath of a mad dog scare three months ago results in an enormous loss to farmers. Stock owners of Helendale and Coburn townships are the heaviest losers. . . an article reprinted from Lincoln Center, Kansas reported men held a girl prostrate while hot tar was applied on her naked body. It didn't say why. . . a woman from the southwest of Leonard was taken by a deputy to Wahpeton to verify her insanity. It named her and said her husband referred her. . . a quip quoted one woman who said, "Do not marry a poet," but then asked, "but suppose he doesn't show any symptoms before marriage?" . . . stories and books were published in serial form for the entertainment of the readers. This one caught my eye because I have owned this book for a long time. A large box ad proclaimed, "A new serial story to appear in The Progress: "Burning Daylight by Jack London. It is the best work yet produced by this masterful writer who has roughed it in many fields of adventure. Burning Daylignt is a character fashioned out of the frozen North; how he comes out of the Klondike with wealth won from the obdurate earth, is vanquished and stripped of his millions in Wall Street, regains them, and returning to the west from whence he came, is conquered anew by love, then to renounce his riches, is told in the powerful style of this author who has achieved world-wide popularity. It will be started in The Progress about December 15."

Then I read in the 1885 issue of The Progress some very gory reporting about the execution of Louis Riel who was known as the leader of the half-breeds. Many of the bull whacking ox-cart drivers coming through here were half-breeds and held Riel in high esteem. This is the language used by the old-time newspaper men, "Louis Riel meets his death like a brave man and declines to make a speech upon the gallows. He was told he would have two minutes to pray, and he repeated The Lord's Prayer. He invoked the aid of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and the other saints. Two priests stood by him and to their exhortations to stand firm, Riel said he was not afraid to die. The rope was now adjusted by the hideous looking hangman who also drew the white cap over Riel's face. The suspense was terrible and could not last much longer. When the words Lead us not into temptation were reached the deputy sheriff nodded to the hangman who kept his eyes fixed on him. The drop was nine feet, and the victim fell with terrible force, so that his neck was broken instantly. . . The description went on with the doctor performing the post mortem who said, "The execution was most cleverly performed. No death could be more merciful." Believe it or not I left out many of the descriptive gory details. News was reported a bit differently then.

Squirrels, Priests, and Nazis

Out our large glass patio door we are treated to a daily show of squirrels feasting and fattening on the dried berries hanging on our tree branches. Three or four of them treat themselves by balancing on the skinny branches,and just because they bounce up and down doesn't deter them one bit.
. . . . .
This afternoon we treated ourselves to the last movie in this series of Osher Institute offerings,
The Scarlet and the Black. The previous two we had attended proved to be well worth the watching, and this one today was no different. Gregory Peck starred as a monsignor working in the Vatican and Christopher Plummer as a Nazi SS officer who is in charge of subjugating the Roman population in World War II. Gregory Peck's character leads a movement to safely hide escaped POWs and downed pilots. Plummer sets about trying to break up the underground but can't quite get it done, and goes so far as to order Peck's murder if ever they catch him off the Vatican grounds. He disguises himself in a variety of ways and eludes his hunters. In the end as the Allies approach Rome to rescue the population, Plummer's character confronts Peck's and asks him to use his network to carry his wife and children to safety. Peck will give him no satisfaction and the Nazi believes his family to be doomed. In the end the Nazi is informed his wife and children made it to the neutral Switzerland and no one knows how it happened except the Nazi knows: it was the priest. The Nazi was sentenced to life in prison; thereafter the priest visited him once a month, never missing, and ended up baptizing him into the Catholic faith.
This is a true story.

Prancing Like a Doe

The camera caught my wife, a doe prancing on her toes in the woods. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but sometimes just a few words says a lot, too. Descriptive writing always catches my eye and makes me want to read more.

A favorite writer of mine is Jim Harrison. He was interviewed in the October, 2011 Outside magazine. The author of the article described Harrison this way - "His head looks as though it belongs to the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate." I laughed when I read that. Harrison's face does look pretty craggy, and his glass eye aims a different direction than where he is looking.

A poet I met this summer at the Western Writers Convention, Red Shuttleworth, writes on his blog, Global warming's so evident you can rope it, and another

All night, one coyote-racket dream after another
You've been swinging off a lard-greased chandelier
in the heaven of half-remembered cow towns,
scared of falling into barb wire and rattler dens.

