The Last Widow

Gee, if only some important event had happened this week so I would have something to write about...

Well, there was one small event that everyone probably missed—the last surviving Civil War widow died.  Yes, more than a century and a half after the end of the war, the last surviving widow has passed away.

Military pensions are an old, old custom started not so much for the welfare of the aging soldier, as for the comfort of their military leaders.  There has always been an inherent problem with training and equipping young men to fight, and then at the war’s end, telling these same men they are unemployed and their services are no longer needed.  Historically, some unemployed soldiers sought employment with new revolutionary leaders.

Julius Caesar understood this problem and used newly conquered lands to build new cities for his former soldiers, simultaneously rewarding faithful service while moving them far from Rome and strengthening new border towns by populating them with citizens of proven loyalty.  Augustus Caesar was forced to change the system slightly, as there was only so much new territory even Rome could acquire.  Upon retirement, a soldier received an honesto missio, an honorable discharge, and a lump sum payment equivalent to thirteen times a legionnaire’s annual salary.  More importantly (and this is something that today’s military might consider as a way of increasing recruitment), the retired Roman soldier received a lifetime exemption from Roman taxes.

The logic behind this was obvious:  Pay a man off and he’s less likely to overthrow you.  In addition, a lump sum payment would allow all but the most spendthrift of soldiers to live comfortably long enough to become less of a physical threat.  This program was so expensive that Augustus was forced to supplement part of the cost with funds from his own pocket.

In the United States, military pensions were originally only for veterans who had become disabled as a result of their military service and not for retirement.  One of the first acts of the Continental Congress was an act to provide for the soldiers, “providing that every commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer and private soldier who shall lose a limb in any engagement, or be so disabled in the service of the United States of America as to render him incapable of afterwards getting a livelihood, shall receive during his life or the continuance of such disability the one-half of his monthly pay from and after the time that his pay as an officer [or soldier] ceases.”

During the Revolutionary War, the pay of a captain was $26 a month while a private received $6 a month.  Even in the late 18th Century, a pension of $3 a month was, at best, barely enough to live on.  Until the 20th Century, neither the recipients nor their dependents could claim the pension if they were able to work.

Over the years, Congress periodically changed the amounts received, the terms of qualifications and added provisions to provide for the veteran’s dependents.  Though the amounts of the pensions were steadily raised, they never exceeded the bare minimum needed for survival.

After the Civil war, only the soldiers who had been disabled by injuries incurred during their service could apply for a pension.  If the veteran fought on the side of the Union, the pension was paid by the Federal Government, while Confederate veterans had to apply to their respective Southern states.  By the end of the 19th century, the widows and dependents of these veterans could also apply.  

Immediately after the fighting, the citizens of the United States were in no mood to pay pensions to anyone in the South, especially to the veterans.  While each state of the former Confederacy eventually established its own individual pension, most of the states did not begin these pensions until decades after the war, and even then, the amount of the pensions and rules for qualification varied.

Early in the 20th century, during the Depression, the Federal Government assumed the responsibility of paying all of the remaining pensions for the Southern States.  There was an ever-dwindling number of veterans still receiving the pension—the last surviving veteran of that tragic war did not die until 1951.

During the Depression, when so many people were starving, that pitifully small pension became vitally important and was a cherished source of cash for many impoverished families.  Aging Civil War veterans began marrying young women to be able to pass on that pension to their spouses.  In some cases, the new spouse was a distant relation of either the Veteran, or occasionally, a relative of his first wife.  These May/December marriages were usually marriages of convenience, with the partners rarely actually living together.

A typical example was Gertrude Grubb, 18, who married John Janeway, 81, in 1927.  Janeway, a Union veteran passed away in 1937 and his wife continued to collect $70 a month until her death in 2003, meaning that the modest pension spanned three centuries.  Gertrude Janeway was the last surviving widow to receive a pension.  The last child of a Civil War veteran receiving a pension died last year. 

The last surviving widow, Helen Viola Jackson, married her 92-year-old neighbor, James Bolin in 1937.  Bolin, who had enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 14th Missouri Cavalry three days before Lee’s surrender following the battle at Appomattox Court House, was bed-ridden and refused to accept charity, so he offered to marry his 17-year-old neighbor in exchange for the care the teenager was providing.  A marriage of convenience, Jackson kept her own name, never lived with Bolin, and after his death, never applied for his pension.  Jackson, who never remarried, died in December at the age of 101.

As far as is known, she was the last surviving widow of a Civil War soldier.

Corny New Year Musings

A new year.  A perfect time to reflect on…. Why you drank so much last night after midnight and why you are too tired to think coherently today.  The last thing I remember from last night was the thought that Congress would probably cancel the stimulus check and just send out t-shirts that said, “I Survived 2020”.

No, this is not yet the day for tackling anything new.  I’ve been thinking about the past for most of the day.  And my email today indicates that many of my friends are thinking about the past, too.   A childhood friend of mine, just posted on Facebook about the time his wife ate a dozen ears of corn at a party and suffered all the next day.

About thirty years ago, I was in Tegucigalpa doing historical research on a revolution that had taken place about eighty years earlier—one of those nameless little revolutions that swept through Central America about as regularly as summer rains.  This revolution had profound consequences—until a counter-revolution fourteen months later succeeded in returning everything to the antebellum status quo.  

Having exhausted all the sources about the revolution available in the United States, I had flown to Honduras to pick through the archives there.  I can give you a valuable tip about the value of archives in a poor country—there isn’t much.  When a country runs out of money, libraries and archives are the first agencies to shutter their doors.

Arriving in Tegucigalpa, I had a reservation at the nicest hotel in the city, but when I arrived, I discovered the hotel was also the town casino and there was a sign that said locals weren’t allowed:  the hotel and casino were only for tourists.  (And members of the Honduran military—as some animals are more equal than others.)

I found an alternate hotel.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as nice: there was no casino, the electrical power went off so frequently that the desk clerk gave me a candle and matches when I checked in, and the water ran only two hours a day, early in the morning.  Bigger hotels had water tanks on the roof that allowed twenty-four-hour usage, but mine didn’t have that luxury.

When the town water supply was turned on every morning at 5:00, the air hissing out of the pipes and faucets all over town made an eerie moaning sound that was responsible for a very high local birth rate. (Five in the morning being too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep).

The town was short of water because it wasn’t raining, even though it was summer:   I spent weeks in Honduras during the rainy season, and it never rained once.  It appears that if you cut down most of the rainforest, you lose both the rain and the forest.  In the years since I was there, the water is now turned on only once a week.  I wonder how this has affected the birth rate.

