April 12, 2007, 09:19 PM | #201 | |
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From the historical novel, "Corporal Si Klegg and his 'Pard.'"
"Corporal Si Klegg and his 'Pard'" is a novelised account of the average Civil War soldier. It was written by 65th Ohio Infantry Lt. Col. Wilbur F. Hinman in 1887 and from what I know of the Civil War soldier, is pretty accurate. On page 254 is a note by the author in which he describes a future president of the United States of America.
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May 1, 2007, 09:27 PM | #202 | ||
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Sea Grammar
Sometimes its good that some traditions die. Here's some salty talk from the Seventeenth Century.
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May 21, 2007, 10:19 PM | #203 | |
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Be nice to your men
Here's a story of an overbearing officer and the men he chastised:
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May 27, 2007, 08:59 AM | #204 | |
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Civil War Vernacular
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May 27, 2007, 11:11 AM | #205 |
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Well I remember My Grandfather saying he was going to "Hoof it to town" on "Shanks Mare". "Ain't got the sand" is still used some places.
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May 27, 2007, 11:49 AM | #206 |
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Interesting turns of phrase, Gary.
". . . the staff of army life was called "hartack." Clearly, this is a minor corruption of “hard tack,” the VERY hard and frequently weevily ration biscuit – really, more like a thick, unsalted cracker. It was standard fare aboard Royal Navy vessels in the early 1800s, as referenced in the writings of C. S. Forester (the Horatio Hornblower series.)
“Grab a root” is likely a shortening of the phrase, “Grab a root and growl.” I often heard in my mother's family, which came to East Texas from the Carolinas both before and after the War of Northern Aggression. It apparently originally referred to field bowel evacuation, with no privy handy. It came to mean that one should “buckle down” and complete an unpleasant but necessary task. I never even thought of “Hunt your holes” as a particularly quaint turn of phrase. It is simply a heads up, warning that “We're about come under fire; find cover.” In the past couple of decades, I've heard it most often in the context of local politics. Best, Johnny |
May 27, 2007, 02:11 PM | #207 |
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misspelling of "hardtack" corrected later. Sorry.
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May 28, 2007, 12:43 PM | #208 |
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St. Patrick's Day
My great-grandfather was a lumberjack in northern Michigan, where I live now. Not just a lumberjack, but an Axeman, begad! It's interesting to think he might have cleared the original forest right in my own back yard.
He was proud that he'd been an Axeman. He considered himself elite, and dressed as a lumberjack whenever he could for as long as he lived. I've thought of using that as part of a CAS persona, if I ever create one. He was also proud that he was an Orangeman, a Protestant Irishman. Grandpa said his dad had to leave Canada and come to Michigan in the first place because the Green Irish were always trying to kill him. But then Grandpa also said his father had to leave the lumber camps because he'd killed a man there. Great-Grandpa always had some mawkish poem on the wall of his bedroom, some poorly-written thing about an accidental death in lumbering. Grandpa thought that was Great-Grandpa's penance for an act of manslaughter. It could just have been that Great-Grandpa was Victorian. Those people were morbid. In any case, Great-Grandpa ended up in Nebraska, where he was involved in one frontier gunfight, right out on the main street (so-called). I wrote about that in another post in this thread, long ago. One year Great-Grandpa happened to be in Greely, Nebraska, on St. Patrick's Day. Now, to me, one of Great-Grandpa's most endearing qualities was a complete lack of sense about a number of matters. One would think that an Orangeman who had issues with the Green Irish from way back would not go into an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day. But that's what Great-Grandpa did. Had a few belts of good whiskey, too. The place was crowded with Green Irish toasting their patron saint. Great Grandpa, suitably lubricated, stood up in the middle of all that and shouted "To Hell with Saint Patrick! I'm as good a man as he ever was." This statement was not well received. In the midst of the ensuing discussion, Great Grandpa grabbed a leg from the broken pool table and therewith smote the Catholic foemen hip and thigh. He always claimed he was holding his own until they started throwing the pool balls at him. After that, he was happy enough when a couple of his friends burst in and held the enraged Irishmen back long enough for Great-Grandpa to get away. I have often said that CAS is not authentic because of the number of guns involved. But there's also the issue of the type. Rifles would have been fairly common. Cheap pocket revolvers would have been. The big single-actions we all love were expensive, and usually illegal to carry in town plus hard to conceal, so I doubt they would have been commonly seen there at all. But every store, bar, or sod hut would have had a shotgun stashed behind a door somewhere. Or, in this case, under the seat of Great-Grandpa's wagon. Which was fortunate, because as he left Greely two men jumped out from hiding and tried to grab the reins of his drafthorse. Great-Grandpa fetched the shotgun from beneath the seat. This action reminded his attackers that they had pressing business to attend to elsewhere. I don't know if he actually fired his gun on this occasion, but it would not have been like him to deny himself that pleasure. |