Sad lines, too, catch your eye. In the book Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, one woman wrote One of the emigrants in our party ... lost several members of his family by death while crossing the plains and at one of our camps ... a daughter died ... they buried her beneath a big plain tree on the banks of a small stream which they christened Grave Creek ... The oxen were corralled over her grave so that Indians would not dig her up and get her clothing. (They used the oxen to trample over and wipe out the evidence of a grave.)

Private Charles Creighton of the 7th Cavalry accompanied Custer's march and wrote in his diary on the 31st day, We spent a few days here learning how to pack a mule. Believe me, we had some fun. The mules had never been packed and we were as green as the mules. We had some that would buck the saddle off in the bush and we had to find our bacon which was just getting ripe for us. If we had waited and left it where it was dropped off overnight, it would have crawled off. (Up to this point of the journey the mules had been hitched to the freight wagons, but as they neared the Little Big Horn they wanted to travel faster and leave the wagons behind.)

Fred Kaufman on that same day of the Custer journey to oblivion described this, A blacksmith was shoeing a mule which was very unruly. One trooper was twisting hard at a twitch, the other held onto the long ears. Not only with his hands but with his teeth, and all the while the smith was cursing at the top of his lungs.

Nodding Donkeys

I learned something today - the nickname of the critter in the picture is a nodding donkey. Using a little imagination I see why. The long ears can be imagined on the upper part of the head and his long muzzle hangs below. When the pump is in operation , it goes up and down, i.e. nodding. We will see lots of them in the future. This morning I opened a website called www.northdecoder.com, a watchdog type of site where the writer loves giving hell to the Republicans in North Dakota. He found a picture of the Bakken oil field taken from space by a satellite. Obviously the oil business is a 24 hour operation as shown by all the lights showing up from various things.

I pulled into my local M & H this morning to fill gas and made small talk with the guy next to me. I said something like "I'll bet all those Southern boys up here working in the oil fields went looking for insulated coveralls when they got up here." He told me about his brother living in Dickinson who can't even find toilet paper in the Wal-Mart because it sells as fast as they stock it. He comes to Bismarck to shop. A front page article in the Bismarck Trib this morning told of how older folks are being displaced in the oil fields. They wanted to die in the home they've lived in, but rents have risen beyond their social security means.

In my way of looking at things, I see similarity in the Occupy Wall Street movement or whatever that is. Cities around the country are closing down the camps and chasing them out. Sanitary reasons seem to be the biggest argument they use to close down the camps. One of the jailed protesters complained they've never heard of such a thing in this country. History tells of one really bad incident, though, that I think is similar. In 1932 out-of- work World War I veterans marched on Washington, DC to collect a bonus for the military service that had been promised. Hoover reneged on the deal and ordered General Douglas MacArthur to clear them out and burn the encampment they had constructed. He did so with gusto.

Poppies as a Symbol

Born with a curiosity that makes me want to know more about the world around me, I constantly go on the search for answers to questions that form in my mind. With the recent Veterans Day, I began wondering why poppies have become the popular icon. This is what I found:

The red poppy worn around the world in remembrance of battlefield deaths has nothing to do with the blood shed in the brutal clashes of World War I.

Instead it symbolizes the wild flowers that were the first plants to grow in the churned-up soil of soldiers' graves in Belgium and northern France. Little else could grown in blasted soil that became rich in lime from the rubble.

Their paper-thin red petals were the first signs of life and renewal, and in 1915 inspired Canadian doctor John McCrae to pen perhaps the most famous wartime poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row ...

It was this poem which inspired an American war secretary to sell the first poppies to raise money for ex-soldiers.

(Information from the BBC News magazine)

Veteran's Day, 2011

At the gym this morning a Vietnam veteran and I made some small talk. I mentioned that today was Veteran's Day, 11-11-11. He was wounded as shown by the logo on his pickup's license plate, and any attempt I've made in the past to try to get him to give some details of his war experience never got far. Today he said it was his wife's birthday. That was what was on his mind. On the "Morning Joe Show" this morning two Medal of Honor veterans talked about others. The panel all said they can never get any Medal of Honor winner to talk about his actions that earned the medal. They all say they were just doing their job.

