Gathering the Bones, XXV: Iron, Butchery, And An Ecotone

 

Look what they found at Hattusa in 2015! It is unfortunately Galatian rather than Early Iron Age, but it's definitely a saw. I'll throw in a 17th C BC bronze saw below, but as an insight into my method, if the Blogspot automatic pagesetter leaves ugly spaces. I'm not fixing them!

I'm thinking about saws in connection with butchery rather than carpentry today, which means that I'm also thinking about pemmican, so I'm going to start by retelling the story of Fenimore Cooper's 1843 Wyandote: Or, the Hutt'd Knoll, which I may have talked about before here. (I'm holding it in my mind that I have, as an incentive to the brevity I find so impossible.)

Wyandote is a frontier novel, and a Western, "Indian" novel, as they said at the time. It is also a difficult one for American readers. Cooper was an Indian lover who supported Removal, and a champion of the uniqueness, originality, and value of American culture at a time when Americans of culture were hopeless in thrall to European norms, but at the same time a man of strictly hierarchical values who often suggested in his fiction that he would be much more strongly opposed to the Revolutionary settlement if he thought he could get away with it. The villains in Wyandote are the frontier farmers who live as tenants on the land ("patent") of a retired British army officer. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, they ally with some Indians and stage an "Indian" attack on their landlord in an attempt to convert their tenancy into freehold at the expense of massacring the officer, his wife, daughter, Maude, adopted daughter, and loyal retainers, because eggs, omelets. The "Wyandote" of the title, is introduced to us as the shiftless, drunken Indian, Saucy Nick, who in spite of his overt status on the page, flirts with  protagonist status, being omnicompetent off page, carrying off various adventures, and then, in what would be the climax of the fight, single-handedly defeating the enemy in desperate battle in the dark. Yet he also murders the British officer, to all appearances his friend, in cold blood shortly after declaring himself "Wyandote," and no longer "Saucy Nick." At first glance it is an almost perverse plot development, not that we'd expect any less of Cooper, who, after writing a romance explicitly pairing cousins, brings a brother and adoptive sister together.

And the perversity doesn't end there, as often in Cooper romances, the plot makes much more sense with a bit of added history and some race mixing. substitute Joseph Brant for Saucy Nick and one of Sir William Johnson's daughters for Maude, and it all makes sense, even the romance. Maude, is, under Indian law, the officer's daughter right up to the moment when she repudiates that status in order to pursue her relationship with his son. This instantly restores her uncle, Nick/Wyandote's, status as a Tuscarora sachem and her guardian, and her ownership of the patent. The contradictions between Indian and English inheritance are, as always, reconciled by marrying the Indian heiress to the English,and the murder becomes instantly understandable in a class and status-conscious society as a tragic clash of cultures. (And also because the officer had idiotically inserted himself into a rescue mission even though he is too old for the work.)

As an interpretation of the plot, I am hanging a great deal here on the patent itself, "the hutt'd knoll." Or, rather, on Nick/Wyandote's references to it in terms of its ability to sustain beaver. It is a natural hillock showing above a hundred-acre beaver pond, itself the centre of a disc of good land about the size of the officer's thousand acre patent, in the wilderness of the upper Susquehanna not far from Binghamton. It used to yield (maintain?) four beaver a year, but no longer does, and the local Indians are willing to sell, Nick tells the officer, "clearing" the patent of Indian claims, as required by New York law. The quality of the drained land under the pond is praised immoderately in the text. The soil is, of course rich, but years of decay under the pond have freed it of the stumps and roots that troubled frontier farmers. The hillock, a natural rocky eminence in the middle of the former pond, recalls a beaver lodge and is the natural place for a fortified manor, the "hut" of the title. This is why the tenants covet it, and why Nick darkly warns that it held beaver in the past, and might again. Of course, if Nick is using "beaver" in the  vulgar way that you might expect of Shakespeare, but not a Regency writer, that's exactly what happens. It used to maintain Maude's mother, and when Maude, a mature woman and mother, returns to New York as the wife of a major-general, and finds Nick (his crime never to be known by anyone but the reader) and the other retainers living in retirement at the knoll, it is still "maintaining" her, only with rents instead of pelts. 