Tegucigalpa is actually two cities divided by a river, the Choluteca River, which crosses the city from south to north, physically separating Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela.  There is a series of bridges that crosses the river, and since there is no rain, the river is about as dry as Lubbock on Sunday night.

Besides Catholicism, the other two major religions were lottery tickets and soccer, and of the three, it is arguably true that the latter two had the most adherents.  Honduras is so lottery crazy that for a while, when Louisiana outlawed lotteries, instead of shutting down, the state lottery just moved to Honduras and continued to sell tickets.  

Lotteries are not much fun to watch, so one Sunday when the libraries and government offices were all closed, I went down to one of the bridges across the Choluteca and watched a spirited soccer match.  Since the riverbeds below the bridges were not otherwise engaged, soccer fields had been bulldozed in the dry ground between the bridges.  Spectators were gathered along the river and up on each of the bridges at the ends of the field.  

I would normally rank my interest in a soccer game slightly below my curiosity about Nigerian waste treatment plants, but I was encouraged by an enthusiastic crowd of spectators, who cheered and whistled and screamed periodically.  I was even more encouraged by the incredible number of street vendors selling exotic food to spectators.  

Street vendors selling exotic food are a strict travel no-no—a wise rule I have violated with gusto on multiple continents.  I would rather eat street tacos from a truck than dine in a Michelin rated restaurant.  Some of the best meals in my life were from curbside carts in Hong Kong, at canal-side stands in England, and from street peddlers throughout Central America.  Yes, I have paid a small price for these indiscretions a few times—I remember longing for death in an airport restroom in Hong Kong after eating coffee flavored peanuts—but that is a small price to pay for great food.  The old Takee-Outee Chinese food stands in the French Quarter that had ginger curry chicken kabobs…

In any case, on that bridge in Tegucigalpa, I ignored all the peddlers selling various forms of bananas as in the previous week, I had eaten them prepared just about every way possible.  It was damn near impossible to get a meal without them.  But, there was this guy roasting fresh ears of corn that caught my eye.

This was fresh sweet corn that was being roasted over a charcoal fire in a six-gallon galvanized trash can right there on the sidewalk.  The ears were cooked inside the shuck, then peeled and roasted over the charcoal fire until the kernels were just starting to blacken, then doused liberally with fresh lime juice and dusted with chili powder and salt.  Wrapped in a paper towel, a fresh hot ear could be purchased for less than a quarter.

I was definitely this vendor’s best customer, because I slowed down eating that corn only long enough to drink from the bottle of real cane sugar Coca-Cola I had purchased.  I have no idea how many ears I ate in a row, but I know that I only stopped eating when he ran out of corn.  

The next day, Monday, I spent the morning working in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras library, hurrying back to the bridge for lunch.  Unfortunately, the street vendors were nowhere to be found.  Over the course of the next week, I went to the town market, a couple of basketball games, and a fiesta, but never found anyone else selling fresh roasted corn.  

Before the next soccer game was held, I had to ride the only remaining railroad left in the country to the Chiquita Brands banana plantation to finish my research.  I can assure you that when you visit one of the largest banana plantations on the planet—one so large it is guarded by the Honduran Army, while there is an overabundance of yellow food—none of it is corn.

I’m still looking for that roasted corn.  If any of you run across someone roasting fresh ears over a galvanized trash can—don’t hesitate to let me know.  And Ruthie, tell Kent to stop teasing you about your love of corn.  (We corn aficionados stick together!)

It’s Good to Be The Queen

Since it is Christmas, it is time for the annual message from Queen Elizabeth II, and as a semi-loyal ex-colonist….I listened to it.  It was, as expected pretty much as follows:

Yada, Yada, Yada….we are all in this together….Covid….We are inspired….next year.

It was a nice speech, and at 94, the Queen looked great and did it well.  I will admit to being a little partial to the Queen.  I’m not exactly a monarchist, but a woman who has dealt with a couple of dozen presidents and Prime Ministers, who slapped down Winston Churchill a few times, and is—extraordinarily—the last head of state in the world to wear a uniform during World War II, deserves a little respect.

Having said that, the Queen is not exactly in this with the rest of us.  If the rich are different from us, the Queen is different even from the rich.  According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is the richest person in the world at $230 billion (which shows you how incorrect Forbes can be).  The queen easily has several times the wealth of Bezos.  

I did a little back of an envelope figuring and not even bothering to list the assets worth less than a measly billion dollars, such as those piddly minor items like the shiny trinkets in the Tower of London or the diaries and notebooks of Queen Victoria.  I stopped adding up the big stuff when the total topped $505 billion.

The Queen owns BIG stuff…. like Antigua and a half dozen other Caribbean Islands.   And as the monarch, she owns the English seacoast and the seabed under the seas surrounding the country (In fact, she owns about 1.4% of all the land in the UK).  The value of mining rights to this property has been estimated at more than $100 billion.  And back in the 17th century, Charles I started a royal art collection every monarch since then has added to it.  Today, the collection consists of some 150,000 pieces, valued at more than $10 billion.  There are more than 600 Faberge eggs.

The monarch has six castles, three shopping centers, and more real estate than anyone could visit in a lifetime, over six billion acres.  And who cares?  That’s not the interesting stuff that fascinates me.  Because of tradition, archaic and forgotten laws, and the longevity of the royal family, the Queen owns some really cool stuff that you have probably never heard about.

On the vast Balmoral estate, valued at more than $50 billion, there is a bat colony.  These are not your regular cave dwelling bats—these bats inhabit Balmoral Castle.  While most property owners would chase them off, the Queen likes the bats and has ordered the castle staff to leave the windows open so the bats can come and go as they wish (except when she catches them in a butterfly net to release them outside).  Cool!—especially in winter.

Actually, the Queen owns a lot of animals.  Besides a stable of race horses—and the Ascot Racetrack—the queen owns a couple of Corgis, two black jaguars, a sloth, all the dolphins in the United Kingdom, and two giant Aldabra tortoises.  Though no one knows exactly how many of them there are—the queen owns all the swans on the River Thames.  And while she technically does not own all the mussels and oysters in Scotland, she does own the fishing rights to them.  

It is almost impossible to list all the incredible classic cars the Queen owns.  Evidently, the monarchy rarely sells any of their cars.  So, the girl who worked as a truck mechanic during the war, now owns three Rolls-Royces, two Bentleys, a couple of Aston Martins, and a gold Royal State Coach.  What the Queen may not own, however, is a driver’s license.  There is some question whether the license she was issued during the war is still valid.  In any case, she’s not likely to get a ticket.