A few years ago I wrote this and was reminded of it this morning.

-We Were Drinking Beer in Herb's-

We were drinking beer in Herb's
when Walter said, "Your dad should
have kicked your ass more often
just as far as I'm concerned."

Walt was a World War II vet,
a gunner in a bomber
who told of watching bullets
bounce off the armored belly
of German jets he shot at.
He flew thirty-some missions.
How could I argue with him?
Just maybe he knew something.

Then I looked beside Walter
to the next man. He'd once said
a man could have walked ashore
on floating soldier's bodies
killed while attempting to land
on gory foreign beaches.
He rarely spoke, yet his eyes
looked at me saying, "He's right."

The next in line at the bar,
a D-Day paratrooper,
spoke cheerfully, masking facts
of his war - hearing the screams
of Germans after he threw
explosives in their concrete
bunker. His box of medals
sat unsung, collecting dust.
In spite of his easy laugh
his eyes pierced this guy's know-it-
all attitude to say, "You
have a lot to learn yet, boy."

Though my spirit had weakened
from this beating I'd taken,
I could still stand at the bar.
My eyes settled on the vet
who hosted a metal plate
in his head for which he'd paid
a piece of his skull and brain.
The crew of his tank had stopped
to cook coffee. A sniper
traded his bullet for the flesh
of this man, neutralizing
forever his reasoning.
Those unfocusing eyes watched
me through a clouded beer glass -
was I friend or enemy,
the one who had wounded him?

I had entered this man's world
thinking I was an equal,
but this cadre proved harsh worlds
apart from mine existed.
That ragged line extended
further down the long counter,
and men's faces became blurred.
Each had his private story
and bore sore wounds in body
or mind. Retreat from their hell
was the better course for me.
Years have passed and none remain
to share these stories and shame
me into humility.
It is this I remember.

copyright, LBueling

A Fool and His Money Are Soon Elected

I turn to Will Rogers for home-spun wisdom again. A fool and his money are soon elected. Who will it be this time around? The debates to date haven't brought the best in anybody yet. I'm at the point of feeling sorry for Governor Perry who wants to cut government spending by eliminating three departments but could only remember two of them. Cain keeps swatting at the flies in his past, but they keep flying around his head.

Alexander Hamilton started the U. S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even. I don't know how accurate that is, but I think it is mostly so.

Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do. Lies, broken campaign promises, corruption with lobbyist payola. Happens all the time. Jack Abramoff who just served four years in the federal pen was on last Sunday's 60 Minutes show. He explained how easy it was to buy votes in Washington

Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans. Not much can be added here, although the united front as created by Grover Nordquist and his no tax increase pledge seems to have sprung a small leak in the dike.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him "father." If he had a sense of humor he might have laughed, but they had their share of arguments and fights, too. In fact political parties started because Hamilton and Jefferson couldn't agree on anything.

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. The comedians have such rich ground to harvest their routines from. I can't wait to see what SNL will do with Gov. Perry.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It's this - no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one. It's hard to predict when the generals and industry will tell us when it is time for another war, but it's fun to think in idealistic terms.

Finally,

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now.
One day this past summer I walked into a restaurant and there stood a young girl with a low cut top that drooped below her tan line. I went home and wrote a poem about ice cream sundaes.

Little Bit of Will Rogers

Today in North Dakota the Democrat Heidi Heidkamp announced she is going to run for the U. S. Senate. Already last week the Republicans expressed their fear of that and ran full page ads telling us why she was so terrible. So it goes. The talking heads on national news keep conjecturing who might be the Republican presidential candidate. One week it's this one, the next that one. The elections are still over a year away and here we are, being fed a heavy diet of propaganda from all sides. When I was old enough to start being interested in things of this nature I remember reading Will Rogers and his take on political affairs. He died in that plane crash in 1935, but his words make sense today.

* If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out.

* The taypayers are sending Congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.

* You can't say civilization isn't advancing; in every war they kill you in a new way.

* We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

* Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate.

* This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

* Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

Watch the late night comedians on tv and try to disagree with the last one. Leno, Letterman, Stewart, and all the others of their ilk make quite a bit of sense at times. The one I've liked the best of all was Tina Fay's Sarah Palin. That reminds me, where has Sarah been lately?

