Empire of the Summer Moon S. C. Gwynne

In the brutality of the American West and Texas in particular, this complex story is about both the beginning and the end of the Indian wars and the chief character is, himself, half white and half Indian. 

 

The brutality of the time is startling and described in some detail.  It is my warning that reading these descriptions is quite unsettling and adult only.

The book details the history of horses and the American Indian and also the life of the prairie – the challenges of weather, the difference from what the settler was used to.  In addition, there is a complex moral story that is difficult to tell to differing cultures and the complexity makes the story even more challenging as you think of victim treatment and torture, because you must think of our own history as recent as Quantanamo.  No torture is forgivable and when torture is allowed the extremes of suffering and cruelty know no bounds.

 

The book is a history of disease, encroachment, and open plains warfare where the white invaders were lucky to have had the “germ warfare” of disease eliminate up to 75% of their adversary.  The battles and the shifts are well told and dramatic reading.

 

We learn about the Texas Rangers and how they began as well as their use of the new colt revolver which changed the history of the old west and redeemed Samuel Colt from poverty.  In fact Colt asked the ranger – Samuel Walker  - to help him redesign the pistol.  Changing from five to six bullets, the Walker Colt became the real pistol of the west.

 

Quannah Parkers mother is the center of the story for the first half of the book.  She was kidnapped by the Commanche and became a chief’s wife.  Then she was recaptured by the white settlers and treated like a freak to be put on display for the curious until she died.  She continually hoped to go back to the Commanches, but that would not be possible.

 

The story follows to Quannahs demise and does him some justice, but in fact he is a small part of the story and no matter how much research he remains an elusive figure and this only partially shows us who he was.


Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History Few people realize that the Comanche Indians were the greatest warring tribe in American history. Their 40-year battle with settlers held up the development of the new nation. Empire of the Summer Moon tells of the rise and fall of this fierce, powerful, and proud tribe, and begins in 1836 with the kidnapping of a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower blue eyes named Cynthia Ann Parker. She grew to love her captors and eventually became famous as the "White Squaw." She married a powerful Comanche chief, and their son, Quanah, became a warrior who was never defeated and whose bravery and military brilliance in the Texas panhandle made him a legend as one of the greatest of the Plains Indian chiefs. In this vivid piece of writing, S. C. Gwynne describes in sometimes brutal detail the savagery of both whites and Comanches and, despite the distance of time, demonstrates how truly shocking these events were, juxtaposed against the haunting story of an unforgettable figure of a woman caught between two worlds.

Walter Meets Mack, Michael Stoesz

http://waltermeetsmack.com/

Michael Stoesz is a teacher and it shows in this children’s book.  It is a story told with a teenage immigrant who flees the oppression of Russia in his native Finland and we follow Walter Myllymäki in his quest to find an uncle in the landscape of shifting jobs – logging, farming, and the low ranking work of early Minneapolis. He is penniless, without an adult to guide him, and only an uncle’s name and Minnesota as his touchstones.

Children will feel for this lost teen and his travails.  It is allegorical in that the teen years tend to be a time when everyone is seeking who they are – the quest for their place in the world and the audience – I would think would be from grades 3 – 6, but teachers will know better than me – and the preteens are always curious about the life of the teens.

Michael brings in a lot of history and his images of early Minneapolis are well done and provide the means by which the reader can imagine what the world was like.  Seen through the eyes of a teenager the confusing world of transients comes to life.

Then the odyssey begins – after finding ways to use his balancing abilities to earn some money he is befriended by an older Finn and he becomes a lumber man in the northern Minnesota forests.  Here we learn about the details of logging, the language, the lifestyle and also the pathos as he sees the stumps and realizes the voracious consumption that is already the hallmark of the nation.

He meets Finnish farmers, befriends a young Irishman and sticks out the logging year thus allowing us to learn about both early farming and the cycles of the logger’s year and the variations that come from the seasons.

Uncle Emil is always a phantom.  He was here, someone met him there, but you keep wondering if he will be successful in finding this illusive relative who seems to be driving Walter’s life through his absence.