I guess you could say that the Queen has her own money, since her picture is on it.  According the Guinness Book of World Records, her likeness has appeared on more currency than anyone else’s in history.  And if she needs access to any of that cash, her bank had conveniently installed her own personal ATM in the basement of Buckingham Palace.  I’m at a loss, however, to come up with a reason why she would ever need to get any cash.  If she wanted to sneak out of the palace one night for a hamburger, she could go to a nearby shopping center where she owns the local MacDonald’s franchise.  

The Queen’s grandfather, King George V, started a stamp collection in the 1890’s and when the public learned of the King’s hobby, he received large numbers of gifts to add to this collection.  The Royal Philatelic Collection is now the largest stamp collection in the Commonwealth, comprising hundreds of albums.  Leafing through the volumes must be sort of like looking at a family album, since a sizable portion of the stamps bear the image of someone in her family.

I have no idea how big the Queen’s closets must be, since she has an incredible collection of gowns and uniforms.  Besides her own clothes and an estimated 200 Launer handbags, she owns the wedding dress of Queen Victoria and the suit of armor for King Henry VIII.  And somewhere, she has to keep the 40 leather suitcases and 9 leather briefcases she travels with, each with a yellow luggage tag that says “The Queen”.  (You have to ask yourself why she bothers with the tags, it’s not like she has to identify her bags on an airport carousel.)

If you are wondering what the Queen carries in her handbag, you might be surprised to learn that she always has a camera with her to “take pictures of celebrities”.  And though it is now against the law in England, the Queen has carried a pocket knife in her purse since the days when she was a ‘Girl Guide’ in 1937. 

Regardless of how many luggage carts the Queen needs when she travels—she also owns the award for the “most-traveled head of state in history”.  Traveling over a million miles, she has been to over 120 countries—a list far too long for this blog so it’s far easier to just say she has not yet visited Madagascar, Cuba, Peru, or Israel.

Yet, despite all of her travels, there is one thing that the Queen does not own now and never has owned:  a passport.

The Atlantic Crossing

As soon as the sailboat rounded the point of land that for generations sailors had called “The Lizard”, Steve raised the sails and cut the small diesel engine.  With any luck, for the next three to six weeks, the crossing would be done with wind power alone.

As soon as the diesel died, Steve was struck by how comparatively quiet the boat was.  To be sure, there was still plenty of sound, but each sound meant something:  it was if the waves and the boat were talking to him (and it was not just the pounding racket of what his father had called the ‘iron spinnaker’).  

Steering south, Steve thought the 42’ ketch should reach the Canaries in roughly a week.  From there, it was roughly a month to Fort Lauderdale.  The long-range weather forecast was favorable—not that Steve really trusted it for more than a few days into the future—and as long as the November winds stayed favorable, the small boat should average roughly 7 knots throughout the crossing.

Steve made minute—and admittedly, probably unnecessary--adjustments to trim the sails, then reached a hand over to the instrument panel.  For long seconds, his hand hovered just over the switch, as if the hand itself, was unwilling to flip it on.  “Quit being stubborn,” he thought to himself and flipped the switch with more force than necessary.

For a moment, the only sign that the electronic brain was working was a green light on the instrument panel, then Steve heard the soft hum of electric motors as the autopilot adjusted the sails.  Steve felt, rather than saw, the bow of the ship move slightly to port.  For the next few weeks, Steve’s main job was to watch the computerized autopilot like a hawk, for all of the steering and navigation would be accomplished by a computer relying on GPS data provided by satellites circling the earth.

Steve’s main navigation job was to select the three waypoints for the computer to plot a course.  The first was 50 miles south of the Canary Islands, the second was the channel marker buoy outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the third and last waypoint was a mile past the channel marker when manual control would be returned to him.  Other than hovering over the computer like a worried mother, Steve’s main jobs would be keeping an eye on the weather and feeding himself.  Well, that and the other endless maintenance jobs required by any vessel afloat. 

Though impressed with the accuracy of the new computerized system, Steve wasn’t really sure he trusted the new autopilot.  A writer by trade, Steve knew all about the old mechanical wind vane autopilots he had used ever since his father had taught him how to sail.  You could watch one of the old contraptions and within five minutes, could learn exactly how it worked and intuitively could know what it could and could not do.  A relatively simple system, its very simplicity inspired trust.  These new systems, however, bordered on magic.  At any given moment, the computer brain could tell you exactly where you were, your present speed, your average speed, and even make an accurate prediction of when you would arrive at your next waypoint.  But, the entire operation happened inside its little computer chips, something no captain of a ship could watch.

Steve had written an article praising the old mechanical steering systems for a popular sailing magazine, admitting his bias and stating that the main reason he didn’t like the new computerized steering systems was that he probably didn’t understand them.  He had pointed out that in the early days of sailing, man had trusted to magic to guide his ships.  Then for hundreds of years, sailors had increasingly used technology and math to navigate:  their compasses, sextants, and chronometers were scientific instruments.  Now, with computers and satellites whose workings you couldn’t see—it felt like a return to magic.

Almost immediately, one of the larger manufacturers of GPS navigation devices had made him a proposition he really couldn’t refuse.  The company would install a new computerized autopilot on his boat and would retrofit it to handle the automatic steering system, in return for which, Steve would sail his boat across the Atlantic, then write a new magazine article about the trip.  The magazine was equally enthusiastic and Steve really couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity.

In due time, his boat was modified to accommodate the new system, the largest changes having been the installation of solar panels and additional storage batteries to power the system.  Unless the weather changed and the solar panels didn’t get enough sun to sufficiently recharge the batteries, it would probably not be necessary for Steve to start up the diesel motor at all.

While waiting for November (the start of the best season for Atlantic crossings), Steve had spent his time learning about the new self-steering system and planning for his crossing.  While this was his first solo crossing, he had been a crew member on a similar crossing three years earlier, as well as on numerous shorter trips between England and the Canary Islands.  Waiting for the weather to be right for a crossing, Steve had found himself increasingly excited about the trip.

Now, with the boat underway and being piloted by a computer that Steve both admired and feared, he decided to do something useful and eat lunch.  Making his way to the companionway leading below deck, he took the first two steps and disconnected the safely line from his harness.  Since Steve was sailing alone, he had no intention of taking a single step above deck without wearing the harness securely attached to the safety line.

The safety line was connected to a jackline that ran down the centerline of the ketch.  If he somehow still managed to fall overboard, the harness also had a CO2-inflatable flotation device.  He had once talked to the captain of an American Coast Guard Cutter who told him that fully half of the bodies the Coast Guard fished out of the Gulf of Mexico were men with the fly of their pants down.  The assumption was that the men had walked to the stern to relieve themselves when sudden motion of their boats had sent them overboard.  Steve had no intention of dying so foolishly.