Writing

Sunday morning. Sitting at this old oak library table and having just finished my regular scan of internet offerings, I think of how many people write. The internet is filled with fresh offerings by countless numbers of folks, some intellectually inspiring, some pure drivel which if we didn’t have that something called “freedom of speech” would be banned for its smuttiness.

Because I’m trying to write some myself, I found many sites on the internet that publish short stories where I can read and study hundreds, maybe thousands of them, with a couple computer clicks. The same goes for novels, poetry, religious tracts, science, porn, etc. Having just made my first humble attempt at writing a short story I can count myself in that total.

I sent the story around to five different people for them to read and criticize and received comments back from four of them, helpful comments which will be incorporated into the final draft. That story is quite unique to our region and I want to get it told well. Further stories will probably not appear here but instead will be collected into a volume and distributed. I finished a story regarding the prairie fire that killed so many people just outside of Fort Ransom and have sent it out to my readers. In the meantime the story of the freighter who traveled with Custer’s command who in his final years lived and died in Sheldon has been started. Who needs crossword puzzles or mental games to keep the brain stimulated from receding into dementia? Dreaming up a story line to support the historical facts is enough for me.
- - - - - -
The other day I picked up Bob Greene’s book Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War in the library and enjoy reading in it for some diversion. The man who won the war in this story is Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. Greene writes respectfully of his father and Tibbets who both served in WW II. He reports of how blunt and clear-spoken Tibbets was in relating his experience. The bomb weighed 9,700 pounds and when it was released over its target the B-29 bucked and “The seat slapped me on the ass.” He then put the plane into a severe diving right turn to get as far away as possible by the time the bomb exploded. Tibbets’ said he sleeps well at night and never felt badly about the lives lost in that explosion, he always thought about the lives that were not lost because the war then ended abruptly. The author spoke several times of how he would interview Tibbets in cafes or bars and nobody knew who the man was.

The Blizzard - Part III, the final of a serial story

The sky finally lightened to let me gain some reference to this sorry state where we found ourselves. I needed to move about, stomp my feet, make the blood flow in my frozen veins, and talk to someone even if the wind ripped the words from our mouths. I climbed from the wagon, stumbled hands first into a drift, and began my hip-deep flounder. My god, how that snow had banked since last I tried walking to the next wagon!

I peered inside the canvas and saw a dark lump; I jabbed and hollered at it. It took a couple of seconds til it moved. From within I heard over the roar some muffled lines of coarse teamster talk that told me he was all right. One eye appeared and I heard him say, “We ever gonna get rollin' again?” I knew no more than he did but had not yet abandoned hope and wanted no part of pitiable talk so I quickly moved on to the next wagon.

In that cold, blowing whiteout, it was impossible to walk the length of forty-five wagons, so what we knew of our fellow drovers' well-being were rumors that made their way back and forth along the line, wagon to wagon, some so hard to believe like the one that had a man going berserk from snow madness who hitched up his team and drove off into the storm. Another had a man breaking out a bottle of liquor, the only thing left unfrozen, and guzzling it into his empty stomach. He passed out and the one who saw him in his wretched condition of frozen vomit-soaked clothes wondered if he were still alive.

If only a man could see into the distance. This white faceless world wore hard on me. I could as easily been back at Gettysburg with the smoke from the guns and cannons so thick you could not see a comrade beside you, let alone a Reb running with a bayonet pointed at your guts. At the Battle of Wilderness we could not see, either. We had the Rebs outnumbered and Grant wanted to meet them in the open, but Lee out-generalled us and lured us into the woods and evened out the odds. And, God, how we cringed when a brush fire broke out between the lines in no-man's land and the wounded men lying there suffered and screamed as the flames ate them alive. At least we did not have to watch them die as they lay veiled in the smoke.

Here our battle, though, was against the cold, the snow, the wind, the solitude, and if this storm persisted, men would die here, too. Another story started making its way along the line: the old teamsters were saying the oxen should have been set free at the outset so they could drift with the wind and fend for themselves. We could have rounded them up later, but here, they said, they will start dying soon if we do not get them up and moving. The wagon boss never gave any further orders contrary to his earlier one, so there the oxen lay with deep snow mounding over and around them.