May 28, 2007, 08:50 PM | #209 |
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Hafoc,
I missed your earlier post about the gunfight, suppose you could find it in your heart to post it again. My grandfather used to talk about the local town Sheriff, that he was a hard man. now mind you this was in the late 1950's that the sheriff he was talking about was near the turn of the century. My grandad dad told of the time when the train was blocking the main road in and out of town and the sheriff climbed aboard and asked the engineer to move the train so commerce could commence. There was some rift going on between the trainmen and the locals that my granddad didn't know about or remember, but what ensued pretty much ended it. The Engineer told the Sheriff in no uncertian terms what he could do, and the Sheriff thumb cocked his 45 and shot the engineer in the head killing him instantly, the fireman jumped ship, and the Sheriff just reached down, set the throttle and moved the train far enough to clear the tracks, climbed down, walked to the local undertaker and told him he had a customer in the cab of the train. This happened in Redkey, Indiana, not in the wild, wild west. |
May 28, 2007, 10:57 PM | #210 |
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Dragoon,
It's easy to find. It's Post #111 in this very thread, which puts it about halfway down Page 5. If it isn't showing up for you, I'll repost or PM it or something. |
May 29, 2007, 11:56 AM | #211 |
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Found it! Good Story. Let's hear some more...maybe ina Great stories thread....so as not to hijack this one. LOL
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June 2, 2007, 10:38 AM | #212 |
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watered down...
We know how drug dealers cut their stuff and it stretches sales and profits. Well, it turns out that's nothing new. The ancient Greeks (think about the time of the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War) used to mix their wine with water before consuming it. One Spartan king, Cleomenes, is said to have gone mad after drinking Persian wine (unwatered wine - thus he became an alcoholic). Well, during the Fur Trade Era a distillery was opened in New Mexico by Simeon Turley. In 1836, Turley hired Charley Autobees, brother of Tom Tobin (mountain-man, scout, hunter), to be the first traveling whiskey salesman and sales was good. Packed in casks carried by mules (2 casks per mule), Charley would lead his mule train to Fort Lupton (25 miles NE of Denver) and Fort Vasquez (7 miles further north). There he would sell his cask for $4 a gallon. The traders would then water it down with river water and sell it for ten times that amount. Sometimes, because it was watered down too much, tobaccco was added to it for color and flavor. :barf: The business prospered until the Mexicans burned down the distillery and killed Turley (Jan. 20, 1847). It appears that the Mexicans were none too happy with the Mexican-American War, did not want to live under the Stars 'n Stripes, and tried to kill the Anglos. Well, they killed a bunch o' them (for which they were hanged) and in the process, burned down Turley's distillery.
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June 4, 2007, 01:40 AM | #213 | |
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19th Century SW frontier medicine
OK, I'm reading about Tom Tobin who was one of the mountainmen scouts of the Nineteenth Century. Apparently besides being adept at tracking, farming, hunting (game & people), he also picked up skills as a frontier doctor. Here are somethings out of the book (which I bought from the Pueblo Historical Society):
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June 9, 2007, 11:50 AM | #214 | |
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Don't let your sons grow up to be painters...
The following is quoted from Jessica Warner's "John the Painter." It is the story of a painter turned highwayman, who, hoping to achieve the recognition he believed he deserved, became an American Agent (terrorist) in England bent on destroying military installations like the Royal Dockyard at Portsmouth. He devised his own incendiary devices and attempted to start fires that would cripple England. Poor matches doomed his enterprise and after several attempts, he was caught and hung. It's a great look at the Scots in England and in America during the Colonial period and of the people in general. While not strictly a military book, Warner provides an excellent account of one man's struggle in the 18th Century.
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June 24, 2007, 12:14 AM | #215 |
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Back in the Civil War...
General John Geary was an Alcade (mayor) in San Francisco before the war. He served in Sherman's Army.