I enjoyed the richness of the descriptions and the subtexts that are incorporated in.  There are lessons in ecology and even geology as well as the presence of a bully and the need to deal with him. 

I recommend the book and teachers and homeschoolers will like the extra ideas on the website.

Devil's Corner by Lisa Scottoline

http://scottoline.com/Books/devil.html

This is the first book I have read by this author and I really found it fun and a page turner even though it stretched possibility and probability. 

A short synopsis would have a good looking young Assistant US Attorney witnessing a triple murder and barely escaping herself, then with vigilante diligence she sets off to right wrong.  She does it by breaking several rules like the physical intimidation of a prisoner and other acts that should have sent her packing rather than suspended.

Of course she then befriends this African American prisoner who was just released and additional murders, drug crimes, and other violent interruptions raise the odds and the excitement while the two women move between law enforcement and criminals to solve and resolve the crimes.

It is a black/white contrasting interaction between the heroes that sets the tone and gives the book some humor as well as a love affair that the heroine longs for from the beginning of the text.  All this gets resolved, but I will not tell you how since that would spoil the story.

Devil’s Corner is the run down section of the city where the black heroine lives and where the white heroines father grew up.  It is a place that has always had an ethnic concentration and over time became a district for crack sellers to prosper.

There are lots of angles and they are all resolved in a way that is unique to this Lone Ranger and Tonto pairing.  Don’t take it too serious, just enjoy the fun.  

The Book Collector

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121217626838633437.html

This is an enjoyable reflection from a man who buys and keeps books, but defies many of the conventions of the book collector. 

"I'm not a snob about books, but I'm probably a show-off -- as who isn't? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed -- much less commented upon -- my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic. It's rather a closed circle; I impress myself. I once felt a certain anxiety about my book-lined living room -- it was too much, no? It seemed to belong in the same category as the display of framed degrees in prominent places. Books do furnish a room -- in Anthony Powell's titular phrase -- but that room would be the library, equipped with 14-foot built-ins with a rolling ladder, and I've never had one of those. I had to consider which impulse was the stronger: the wish to let the world admire my complete collection of the works of Raymond Roussel, or the wish not to appear a bore. Having books crowd every inch of wall space in the room in which I entertained imposed a certain burden on the conversation, as if dead authors were leaning in, contributing dry, derisive chuckles."

There is also a great sidebar on libraries and book collections from their historical beginnings.

Nesting Season, Bernd Heinrich

Heinrich has some of the most intriguing and complex natural history books on the market.  From his personal insights to his search of literature he does not attack a subject without being exhaustive.  As a result the pages are densely packed with information, encyclopedic in content, and tough reading. 

I could only read 3 – 5 pages at a time.  To read more would be to skim and miss the details that are in every chapter.  No skim reading for this book or else don’t bother reading it.  To absorb is to take your time, reflect and make your own observations.

This book came from friends Ruth and John who took to reading the book over their own area nesting season – a wonderful and clever idea to add depth to the reading.  Bernd lives in Vermont and teaches college students to observe and think about the wonders of nature.  We need more people like him.

Harvard Press has this to say about the book:  “Why are the eggs of the marsh wren deep brown, the winter wren’s nearly white, and the gray catbird’s a brilliant blue? And what in the DNA of a penduline tit makes the male weave a domed nest of fibers and the female line it with feathers, while the bird-of-paradise male builds no nest at all, and his bower-bird counterpart constructs an elaborate dwelling?

“These are typical questions that Bernd Heinrich pursues in the engaging style we’ve come to expect from him—supplemented here with his own stunning photographs and original watercolors. One of the world’s great naturalists and nature writers, Heinrich shows us how the sensual beauty of birds can open our eyes to a hidden evolutionary process. Nesting, as Heinrich explores it here, encompasses what fascinates us most about birds—from their delightful songs and spectacular displays to their varied eggs and colorful plumage; from their sex roles and mating rituals to nest parasitism, infanticide, and predation.