We came to believe the story about the man going crazy and taking off with his team, at least it seemed verified in its retelling. I could only wonder about his fate, maybe he had found shelter and sat there thinking we should have followed him, but as sure as there is a heaven there is a hell. More than likely he died, frozen stiff on the prairie, experiencing the notion of being warm and, then slipping off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The weaker, older oxen started dying but little could be done about it now. Maybe the same fate will come to us, hunched up as we were, shivering, fever setting in, craving water. Eating snow to slake our thirst brought scant relief, and I kept dreaming of a flame-scorched pot of boiling coffee hanging over a fire. If this hell did not soon end our carcasses would freeze stiff in what ever contortion the final heartbeat found us.

Pitch black darkness settled over us again, the end result being no different than if someone had tossed a buffalo robe over my head. What was this, the third night? I was as lost in time as in place. Horrid nightmares visited me, always on a battlefield. Men I had killed rose up through the musket smoke with their gaping wounds and began to come for me. I shot to stop them, but still they came. I tried running but my legs felt paralyzed, and I awoke in fright just as the bayonet plunged downward. Then the noise of the battle began to slack off, the cannons stopped, the shouting, the screams of the wounded horses and men, all vanished. Slowly I came to my senses, but something was different, what was it? I sat upright and shook my head. I welcomed the quiet after the din of the nightmares. Quiet! That was it, I did not hear wind roaring and whistling against and around the wagons. Lifting the wagon cover I saw a bit of light in the eastern sky, the top edge of the sun peeking over the horizon. The storm had ended, the sky was clear! We would roll again.

Part II - The Blizzard - a story in serial form

This place was on the edge of everything we called civilization. West of here Indians hostile to our presence still roamed about, though we kept a sharp eye out for them on our trail,too. The fort seemed to be on constant alert and sentries watched around the clock for signs of an Indian attack. This was not a training exercise for the soldiers. Just the year before a company of men stationed at Fort Phil Kearney died in a battle when they rode to provide escort for a wood-chopping crew. Earlier their commander William Fetterman had said he could defeat the whole Indian nation with eighty men. Well, that is how many he led and that is how many died on the day known as the Fetterman Massacre. Then in August, just five months before we got here in Fort Ransom, Red Cloud's warriors again attacked a wood crew out of Fort Kearney. This time they and their escort of soldiers fared better when they arranged their wagon boxes to fight behind. New and fast-firing breech loading rifles evened out the odds, too, and they drove the Indians away. Now they are calling it the Wagon Box Fight.

More than a few of the teamsters were always on the lookout for a little fun, and when they mixed with the soldiers and blended in a little whiskey they grew raucous. A game of chance “Who is the best shot?” started up and almost ended with a dead man to bury. Tiring of shooting at targets set off a ways on the prairie and loosening up with more spirits someone suggested a more daring variation on the game, drawing straws to see who got to set a tin cup filled with whiskey on his head with the winner trying to shoot it off. The first few rounds turned out all right because no one could hit the cup, but the last time with a teamster doing the shooting he shot a little low and grazed the trooper's scalp causing blood to pour down his face. Neither group of men was without discipline; when the fort commander caught wind of the escapade he ordered the military men into the confines of the fort, and the wagon boss said if it did not stop he would withhold wages. So things settled down for the night.

At daybreak on the morning we started back such a commotion you never did hear as when those old bullwhackers' started cracking their whips and cussing at the beasts to get rolling. A grizzled old drover in St. Cloud taught me how to pop a whip that sounded like a gunshot over the oxen's ears, and with my skill and stock of swear words growing every day I added to the clamor. I thought of my mother back in Illinois who would have washed my mouth out with laundry soap if she could have caught me.

Men were bitching about their rheumatiz acting up and kept eyeing the sky and those thick, gray clouds that unrolled over us like a heavy rug. Even with the pulling of empty wagons ox teams travel slowly, so we had made only about twelve miles by mid-afternoon when the first snowflakes flurried down which made me wonder about the augury of aching joints. It did not take long for a snow storm to develop, it grew rapidly, and even with some remaining daylight on this short day of December, the fury of the wind and the growing drifts made us stop … here!