I forgot which book I read it in but he got some of the boys pissed off. The boys pounced on him and pummeled him. Afterwards, they fled into the crowd. After recovering, an angry Geary demanded from the audience the identity of his assailants, but nobody saw anything. The American Citizen Soldier was quite a different man back then. Today the Army, Army Reserves and National Guard all receive the same boot camp training and the likelihood of a soldier hitting an officer is remote or if he does, he'll pay for it.
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June 24, 2007, 07:07 PM | #216 |
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Passing inspection
Like today, soldiers of yesterday stood in formation and were inspected. An officer would pass along the ranks and inspect the cleanliness of the soldier, his uniform, his accoutrements and his weapon.
Well, in the British Army of the Napoleonic era, one soldier was very fond of his drink. So fond, that when he ran out of money, he sold his shoes to pay for his liquid refreshments. Ordered to stand in formation for inspection, he knew his white feet would stand out and draw attention to him. Questions would follow and determine that he had sold his shoes. He could then be lashed as a penalty. Well, our brave hero was no slow thinker. He applied soot to his feet, blackening them for the parade. It didn't quite work. He was caught. It was memorialized. Nice try anyway.
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July 4, 2007, 07:34 PM | #217 | ||
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I'll pass on the canned pigeon
The following is taken from page 147 of Mike Pride and Mark Travis's, "My Brave Boys: To War with Colonel Cross & the Fighting Fifth."
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Note to self: don't send canned pigeons to the troops in the sandbox. Also from the book: Quote:
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July 7, 2007, 09:20 PM | #218 |
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On April 3rd, 1677, at the British fort in Bombay, India, the storekeeper decided to send up some gunpowder to dry on the North East bastion. Meanwhile, at the guard house, a certain Corporal Staunton had a sense of humour and, took:
‘an old bandileer and filled it with with wild fire, intending to tie it to the tail of a dog, then in the guard [house], and [Corporal Staunton] running to the gate, the dog not being [found] in the way, he took the bandileer, there being a string tied to it and flung it towards the Old Judge’s House, but the wind being very strong, it blew it upon the bastion and fired all the powder which was 35 barrels all English. There were 8 Coolies tending it and 1 Centry who were all burnt to death, whereof 6 blown into the ditch and the parade, and some limbs blown over the fort. All the doors in the Fort were blown open, and made most part of the Town shake.’ Corporal Staunton was not hurt but was kicked out of the garrison after being made to run the gauntlet three times for his little prank. One is amazed he was not executed! Arthur E. Mainwaring, Crown and Company: Records of the 2nd Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers (103rd ) foot. Formerly the 1st Bombay European Regiment, 1662-1911, London, A.L. Humphries, 1911, p. 60, quoting a 1677 report. (with thanks to Rene Chartrand).
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July 8, 2007, 10:03 PM | #219 | |
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More fighting Irish
Observed by a Confederate PoW near Sheridan's HQ (Oct. 12) in the Shenandoah Valley.
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July 8, 2007, 11:21 PM | #220 |
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Re: Wildfire and Blackpowder
The story of Staunton's prank gone wrong and the resulting punishment shows a British legal distinction that is still around today both in England and in the US. I think the reason he had to walk thrice through the gauntlet rather than meeting the rope was that the court or whatever body dispensed punishment believed that the deaths were a result of gross boobery. If they had found that he acted with a "depraved heart" by intentionally creating a situation likely to result in death he would have swung for murder. This distinction is the difference between modern involuntary manslaughter and 2nd degree murder charges.
Three times through the gauntlet was no joke, though. |
July 29, 2007, 01:34 PM | #221 | |
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So, if you don't want our script (money)...
I love this account of Gen. Putnam & the Tory Innkeeper.
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July 29, 2007, 02:31 PM | #222 | |
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Gatling guns actually used in the ACW
American Heritage magazine article
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July 29, 2007, 02:32 PM | #223 | |
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Part II of article
continued from the previous post...
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July 29, 2007, 11:19 PM | #224 | |
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Black Bart
The highwayman. Read it Here!
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July 29, 2007, 11:22 PM | #225 |
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Part II
We continue our saga of Black Bart.