Until he had rounded the Canary Islands, Steve had done little more than double check the systems, tracking the boat's progress on an old-fashioned paper chart.  Now, on course from there to Fort Lauderdale, Steve had twice inputted small corrections into the system to avoid squalls in the distance, neither of which was a serious threat to his crossing.  Steve knew that he had decided to input the two small detours into the system more to play with the computer than for any actual necessity.  He was forced to admit that he was having some doubts about who the captain of the vessel really was.

Five weeks into the crossing, Steve was just 5 nautical miles off the US coast when his cell phone rang for the first time in weeks.  Answering the call, Steve learned that the magazine had arranged for a photographer to meet him at the marina, Bahia Del Mar, in Fort Lauderdale.  For the first time since leaving Portsmouth, Steve suddenly thought about his appearance and how the photos would look in the magazine article.

Steve unclipped the safety line from his harness and rushed to the head to do a quick wash and shave—he would have to hurry, as the boat was nearing the next-to-last checkpoint, the channel marker buoy.  A single mile past that point, the self-steering system would turn itself off, returning manual control of the ship back to Steve.

Steve was on his hands and knees desperately searching the head’s small locker for his razor when the collision occurred.

Three weeks later, at the Coast Guard hearing in conjunction with the Broward County Sheriff, it was determined that the self-steering mechanism had (as it had been programmed to do 3,000 miles earlier), steered directly to—and right over—the channel marker buoy, rupturing the sailboat’s fiberglass hull in multiple locations.  The collision had probably knocked the captain of the sailboat—the only occupant—off his feet and knocking him unconscious.  He had drowned when the vessel sank in the channel within sight of the shore.

-------------------------

Note.  This is a work of fiction, based loosely—very loosely—on an actual accident that occurred near Fort Lauderdale about a decade ago.  And, the part about sailors falling off the sterns of their ships while relieving themselves?—It’s also true, unfortunately.

This blog was started 12 years ago on a whim that turned into a stubborn habit, and since then has become an obsession.  It so happens that the first story was about a sailboat.  Since this is the 600th entry in a row without missing a week, it felt only right to make up another story about a sailboat.

O Canada, O Canada

There is a great line in the movie Paint Your Wagons where Ben Rumson is discussing ethics with his partner, Clint Eastwood.  “I’ve coveted my neighbor’s wife whenever I had a neighbor and whenever he had a wife.”

This pretty much encapsulates America’s view on territorial expansion.  Far more often than is comfortable to recount, America has desired a little elbow room.  Call it empire building or manifest destiny, or whatever you like, but at one time or another America has seriously considered annexing all of North America and even parts further south.  

President Polk wanted to try Nicholas Trist—our negotiator to peacefully settle the Mexican-American War—for only acquiring California, Texas, and the rest of the Southwest to end an unjust war we started.  Polk thought such a puny settlement was treason, as he had wanted all of Mexico, at the very least.

Congress has at various times discussed annexing Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as making a state out of Puerto Rico.  One senator even took to the floor to make an impassioned speech that once the US flag had started “it’s march southward, it was inevitable that it would reach the southernmost tip of Argentina”.  And we have indeed invaded southward more often than most Americans realize.  The U.S. has invaded Mexico so many that times I’m kind of surprised our neighbors to the south aren’t the ones insisting on a wall.  We even invaded Mexico once with a streetcar.  

America has occasionally glanced northward with a little envy, too.  Everyone remembers the War of 1812, but that wasn’t the only time we tried to wrest Canada away from Great Britain.  

During the Civil War, both the North and the South tried to curry the favor of Great Britain.  The South desperately needed the English to continue to buy its cotton, to officially recognize the Confederate States of America, and perhaps most of all, to use the powerful British navy to keep Southern ports open for trade.  When the war started, the pitiful US Navy was more of a threat to itself than to any potential enemy.

The North, on the other hand, desperately wanted the English to stay neutral and not recognize the South.  As long as the Brits didn’t formally recognize the Confederacy, the merchants of England were forbidden by international treaty from selling military goods to the South.  Since establishing a naval blockade of Confederate ports was a major part of the North’s strategy, if the South could continue to export its cotton and import necessary military supplies, the chances of the South being successful in the war improved enormously.

If the South had really wanted to win, say if it were really focused on issues like state’s rights….All it had to do to gain British recognition was to abolish slavery.  Great Britain had fought the slave trade around the world and was never going to recognize the South until it emancipated its slaves.  And freed slaves could have been enticed to enlist and help relieve the manpower shortage hindering the Southern Army.  You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think the South was just fighting to preserve slavery…

The Confederates couldn’t buy war goods from England, but they could buy non-military supplies.  Of course, there was the small problem of getting anything past that the growing number of Yankee ships guarding every port, making blockade running possible only if you had a sea captain with the skills of a Rhett Butler.  

Still, the South could purchase goods that weren’t going to be sent home...Say, a large, fast ship that had no cannons, but had empty gun ports, could be sailed to a different country where Confederate gold might buy black market cannons that could turn a peaceful ship into a powerful and fast warship.  Technically, the British merchants weren’t breaking any laws, just bending the crap out of them.  

Great Britain did everything it could to help the Confederacy without technically violating its neutrality.  It didn’t take a genius to see that the United States was growing more powerful with every passing year, and the prospect of splitting America into two nations would help assuage England’s growing fear of an enfant terrible just across the Atlantic Ocean.

So, the Confederacy bought ships in England, sailed them to the Azores and refitted them with cannons, turning fast merchant ships into warships.  These auxiliary cruisers or commerce raiders, like the CSS Alabama (right), were very successful in attacking unarmed Northern merchant ships.  In its first 21 months after being launched in England, the Alabama cruised 75K miles and took 64 Northern ships worth more than $6.5 million.  All this happened without its ever once getting within 100 miles of the South, much less the state of Alabama.  The Alabama was the most successful commerce raider among the small fleet the South developed using this same method.  The  US Navy was thus forced to divert ships from the blockade to patrol shipping lanes around the world.

After the end of the Civil War, the United States was a little angry with a few nations.  It was angry with France for violating the Monroe Doctrine and seizing Mexico while we were a little busy killing each other.  President Johnson sent 50,000 troops to the Southern border and suddenly Napoleon III decided to pull his troops out of Mexico.

Besides France, America was also a little peeved at Great Britain, for having sold the Confederacy ships that any fool would have known the South would convert to warships.  In the case of the Alabama, the American ambassador to England, Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of American presidents—had explicitly warned Prime Minister Lord Palmerston not to allow the ship to be was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Sumner demanded that Britain not only pay for the loss of the ships and cargo, but pay punitive damages for extending the Civil War and increasing the number of Americans who died.  For this, Sumner demanded that Great Britain pay $2 billion! 