With little else to do, I arranged a nest for myself inside the windbreak of a wagon box. Lying there my thoughts wandered with no focus except that I kept thinking about finishing this journey and finding warm shelter and food. The oxen should be all right and would not suffer any more than the teamsters. So I lay all the night, shivering, stomach growling, and wishing to hell I was somewhere else besides in this predicament where the wind grew stronger each hour and howled like a banshee clawing fingernails into our wagon canvas.

Finally the blackness of the long night ended when the sky blanched to pale white, but the morning brought no rays of sunlight stabbing through the clouds or the blowing snow. Peering out from the wagon box was to be stung in the face with a hundred snowflakes, and the wind seemed to blow harder with each hour. Long drifts of snow formed in the lee of the wagons, and I began to worry about the oxen. Attempts to wander among the wagons and mingle with the other men in their shelters brought no relief from my distress; we all suffered from the bone-chilling wind and stayed alone in our blanket­wrapped misery. My mind began to wander, lost on a battlefield amid the wreckage of armies littering the ground and hearing the heartrending screams of the wounded. I wanted to find solace in some quiet place where food and drink filled my belly.

By what measure could I judge the passing of time? The sun never revealed itself, I possessed no watch, my stomach persisted with its demands to be fed. Was time standing still? Only with intense darkness setting in would I know that this day had passed, and another long night loomed ahead. Mind games occupied me some; I tried recalling some of recent newspaper stories. Something called the Homestead Act, just think, free land! . . . If I ever get a couple of dollars ahead, I am going to buy one of those new Stetson hats . . . Jefferson Davis got himself caught, he and his crowd started the war that caused men like me to shoot other men . . . They say Negroes can now become citizens. Some of those poor devils I saw down south surely needed help. One from Georgia is with us on this train, a good man, I wonder how he, the southerner, is doing all wrapped up in his bedroll? Drowsiness finally overcame me. I slept some . . . but something made me jump with a start, I heard a baby crying in the distance, a mournful cry that sent chills down my spine. I tensed and wondered where it was, why is its mother not seeing to its need? Then, benumbed, I again grew aware of the howling wind.

The Blizzard - a serial in three parts

Many stories float about in my head that want telling, and since the years keep piling up I had better get started. The area of North Dakota where I was born and raised is rich with tales that have never been told except scantily in dusty historical references. So to prove to myself that I am serious with my undertaking I will print one I call "The Blizzard," in serial form running three days. When I was a kid going to the movies on Saturday night there was often a special feature of a story told in serial form which made you want to buy a ticket the next Saturday night to see how things worked out. As my stories accumulate I intend to publish them in a collection. The events in the stories are factually based. The one following occurred in 1867 near Lisbon, ND.

Stalled in a Storm

Most days I shuffle over to this clouded window and spend a lot of time sitting and remembering. In years past I sat with friends and spent hours talking about the old days while we played a few hands of cards. I am the last one, though and know I will soon join them in silence, but I want my family to know my story. I have experienced many things, some still play in my head, but mostly I dwell on the war and my freighting days. Considering my age I am lucky to be alive since either one could have been the end of me, and it is only my fellow companions on those journeys who knew and understood what we went through. So much has been written about the war but nothing about that time we got stranded in a three day blizzard with our wagons and oxen. At the time the location had no name on a map; it was just the place south of the big bend of the Sheyenne River in what is now North Dakota. I want to start there.

…

We had to stop; the wind drove the snow with brisk gales and wrapped us in a small, white world from which we could not see beyond to the next wagon. Our usual task of parking the wagons proved impossible since we could not see or hear the wagon boss, and by the time he rode back within earshot hollering and screaming, the train sat in muddled disarray. The oxen needed attention, we unhitched them but kept them yoked together. Feed and water had to wait. We tethered them to the wagons so they would not drift across the prairie with the wind at their tails.

Hunkering down for the night we tried to light cook fires, but every time someone's shaking hands struck a match, the stiff wind snuffed it out. More than anything I wanted to wrap my cold fingers around a cup of hot coffee, but tonight there would be none. I chewed on hardtack and tried to think of other places and better times. By morning we would roll again so all any of us could do was try to get some sleep, a wish not realized since our bed rolls did little to chase the chill. We huddled there all night listening to the wind drum the wagon canvas against the bows.

