30 November 2017
Tequila
Rico says, yet again, that no man should drink anything that requires a condom (and, yes, tequila, I'm talking about you, not about penises).
Ponzi, still getting the blame
Poor Carlo Ponzi:
Carlo Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who bilked millions of dollars out of thousands of hopeful investors in the 1920s, in what has since become known as a Ponzi Scheme. Ponzi arrived in the US in 1903, then made his way to Canada by 1908. After a jail term for forgery, Ponzi was arrested for smuggling aliens into the US and ended up in a Federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts and worked as a dishwasher for years before coming up with a plan to get rich. In 1919 he formed the Securities Exchange Company (SEC), promising financial success by converting foreign postage coupons into US currency. Ponzi promised returns too good to be true. And they were: early investors were paid off with money from new investors; there was no real investment going on, just cash distribution. (The approach is also known as a “pyramid scheme”.) Beginning in late 1919 and early 1920, Ponzi moved as much as fifteen million dollars from thousands of investors, eventually using thirty-five branch offices. The scheme fell apart eight months later and Ponzi was convicted of embezzlement. His legal troubles dragged on for more than a decade and he was in and out of jail in the US until 1934, when he was deported to Italy. He worked briefly for Benito Mussolini and then landed a job running an airline in Brazil, where he died destitute in 1949.All these years after his death, he's still getting the blame for everyone's wrongdoing, from Nixon to Harvey Weinstein...
More Moore for the day
Esquire has an article by Charles P. Pierce about Mr. Moore (photo, below):
I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and a modern representative, in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen, and bullies.”Rico says the entire fucking country is looking more Yahoo-like than ever... (And Moore is lucky that Judge Roy Bean isn't around...)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
November 30 happens to be the birthday shared, 150-odd years apart, by Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. If some wealthy and interested soul wants to start a campaign to have 30 November declared an International Day of Righteous Scorn in their honor, I’m willing to chip in a pittance.
(I feel obligated to note that it is also the birthday of Winston Churchill, a prominent politician of the nation most recently pissed off by our president, who’s suddenly got people wondering if he doesn’t more closely resemble Winston’s father, Randolph, particularly in the latter stages of that worthy’s life. But anyway.)
To celebrate the two masters, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the news on the birthday they share. Oh, look, there’s Marco Rubio. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to uncrate the famous animated recreation of Rubio’s entire public career but, boy howdy, was he not supposed to say this out loud. From Financial Advisor Magazine:“I analyze this very differently than most,” Rubio told the crowd. “Many argue that you can’t cut taxes because it will drive up the deficit. But we have to do two things. We have to generate economic growth which generates revenue, while reducing spending. That will mean instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future,” the senator said.Jesus, Marco, get with the program. You’re supposed to sell this Abomination of Desolation as a boon to “the middle class”. Then, when it blows up the deficit, you’re supposed to come sadly before the nation, blame the Democrats for not “compromising,” and mournfully tell millions of the elderly and disabled that it’s time for those lazy moochers to kick in. But Rubio wasn’t finished giving away games.
Somebody asked him about what might happen if, as appears probable, ol’ Judge Roy Moore gets his’sef elected down in Alabam’. He served up some very tasty waffles in reply, as The Washington Examiner reports:“This information is before the voters of Alabama," Rubio told Fox News' Laura Ingraham. "And if they elect him and then you as a Senate have ethics hearings to remove him from office or something like that, that gets more complicated. That's a little bit more difficult, because voters will have this information before them when they vote for him if, in fact, he is elected."No, no, no. You wait until he’s seated before you explain to the nation how you can’t disrespect the votes of the goobers who sent an alleged pedophile to the Senate. You’re not supposed to be this direct in informing the nation that the Republican majority would seat Vlad The Impaler if he were good on tax cuts and shredding the social safety net. Yeah, it’s time to sum up Marco Rubio’s career again in that old, familiar way.
Which reminds me, ol’ Judge Roy seems to be having a high old time. His goons are slugging cameramen, from Fox, no less, and he’s got the rubes higher than kites on that old-time culture war religion. From The Hill:"When I say they, who are 'they?'" he asked. "They’re liberals. They don’t hold conservative values. They are the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender who want to change our culture. They are socialists who want to change our way of life and put Man above God and the government is our God. They're the Washington establishment, who don't want to lose their power."Yeee-fucking-haw! That’s the real stuff right there. And it’s not like ol’ Judge Roy hasn’t been dealing it out for years. As ThinkProgress reports, via the invaluable AL.com, ol’ Judge Roy once taught a course about how important it is to keep the wimmenfolk out of politics.
The study includes a lecture from William O. Einwechter, a teacher elder at Immanuel Free Reformed Church. The lesson, titled What the Bible Says About Female Magistrates, contends the Bible forbids women from holding elected office. "She's not a warrior. She's not a judge. She's a woman. Created by God. Glorious in her place and in her conduct and in her role," Einwechter said. "Nothing is said in scripture that supports the notion that she is qualified or called to be a civil magistrate."
That’s going to come as something of a bummer to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, who is a wimmenfolk her own self.
(By the way, one of Ivey’s real triumphs in office was signing a bill restoring voting rights to prisoners who had served their time. Thousands of the people who have benefitted from this true reform have registered to vote in the senatorial election, largely through the efforts of people who have reached out to them. This, naturally, has set the cast of Three Dolts on a Divan into what my mother used to call “high-sterics.” This, of course, is because they are useless tools. Good on you, Kay Ivey.)
Fnally, getting back to Washington, there’s promising new Batman villain Steve Mnuchin, who has assured us that he has an analysis showing that the Abomination of Desolation will bring upon us a golden age of jobs. As The New York Times reports, however, there’s one problem with this analysis. It may not exist. Or, as the Times delicately puts it, the analysis “proves elusive.” As does Sasquatch.
Mnuchin has promised that Treasury will release its analysis in full. Yet, just one day before the full Senate prepares to vote on a sweeping tax rewrite, the administration has yet to produce the type of economic analysis that it is citing as a reason to pass the tax cut. Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth, because one did not exist.
Thus, then, do we celebrate the birthdays of the Dean and the Old Fella. May their spirits walk among us, and may they do so soon, because we’ve all climbed aboard Huck’s raft only to find ourselves beached in the land of the Yahoos.
Champ family history
The Fort Bliss Bugle has an article by David Poe, USAG Fort Bliss Public Affairs, about the military service of the father of Rico's friend Bill Champ:
On 22 November, Bill Champ and his sister, Bonnie Rodriguez, went on a search to find their dad. They weren’t looking for the retired Donsel Champ (photo, above), because they could find him in the hills of Ripley, West Virginia, where he happily resides. Instead, they returned to a unique memorial on West Fort Bliss to find Sergeant First Class Donsel Champ and they found him at the SAFEGUARD Central Training Facility display near the corner of Jeb Stuart and Taylor roads.Rico says his father got out of the Naval Academy in 1950 and never served...
Dedicated to the Cold War missile defense program and the school that stood because of it, the display tells the story of the missile corps presence at Fort Bliss in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the roles that instructors, students and staff played in a world where nuclear proliferation was a reality. Sergeant First Class Donsel Champ was a staff member at the SCTF.
“He was very serious about his work,” Bill remembered as he scanned the cement planes and placards around the site. “He was very quiet, so we didn’t hear a lot of stuff. Even today, if I ask him something about the Sprint missile, I’ll say, ‘Surely now you can tell me what the top speed of that missile was,’ but he’ll say, ‘No, it’s classified.’ He still won’t talk about it.”
American missile capabilities were especially sensitive during that time, so much so that the school created sound proofed, controlled classrooms. Many had no windows and special sound-proofing and security baffling were added to the air ducts and attics. Also, no outlets were installed back-to-back to prohibit the installation of listening devices. The SCTF included mock missile silos, multiple labs for hands-on training in electrical systems, power generation, mechanics, and radar electronics, among other areas.
“He is very proud of his career,” Bill said of his father, who retired to Chaparral, New Mxico, and stayed in the Borderland for many years before heading back to West Virginia, “even if he couldn’t talk about it to a lot of people because of the classified nature of it. If you met him in a cafe, he wouldn’t be the one buttonholing you about his military career.”
Although the SAFEGUARD school didn’t start until the 1970s, it wasn’t the first time Fort Bliss had been considered a missile hub. It became the home of the First Antiaircraft Artillery and Guided Missile Battalion and School in 1946. Under what was called Operation Paperclip, Fort Bliss became the center of research of the German V-2 rocket research led by German scientist Wernher Von Braun, as well as the development of the first guided interceptor missiles, or ABMs.
Although the SAFEGUARD program may be gone, the display stands as a reminder of the innovative Soldiers who brought it to life at a challenging time in our nation’s history., soldiers like Donsel Champ.
“The program selected you, so they looked over the men with the necessary training and looked for the best. I didn’t realize how he was at the top of his food chain,” Bill said of his father. “I’m glad there’s still a place here that serves as a remembrance of this program. It’s a dead program now, but it had some really interesting technologies, so I’m glad there’s a place where people can come.”
Bonnie Rodriguez added that the SCTF site is also part of her family’s history and said Fort Bliss has a lot of stories that parallel the stories of families.
“Not only is this military history, but family history,” she said. “It’s cool to bring your kids to these places and say, ‘This is what your father did. This is what your grandfather did.’ It’s something to pass down through the generations. This is who your grandfather was and this is what he did. It makes him come alive and helps you get to know him.
“This is my dad and this is what he did,” she said.
For more details on the short-lived SAFEGUARD program, the SCTF, and the role Team Bliss brought to missile defense during the program’s heyday, visit http://bit.ly/2AeZBTZ.
28 November 2017
Kit Carson
True West has an article by Paul Andrew Hutton about the famous Kit Carson:
A large rodent determined the destiny of Kit Carson, (image, above) the Mountain Men, and much of the American West. The North American beaver, the second-largest rodent in the world, along with its Eurasian cousin, was prized for its luxurious fur. Beaver pelts, useful in manufacturing malleable felts for hats, were prized throughout Europe, with the industry centralized in Russia from the fifteenth century onward.
The fine quality of beaver hats, and their expense, led to their identification with wealth. During the English Civil War, the broad-brimmed beaver hat became symbolic of the Royalist Cavalier faction while, in the Catholic Church, it became the headgear of Cardinals. By the late sixteenth century, however, European beavers had been trapped to near-extinction.