“What moves birds to mate and parent their young in so many different ways is what interests Heinrich—and his insights into the nesting behavior of birds has more than a little to say about our own.”

The quotes below contain a few tidbits that I thought were fun.

“One of the strong interests that we have in other animals (as we also have in one another) is not just what they do.  We also want to know why they (and we) do it.  For that we need to learn what drives them to behave as they do.  However, despite our own huge emphasis on feelings or emotions in trying to understand ourselves, the topic has been practically taboo in the considerations of other animals, for whom instead we categorically presume that we cannot know what they feel.  However, a more conservative approach is that feelings of love and attachment, despite their imponderable quantities, are universal attributes of other vertebrate animals, just as our physical construction is virtually identical to theirs, except for the minor exterior adaptations to our differing physical environments.  By invoking Occam’s razor it would be a greater error to presume that animals are not driven by geelings than to suppose that they are.  Instead, currently we seem to have decided that humans are exempt from the rules that obtain across the rest of nature, and that sophisticated emotions are our exclusive province.”

“Satellite tracking has revealed that albatrosses may cover 184000 km of travel in their first year of life, and then they may wander another seven to fifteen years before breeding.”

“Anna and Pavil, built a nest and mated in January 1968 and they continued to nest annually until they had produced seventy six young by 1987 when someone apparently stole Anna.  The zoo then provided Pavil with another femail from the Krakow Xoo.  He immediately attacked her.  Three months later a weakened raven was found walking about in Warsaw, and since she reacted when addressed by the name Anna, this bird was brought to Pavil.  The two greeted each other wildly and with obvious pleasure.  They reunited immediately and produced one more clutch of young before dying of apparent old age.”

“A male spotted sandpiper’s evolved willingness to incubate eggs should be contingent on his assurance of paternity.  However, male paternity is never assured and females may not need to be choosy in a partner, so long as he will incubate her eggs.  A female appears to placate a potential mate by copulating with him frequently, which would increase his chances of paternity and hence make him willing to incubate the eggs and then lead the young around.”

“Crossbills nesting in winter while feeding on spruce and larch seeds and the goldfinches breeding in August when the thistles come into seed are exceptions to the rule of spring being most bird’s breeding time.”

“The steps of the cranes’ dance performance, like any dance of ours, are set by convention and are probably honed to perfection by maturation and by practice.  If there were no strict convention, there could be no perfection.”

“Snowy owls, for example, attach Arctic foxes that threaten their nests, and snow geese gain protection by nesting near them.”

“The common (European) swift has, like all the other eighty five to ninety species of swifts, achieved the ultimate perfect in of life on the wing in open skies.  The two young from a clutch of this small bird with long narrow pointed wings spend about six weeks in the nest and leave it about fifteen minutes after sundown, apparently to avoid falcons.  From that moment on the young’s ties with their parents are broken forever, and they ascend into the sky to 2000 to 3000 m in altitude to meet up with others, staying continuously and uninterruptedly airborne for two to three years.”

The Personal History of Rachel DuPree Ann Weisgarber

The voice of the narrator – the books story teller, is perfect.  It is the mother of the family, and she is strong, she is smart, and she has the right emotions to take us through this historic narrative.

I have the distinct history of having been to the badlands for 50 straight years, last year was my first miss.  It is a distinct landscape that has to shape the person no matter how long you give it.  I have backpacked, spent weeks there, wandered its exotic landscape and explored.  But I have always felt that I want to return, but not to stay.  I cannot think of a landscape that would ask more of the settler, Indian, traveler.

The book captures the strength needed to survive in this land and adds the challenge of being an African American in 1900.  It also creates a strong image of the plight of the American Indian as the husband, an ex-cavalry man who had both fought and fathered them.  He felt a distinct resentment of the Indian, but the wife discovers the humanity of the Indian through the help that she receives from them as her husband works the mines and ranches and leaves her to deal with both their homestead and their five children.

Tragedies are personal.  Each person was exhausted by life and the challenges of each day – the loss of their only milk cow, the loss of a child, the threat of storms, the isolation of their lives in a landscape that has no sympathy. 