Caught on a high plain was not the place we wanted to be when a December blizzard roared in and piled snow so deep that our train mired in the drifts. The storm caught us with 45 wagons and as many yokes of oxen on open ground. The wagon master, taken sick with high fever in Fort Ransom, stayed back, but curiously he put a man with little experience in charge of the train to lead us the sixty miles back to Fort Abercrombie. Most of us would have felt a lot more comfortable taking orders from one other man, but he and the boss never saw eye to eye. For reasons known only to him, the new man directed us to take the longer route around the bend of the river where we now sat stalled instead of the shorter low water trail where the river needed crossing only twice, at the Brunton ford and the Shin ford. With jobs hard to get, the men kept quiet and did as they were told, although quiet is maybe not the best word, this was a profane bunch who cursed and grumbled first thing in the morning when they opened their mouths and the last thing before rolling up in their blankets.

Donald Stevenson, a Scotchman, from Osakis, Minnesota owned the ox and wagon outfit and held the freighting contract to supply Fort Ransom, an outpost established just six months previously in June of 1867. He was not traveling with us on this trip. An ambitious sort, he worked on other pursuits, too, but planned to meet us somewhere along the trail as we returned to Fort Abercrombie.

Before coming out here I wore the uniform of the Union Army; now along with many another veteran of the war, I found myself drifting westward on the cusp of new country. I hired on as a teamster in St. Cloud and was sent to the depot to pitch in and help load the freight wagons. A day later we started out on a westerly bearing to Fort Abercrombie, then on to Fort Ransom where that isolated garrison heartily welcomed our arrival. After unloading we turned the oxen out to rest and graze on the prairie for a couple of days while we busied ourselves greasing wagon wheels and fixing worn or broken gear.

This place was on the edge of everything we called civilization. West of here Indians hostile to our presence still roamed about, though we kept a sharp eye out for them on our trail,too. The fort seemed to be on constant alert and sentries watched around the clock for signs of an Indian attack. This was not a training exercise for the soldiers. Just the year before a company of men stationed at Fort Phil Kearney died in a battle when they rode to provide escort for a wood-chopping crew. Earlier their commander William Fetterman had said he could defeat the whole Indian nation with eighty men. Well, that is how many he led and that is how many died on the day known as the Fetterman Massacre. Then in August, just five months before we got here in Fort Ransom, Red Cloud's warriors again attacked a wood crew out of Fort Kearney. This time they and their escort of soldiers fared better when they arranged their wagon boxes to fight behind. New and fast-firing breech loading rifles evened out the odds, too, and they drove the Indians away.

TR Symposium

On Friday I took my annual trip to Dickinson to attend the 6th Annual Theodore Roosevelt Symposium. It was a bigger deal this year since they held it in conjunction with the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. Name tags showed me that attendees came from many states; a lot of people are big TR lovers. Every year new books are written about the man, and it must be hard to find new information so the authors aren't tripping over each other by repeating the same old same old. We were told that only one other man in U. S. history has had more books written about him than TR - Abe Lincoln.

Sure enough, there has been a new book written - Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician's Quest for Recovery in the American West by Roger Di Silvestro. He gave a very interesting speech and afterwards book buyers lined up deep to buy the book and have him autograph it. My friend Doug Ellison, owner of the Western Edge bookstore in Medora had the book concession. He was taking checks and credit cards right and left.

TR's grandson Tweed Roosevelt always attends to lend his name and family support to the event. On Saturday the group all migrated to Medora for further meetings and socializing, and today, Sunday, were headed on a Doug Brinkley's Majic Bus tour around the area. Brinkley is quite a well-known historian, and I often see him on national TV doing commentary about various political and historical topics. Unfortunately, I did not participate in any of the Saturday or Sunday events.
. . . . .
Snow came to the Rocky Mountain and the east coast areas; therefore I have to get on the ball and finish last minute details before it flies here. Tomorrow, after going to the gym for my workout, I'm going to mow and mulch one last time, take out the garbage, fix the garage door opener light, service my snowblower, wrap the father-in-law's air conditioner with plastic, take a shower, go to the Heritage Center library to photocopy an obituary I need, begin writing my third story, get ready for Halloween. It is going to be hard this year to answer the door for trick-or-treaters, though, since it will interfere with Dancing with the Stars. I should sleep like a baby tomorrow night.