The colonization of the New World opened up a fresh and cheaper supply of beaver pelts. The French and the British fought a series of wars in order to monopolize this new fur trade market. The triumphant British attempted to keep their American colonies hemmed in to the east of the Appalachian Mountains to better control this valuable trade, which contributed to the outbreak of revolution in 1775.
A Presbyterian pastor, the Reverend Samuel Parker, was the first to introduce Kit Carson and his exploits in a book. Kit’s interest to readers would continue, even after his death on 23 May 1868, as demonstrated by works that included The Fighting Trapper, or, Kit Carson to the Rescue, a dime novel published in 1874:
With an increased supply of high-quality beaver pelts from America and the introduction of demi-castors (half-beaver pelts mixed with wool or hare), the price dropped and markets expanded throughout Europe and the colonies.
Now affordable to most consumers, hats were worn by everyone, in styles ranging from the top hat to clerical and military headgear that included the naval cocked hat, the tricorne, and the army shako. In this era of almost-constant warfare, the English dominated the military headgear trade after 1750; it was big business.
The new American government looked to the frontier fur trade as a critical source for economic growth. When Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark westward in 1803, the explorers were charged with ascertaining the potential of the fur trade beyond the Missouri River. John Colter, one of the members of that expedition, would soon become famous for his exploits as a new type of frontiersman, the Mountain Man.
Yet the most famous of all the Mountain Men would be born on Christmas Eve in 1809 in Madison County, Kentucky: Christopher “Kit” Carson. Does his celebrity status mean Kit also deserves to be recognized as one of the kings of the fur trade?
When Kit was two, his parents, Lindsey and Rebecca Carson, moved their family of eleven children westward in 1811, following Daniel Boone’s trail to Boon’s Lick in Howard County, Missouri. Lindsey was killed in an accident while clearing out trees in 1818. Three years later, after Rebecca remarried, she apprenticed twelve-year-old Kit to David Workman in nearby Old Franklin; the boy was to learn the saddler’s trade.
Workman was a kind master, but Kit was unhappy with the labor. He later stated that “being anxious to travel for the purpose of seeing different countries, I concluded to join the first party for the Rocky Mountains.”
Old Franklin was an outfitting center for wagon trains heading west over the Santa Fe Trail. In August 1826, Kit joined William Wolfskill and Andrew Broadus’ caravan bound for Santa Fe in present-day New Mexico. Workman placed a one-cent reward for the runaway in the 6 October 1826, Missouri Intelligencer: “Notice is hereby given to all persons, that Christopher Carson, a boy about sixteen years old, small of his age, but thick-set; light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin in Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler’s trade. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or assist said boy under penalty of the law.”
The teenager reached Santa Fe that November and immediately headed north to Taos, then the seat of the Southwestern fur trade. He wintered there with Matthew Kinkead, a trapper who was also from Boon’s Lick. In the spring, Kit joined on as a teamster for an El Paso, Texas-bound wagon train. Back in Taos, Kit met Ewing Young, famed for his daring trapping expeditions throughout the Southwest. Young employed Kit as a cook, but soon promoted him to trapper.
Fur trappers were more rustic in their hats, as seen in the 1890 Frederic Remington artwork (above), but the beaver pelts they sold were turned into fashionable hats fraught with peril. Mercury nitrate made producing demi-castors easier, by applying the chemical compound to hare felt that was being mixed in with the higher-quality beaver felt. That process, however, led to unfortunate health consequences for workers who made these hats; thus the phrase “mad as a hatter”.
From Young, Carson learned not only how to be a trapper, but also the cruel reality of life on the far-flung edges of the frontier. In the spring of 1829, he accompanied Young and forty other trappers on a dangerous journey to trap beaver along the headwaters of the Gila River. This was Apache country, and the trappers had to dodge Mexican Army patrols (as fur trapping by Americans was illegal), as well as Apache scouts.
American trappers were notorious for bribing Apaches with powder and guns for safe passage, yet Young declined to do so. Along the Salt River, Apaches attacked, but he and his trappers repulsed their foe. In this fight, nineteen-year-old Kit killed his first man. As was the trapper’s custom, Kit scalped the Apache.
As Young’s party pushed westward to trap along the Verde River, various American Indian bands continually harassed them. In frustration, Young sent a party of men to Taos with the beaver pelts secured thus far, while he headed to present-day California with Kit and sixteen others to seek safer trapping country.
A difficult journey followed in which their passage was blocked by the Grand Canyon. A band of Mojaves, who traded corn and beans with the trappers, guided them south to a crossing of the Colorado River, the same river crossing is where the Mojaves had slaughtered most of Jedediah Smith’s trappers two summers before.
Young’s party reached the San Gabriel Mission (near present-day Los Angeles) and turned north to trap the central valley of present-day California before returning to Taos in present-day New Mexico with two thousand pounds of beaver pelts in April of 1831. This was the first party of Americans to cross from the Rio Grande settlements to present-day California and back again. In this epic journey, Kit became a full-fledged member of that daring and eccentric breed that came to be called the Mountain Men.