Today, Washington throws money around in large denominations—a billion here, a trillion there—but in 1869, this was not only more money that Great Britain would pay, it was more than she could pay.  Senator Sumner understood this and had a simple solution—the United States would accept Canada in lieu of a cash payment.  

This was not quite as insane as it sounds.  Remember, just twenty years earlier, we had accepted California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and a chunk of Oregon in payment of a debt that Mexico didn’t really owe us.  And though a decade earlier, we could not have militarily enforced such a measure, after the Civil War, we momentarily had the largest navy and the most powerful army on Earth.  True, our navy was mostly a coastal defense force, but Canada was just up the coast.

The idea was popular with a number of politicians, even drawing the support of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had just finished purchasing Alaska from Russia, and when it came to northern territories, Seward obviously wanted to collect the whole set.

The situation might have resulted in a war, but several things occurred that cooled down the situation.  First, the United States rapidly de-militarized, mothballing ships and disbanding army units.  By the middle of the 1870’s, the US Army was down to 17,500 men, making it slightly smaller than the Bulgarian army (or to put this in more modern terms, roughly equal to the number of servicemen that today are stationed in Anchorage, Alaska).  After the horrors of the Civil War, the American people were in no mood to fight a country in Europe.

In 1871, the United States and Great Britain signed the Washington Treaty, in which England paid $15 million to settle claims.  This is generally recognized as the beginning the “special relationship” between the two countries.  Since then, the United States has abandoned any plans to annex our northern neighbor.

For now.

A Sense of Decency

Every American deserves to feel secure in their vote, to believe that their vote was counted and that it wasn’t “stolen” or lost.  It is the duty of government to ensure that our votes are counted honestly and fairly.  And is the duty of every American to aid in this process.

Personally, though I live on the US-Mexico border and know quite a few immigrants, I don’t think the occasional immigrant voting illegally—either maliciously or mistakenly—is really a large enough problem to worry about.  I’m sure that voter fraud occasionally takes place, but not to an extent that it changes the outcome of any election.  And though I think requiring voter identification is a solution in search of a real problem, the practice is all right with me if it will help reassure voters and can be accomplished without suppressing voter participation.  If requiring voter ID will increase voter confidence in the process, I’ll play along.

Voting machines have been shown to be far more accurate than any paper voting system.  Eliminating human math errors while tabulating results pretty much ensures better voting accuracy.  Extensive studies have been done on whether the machines are more accurate than paper ballots, and the machines always come out on top.  But, there appear to be a number of people who think that these machines are being hacked by little green men in spaceships or something—so if it will make everyone feel more secure—let’s use paper ballots until the technophobes get over their irrational fear of overgrown adding machines.

I’m sure that somewhere a mail-in ballot was used by a recently deceased family member to send in an illegal vote.  I do not believe that people have ever gone to graveyards and written down the names of dead people so they could be used for fraudulent voting purposes.  The whole idea is ludicrous—there wouldn’t be enough recently dead people still on the voting rolls to matter, and if you are just looking for made up names to register—there has to be a better way to make up names than wandering around a cemetery with a clipboard.  Computer generated lists of random names are within the means of anyone with moderate technical skills and the everyone else could just use out of town phone books available at any public library.

There have been countless studies done trying to find any real proof that dead people have voted in any significant numbers—and it simply hasn’t happened.  Though having said this, I can guarantee that someone will write me telling be about a cousin who had a friend whose first job on the police department of a small Southern town in New York was to write down the names on tombstones…  But, I am certain no one will write me with hard evidence about an actual case.  

America needs to rest assured that we still have the most honest, fair, and accurate elections possible.  There are occasional errors:  after all, in the last election, over 167 million people voted.  If the odds of an accident happening were only one in a million, then there statistically had to be occasional errors.  Errors that most likely balanced themselves out.

Relax, America.  We can live with this and work together to improve our elections.

But, we cannot fix the problem if high ranking election officials—And yes, I mean President Trump—seek to further their chances in a future election by trying to convince us that this last election was stolen.  Or is it simply the need to be the center of attention that forces the President to scream about a fraud that never was?

Creating serious doubt—unfounded and ludicrous doubt—about the accuracy of our electoral process is not only immoral, it is deliberately damaging to the foundations that our society is built on.  As Edward R. Murrow once said, “Accusations are not proof.”

Trying to convince the governor of Georgia to overthrow the results of the election, while technically legal, is a heinous act.  And it’s fairly stupid, too, since the governor does not have the legal right to do so.  (Something that the governor, to his credit, has wisely admitted publicly).

During the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly defamed an innocent, good man to make political points.  And, in a nation that had more than grown weary of the constant chaos of McCarthyism, a brave man, Joseph N. Welch, finally said publicly what so many had been thinking.  Joseph N. Welch spoke for all of America when he asked the senator, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

It is now time for someone, preferably in the Republican Party—a party long held hostage by a man who is obviously more concerned with himself than his country—to have another Road to Damascus moment and publicly denounce our president’s continued undermining of the democratic process.  

Mr. President, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Bottle Trees

You’ve seen them, and if you are from the South, you probably know someone who has one in their yard.  Take a tree (preferably a crepe myrtle) and start shoving empty bottles over the ends of the branches.  You can use blue bottles if you are a traditionalist, and damn near any color bottle if you’re more artistic.  The result is a Southern Bottle Tree.  

You’d be surprised at just how long man has been playing around with glass.  Long before he could make it himself, he could find small pieces of decorative clear glass in deserts, the remains of where meteorites that had exploded in the silica-rich sand millions of years earlier.  There were examples of this in King Tut’s tomb.

Man-made glass dates back to roughly 3500 B.C., in the Middle East, with the first hollow shapes created after 1600 B.C., in Egypt and Mesopotamia.  Glass production advanced dramatically, becoming an important trade good throughout the Mediterranean world.  By 100 A.D., clear glass was being produced in Alexandria and the Romans had begun mass producing both cast and free blown glass objects using tank furnaces that could hold as much as a ton of melted glass at a time.  

These early Roman bottles were obviously designed as much for their aesthetic appeal as for their utility.  The bottles range in color from pale blue-green to brown and are both spherical and bell shaped, with long tapering necks.  Several of the bottles have a separate decorative rope lip applied around the mouth...And those mouths may be the start of the real story of our bottle trees.

The wind blowing over the tops of those bottles produced an eerie sound that had to be obviously the work of demons and evil spirits.  This is roughly about the same time that the stories of genies in bottles started appearing.  And then, poor Jeannie had to wait over a thousand years for Major Nelson to show up and…. Oops!  Wrong story!

The bottles—and the belief in trapped spirits—made their way south into Africa, eventually reaching the Congo, where there was already a custom of decorating the graves of family members with plates and various household goods.  It was here that the custom of bottle trees was born.  And when slaves were brought to the new world, they brought the custom with them.

The “logic” of bottle trees is easy to understand.  The light of the sun shone through the glass, attracting the evil spirits lurking around houses.  Once inside, the spirits were caught like flies in a bottle, unable to find their way out again before the intense sunlight killed them.  Think of it as home security—spirit-catching bottle trees around a house would protect you from evil.

It didn’t take long before the plantation slaves were placing bottles on trees, especially crepe myrtle trees (probably because the crepe myrtle is linked in the Old Testament with slaves seeking their freedom).  And the custom spread and endures to this day.

Before some damn Yankee writes me about the quaint customs of hillbillies, I should point out that at the same time those stories of genies spread south into Africa, a related custom was spreading north into Europe, eventually reaching England.  Witch balls were round glass balls containing a single strand of hair or string.  Hung in windows to catch the morning light, an inquisitive witch would enter the ball and become entangled with the strand of hair, unable to escape before the sun killed them.  European immigrants brought the custom to New England, where they are still being made three hundred years later.  Sometimes these witch balls are called ‘watch balls’ or ‘gazing balls’ and are the source of those strange shiny bowling ball thingys you can see atop pedestals in people’s yards.

If you spend fifteen minutes online looking at photos of bottle trees, you’ll notice that about half of them use only blue bottles—cobalt blue bottles.  About five thousand years ago, someone accidentally noticed that if you added little lumps of various metals to molten glass, you got pretty colors.  I can just picture it:  Groups of Bronze Age glass makers running around trying to find something different and interesting to throw into the vat of molten glass to see what would happen.  (Was this one of the first, “Here—Hold my beer and watch this!” moments?).  Eventually, someone tried a lump of brittle gray cobalt—and got a brilliant blue cobalt glass for his trouble.

I’ll bet a dollar that you didn’t know the word cobalt came from the German word, kobald, which means “demon”.  Unfortunately for this story, the Germans named it for the bad spirit that gave them lung ailments when they tried to refine the silver containing cobalt.  It would have been so cool to picture early Germans placing empty bottles of Liebfraumilch onto trees…  Nah, it won’t stretch.

Today, you can generally tell the age of a bottle tree by looking at the bottles on the branches.  If there is a pretty blue, rectangular bottle—then it was made before 1980—back when the Phillips company was still selling Milk of Magnesia in glass bottles.  If there is a straight-sided Skyy Vodka bottle up there in the branches, it was made after 1992.

Bottle trees are the epitome of Southern folk art…. Well, they were the epitome for a couple of hundred years.  Today, they are so popular, you can find them just about anywhere, including in all fifty states.  I spent a little time amusing myself doing Google searches like “Boston Bottle Tree”.  (There are eight there.... And there are twelve in New York City).  You can find them in London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  Well, to be fair, I couldn’t actually find one on display in Hong Kong, but they make them there and sell them on Amazon.

I doubt that very many people are still making bottle trees in order to to catch evil spirits.  (If they were, they’d be all over Washington D.C.)  Maybe bottle trees are popular because Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, took a photo of a bottle trees in front of an old Southern house.  The image inspired the short story Livvie, where she wrote:

Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did.

Maybe.  Or maybe bottle trees are so popular today because, like the artist Jenny Pickford said, she is “holding glass up to the light, where it can sing.”

About Time to Shove the Cob

Enema U is an ag school, so I guess technically, I’m an Aggie.  Yeah, I’ve heard all the Aggie jokes.  (Did you hear about the Aggie coyote that got caught in the trap?  Chewed off three legs and was still caught in the trap.)  

Strangely, about the only people who ever tell me Aggie jokes or even use the word around me are university administrators hired from back east who are obviously a little embarrassed at finding themselves working at Harvard on the Rio Grande.  These are the people who sign their constant stream of nonsensical email with the phrase, “Go Aggies!”  

While the vast majority of faculty and students at Enema U have never been within a hundred yards of a tractor, it is still hard to spend a few decades at an agricultural school without learning something about growing crops.  I guess if you went back in time and plucked up a reasonably intelligent Neanderthal and dropped him down in the middle of a modern nuclear power plant for thirty or so years, he would eventually figure out a few things.  That’s me—an agricultural Neanderthal.

I’ve learned a few things about corn, probably the most genetically modified crop grown today.  At archaeology sites, I’ve seen some ancient examples of what corn used to be like.  Most people would not even recognize corn’s cultigen (original form).  Looking more like bumpy okra that corn, the cob was originally only a few inches long and had only five rows of tiny kernels.

Thousands of years ago, some farmer must have noticed that one of the ears of corn in his crop had seven rows instead of five and wisely decided to save it for seed.  Over a long time, such tiny selective processes have led to the monster ears of corn I like to roast in my BBQ grill.  (As Nero Wolfe said, people who boil ears of corn should themselves be boiled.)  

What originally got me to thinking about all of this was a conversation I had with my neighbor, Chuck—who is also an Aggie (though I think of him more as an autodidact).  We were talking about mechanization of troops in WWII, which eventually led us to discussing the rapid adaptation of tractors in the 20th Century.  If we hadn’t run short of beer...and if our good friend, Jack, had been present...we eventually would have balanced the national budget and brought about peace in the Middle East.

For some reason, people seem to believe that when new technology is invented, the old tech magically vanished instantly.  Worse, some politicians think that by outlawing the old tech, they can speed the adoption of new technology.  (California’s banning new gasoline-powered cars will not cause a dramatic increase in sales of electric vehicles, it will cause a dramatic increase in the sale of gasoline cars in neighboring states.)  In any case, the incorporation of tractors in farming was slower than most people think.

Among the “benefits” of the mechanization of farming wasn’t just the increase in efficiency:  mechanization also dramatically increased the amount of land being used to grow food for the table.  Before tractors, fully 40% of the cropland in America was being used to grow fodder for draft animals.  As the use of tractors grew, increasingly more of that land was used for the production of human food stuffs, which, while it dropped prices for consumers, also brought about agricultural overproduction that aggravated the Great Depression.

Eventually, Americans found markets for the surplus...which was good...but they also found other uses for the surplus, such as for corn, and this has turned out to be something of a problem.  Slowly, more and more corn was used to produce ethanol and high fructose corn sugar.  Today, the vast majority of corn production is used for these two products, so that the area of farmland used to produce corn  is roughly the size of California and 40% of that is to grow corn for the ethanol industry.

Ethanol production has not proved to be the environmental solution that most of us were promised.  It is bad for most engines, it is more expensive to produce than gasoline, and perhaps worst of all, it has totally warped the political landscape of the United States.  As every American is currently (and somewhat painfully) aware, presidential politics revolve around the Electoral College, which means that candidates must do well in the early primaries (particularly in Iowa, the golden buckle of the Corn Belt).

Every politician, whether Democrat or Republican, who hopes to do well in Iowa eagerly takes the Corn Pledge.  That’s a political promise to continue government subsidies for corn.  Today, largely because of the political power of the Midwest states in determining early primary races, the federal government spends more on subsidizing corn through direct payments, tax credits, low cost crop insurance, and subsidies for ethanol production, than on any other crop.  This is currently about $100 billion a year.  With these subsidies, corn is profitable, prompting even more farmers to switch their agricultural production from foodstuffs to non-food corn, slowly raising the prices of the food.  Today, corn is produced in all fifty states, and every year the total number of acres producing corn increases about 3%.

As more and more of the Midwest is devoted to producing a single crop, the risk to the economics of the agricultural community increases.  A bad year resulting from a worse than normal drought, a crop disease, or a flood would mean wide-scale disaster to the entire industry, and enormous cost to the taxpayers (who fund the federal crop insurance).

In addition, there are indirect costs of corn production:  Roughly six million tons of nitrates from fertilizer annually wash down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, helping to produce a “dead zone” that is seven thousand square miles this year.  This growing dead zone kills fish, shrimp, and oysters, raising the price of seafood to the consumer.  And every year, America’s burgeoning corn crop requires the use of more groundwater than the year before.

Worse, while ethanol is “cleaner” than gasoline, that is not the whole story.  To produce really large and profitable crops, corn farmers must use a lot of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides—all of which require even more petroleum for their production, transportation, and application.  Further, for reasons that are too involved for this blog, processing corn releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.  Increasingly, economists who have studied the net result of all of this have concluded there is little, if any, benefit to the environment from switching to ethanol.

The worst part of all of this is that the type of corn grown for ethanol and high fructose corn syrup isn’t even edible.  It’s a special variety of corn that you would have to boil for a day to get it soft enough to chew, and even then, it would have no flavor.  Even an Aggie knows this  stuff is not only not meant for humans, it hardly qualifies to be called corn.  

But, I’m just a poor dumb ol’ country boy:  Maybe you should ask a real Aggie.

The Queen of Washington D.C.

As we begin to once again change the occupants of the White House, we are starting to see stories about both outgoing and incoming First Ladies.  Predictably, not all of the stories are either complimentary or even kind, as if is okay to blame the wives of presidents for the political policies of their husbands.

Being the First Lady has to be right down there on the shit list of the most horrible jobs imaginable—somewhere between being Wolverine’s proctologist and Donald Trump’s speechwriter.  No one would want to volunteer to do that rotten job, much less be forced into the role by an overly ambitious spouse.  Still, the job today is better than it used to be, and for that we can thank the woman who really created the role—Dolley Madison.

Dolley, Dolly, Dollie--no matter how you spell her first name, you’re probably correct, as even Mrs. Madison kept changing the spelling.  This was back in a glorious time when only the truly ignorant could only think of one way to spell a word.  And technically, in Dolley’s day, you didn’t refer to the wife of the president as the First Lady, a term that didn’t exist until President Zachary Taylor used the term to refer to Dolly at her funeral.  While her husband was president, society was still debating exactly what term to use—Presidentess or Presidentress were considered before a more informal title was used, Queen Dolley.

During the two terms of President Washington, his wife Martha worked diligently to make her role the social head of the government.  Though she staged parties, as the wife of the president, she eschewed European fashions, wearing instead homespun American clothing envisioning her role as making the head of a new socially conscious American government.  Her successor, Abigail Adams, had a different vision, and sought to make her role as the political partner of her husband, the President.  

The Adams were the first to live in the newly completed White House, and perhaps the city of Washington was just not yet up to the role of grand capital.  The streets were rutted muddy swamps with vast open distances between the few buildings and houses.  Poor Abigail had to hang the laundry up in the East Wing to get anything to dry.

Thomas Jefferson was a widower, and once again, had a different idea about White House parties—mostly, he didn’t want any.  Nor was Jefferson a great believer in bipartisan efforts, usually inviting the men of his party to the White House—without their wives—to argue and hammer out policy.  Then Jefferson would invite the men of the opposition to the same kind of meeting.  The results were predictable—fistfights and the occasional duel and damn near no cooperation between the parties.  Believing that formal protocol and courtly fashions had no place in a democracy, Jefferson went out of his way to act informally, frequently answering the front door in slippers and casual clothing—a deliberate ploy to demonstrate that he thought that even the President

 should be a common man.

Even Jefferson had to host a few parties a year where the wives were invited, and the customs of the time required the president to have a female hostess as a chaperone.  When this happened, he usually asked the wife of his Secretary of State—Dolly Madison—to handle the chore.  Jefferson’s biographers are still debating whether he didn’t know proper protocol or was just deliberately ignoring it to make a political point.  At a state dinner, the President was supposed to take the arm of the British ambassador’s wife and escort her to dinner, but chose instead to escort Dolly.  Anthony Merry, the British ambassador was so indignant at the insult, called the Merry Affair, that he arranged a social boycott among the European diplomatic corps.  Jefferson ignored them and eventually the affair was dropped.

After Jefferson, James Madison became the president and he and his wife moved in to finally begin the process of turning the White House into a home suitable for the functions required by the head of state.  For the first time, the government bought furniture for the building and began decorating it for the state dinners and social functions that had to be conducted there, all under the personal supervision of Dolley Madison.  In essence, she was the first wife of a president to realize that the job required the social functions of Martha Washington and the political partnership of Abigail Adams.  Washington benefitted greatly from this, and during these parties a lot of important business was conducted.

Dolley ignored the American homespun cloth, and imported French silk for her gowns, which were cut scandalously low.  Much like Jacquelyn Kennedy, who later admitted Dolley was her inspiration, Dolly Madison was a fashion trendsetter.  Under her guidance, the large drafty Executive Mansion became a stylish home that hosted large and formal parties.

Unfortunately, this was work she had to do twice, as we all know that during the War of 1812, the British burned the White House as poor Dolley fled after rescuing the famous Washington portrait.  Well, sort of...Actually, she had the White House slaves gather up the best china and some important papers (including her husband’s notes on drafting the Constitution), sending everything away on carts.  While the slaves were doing the real work, Dolley was writing a letter to her sister, detailing the events.  (Not that it matters, but the Washington portrait that Dolley saved was a copy.)

