Tuesday, August 17, 2021

When will we ever learn …?

  A week or so ago I made fun of the coincidence that Welsh settlers had named a village they established in the Tennessee Valley with a word that hinted at the name “Dollywood.” That passage dated in the 1170s appeared in the book “Children of the First Man” By James Alexander Thom. Today as I’m reading toward the end of the book I came across this passage written about a Mandan tribe’s village on the Missouri River just south of the Yellowstone in 1837:

This is the frontispiece of the book. It is a drawing of Four Bears done in 1832 by George Catlin. Their relationship is described in the book. (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

“(Four Bears) remembered that Red Hair (George Rogers Clark ) had tried to prevent this. (Most of the village dead or dying). He had encouraged the chiefs of all the Peoples along the Muddy River to have a scratch on their skin which would keep them from getting this disease (smallpox)! Yes, Red hair had tried that and sent soldier doctors everywhere to make the scratches. …
“But most of the chiefs had not trusted the soldier doctors. They had warned their Peoples that the doctors were probably bringing death in little bottles to kill Peoples and get them out of the way. The chiefs had all learned not to trust the white men or anything they said and did.
“Four Bears himself had forgotten his trust of Red Hair and had not let his People go and get the scratches. Now, he thought, we will all die ….”
— ”Children of the First Man” was published in 1994.
As they say what goes around …
Here is an account of that incident from the official page of the State of North Dakota, it includes a day by day account written by Francis A. Chardon. In 1837 he was superintendent at Fort Clark just across the Missouri from this village.

Here is the first post from facebook:
I am reading a book called The Children if the first Man by James Alexander Thom. If you are not familiar with him he writes massive tomes of historical fiction. In this one so far a group from Wales journeys across the Atlantic in the 1170s seeking to establish a colony on the east coast of North America which their leader had visited on a previous voyage. A hurricane blows them off course into the Gulf of Mexico. Mind you he does not use modern place names, rather a cumbersome collection of what he imagines are Welsh grunts and sighs and I had to figure out where they were from his descriptions. They spent a year stuck in the Mobile Bay swamps as best I could figure. Then they followed a great river north looking for suitable ground. They went north until they reached hilly country and solid ground. But still wanting that east coast place they eventually turned off the river and headed to the east across a low ridge of mountains. At the peak of the ridge they look out across a large valley with another river running through it and a bluish cloud lingering near the far edges of it. Now, as I figured the first river was the Tennessee. When they turned east I figured them somewhere along the now northern Louisiana border. I wasn’t sure but I had a suspicion. They built a castle and a village in that valley. In their best Welsh Thom had them name it Dolwyddelan. Then I knew where they were. I literally laughed out loud. Try to say that word out loud and see if you get it. If not, think of whom you might have heard of who came from the mountains of Tennessee.
It turns out this was just a coincidence that the names of the t3wo places sounded similar. It was the name of the original castle in Wales. Sorry Dolly!

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

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A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

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“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

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My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

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I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

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Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

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As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

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