In the autumn of 1831, Kit signed on with Thomas Fitzpatrick, one of the heads of the new Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Called Broken Hand by the Indians because of a gunshot wound to his left wrist, Fitzpatrick had immigrated to America from County Cavan in Ireland in 1816, at the age of seventeen. He traveled up the Missouri in 1823 with William Henry Ashley’s company, a band that included Jed Smith, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, William Sublette, and James Clyman. Some of these men were already on the Yellowstone with Ashley’s partner, Major Andrew Henry. Fitzpatrick took part in the great battle with the Arikara that June on the Missouri, in which a dozen trappers were killed and as many more wounded.
Many trappers pulled out of the trade after Ashley’s fight, but Fitzpatrick, along with Smith, Sublette, Clyman, Edward Rose, and six other bold adventurers, decided to bypass the river route and strike westward to find a pass across the mountains and open up a land route between St. Louis, Missouri, and the rich beaver country on the far side of the Continental Divide.
The party crossed the Black Hills and made for Absaraka, (which gave its name to Absaroka, the fictional county in Longmire) the land of the Crows. Rose, who was intimate with the Crows, went ahead to meet with his friends. While he was gone, Smith was horribly mauled by a grizzly bear along the Cheyenne River. His detached scalp and dangling right ear were stitched back on by Clyman.
Carson’s near-deadly encounter with grizzly bears may have left him desirous of a grizzly bear chair, like the one presented to President Andrew Johnson, crafted by fiddler Seth Kinman, who sits in the chair in the photo below:
Based at Fort Humboldt in California, Kinman reportedly shot eight hundred grizzly bears in his lifetime.
Fitzpatrick went ahead with most of the men to trap along the branches of the Powder River, while two stayed behind to nurse Smith. The party, eventually rejoined by Smith, then wintered with the Crows just north of present-day Wyoming’s Wind River Valley.
The Crows told their guests that the beaver were so plentiful in the Green River to the south that they would not need traps, but could club them. The trappers headed south in February to find this beaver Eden and, after an arduous journey, rediscovered South Pass. Others had been there before, most notably the eastbound Astorians led by Robert Stuart in 1812, but the Smith-Fitzpatrick party put South Pass on the map. In time, South Pass became the key point on the great road of Western empire.
The party trapped with great success. Smith and some of the men remained in the mountains, while Fitzpatrick carried their beaver pelts to Fort Atkinson, along the Missouri in present-day Nebraska, and reported the discovery of South Pass to Ashley.
When Fitzpatrick led Ashley and a party of trappers back into the mountains, Ashley divided the trappers into smaller parties and marked a spot along the present-day Utah-Wyoming border (at the mouth of Henry’s Fork of the Green) where they would all meet at the end of their hunts. The result was the first great Mountain Man rendezvous, held on the Green River in July of 1825. (Rico says he would send you to the website of American Rendezvous magazine, formerly published by his friend Bob Leone, but both he and the magazine are, unfortunately, dead.) More than a hundred men attended this first of sixteen such mountain fairs. Most were Ashley-Henry trappers who included Fitzpatrick, Clyman, and Smith, but twenty Hudson Bay Company deserters joined in, as did a band of trappers up from Taos under Étienne Provost. At that first rendezvous, Ashley hauled in nine thousand pounds of beaver pelts, worth fifty thousand dollars in St. Louis, Missouri ($1.25 million today). Beaver skins traded for around $5 each. In comparison, coffee or sugar traded for $2 a pint, gunpowder $2 a pint, lead $1 a bar, tobacco $2 per pound, a good knife $2.50, while a blanket was $20. Whiskey was not plentiful at this first rendezvous, but that would change.
After the 1826 rendezvous, held in Cache Valley in present-day Utah, Ashley sold out to Smith, Sublette, and David Jackson. Smith then led expeditions southwest from present-day Utah into California, where he trapped north up the San Joaquin to the American River and then east across the Sierra Nevada to reach the 1827 rendezvous at Bear Lake in present-day Utah. His remarkable expeditions made the teetotaling, bible-reading Smith a legend in the mountains. In 1830, Smith sold out to Fitzpatrick, Bridger, and three others, who formed the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. This is the outfit that Kit signed on with in 1831.
After purchasing the fur company, Fitzpatrick traveled to Santa Fe, in present-day New Mexico, with Smith, Jackson, and Sublette. He needed to secure trade goods to take back to his men in the mountains. Smith, who had decided to quit the mountains after so many narrow escapes, was killed by Comanches along the Cimarron that May.
Late in July 1831, Fitzpatrick and some forty men, including Kit, headed north up the front range to the North Platte and then west toward the Green River Rendezvous. Fitzpatrick soon returned to St. Louis, Missouri, but Kit and the others trapped the Green and then wintered in Idaho Country near the headwaters of the Salmon River. With the thaw, Kit and a handful of companions moved east to trap the central Colorado streams, where they had several sharp engagements with natives, endured considerable privation and hardship, but still returned to Taos in New Mexico country in October of 1833, laden down with fur.
Trapping was, needless to say, hard and dangerous work. Kit’s friend Joe Meek left a clear account of the techniques employed by the trappers:
“The trapper has an ordinary steel trap weighing five pounds, attached to a chain five feet long, with a swivel and ring at the end, which plays round what is called the float, a dry stick of wood, about six feet long. The trapper wades out into the stream, which is shallow, and cuts with his knife a bed for the trap, five or six inches under water. He then takes the float out the whole length of the chain in the direction of the center of the stream, and drives it into the mud, so fast that the beaver cannot draw it out; at the same time tying the other end by a thong to the bank. A small stick or twig, dipped in musk or castor serves for bait, and is placed so as to hang directly above the trap, which is now set. The trapper then throws water plentifully over the adjacent bank to conceal any foot prints or scent by which the beaver would be alarmed, and going to some distance wades out of the stream.”The trappers skinned the beavers after removing them from the trap (if the trap worked properly, the beavers had drowned). They discarded the meat and harvested only the pelt and the castor glands for future bait. They kept the beaver tail too, considered a delicacy in the mountains.
The mountains were becoming crowded. Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company ruled the far Northwest. Their trappers pushed south into the central Rockies with the goal of trapping out the beaver and keeping Americans from coming north. Empire was at stake as well as money. The Americans had no such monopoly, for rival free trappers competed with the men of Fitzpatrick’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company and John Jacob Astor’s older American Fur Company for furs.
In this reckless enterprise, the beaver population was soon destroyed, as was the self-sufficiency of the natives. The diseases inadvertently introduced by the trappers also decimated the Indian population, especially among the river tribes. Astor, who operated several important fur trading posts in competition with the St. Louis trappers, came to dominate the trade. He made a fortune, but wisely left the business in 1834, just before its rapid decline.
Kit remembered his youthful years as a Mountain Man as the happiest days of his life. In March of 1834, he rejoined Fitzpatrick and Bridger in northwestern Colorado. Although he was a free trapper, he agreed to work with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
While out hunting alone late one afternoon, Kit shot an elk, but almost immediately was confronted by two grizzly bears, who seemed to desire a two-course dinner of both hunter and elk. With no time to reload, Kit ran for his life and climbed a tree. The bears could not climb the tree, but one remained a while to study Kit. “He finally concluded to leave,” Kit recalled, “of which I was heartily pleased, never having been so scared in my life.”
Bears might well have been Kit’s most terrifying foe that trapping season, but the Blackfeet also made life miserable for the trappers. In February of 1835, Kit was shot through the shoulder in a fight with the Blackfeet along present-day Idaho’s Snake River. He recovered well enough to join Bridger in a spring hunt before heading to the Green River Rendezvous. Although that spring hunt was successful, it damaged the future of the Mountain Men by killing beaver mothers before they could nurture their kits (baby beavers who remained in the lodge for the first month of life).
The August of 1835 Green River Rendezvous was to be one of the last of the great Mountain Men gatherings, and also its most notable. Lucien Fontenelle had departed from what would become Bellevue, Nebraska, in late June with six wagons, roughly fifty men and nearly two hundred horses, and, on 26 July, met up with Fitzpatrick at Fort William along the Laramie River (the future Fort Laramie). He had with him two Presbyterian missionaries: Dr. Marcus Whitman and the Reverend Samuel Parker, bound for Oregon Country. Under Fitzpatrick’s command, the party set out on 1 August and reached the Green River Rendezvous eleven days later.
Roughly two hundred Mountain Men came, along with bands of Arapahos, Shoshones, Nez Perces, Flatheads, and Utes. All attention was quickly riveted on Dr. Whitman, who demonstrated his great surgical skill by removing a three-inch iron arrow point from Bridger’s back. The Blackfoot barb had been lodged in Bridger for three years. Whitman, the hero of the hour, was now much sought after by many an ailing trapper in the camp.
Parker was delighted to find so many potential Indian converts at the Rendezvous, but he had no hope for the white heathens he found there: “They appear to have sought for a place where, as they would say, human nature is not oppressed by the tyranny of religion, and pleasure is not awed by the frown of virtue.”
Kit distracted the good reverend in a dramatic display of Mountain Men anger: “A hunter, who goes technically by the name of The Great Bully of the Mountains, mounted his horse with a loaded rifle, and challenged any Frenchman, American, Spaniard, or Dutchman, to fight him in single combat,” the Reverend wrote. “Kit Carson, an American, told him if he wished to die, he would accept the challenge. Chouinard defied him, mounted his horse, and, with a loaded pistol, rushed into close contact, and both almost at the same instant fired.”
Kit, who was slightly wounded above the ear, put a ball through his opponent Joseph Chouinard’s wrist that went up his arm before exiting. The wounded French trapper, who worked for Astor’s company, begged Kit for his life. Parker did not know that Kit and Chouinard had previously quarreled over the affections of an Arapaho girl, Waanibe or Singing Grass, and that she had inspired their duel. In good time, Kit would ask her father for the girl’s hand, pay a substantial bride price and take her away into the mountains.
With the Rendezvous winding down and most of the Indian bands departing, Fitzpatrick headed to Fort William with a hundred and twenty beaver packs and eighty bundles of buffalo robes. More than eighty trappers accompanied him, for the beaver were playing out and trappers were quitting the business. Fitzpatrick was also joined by Dr. Whitman, returning east to recruit more missionaries.
Bridger guided the Reverend Parker toward Oregon Country, until he and his men reached Jackson Hole in present-day Wyoming to trap; Flatheads and Nez Perces conducted the missionary westward.
Parker explored the Oregon country before he returned to the East coast by sailing ship via Hawai'i and Cape Horn. His memoir of his adventures, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains, published in New York City in 1838, contained his account of Kit’s duel with Chouinard. This marked Kit’s first appearance in a book, but hardly the last.
By mid-September of 1835, Kit was trapping with Bridger along the Yellowstone and Big Horn Rivers on the fall hunt. Kit even worked briefly for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The trappers found themselves constantly harassed by Blackfeet until the spring of 1837, when a smallpox epidemic reduced the once mighty tribe by two-thirds. The Mandans were almost completely wiped out. Astor’s men had inadvertently carried the pestilence up the Missouri River.
When Waanibe bore Kit a daughter, Adeline, they quit the Blackfeet country and went south to Fort Davy Crockett at Brown’s Hole in present-day northwestern Colorado. Many of the Mountain Man marriages with Indian women were unions of economic convenience, but Kit and Waanibe were a real love match. Kit attempted to explain their devotion to each other to Jessie Benton Frémont, in simple Mountain Man terms: “She was a good woman. I never came in from hunting but she had warm water for my feet.”
Waanibe bore Kit another child, in 1840, but became ill with fever and died from the complications of childbirth. A devastated Kit, with two small children to care for, decided to leave the mountains. “Beaver was getting scarce, and, finding it was necessary to try our hand at something else,” he later declared, some of us “concluded to start for Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas.”
Kit was warmly greeted at the trading post in 1841. Ceran St. Vrain and the Bent brothers offered him employment as a contract hunter, at a dollar a day. The buffalo hide trade was quickly supplanting the beaver trade as the money maker. In Europe, the silk hat had come into favor, while the beaver hat fell out of fashion. By 1840, the beaver had been all but wiped out by the trappers anyway.
“Come, we are done with this life in the mountains, done with wading in beaver-dams, and freezing or starving alternately, done with Indian trading and Indian fighting,” Robert Newell told Joe Meek. “The fur trade is dead in the Rocky Mountains, and it is no place for us now, if ever it was.”
One by one, the trappers quit the mountains. The great era of the Mountain Men had come to an end. Many of these men, including Kit and Fitzpatrick, found work as guides for Army explorers and as Indian agents. Kit guided the famed Pathfinder, John C. Frémont, and that soldier’s report of their exploits made Kit the most famous frontiersman in America.
Was Kit the king of the Mountain Men, as later writers heralded him? Not at all. While Kit certainly deserved his reputation as a scout, Indian agent, and soldier, he was never a leader of the Mountain Men. He came to the mountains late.
Young, Smith, Fitzpatrick, Sublette, and Bridger were among the true leaders of that rare breed. Backing them, of course, were the men with the money: Astor, Ashley, and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
All of them contributed to a bold enterprise that had blazed a trail across the wilderness that would soon give rise to a continental nation.
A distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico, Paul Andrew Hutton won the Western Writers of America Spur for his most recent book, The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History.Rico says he does love history, but he's sorry that American Rendezvous Magazine and it's publisher are no longer around...
Soft landing
Space.com has an article by Harrison Tasoff about a new form of parachute:
A new NASA nanosatellite is testing a cross-shaped parachute, called an Exo-Brake (photo, above), which could allow small satellites to return to Earth without the directional aid of rocket boosters.
NASA launched the TechEdSat-6 to the International Space Station on 12 November 2017. This nanosatellite is the sixth installment in NASA's Technology Educational Satellite series, a project that tests different tracking and communication technologies. TechEdSat-6 is the fourth satellite to test the Exo-Brake. The satellite was released into low-Earth orbit on 20 November 2017 to begin its experiments, deploying its Exo-Brake once it was safety away from the space station. The agency released an unbloggable video of the satellite's deployment.
The current version of the Exo-Brake uses struts and flexible cords to warp the parachute, "much like how the Wright brothers used warping to control the flight behavior of their first wing design," Marcus Murbach, the device's inventor, said in a previous NASA statement. Engineers will be able to use the device to steer nanosatellites to desired landing sites without using fuel, which adds significant weight to a space-bound payload, according to this NASA statement. Currently, small satellites would have to fire rocket boosters to control their direction as they de-orbit. Small satellites are relatively quick and inexpensive to develop, build, and deploy compared to conventional satellites. As a result, they've become increasingly important in space, military, and telecom research. The Exo-Brake would offer a low-priced way to return samples to Earth from the space station or other orbiting platforms, NASA. What's more, engineers are looking to use the device to de-orbit satellites once they have completed their missions, which would combat the growing threat of space-junk accumulation in orbit, according to TechEdSat-6's mission profile. NASA also hopes to build on the technology to develop systems that could land small satellites on other celestial bodies, like Mars, according to the statement that accompanied the video.
NASA launched the TechEdSat-6 to the International Space Station on 12 November 2017. This nanosatellite is the sixth installment in NASA's Technology Educational Satellite series, a project that tests different tracking and communication technologies. TechEdSat-6 is the fourth satellite to test the Exo-Brake. The satellite was released into low-Earth orbit on 20 November 2017 to begin its experiments, deploying its Exo-Brake once it was safety away from the space station. The agency released an unbloggable video of the satellite's deployment.
The current version of the Exo-Brake uses struts and flexible cords to warp the parachute, "much like how the Wright brothers used warping to control the flight behavior of their first wing design," Marcus Murbach, the device's inventor, said in a previous NASA statement. Engineers will be able to use the device to steer nanosatellites to desired landing sites without using fuel, which adds significant weight to a space-bound payload, according to this NASA statement. Currently, small satellites would have to fire rocket boosters to control their direction as they de-orbit. Small satellites are relatively quick and inexpensive to develop, build, and deploy compared to conventional satellites. As a result, they've become increasingly important in space, military, and telecom research. The Exo-Brake would offer a low-priced way to return samples to Earth from the space station or other orbiting platforms, NASA. What's more, engineers are looking to use the device to de-orbit satellites once they have completed their missions, which would combat the growing threat of space-junk accumulation in orbit, according to TechEdSat-6's mission profile. NASA also hopes to build on the technology to develop systems that could land small satellites on other celestial bodies, like Mars, according to the statement that accompanied the video.
Email Harrison Tasoff at htasoff@space.com or follow him @harrisontasoff. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook, and Google+. Original article on Space.com.Rico says it'll have to be bigger when they use it on Mars, with its less-dense atmosphere...
27 November 2017
23 November 2017
22 November 2017
History for the day: 1963: John F. Kennedy assassinated
History.com has an article about the assassination:
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible.
First lady Jacqueline Kennedy (photo, above) rarely accompanied her husband on political outings, but she was beside him, along with Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, for a ten-mile motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas on 22 November1963. Sitting in a Lincoln convertible, the Kennedys and Connallys waved at the large and enthusiastic crowds gathered along the parade route. As their vehicle passed the Texas School Book Depository at 12:30 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor, fatally wounding President Kennedy and seriously injuring Governor Connally. Kennedy was pronounced dead thirty minutes later at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital. He was 46.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was three cars behind President Kennedy in the motorcade, was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States at 1439. He took the presidential oath of office aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at Dallas' Love Field airport. The swearing in was witnessed by some thirty people, including Jacqueline Kennedy, who was still wearing clothes stained with her husband’s blood. Seven minutes later, the presidential jet took off for Washington.
The next day, November 23, President Johnson issued his first proclamation, declaring November 25 to be a day of national mourning for the slain president. On that Monday, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Washington to watch a horse-drawn caisson bear Kennedy’s body from the Capitol Rotunda to St. Matthew’s Catholic Cathedral for a requiem Mass. The solemn procession then continued on to Arlington National Cemetery, where leaders of nearly a hundred nations gathered for the state funeral. Kennedy was buried with full military honors on a slope below Arlington House, where an eternal flame was lit by his widow to forever mark the grave.
Lee Harvey Oswald, born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1939, joined the Marines in 1956. He was discharged in 1959 and nine days later left for the Soviet Union, where he tried unsuccessfully to become a citizen. He worked in Minsk and married a Soviet woman and, in 1962, was allowed to return to the United States with his wife and infant daughter. In early 1963, he bought a .38 revolver and rifle with a telescopic sight by mail order, and on 10 April 1963 in Dallas he allegedly shot at and missed former general Edwin Walker, a figure known for his extreme right-wing views. Later that month, Oswald went to New Orleans and founded a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization. In September of 1963, he went to Mexico City, where investigators allege that he attempted to secure a visa to travel to Cuba or return to the USSR. In October, he returned to Dallas and took a job at the Texas School Book Depository Building.
Less than an hour after Kennedy was shot, Oswald killed a policeman who questioned him on the street near his rooming house in Dallas. Thirty minutes later, Oswald was arrested in a movie theater by police responding to reports of a suspect. He was formally arraigned on 23 November for the murders of President Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit.
On 24 November, Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy’s murder was the motive for his action. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder.
Jack Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated strip joints and dance halls in Dallas, Texas and had minor connections to organized crime. He features prominently in Kennedy-assassination theories, and many believe he killed Oswald to keep him from revealing a larger conspiracy. In his trial, Ruby denied the allegation and pleaded innocent on the grounds that his great grief over Kennedy’s murder had caused him to suffer “psychomotor epilepsy” and shot Oswald unconsciously. The jury found Ruby guilty of “murder with malice” and sentenced him to die.
In October 1966, the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the decision on the grounds of improper admission of testimony and the fact that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the time. In January of 1967, while awaiting a new trial, to be held in Wichita Falls, Ruby died of lung cancer in a Dallas hospital.
The official Warren Commission report of 1964 concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby were part of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or international, to assassinate President Kennedy. Despite its seemingly firm conclusions, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event, and in 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in a preliminary report that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” that may have involved multiple shooters and organized crime. The committee’s findings, as with those of the Warren Commission, continue to be widely disputed.
Rico says he remembers it like it was yesterday...
Al Franken
Esquire.com has an article by Ana Marie Cox about Al Franken:
I am a constituent of Senator Al Franken. I voted for him. I gave a copy of his latest book to my dad. I've met him a handful of times. I think he's done good, if not great, work in office representing my interests.