It is a well told story and the images are strong.

Audible.com synopsis.  Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, Ann Weisgarber's moving and majestic debut highlights one black family's struggle to survive the South Dakota Badlands. It's 1917 - 14 years after Rachel and Isaac Dupree came to this unforgiving land - and Isaac is proud of his landed independence. But rain stops falling, cattle are dying, and supplies are gone. Desperate and exhausted, Rachel determines to do what's right for her children, herself, and her husband.

The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter

There is a lot of good writing in this book, good descriptions, good sentence, and some challenging ideas.  The title of the book comes from the name of a painting that the main character makes, one that far surpasses all his other mundane “art”, but one he has put away in his basement because he sees it as unobtainable.  It is a table glowing in light, reflected light, direct light, light that is literally the food of the feast, the enlightenment that he seeks.

Through the novel we find a collection of stories – each inspecting an aspect of love.  It is a journey of loneliness and wanting.

“On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can’t reflect anything anymore.  Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions.  Like me, it’s glimmerless.  You can’t see into it now, just past it.  Depth has been replaced by texture.  This mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone.  The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do.  That is its beauty.”

His love life and two failed marriages has caused him to challenge his friend to interview the people surrounding him about love.  In his own sad reflection he states, “But it’s’ a funny thing about other people’s phobias, when you don’t share them: you pick at them, like a scab.  You want to remove them.”

The wife that leaves him for another woman says “He loved only his love for me…”  and described her dissatisfaction with their sex, “…he made love the way you would drive a car to work.  Autopilot stuff.”

In his loneliness he has to get back the dog that he asked his sister to keep for him for two months only to learn that she does not want to give it back now.  How he gets it is a good tale, but also a sad commentary.  Then we meet his Jewish neighbors, the male is a professor who has his career based on Kierkegaard.  “Of the two vast subjects about which one can never be certain and should therefore perhaps keep silent, God and love, Kierkegaard, a bachelor, claimed especial expertise.”  “He wrote intricately beautiful semi-nonsense and thus became a hero of the intellectual type.”

It is obvious that the writer publishes short stories, because many of the chapters could stand alone as short stories, but gain in poignancy by our familiarity with the characters.  Bradley the man, Bradley the dog, the neighbors (Ginsbergs), and the tragic pairing of Chloe and Oscar – youthful lovers who have been goth, addicted, tattooed and slightly outside of any mainstream. 

Chloe and Oscar are wonderful contrasts to Bradley and his two wives.  They are so in love that faults and obstacles fall away from them, while Bradley in his quest for love continues to find nothing but obstacles.   Their lack of pretension is a contrast to the brief second marriage of Bradley.  The short term wife – Diana – reflects on their Ann Arbor locations, “Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand.  We’re all hand-me-down personalities.  But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.”

The Ginsberg’s are another contrast.  A married couple that has settled in to being together, though not being passionate anymore, just living parallel lives in the same home with respect of one another.  Their great tragedy is their third child who creates all the drama in their lives and occupies their minds more than their other two children combined.  It is a tragic reality that many families have experienced.

Ginsberg, who is a professor of philosophy states, “As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories.”

Chloe walking the streets after losing the love of her life reflects on what she sees in the Ann Arbor homes, “ I walk past these houses and I see all these domestic arrangements, I guess you’d call them. Women living with women.  Women living with men.  Men living with men.  Women living alone.  Men living alone.  Sane people and crazy people, people who have lost what once remained of their minds.  The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way.  I believe that.”

In the end, the book is a reflection on our need for love, not just the physical aspect of sex, but that deeper need for someone to understand us, to sympathize with us, to listen to us.  Finding that person is not easy and all of us who have, are really lucky.

Highly entertaining book.

