My wife said for not having anything to say, I sure do it well. Now I thought about that one for awhile and decided there was probably a multiple choice question in there. Here are the choices:
1.) I was the victim of a left-handed compliment
2.) It illustrates the art of the gentle put down
3.) She damned me with faint praise
4.) All of the above
Like many another husband, I just can't fool her with blib-blab.
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I found the barn with the hilly backdrop near Huff, ND. So many old hip-roof barns look like this or even worse. One time they were a very common sight but have been replaced with tin sheds. They stand as historical monuments celebrating a time that has passed
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Speaking of history I enjoyed reading a text and writing a review on this book - Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876-1877 by Marc H. Abrams. The Bismarck Tribune receives examination copies and makes them available for citizen reviews. Recently I saw the editor's announcement of the availability of this book, asked for it, and found myself the lucky recipient of it in the mail. The book read well, and I found it very informative. The author drew accounts from thirty-one different newspapers and dozens of various other resources to piece together a good picture of the period.
I couldn't help but state my own understanding of the period and said, "An often overlooked back story, yet present and significant, threads through these accounts. With battles fought in the names of generals and chiefs, the soldiers and warriors receive little attention in the histories.
Just enough seeps through the articles to tell us that soldiering in the field during this time was harsh. With only bacon and hardtack making up their field diet, scurvy set in. Illness and injury went untreated. Men traveled and slept through blizzards, mud, drought, mosquitoes, and pelting hail lacking adequate shelter...."
It was little wonder Custer's command suffered defeat, "The soldiers and their mounts were undernourished and exhausted from their march and Custer's cavalry could not maneuver well in the area of the final showdown." So the Deseret News concluded, "The simple truth is that General Custer went out to slaughter the Indians, and the Indians slaughtered him."