Okay, yes, blah blah blah, Cooper the secret key to early American history, get over it, can't you, Lund? The dynamics of the fur trade are very simple. People go out to do very hard work on the trail and trapline. They have to be fed with a portable and durable food. That's your pemmican, and parched corn. Their work is thus based on the land, and we can ask ourselves how many acres and farmers are needed for each coureur de bois. The answer is "not a lot of land" for the corn, and "Hunh?" for the pemmican, because buffalo are just there. This here article I found with Google says that a 90lb bag of pemmican was the standard unit, and accounted for two buffalo. Which brings me to Robert Morrissey's People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America, which is a book in the UW Press's Weyerhauser Environmental Books Series, because this is 2026. Blogspot spellcheck doesn't recognise "Weyerhauser," by the way. Forgetting is the best greenwashing! Also, if you go to the link, you will find that the fabled forest products company characterising its "work" as managing 40,000 square miles of "timberland" in Canada and the United States. It's a giant landlord! (The fine print notes subsidiaries that are still in "wood products.")

Postblogging Technology, March 1956, II: Delta Goes, Nixon Stays

It's too bad that there was no use or market for a high-speed delta wing fighter in the late Fifties and Sixties, and, if there was, Saunders-Roe was the ideal 
contractor to deliver it, since they were due for a win.  
By The Trempe See: http://www.1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Trempe/TrempeInfo.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1785669

R_.C_.,
The Lakehouse,
Nakusp, B.C.
Canada




Dear Father:

As March melts into April here in the Bay City, I am bound to work when we are not tittering over the disaster overtaking Richard Nixon, as who doesn't want the worst for jumped-up L.A. parvenues? Do not get me wrong; I am sure that he will be the Vice-Presidential nominee in 1956 and he will probably be the Presidential candidate in 1960, but when Ike --IKE!-- stabs you in the back, what is there even left to say?

Which is quite enough politics, and since I have exhausted myself on family matters under separate cover, I will simply sign myself 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: The Past Isn't Even Past

 

Something about how for every Southern boy, it's 3PM on 3 July 1863, and Pickett's Charge hasn't been launched yet and I'm not even going to continue with this line of thought about history not being past. The last week of June isn't a good time to be thinking about the Neo-Confederate capture of American government in the Anglosphere because 70 million of us are suffering through a historic heat wave, and a major British political party's solution to the problem is to let the oil and gas industry rip.  

It hasn't been terrible in British Columbia. My work week was disrupted by a heat wave, and everyone in Vancouver felt it, but it was, as these things go, a normal heat wave with cooling at night. We're seeing plenty of early signs of a food security crisis in the form of chronic and persistent shortages of seasonal crops like watermelon, asparagus, strawberries, and sweet corn, and part of that is down to weather; but it is also in large measure politics, and I guess we're back to the first paragraph. 

I was away visiting last week, but I was rewarded for my time off with a five day work week followed by a single day off (yesterday). I didn't feel like high effort blogging yesterday, and there's some business to catch up, specifically Eric Cline's book about the "collapse and survival of civilisation" after the "collapse" of 1177, which struck me as fairly low effort for most of its run, until the final chapter, which was on about the IPCC's take on Climate Change and Cilizational Collapse, as the bloody Wikipedia article is titled.

(The short week is why Postblogging March 1956, II, isn't up yet. There may then be delays in July over library issues, and I still won't have an aviation magazine next week, as Aviation Week managed to fill up a whole volume with the January-February issues, and I have no idea what was going on with Flight in the spring of 1956, what with the labour trouble in the British printing industry.) 

Postblogging Technology, March 1956, I: Italy Didn't Have Income Tax Until 1973? Seriously?