Free libraries

http://www.utne.com/The-Sweet-Pursuit/Little-Free-Libraries-Are-Coming-To-Town.aspx?newsletter=1&utm_content=09.12.11+Literature&utm_campaign=UTR_ENEWS&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

Waiting for White Horses, Nathan Jorgenson

This novel is set in Northern Minnesota for the majority of the prose, but has as an unlikely pairing – Washington D. C.  The book took me a long time to get into, it was just too improbable.  The Dentist with his hunting and fishing companions in N. MN who are pals of the President of the US and because of this the hero, a dentist, connects with the love of his life and struggles through the odyssey of emotions and loss.

If there is Chic-lit, then this would be guy-lit: Hunting, fishing, the outdoorsman that everyone loves including a powerful female member of the DC press.  He serves on a presidential committee and like Mr Smith Goes to Washington, he comes down on them with his lake country wisdom.

He goes through the loss of his wife, the potential disconnect with his daughter and other personal tragedies that I will not outline in case you want to read it. 

When I checked out the reviews the majority of people really liked it, but those who did not, really hated it.  My good friend gave it to me with high expectations and I hoped to love it, but I just could not. 

The hero – Grant – was too perfect, even with the exposure of his soft emotional self and the trip in to inner blackness when too many bad things seem to happen to those he loves. 

The settings in MN are fun for Minnesotan's.  We know Leech Lake and Walker and if you have been in a small town much you will know a diner like Emil's.  These local settings were the highlights of the book.

Not a bad book and one that would be good for those who like the outdoor setting and the successful search for self.  In fact, I can name friends who would love this book.

The Greater Journey, David McCullough

What makes Paris the city of enlightenment and creative inspiration?  McCullough has a large history of Americans in Paris to draw from and he investigates the city phenomenon through the peoples who went there from the 1830’s to the end of the century. 

John Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson began this connection, but the book begins with the next group – Samuel Morse (Morse code and telegraph), Wendell Holmes (Father of Oliver), and James Fennimore Cooper who came by sail and endeavored to absorb the arts.  There were others who learned medicine and came back to eventually head the medical schools in the US and other artists who gained depth in the French capital.

After the steamboat, the stories shift to P T Barnum and Tom Thumb, Catlin and the Iowan Indians who brought a short-lived curiosity to the theater of Paris and Paris was all theater – written, spoken, painted, sculpted. 

I learned a lot of American history from this book (and of course Parisian/French).  As the next wave of people came in at the time of the last Emperor Napoleon and the defeat in the Prussian war we had Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Elihu Washburne, brother of Cadwallader who was one of the founders of General Mills.  Elihu was ambassador to Paris appointed by his close friend Ulysses Grant.  Three Washburne brothers served in the House of Representatives at the same time from three states!  Washburne was a hero in France for his efforts during the war and seems to have been a tireless worker who was the perfect appointee despite terrible reviews when he got the appointment. 

Then there is the sculptor – Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  Like some of the others in the book, they are prominent people, but I did not know them.  It turns out that he was our first preeminent US sculptor and his home and works are a National Historic Site.  In many ways he carried the second half of the book along with John Singer Sargent and their careers and artistic development are the glue for the additional people and tales.

Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Mary Cassatt, Henry James… there is a large cast of characters and in the middle there is the 1870 – 1872 war with Prussia (another of a long history of defeats) in which the Prussians take the city after months of siege which resulted in starvation and deprivation, but very little destruction of the city itself. But in the aftermath, the commune, takes over Paris and during its reign the city suffers the terror of arrests and murders, and eventually when France reasserts its claim, the short lived war sees French killing French and destroying the town in a way that no invading foreign army ever did.

But somehow this interlude of violence and chaos like the revolution itself seen passed and the cafes and the gardens and the society of poets reestablishes itself. 

The strength of the poetic Paris is never really established, but never-the-less I find myself wanting to spend a month living in Paris because of the strength of the book and the feelings of the people who went there. 

Unlike America there was a freedom that was not repressed by religion and there was less racial bigotry and more openness.  The church was there in architecture and design more than in repression as it is found in so many places in the world.  Of course this openness was somewhat inconsistent as are all cultures.

The figure to the right was a portrait of one of societies belles and is considered one of the great portrait paintings of all time for many reasons I cannot elucidate, but the controversy is something I do appreciate.

In Paris, unlike the US, nudity was acceptable and caused no bans and outcries by the righteous, but for some reason this painted created an emotional stir by the French who found the low neckline and the posture to be too suggestive and the painting initially got terrible responses for its low moral standard!

Oliver Wendell Holmes upon his return to Paris “found himself to tired to go to the theater or the Opera.

               “But there was joy still in seeing the beautiful bridges on the Seine.  ‘Nothing looked more nearly the same as of old than the bridges.’ he wrote.  The Pont Neuf looked not the least different to him and evoked all the good feelings of old.

               “Stopping at the Café Procope, once his favorite for breakfast, he thought it much improved in appearance.  He sat contentedly over a cup of coffee, daydreaming of Voltaire and the other luminaries of the far past who had gathered there.

               “’But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my early friends and companions that came before me in all the freshness of their young manhood?’ He need never chase off to Florida in search of Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth, Holmes decided.  It was here.  In Paris.”

Saint-Gaudens found that he was incurably sick with cancer and was sentenced to eventual death by the disease.  This bothered him immensely and he thought he should choose his own end.  To that cause he decided to jump off a bridge into the Seine (suicide), however, the following is from the notes of one of is sculpture assistants who wrote down what Gus said when he reached the studio.

“I ran – I was in so much of a hurry!  I reached the river and went up on the bridge and as I looked over the water, I saw the Louvre in the bright sunlight and suddenly everything was beautiful to me, the Louvre was wonderful-more remarkable than I had ever seen before.

               “Whether the running and the hurrying had changed my mental attitude, I can’t say – possibly it might have been the beauty of the Louvre’s architecture or the sparkling water of the Seine – whatever it was, suddenlyh the weight and blackness lifted from my mind and I was happy and found myself whistling.”

Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site Discover the beautiful home, studios and gardens of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of America’s greatest sculptors. Over 100 of his artworks can be seen in the galleries, from heroic public monuments to expressive portrait reliefs, and the gold coins which changed the look of American coinage. Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), created over 150 works of art, from exquisitely carved cameos to heroic-size public monuments. Works such as the "Standing Lincoln" monument and the Shaw Memorial, continue to inspire people today and his design for the 1907 Twenty Dollar Gold Piece, is considered America's most beautiful coin.

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American parents.

Sargent studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.

Sargent studied with Carolus-Duran, whose influence would be pivotal, from 1874-1878. Carolus-Duran's atelier was progressive, dispensing with the traditional academic approach which required careful drawing and underpainting, in favor of the alla prima method of working directly on the canvas with a loaded brush, derived from Diego Velázquez. It was an approach which relied on the proper placement of tones of paint.           http://www.johnsingersargent.org/

Mighty Mississippi, Marquis Childs

Published in 1982, this book was begun in 1932, and you can feel the shift in the authors time as well as the timeline of the Mississippi.  It is an insightful book with lots of pithy little descriptions that jump off the page as you wade through the deep and varied history of this magnificent and abused river.  Childs grew up near the river in Clinton, Iowa and then began a career on the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

His story is historical, but his insight is personal.  I was pleasantly surprised by this little volume that is probably only available in used bookstores.  If you find it, buy it, but in the meantime, here are some fun quotes to savor the flavor of the book and the river.

“Ascending rapids was most trying of all.  The entire crew was put to it to hold the boat in place while one at a time each man shifted his pole to place of better advantage.  The slightest error in pushing or steering the boat exposed her to be thrown across the current, and to be brought sideways in contact with rocks would mean her destruction.  Or, if she escaped injury, a crew who had let their boat swing in the rapids would have lost caste.  A boatman who could not boast that he had never swung or backed in a chute was regarded with contempt, and never trusted  with the head pole, the place of honor above keelboatmen.”

“After 1763, when France lost the war with the British in America, many of the French moved to the west side of the Mississippi to escape English rule, and so Saint Louis was founded.  Fort Chartres was abandoned.  Kaskaskia dwindled.”

“The French on the Mississippi were not conquerors.  They were petite bourgeoisie and peasant farmers who placated the Indians, mixed with them, and married them.”

“It was Father Allouez, founder of the mission of Pointe du Saint Esprit in 1665, who first sent out the name – Missipi.”

“New Orleans was the crowning experiences for these rustics from the back country.  If Saint Louis was still a raw, beginning town, New Orleans in 1825 was a city of compact elegance.” 

“With the development of the steamboat, New Orleans advanced from year to year , almost month to month, at a rate extraordinary even for America.”

“As early as the five-year period from 1822-1827\ the property loss was $1,362,500.  In 1841 there were forty nine boats lost on the Mississippi and its tributaries; in 1842, sixty eight; in 1846, thirty six.”

“In 1839 the number of steamboat arrivals at Saint Louis was 1476 representing a total of 213193 tons.  Seven years later this had increased to 2412 boats representing 467824 tons.”

”The Clemens had not been long in Florida [MO] when, on November 30, a fifth child, a son they named Samuel was born.”

“Appealing very deeply to something that is, or was, at the root of many Americans, and rare in our literature, there is, in particular in Huckleberry Finn an appreciation of the solitude of the river.”

Ultimately the battle that emerged was about commerce and transportation and not the river itself.  It was a battle waged by the Railroads before the civil war and then in full attack after when the financiers of the war used their acquired powers since they were also the financiers of the RRs.

“Railroad rate structures were ingeniously designed with the sole purpose of taking trade from the packets.  Special low rates often below the cost of the haul, were offered to lure freight from the Mississippi.  Inland towns, where the railroads had an unquestioned monopoly, paid through the nose to make up for these proffers of bait that were constantly held out, but this was not too obvious.”

The response was the loss of riverboats, but the advancement of barges.  This did not overcome the natural forces of the river.  “In December of 1867 there were twenty boats aground in one  short stretch of the river below Cape Girardeau, most of them towboats.  Barges, many of them cut adrift, were hard aground too.”

“Congress in 1875 accepted Captain Ead’s plan to open the mouth of the Mississippi with a twenty-eight foot channel that could be so maintained that large oceangoing boats might dock at the port of New Orleans.”

“Hardly had the comet faded out, the strange twilight it had created over the forest dimming from night to night, when there occurred the first of the New Madrid earthquakes,  A pall darkened the air, the smell of sulphur was strong, geysers of steam and hot water shot up thirty feet high, hell’s mouth gaped. 

“From the perspective of the present, the naval engagements on the Mississippi have a curious, half-mad, half-pathetic quality – brother fighting brother in bubs armored with tin, pilothouses that were called slaughter pens because there was no escape from death, great engagements in swampy bayous and narrow reaches where men fought win the sound of each other’s’ voices, cracker-box flotillas that burned like rushlights, sealing the crew and officers within small floating hells.”

“White Pine that today would go into the finish of a fine interior was put into hog pens and cow barns.  While the shrewder ones may have foreseen the end, the illusion of the inexhaustible pineries persisted.”

“Iowa was dry in earnest, but Fairview, across the Mississippi in Illinois, was dripping wet, and a stream of thirsty Iowans poured through Winslow and over the high bridge.  Returning very drunk, they gave to Main Street a faint semblance of the wild and bloody past.  …liquor was smuggled across in wheelbarrows, baby buggies, pushcarts , anything on wheels.”

A Coleridge poem for the Season

Check out the website for more about Coleridge.

Work Without Hope
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

Save our libraries

Book-Loving City Forgoes Free Ones for a Week

www.nytimes.com

The closure of the Seattle Public Library due to cuts has become something of a late-summer tradition in recent years.

The Mechanical Muse

I do not want to discourage any form of reading, after all I am addicted to audible books, but this is a very good essay on the reading devices like Kindle and captures my current feelings. 

The texture of the book, the availability of all its pages and thoughts simultaneously is really important to me.  I feel like a luddite.