Mish-mash

The picture is of the railroad bridge between Mandan and Bismarck taken from a boat in the river.  Note the iron ice-breaker on the right side of the pillar.  This piling is said to be the original.

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We had a busy week, the way we like them.  Last Thursday we took an OLLI field trip to Fort Abraham Lincoln.  To get there, we rode the five-miles in an open trolley car.  With low temperatures and gusty winds but enough clothing, we arrived to tour Custer's house, then down to the Indian village.  We've been there a few times before, but it is always fun.

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We attended the Governor's History Conference on Friday night and all day Saturday.  One of the Little Rock nine attended to give the keynote address.  On Friday evening we watched a film about Judge Ronald Davies, the North Dakota judge who was called to Arkansas to adjudicate the problem of getting the black students enrolled in high school.  Quite an impressive man.  I asked one retired judge here if he knew Davies.  He did, and agreed that he was tough and no-nonsense.

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On Sunday we drove to Washburn to attend their open house of the new and improved Lewis & Clark Museum.  It was free so we decided to take advantage of that fact.  It's a nice facility and the parking lot had lots of out-of-state license plates.

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There's a big day coming on Saturday - wild horse sale in Wishek.  I plan to attend and take pictures and see if I can't get a story to write out of the event.  The Western Writers of America might like it. There's a pushback on the sale.  The Nokota horse people say the wild horses are no different than domestic horses; that they have the true wild horses.  A letter to the editor in the Tribune claimed the Theodore Roosevelt Park, the wild horse experts, and the Wishek sales ring are having a big party at the horse's expense.

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A couple of months ago Mary and I were asked to come to the BSC campus and sit for a promotional video being made for the Osher Institute.  We did and thought they might use a bit of our remarks, but they did more than that.  Check it out.  Search uofnorthdakota.  When at their website search for recent videos and click on "What is OLLI?"  It's about eight minutes long, and we appear three different times.
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My old buddy sends me an Ole and Lena joke occasionally, and this is the latest:

Government surveyors came to Ole's farm in the fall and asked if they could
do some surveying. Ole agreed, and Lena even served them a nice meal at noon
time.

The next spring, the two surveyors stopped by and told Ole, "Because you
were so kind to us, we wanted to give you this bad news in person instead of
by letter."

Ole replied, "What's the bad news?"

The surveyors stated, "Well, after our work here, we discovered your farm is
not in Minnesota but is actually in Wisconsin!"

Ole looked at them and said, "That's the best news I have heard in a long
time. I just told Lena this morning that I don't think I can take another
winter in Minnesota."
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I'm taking a week off so there will be no blog "Miscellaneous Musings" next week.

Cruisin'

Monday morning found us cruising down the Missouri River on the Lewis & Clark riverboat. The reason: we signed up for a class through the Osher Institute called “The Mighty Missouri River.” So what could be better than floating down it listening to Tracy Potter. I've come to one conclusion about the river and the areas adjacent to it. There's a heckuva lot of history around here.

Tracy told an interesting story about the man piloting the boat. When he needed a pilot a couple of years ago, he advertised all over the country. A man from Key West applied to come up during our tourist season, and then he heads back down to Key West to run fishing boats down there. Sounds like a good fit.

At the point where the boat started to turn around for the return trip, it seemed to stall. I thought, “Uh, oh, we're hung up on a sandbar.” Anyway, Tracy asked him later what happened. The pilot said he was just experimenting on how slow he could go and still maintain his position. He needed to know because in a couple of weeks , he would be parking it in its winter berth and needed the knowledge for controlling and steering it in the Missouri River's strong current. What with the sandbars constantly changing in the river, it was a safe guess about being stranded out there. (At least I thought so.)

Later this week, Thursday, we will spend the afternoon on the grounds of Fort Lincoln for another class tour. And on Saturday the North Dakota Historical Society sponsors the Governor's History Conferece, the topic being the integration/segregation at Little Rock, Arkansas. One of the black students involved in it will be the featured speaker.

Here is where the map should fold

Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings, and small outcrops. John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley.

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We ran one of our infrequent garage sales last Friday and Saturday. Items sold well, and no large items

remained at the end to lug back into the house. The large annual Indian powwow was being held, lots of new people were in town, and residents put up garage sales signs all over the twin towns. The reason: to get some of the Indian money, of course. A steady stream of lookers stopped by our place on both days, several being Indians.

I enjoyed visiting with one woman who did something interesting. She was talking on her cell phone as she looked at our wares, and it wasn't English she was talking. When she finished, I asked her, “What language were you speaking?” She answered right back, “Crow.” Sometimes a question like that can turn sour if they think it's none of my business. But she visited with me about it and told me she had been raised by her grandmother who spoke nary a word of English. This lady, about 40 years old and well dressed said, in fact, Crow is her first language. She'd rather speak it than English, although she spoke it very well, too.

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It's no secret I like frontier history, and I ran into an interesting tidbit in the weekly Mandan News. They always run a column named, “Those Were the Days,” going back as far as 125 years to 1888. Last week this item appeared, “It is a matter of regret that there are a few boys in town who can be correctly called hoodlums. The latest development among them is a desire to disturb a religious meeting in some way. Not long ago, during a prayer meeting in one of the churches, a boy came quietly to the door and yelled at the top of his voice 'Get the ____ outa here!' and then ran away as fast as his legs would carry him. Such shocking behavior would never have occurred here just a few short years ago. Obviously, the parents of these boys are largely to blame for such actions; lack of discipline at home is the cause.”

Having been in the school business, the poor parents always got blamed when the kids acted up. I also know that many hell-raisers came from very strictly disciplined households. Things haven't changed in 125 years.

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A few days ago our daily paper ran a cartoon I couldn't help but clip and save. It's a single panel cartoon showing Dick Tracy in the forefront looking at the radio-thingy he always talked into. Now this was 60 years ago or better when I started reading his cartoons. Anyway, here comes a younger couple meeting him, both of them looking at the phone on their wrists. One says, “Who's the old guy trying to be hip?” Isn't there a line in a song that goes something like, “when everything old is new again​”?

Labor Day

South of Mandan

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction. - Will Rogers

The official celebration of Labor Day was signed into law by President Grover Cleveland. He didn't do it because he liked labor, but because he was afraid if an official day wasn't given over to labor more riots and bloodshed would occur, like that of the so-called Haymarket Massacre.

One of the early leaders in the Industrial Workers of the World labor movement was Big Bill Haywood who effectively organized mine workers in the West. A biography of the man has been written, I've read it, and came to admire his steadfastness in the face of threats and intimidation. The Wobblies, their popular name, made enemies among the owners and management for their tough tactics.

My hometown's poet Tom McGrath wrote in his book-length poem – Letter to an Imaginary Friend - about a scene he witnessed as a boy at his uncle's threshing machine. His uncle took offense for the labor troubles occurring in his field and beat one of the Wobblies severely. Nothing settled. McGrath wrote, “My uncle was cursing the Reds, Ordering the rig to start, but no one started. The men drifted away.”

That is just one small example of labor and management's struggle. In this present time, there seems to be little mention of unionism. Plants get shut down because the workers are making too much money. Then re-open in a year or two without union representation.  There was a time, though, when the Will Rogers quote made a lot of sense to union organizers.