[QUOTE]Until he gave himself a name, he was anonymous. Then, on his fourth holdup—he had let fourteen months pass this time between jobs—he gave the lawmen a handle to use, and he was from then on Black Bart the Po8. No poet—or PoS—ever rode to fame on so meager an output. In his whole career Bart wrote but two poems, though he did claim to have had a third ready for job No. 29, the one he never got to pull. The second, and last, poem was again written on a waybill and was left at the scene of his fifth stage robbery. It consisted of two new stanzas with the first poem sandwiched between. The two new stanzas read: here I lay me down to Sleep to wait the coming Morrow perhaps Success perhaps defeat And everlasting Sorrow let come what will ‘I’ll try it on My condition can’t be worse And if theres money in that Box Tis Munny in my purse He purposely vulgarized the spelling and punctuation for he knew better, as his letters home show very clearly. This fifth stage robbery, on July 25, 1878, almost a year after the fourth one, was in the mountainous Feather River country of north-central California. While still no bonanza, it did bring Bart about $600 in coin and equivalents. By this time, Bart had settled into a pattern for his robberies in every respect except the time lapse between them, which was erratic. That may have been dictated simply by economic need, for Bart was not greedy. The most amazing thing is that this quite conservative man should have become so successful a thief. Or perhaps his conservatism was the explanation: his cautious methods made him very difficult to catch. Wells Fargo’s Detective Hume knew that he couldn’t expect a great deal of help from sheriffs in the counties where stage robberies occurred: few of them were really good at careful police work. Hume, a big, quiet man who usually had a cigar clamped between his teeth, was on his own. But in the duel of wits with Black Bart, Hume held the best cards, and in the end the winning ones: experience, the better mind, the organization to back him. Another trump was added after Bart’s fifth holdup—a reward. The governor of California, William Irwin, offered $300 for Bart’s capture; Wells Fargo matched it; the post office department—whose pouches Bart regularly slit open and plundered, ignoring the fact that the mail was not necessarily owned by the vested interests he was supposed to be fighting—added $200 more. To collect this total of $800, a person would have to capture Black Bart and produce the evidence needed to land him in jail. But for the one who succeeded there was the possibility of added compensation, for it was customary to give a road agent’s captor one-quarter of any booty that might be recovered. For a while at least, instead of helping bring him to book, Black Bart’s victims exalted him into an awesome legend, a superman who appeared out of nowhere and vanished into nothingness. It was so unusual for a highwayman to walk any distance, let alone across rugged open country, that it is no wonder the legend was embroidered with tales of a phantom horse, or of a devil’s disciple flying by dark of night. So it was that as he continued his road-agentry, the man who had been a failure all his life found himself an immense success. Although he relished it hugely, he hardly ever talked about it to anyone. But one day in the fall of 1880, about ten days after his thirteenth stage robbery, Bart was in Sonoma County, about 150 miles south of where the holdup had taken place. On foot as usual and finding himself still a distance from food and lodging at sundown, he took politick with a lone logger, one Elisha Shortridge, who had a ranch west of Santa Rosa. By this time Bart had abandoned the use of the cumbersome valise. Law officers found it beside a creek but could extract no useful clues from it (fingerprints as a police tool did not come into use until after the nineteenth century had ended). When he met the logger, Bart was carrying a bedroll over his shoulder and was cradling his shotgun, so that Shortridge took him for a hunter. Afterward the logger said, “Just two things about him struck me. His voice sounded like he was talking into an empty barrel, and he had eyes that seemed to look clear through you.” He added: “I thought maybe he was looking the country over, sizing up land and timber.” Bart corrected that error the next morning. After breakfast, Shortridge was giving the stranger’s gun a friendly once-over, a usual thing between gun fanciers, and noticed that it was an early type of breech-loader. He opened it, found that the barrels were clean and bright, and observed to its owner that it was a good weapon. Bart smiled. “It always gets what I go after. I never waste ammunition. I save money in other ways, too,” he said. "1 don’t drink or smoke.” Then he asked what he owed his host for the hospitality. It was a somewhat peculiar question in a pioneer territory, where a stranger was welcomed as a guest. Shortridge courteously refused payment, but Bart couldn’t let it go at that. “Did you ever hear,” he said with a sudden smile, “of Black Bart?” “Hear of him!” Shortridge cried. “He’s one of the main things talked about in these parts nowadays.” “Well,” said Bart, “I’m Black Bart. I just thought that if you knew who I am, you might be willing to accept something for your kindness.” The logger thought he was joking. “Sure you ain’t Joaqu
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