R_.C_.,

Nakusp,
British Columbia,
Canada

Dear Father:

I hope that this letter finds you well and in full recovery. Do not worry about me just because Aviation Week (and Flight) are lacking this week. I won't regale you with the sordid details of the logistical issues that got in the way, but I will say that when it comes time to bind the current numbers of Aviation Week, they'd better have a January/February volume, or the librarians won't be able to lift it! 

At the very least, focusing on Fortune and The Economist instead of the trade press lets us hear the voices (on the right) calling for cuts in defence expenditure. Yes, I know that I am sounding shrill and partisan and womanly this week, but I hear far too much from James' friends about "pacifists and socialists" when these discussions come up! (Remember when Bevan was drummed out of the cabinet for saying that the emergency defence budget called for more spending than British output could support, and how Winston Churchill was allowed to announce spending cuts on the same argument just a few months later?) I am just glad to see Ike and Eden (or Rab, really) owning the cuts this time.

Oops. Sorry, politics! To compensate you, charming pictures of grandchildren under separate cover.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Gathering the Bones XXIV: Ohio or Bust!

 

California, Pennsylvania, is in the heart of Pennsyltucky, with all that goes with it, mainly closed coal mines. (Wikipedia reports that the local Vigilant Mine once produced the largest lump of coal in the world.) It is, however, the home of Pennsylvania Western University, which is, I am devastated to report, the new name since 2022 of the California University of Pennsylvania. First they renamed the Rough Riders, and now this! At least we still have the Miami University of Ohio, right? (Right.) The United States is just so darned big that these obscure schools can be real things, although clicking through to the Wiki suggests that  PennWest is on the bubble these days. Can't imagine why people in Pennsyltucky might be disgruntled about stuff. 

Anyway, it's probably called "California" on the basis of a joke about how once you've made the climb out of Brownsville you're practically in California. I don't know that. I made it up, in fact. But now it's a joke on a Blogger page, so real enough for me! Actually it isn't even halfway to Wheeling, West Virginia, where the National Road reaches the Ohio. 

You had to figure that a group of winsome lasses would do a version of Clementine as a slice of Americana. It's regrettably not Lana Del Ray, but check out the costuming!

Missile Gap? A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1956

 

Long time readers will be tired of me bleating about how I was sold a bill of goods in high school about how "we," meaning of course the United States --and, by the way, those Latin American whiners complaining about how "America" has been recently appropriated to mean just the U.S. are 100% correct, to my surprise, but it was the British press that led the pack-- were surprised by the unexpected space technology gap signaled by the shocking surprise of Sputnik. (That was as shocking surprise.) For me, the takeaway point, twenty-four years later, was that it was still necessary for every bright child in a provincial high school to major in the physical sciences if "we" were to have any chance to catch up. 

And you will of course heard from me that this is not true, that the satellite launches undertaken for the International Geophysical Year were scheduled years in advance. Sputnik was no more of a surprise than the T-34's appearance on the battlefield, the first Soviet atomic test in 1949, or the defection of Kim Philby, to name three. It turns out that our received history of the Fifties has been sucked of nuance and detail for any number of reasons. In the case of Sputnik, and the missile gap in general, we can even see the explanation. The Eisenhower Administration's attempt to rein in military spending in the 1956-57 fiscal year led to an industry response that was coordinated with congressional Democratic majorities to produce an  airpower-centred arms race. (Much to the disappointment of those wanting an infantry-centred arms race.) 

But that isn't the limit of my disillusionment. Missile programs might be a silly starting point, but I am, er, beginning to doubt the value of the American experiment.

 

Postblogging Technology, February 1956, II: Working Class Atoms

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

A typically foggy winter here in San Francisco sees me with my magazines almost all sorted out just in time to celebrate the atomic age, held back in Britain by its obsolete industry and the stifling weight of atomic tradition. That's not how our distant forefathers gathered plutonium! Seriously, it's what the Americans are saying now that it is clear that Calder Hall will beat American commercial atomic power generation into service by a year or several. Unfortunately, the printer's dispute has kept The Engineer from going on and on about it, as it would surely love to do. I, on the other hand, will not go on and on, as I have documents to review. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie