Tag Archives: history

Children, Buffalo Chips and Grizzle Bears

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Many of us never develop the love of history until well into the span of our lifetimes.  Often, retirement is the only thing that allows some the time to learn a little of what went on before us, or the genealogy urge hits us long after those eyewitnesses to our family pasts have long since died.  It is often said that we should introduce our children to history.  While that may be true, I think it even more important not just to introduce them to history, but to do so at a young age while their tastes are still being formed – before video games, i-phones, Japanese robot cartoons, and monster trucks have time to make the world’s low technology past seem boring and tame to them.

I recall burning our pastures off one spring with my three year old son tagging along at my heels.  He spied a dried piece of horse manure smoking in the charred, sooty remains of a clump of grass.  Naturally curious and shocked by the fact that feces would burn, he was full of questions.  I explained to him that there was a time on the Western plains, a land often scarce of firewood, that the Indians, immigrants, mountain men, and explorers burned buffalo manure for their campfires.  Westerners gave the fuel the simple name of “chips.”  Buffalo chips were simply dried patties of manure, so disklike as to resemble little frisbees scattered across the terrain.  Women and children walking alongside an oxen drawn wagon train might gather chips during the day’s travels.  Accounts of travelers on the Oregon or California trails mention the women using their bunched skirts to hold such fuel.  Cowboys driving herds of longhorns north sometimes strung a tarp underneath the chuckwagon, or hooligan wagon if they had one, to store the chips the cook gathered during the day. Many a branding iron was heated on a cow chip fire.  Dried cow patties will burn just as good as the offerings of their bovine cousin, the buffalo or American Bison.  Both animals are herbirvors and grazers, and their excrement consists mostly of the undigested or partially digested grass.  Chips are nearly perfect fuel when dried, possessing a low ignition point, and making wonderfully hot coals.  Basically, they are just a ready made tinder bundle.

My son was a heap impressed (I find as he gets older it is much harder for Daddy to appear the all-knowing super being he once was).  I could see his little eyes envisioning pioneers roughing it on the trail and hunkering down over buffalo turd fires at night and staring into the darkness for signs of Indians on the warpath.  We can bore our children to death with facts, or recent theories as to what “actually” happened during famous historical events, or we can let them learn that stuff later and simply enjoy a little more romanticized past, even if not quite accurate.  Little tikes don’t care if Wyatt Earp was trully a good guy, or a gambler gunfighter who used his badge during a personal feud at the O.K. Corral.

Just recently, I gave in and purchased that same son (now 10) an X Box video game system.  I always felt that a child was better served playing outside or reading a good book rather than killing zombies on the TV, but I’ve found that even video games offer chances to talk about history with my children.  While my son was proudly showing me his ability to kill a man-eating grizzly on a Cabela’s game I took the opportunity to tell him how the mountain man, Hugh Glass, was once terribly mauled by such a bear and left for dead by his fellow trappers (Jim Bridger being one of them).  Glass, half-naked and looking like a piece of raw hamburger, crawled over a hundred miles to the nearest fort and survived.  Talk about tough.  I added how the Lewis and Clark Expedition immediately discovered on the Missouri River that their thirty something caliber rifles were far too light to be fighting a pissed-off grizzle bear.  Wouldn’t you know it?  A kid that loves video games soon had dropped his controller, forgotten all about the TV screen, and was asking me all sorts of questions.  For days his time outside was spent playing like he was tackling old Ursus arctos horriblis with the hickory stick that serves as his backyard gun.

On a recent family trail ride through the mountains he asked if he could carry his little single-shot .22 rifle in a scabbard on his saddle.  While there was no need for him to travel with artillery, I allowed him to over his mother’s protests.  He spent the day passing through the mountains imagining himself armed to the teeth and riding through woods infested with hordes of bandits, scalp hungry Indians in wild paint, and yes, even grizzle bears.  His ancient old sorrel gelding became transformed into the speediest steed Jesse James ever swung a leg over to flee a bank he’d just robbed.  Come nightime at our cabin, that little boy of mine asked me if we had some buffalo chips could we burn them in the cast iron stove.  I told him a little fat bear meat would cook well over such a fire, and he looked at me with big eyes and asked if a .22 was enough gun to tackle a grizzly.  And while the old stove ticked pleasantly and put off a toasty warmth I propped my feet up on the edge of my bunk and did a little dreaming of my own.  I remembered another boy many years before, sitting on the back of an old sorrel gelding wasting his Daddy’s cartridges pumping lead into a dead blackjack snag pretending like it was some rival gunfighter.  Once upon a time, we were all kids.