In light of the allegations against him, I think he can do even more good by stepping down.
It rankles Franken supporters to have his relatively petty indiscretions lumped in with the criminal accusations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, as well as the serial assaults that a dozen women have claimed to have suffered at the hands of President Trump. What's more, in obvious contrast to Moore and Trump, Franken has been contrite and apologetic about his behavior. So, people have some questions: doesn't he deserve credit for apologizing? Doesn’t he deserve credit for being an ally to women in every other way? Shouldn't it matter that female staffers and former Saturday Night Live employees have come forward to testify to his character?
To my mind, these would be helpful arguments if Franken's fate was in the hands of a judge or jury. These outside forces can't know the truth of Franken's beliefs or motivations; they can't know if he's "really" a sexual predator, or a sexist, or both. But if Franken were to resign, he could acknowledge that question isn’t one of who he “really” is, but simply: is he prepared to be held accountable for his actions?
To be very clear: I do not think Franken should lose his job as punishment. I think Franken should voluntarily relinquish a privilege in recognition that women’s voices and experiences are more important than his short-term political career.Rico says it's tough to be funny and a Senator, but this bad behavior has gotta stop...
Many years ago, after a late night out with colleagues, I asked a man I didn't know well, but who had lots of influence and important friends, to walk me to my car. Ironically, I was concerned about my safety. I was turning to thank him when he shoved me up against the driver's side door, grabbed my breasts and, as he ground his hips into mine, said, "How about a ride home?"
It was corny and unexpected, nothing in his arch attitude all evening remotely suggested he was interested in me, and certainly I was not interested in him, so I guffawed in his face. He stepped back, apparently confused that his gambit had failed. I think I got out a breathless "Really?" before he scurried away. His wilted departure was the only thing that made me think his lame pun and gross advance were supposed to lead to anything besides laughter. For years, I told that anecdote with a laugh, too. I didn't consider it assault, just a weird story about a creepy guy.
It took Trump's election for me to stop laughing about it, for me to realize that I was the butt of the joke in that story. After all, I was the person from whom something had been taken. The man who touched me? He lost nothing. He may have even gained. He got to continue his career, and his behavior, while I got a sort-of funny bar story. Each year he accumulated successes, I got another brick in the heavy load of self-doubt that every victim of unwanted advances carries: maybe it really was me.
As long as men who commit acts of sexual predation or violence suffer no consequences, women will carry that weight. Trump's presence in the White House only increases the gravitational pull. As of this writing, there are only two women who have come forward to accuse Franken of inappropriate sexualized touching. Perhaps that's all that there will ever be. The thing I keep coming back to, the thing that drives my belief that something more than an apology is in order, is that photo.
I realize that, of the things Franken has been accused of doing, the picture of him pretending to grope Leeann Tweeden while she's asleep is the least serious. He doesn't even appear to be touching her. Were we to know nothing else about that trip, if that photo simply remained on the camera roll, if she had never seen it, one could argue that it was almost entirely harmless, a childish prank, an artifact of the bad blood that sometimes curdles when people travel in close quarters under less than ideal conditions.
Franken has said the photo was “intended to be funny", but I see a deliberate insult by a man supremely confident in his authority. I see a woman prepared to survive a firefight, but, in the moment, powerless to prevent the most intimate kind of violation. I see a thinly-veiled threat: look at what I did to you. Look at what I did to you without the fear of getting caught. Look at what I did to you and know that I could do it again.
Embedded in that photo is the same message that the election of Donald Trump sent millions of women: when you're a star, they let you do it.
20 November 2017
The song in Rico's head: California Dreamin'
Rico says he still thinks about it, particularly as Winter (bleagh) approaches...
Rico says the problem with getting a classic stuck in your head is getting it out...
History for the day: 1945: Nuremberg trials begin
History.com has an article about the Nuremberg trials:
Twenty-four high-ranking Nazis went on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, for atrocities committed during World War Two.
The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace, to crimes of war, to crimes against humanity. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, the British member, presided over the proceedings, which lasted ten months and consisted of over two hundred court sessions.
On 1 October 1946, twelve architects of Nazi policy were sentenced to death. Seven others were sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten years to life, and three were acquitted. Of the original 24 defendants, one, Robert Ley, committed suicide while in prison, and another, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, was deemed mentally and physically incompetent to stand trial. Among those condemned to death by hanging were Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; Hermann Goering (photo), leader of the Gestapo and the Luftwaffe; Alfred Jodl, head of the German armed forces staff; and Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior.
On 16 October 16, ten of the architects of Nazi policy were hanged. Goering, who at sentencing was called the “leading war aggressor and creator of the oppressive program against the Jews,” committed suicide by poison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann was condemned to death in absentia (but now believed to have died in May of 1945). Trials of lesser German and Axis war criminals continued in Germany into the 1950s and resulted in the conviction of 5,025 other defendants and the execution of 806.
Rico says torture, unfortunately, wasn't involved, but mere execution...
Charles Manson, cult leader and serial killer who terrified nation, dead at 83
Rico says we should've had him whacked in prison a long time ago...
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Subject: Most Read from The Washington Post: Charles Manson, cult leader and serial killer who terrified nation, dies at 83
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