While the White House was being rebuilt, the Madisons moved into the Octagon House, about two blocks from the ruined executive mansion.  This house survived the general destruction because the owners had arranged to have the French flag flown on the building, indicating it was part of the French embassy.  The British were temporarily at peace with the French, so they left the house standing.

After the Madisons left the White House, they returned to their beloved home, Montpelier.  Following the death of her husband, Dolley eventually moved back to Washington, becoming something of the social queen of the city, famous for her ability to work with politicians from both parties.  The House of Representatives, in recognition of her bipartisan work, gave her an honorary seat in Congress.  When Henry Clay said, “Everyone loves Dolley Madison,” she answered, “That is because she loves everyone.”

Dolley Madison was famous for creating conditions in which the two parties could work together, both formally and informally.  Perhaps it is time for a little more of the Madison spirit—and a little less of the Jefferson system—to return to Washington.

Once Upon a Time In Westerns

The other night, The Doc and I were watching the new Tarantino movie and I had a hell of time figuring out who was who.  I’m face blind, and as far as I can tell, about half of the actors in all Hollywood movies are Brad Pitt, and this movie actually had Pitt in it, and Leonardo DiCaprio was his stunt double and made up to look just like him—unless it was the other way around—so the plot was sort of hard for me to follow at times.

To me, it looked like Brad Pitt was in all the movie scenes, except occasionally, when he was joined by Brad Pitt.  I was very surprised not to see Scarlett Johansen, since she is in almost every other movie I watch.  (Brad Pitt would understand all of this, since he, too, is face blind.)

What I did notice however, were the horses in the Western scenes.  I have no idea how many different horses were used in total, but most of the scenes featured the same three bays and a single sorrel.  There was even one particular scene where Brad Pitt was talking to Brad Pitt, and both were seated in front of what looked like a crowded corral of horses—BUT, if you watched carefully, there was a guy in the corral that would walk across the screen from the left leading a bay followed by a sorrel, then he walks back the other way leading the sorrel followed by a couple of bays….  If you pay attention, there are even a couple of scenes where Brad Pitt is riding the sorrel.  

It’s a good movie, Brad should get an Oscar for Best Actor.  And another one for Best Supporting Actor.  (The Doc just told me the movie came out last year and Brad Pitt got an Oscar for Best Producer.)

As a child of the fifties and sixties, with about a zillion hours of television under my belt, I have a Ph.D. in Westerns, so I have always known that it wasn’t all that strange to see the same horse in several different television shows.  Matt Dillon, for example, rode the same buckskin horse in Gunsmoke as Ben Cartwright in Bonanza.  Thankfully, so as not to confuse the poor animal, he was named Ol’ Buck on Saturday night in Kansas and just plain Buck when he was in Nevada on Sunday nights.  And Little Joe’s appaloosa would occasionally wander off the set of Bonanza and appear on The Virginian.  

If you looked close, a lot of movies in the early fifties featured Roy Roger’s Trigger.  Occasionally, the horse even showed up in the credits, but never using his real name.  Trigger was a stage name; the palomino was registered as Silver Cloud.

A few Western stars actually owned their own horses.  Besides Roy and Trigger, Dale Evans owned Buttermilk.  (This prompted the show’s co-star, Gabby Hayes to call Dale ButterButt on the set.)  Tom Mix owned Tony, Gene Autry owned Champion, and Hopalong Cassidy owned Topper.  

You could just about fill a phonebook with all the horses that John Wayne rode in various movies.  Wayne was pretty candid about the fact that he was not exactly a horse lover, though he was a good rider and spent a considerable amount of time in the saddle.  The only movie horse that he actually liked was one called Dollar, a chestnut quarter horse Wayne rode in several of his last movies.  Wayne, like most actors didn’t actually own the horse—by the time a horse was trained enough to stand the noise and confusion of movie set, the trainers were very reluctant to sell their talented animals.  Though Wayne claimed he didn’t particularly like horse, he did arrange for an exclusive contract so that no other actor could use Dollar in a movie.   And in several movies (in particular, The Shootist), Wayne had the script altered so the horse would be mentioned by name. 

The Duke wasn’t the only actor to get attached to his horse, when Bonanza ended, Lorne Greene was afraid that Buck would end up in the glue factory—the poor animal had been hauling two big men around the West for almost two decades and his career was about over.  Greene bought the horse and arranged for the animal to be used in horse riding therapy classes.   Buck lived longer than some of the stars that had ridden him, passing away at the age of 49—an unusually long life for a horse.

Perhaps no actor formed as close a bond with his equine co-star as James Stewart and a sorrel named Pie.  If you’ve watched a western with Jimmy Stewart, chances are you have seen Pie—they were together in at least 17 movies.  The exact number is a little confusing, since officially, the last movie Pie was in was Bandolero, but you can clearly see the horse (right) in Cheyenne Social Club, released two years later, when the horse was at least 30 years old.  Let’s just say the two were together a long, long time.

Stewart didn’t own Pie, though he tried to buy the horse multiple times.  The owner, a young girl whose family had been training horses all the way back to the days of Tom Mix and William S. Hart refused to sell the animal, since they made their living hiring the horse out to lots of assorted movies and television shows.  The sorrel was a trifle small for a quarter horse, and was supposedly difficult to ride—he almost killed Glenn Ford by running deliberately into a tree.

With Stewart, however, Pie was a different animal; the actor claimed the horse understood the business of making movies and always hit his mark, standing still until the shot was over.  In one famous episode, Pie was supposed to slowly walk down the middle of the street without a rider.  On the day of the shot, the trainer wasn’t around, so Stewart simply explained what was needed to the horse, who did his solo scene flawlessly.  You can see the scene for yourself in the 1954 movie, The Far Country.  

While they were filming their last movie together, Pie was obviously in bad health.  Stewart’s co-star, Henry Fonda was a talented amateur artist and while they were filming in Santa Fe, Fonda painted a portrait of Pie for his friend.  Shortly after the painting was finished, Pie passed away.  Though Stewart didn’t own the horse, he arranged for a private burial of the horse at an undisclosed location, so that no one would be able to bother the grave.   

It’s kind of sad that we don’t make many Westerns any more.  There probably aren’t that many trainers devoting the years it takes to produce horses like Pie, any more.  Out of work horses should start a union.

And I can already hear the criticism from my own family, “How can you tell these damn horses apart and you can’t remember which granddaughter you’re looking at?”

The horses are bigger and have four legs.