History isn’t just dusty old books, and it’s nothing without an imagination.  Take every chance to teach your children what you love.  The opportunity only comes once.

Shoot low.  They’re all ridin’ Shetlands,

BC

 

The Old West Stinks

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    Many colorful adjectives and adverbs have been attached to the Old West. It was bloody, romantic, exciting, epic, etc. However, amidst all the high drama, an oft overlooked fact of the era was that our pioneer forefathers (and mothers) were probably highly odiferous. To put it bluntly, the Old West simply stunk to the high heavens.

I’ve always believed in reading primary sources for research purposes, and I got quite a chuckle recently while perusing a home remedy journal dated from 1890.  Although the author emphasizes the correlation between cleanliness and good health and stresses the use of antiseptics for wounds, his concept of adequate hygiene is a little different from ours. The public is urged to take at least one bath a week (whether they needed it or not).  Also, a cleanly citizen is advised to thoroughly wash and comb their hair with soap and water at least every two weeks for healthy and luxurious locks.

Many U.S. cities were without running water, or municipal water systems, well past 1900.  Of course, pioneers on the frontier of the American West faced even harsher conditions.  Unlike today, there was no coming home from work to a quick hot shower and microwave cooked meal before flopping down on the bed or in front of the TV.  A bath could be an arduous task unless you were rich enough to have a well plumbed into your house.  Carrying water in buckets from a well, river, spring or other supply source was highly labor intensive, added to by the need to build a fire to warm the bath.  Once the old bathtub or galvanized wash tub was filled, an entire family might have to share the water. It’s understandable that old-time accounts state that many of the most cleanly and fastidious of families on the frontier often made a weekly bath a ritual. A wash pan to clean faces and hands was all you might get during the time in between your Sunday or Saturday scrubbing.

One of the styles of the Victorian Era was for men to wear wool suits, coat and vest.  Also, the long petticoats, skirts, bustles, and girdles women wore weren’t what could be termed as “warm climate friendly.” Summer temperatures in West Texas or the plains of Wyoming swelter past 100 degrees and humidity levels in the South are often in excess of 90%.  Given that there were no stick deodorants in the 19th Century, a world filled with once-a-week bathers was probably highly odiferous to say the least. A gathering of wool-coated men and stylish ladies might have smelled like a sheep pen. The author of the medical journal seemed to have that in mind when he provided the recipe for perfumes among his pages.

Many Western authors have orphaned the heroes of their stories with the historically accurate use of a cholera plague.  Cholera outbreaks killed thousands during the first hundred years of our great nation.  Those affected with the disease suffered severe, watery diarrhea. Cholera was often called the Blue Death, as many of the ill turned a pale blue due to dehydration. Many of the frontier settlements, and cities alike, lacked sewage systems and sanitary garbage disposal.   Floods and high waters during the rainy season often contaminated drinking water sources with smelly #2 containing the bacteria that caused cholera.

Despite the concept of the Noble Savage, Native Americans weren’t the immaculately clean people clad in spotless buckskins the movies would have us believe. Water is and was in short supply in many of the arid western lands, and frigid winter temperatures weren’t conducive to bathing.  Rather than a bath in a tepee, many tribes resorted to scouring themselves with sand. Grime, blood, and animal fat stained buckskins until a new pair was made.  Combs were used among Native Americans, but often fellow tribe members helped pick the nits and lice out of each others’ hair.  Western travelers of the 1800′s noted how many of the tribes coated their hair and sometimes their skin in bear grease. While somewhat smelly, the shine it produced was the epitome of a stylish, fashion-conscious Indian. Other historical accounts tell that one of the reasons the nomadic plains tribes move their camps so often wasn’t just because of the need to follow buffalo herds or to locate other food sources.  Breaking camp was often a means to get away from the reek of feces, carcass refuse, and so on.  One early day trailblazer said the stench of a recently vacated Comanche camp could be smelled a mile away.

I assume that the noses of those living in earlier times were adjusted to the smell of their fellow man, but if we were to take a time machine back to our beloved past we might immediately want to call in the Old Spice dude to doctor up long, tall Matt Dillon, or hand Miss Kitty a bar of soap.

BC