News from 1885

A trip to the Heritage Center library to read the news of another time revealed stories of President U. S. Grant's death in 1885. He was carried to his final resting place in New York City. We had the opportunity to visit his burial place a little over a year ago. Unfortunately, my main memory is of the pit bull who lunged at us with murder in his eyes as we walked up the stairs to enter the domed building. Luckily his master pulled him up short, but it was not pleasant. Maintained as a national memorial by the National Park Service it stands as an imposing structure, and park rangers man the site. Another article written in this period reported that naysayers had their say when they added up the costs to the city of New York to hold the funeral, one million dollars.

History seems to be holding Grant in higher esteem, especially as a commanding general. We visited the Vicksburg battleground near New Orleans where it was plain to see it took good generalship to gain a victory in that terrain, and he did just that.

Casualties were extremely high in the Civil War. This article, "Going into Battle,"was reprinted in Sheldon's first newspaper, The Enterprise, and gives a strong reason why.

Said Captain George W. Stone recently: "I don't believe any man ever went into a battle without feeling frightened. I know I never did. I'll tell you when a man feels real badly. It's when he is forming his men into line for a big battle while a little skirmishing fire is kept up all the time. Every minute or so, someone, maybe your best friend, standing right next to you will shriek out, "Oh, my God," and fall back dead, yet you cannot let your men fire, for the army must be drawn up first. There is plenty of time to think. You don't dare retaliate in any way. The next bullet may find your heart, and your children will be left fatherless. It is a moment that tries the bravest man, because he has to stand quietly and take it all. But when the order comes to fight and the excitement of the battle arises, fear passes away. You have something to do. You have a duty to perform at any cost. Bullets drive into the ground at your feet, sending up little clouds of dust; they whistle past your ears and may cut holes in your clothing. Shot and shrapnel kill your comrades and leave you living, and soon there comes a feeling that some good fortune has preserved you and will protect you, and the desire to do as much damage to the enemy alone fills your mind. That was my experience in the army, and I don't believe that the man lived who did not feel at the commencement of a fight that he would rather be somewhere else."
... ... ...

Grant loved to smoke his cigars, something which killed him since he contracted cancer of the esophagus from them. Warnings about tobacco usage had not yet come about. This ad ran in several editions of the paper, "We don't smoke over a dozen cigars per day, but when we do smoke, it's the Diplomats. For sale at a nickel each at Cole's drug store."

Fifty Years Ago

The lines of an Ian Tyson song - "Fifty Years Ago" - caught my attention when I first heard them and I've not forgotten them:

Oh the time has passed so quick
The years all run together now
Did I hold Juanita yesterday
Was it fifty years ago

This song deals with love lost, but substitute the name Juanita with most anything and it applies. Our Sunday edition of the Bismarck Tribune carried an article that made me think of the song again: "UND's library celebrates 50 years." I remember clearly the event that brought the library about; Chester Fritz, a self-made financier, had attended UND and granted one million dollars for a new library. To a sophomore lucky to have a dollar bill in his pocket, I thought that was a mighty big pile of money to be handing out. As these things go, though, it took another $4.5 million from the state in 1981 to make the library what it is today.

On Sunday we celebrated Mary's dad's 95th birthday (actual date being today, October 24). I did not know him then, but subtract 50 years and he was a young man of 45. I'm sure he was close to still being in full bloom yet as he battled the elements to make a living for his family.
Tomorrow, the 25th, marks the first anniversary of the death of my father. I do remember him as a 45 year old man that worked hard to keep our little farm going.

The cost of living was much different 50 years ago. The average cost of a new house - $12,500, average income per year - $5,315, cost of a gallon of gas - .27, average cost of a new car - $2,850.

On the political front several things of interest occurred. Fidel Castro took over in Cuba, JFK was inaugurated, the Peace Corps was established, JFK asked for the money to put a man on the moon, construction of the Berlin Wall begins, Pampers diapers were introduced, etc.

Someone thought it was cute when he hung a sign in the classroom that said, "Time passes, will you?" I know now the answer is yes, I will pass, but not in the context of school promotion as this simple phrase asks.