Pioneer Thanksgiving

 The Faro Caudill family eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 (Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

We don’t have an official pioneer memorial day, but Thanksgiving seems a very appropriate time to think of all those trailblazers who came before us, especially the ones that didn’t make it.

 

So, here’s to the pioneers, the one’s who couldn’t sit still, the visionaries, the utopians, the filibusters, the proto-hippies, the foolhardy, the oddballs, and the merely hungry.

Here’s to the Studebaker company, that made the Conestoga wagons and all the little wagon shops too.

Here’s to the Overland Trail, The Oregon trail, and the Cumberland Gap, not to mention the Ozark Trail where the jalopies first rolled.

Here’s to the Susquehannock, the Sioux, and Comanche, who tried to keep us out.

Here’s to the  captive, the scalped, and the innocents of both sides.

Here’s to the indentured servant and the slave and the immigrant, to the Mexican citizen who suddenly became Hispanic American.

Here’s to the plainsman, the rancher, granger, ploughman, ranger, homesteader, sod buster, husbandman, stockman, pilgrim, and nester.

Here’s to the failures, the burnt out, dusted out, starved out, flat broke and busted.

Here’s to the sickly, the consumptive, and the pioneer mother burying another one too soon.

Here’s to the rebels, Quanah Parker, Delfido Gonzales, and Billy the Kid, who claimed to ride for justice, and probably did.

Here’s to the merchants and the freighters, hauling it all across the Santa Fe Trail and Belen Cutoff.

Here’s to the preachers, giving us hope and burying our dead.

Here’s to the teachers in the sod schools, the dugout schools, lean-to schools, and the dame schools.

Here’s to Bob Wills, Woody Guthrie, and all the fiddle & guitar players who lifted the gloom, if only for awhile.

Here’s to anybody who finds themselves “a stranger in a strange land.”

God bless you all, and finally, thanks.

Letter from Back East: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

The 1935 Hurricane memorial on Upper Matecumbe Key, Florida.

After World War One, veterans were offered a service bonus payable in 1945. And that was a fine and good thing, but along came the Great Depression and many of the veterans, displaced by the economic hard times, lobbied Congress to pay the bonus sooner.
In 1932 thousands of them demonstrated in Washington D.C. They set up a camp and there they stayed. President Hoover eventually ordered the marchers out of the city by force. It wasn't a pretty sight.
The next year the marchers returned and President Roosevelt persuaded many of them to take jobs building the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys. While working on this project, they were hit by a hurricane on Labor Day, 1935. It was the most intense hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States. 164 Keys residents were killed that day, along with 259 veterans. The stories from this storm are gripping and I won't go into them here; there are several books that do a better job of it than I could in a little blog entry.
How does this relate to our area? It doesn't. It's just that some of those bonus marchers stayed at my grandfather's house in Washington D.C. all those years ago, and every Labor Day I wonder if any of them went down to work on the highway, and if any of them made it out alive.

Florida Keys at sunset, both photos Canon EOS 20D.

Arthur Rothstein

Perhaps Rothstein's most famous photo, and an icon of the Dust Bowl:
 a farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936

(Wikipedia) Arthur Rothstein (July 17, 1915 – November 11, 1985) was an American photographer. Rothstein is recognized as one of America’s premier photojournalists. During a career that spanned five decades, he provoked, entertained and informed the American people. His photographs ranged from a hometown baseball game to the drama of war, from struggling rural farmers to US Presidents. Continued

Feed Sack Fashions And Patterns of Depression Era America

(Library of Congress)

(Flashbak) During the Depression people used cotton flour bags and feed sacks to make clothes, curtains, diapers, awnings and other household items. Manufacturers got wind of their bags’ other uses and began decorating them. Color and patterns added a little style and joy to the common sack dress. Of course, it wasn’t all altruistic. As we read in Cotton bags as consumer packages for farm products (1933): ‘One of the greatest opportunities to increase the use of American  cotton lies in the field of consumer packaging of farm products… Continued

Obar, New Mexico: Land of "Tropical Luxuriance"

Obar, New Mexico once sat along the Rock Island Railroad tracks, between Logan and Nara Visa, but nothing remains today. And I mean nothing, it's the most absent town I've found in these parts. Kenna, after being burned over a few years back, still has a few dwellings, along with a few inhabitants. Even Norton has a foundation or two to show for itself, but nothing remains of Obar proper.
This is all the more remarkable because Obar was heavily promoted by the New Mexico Land and Immigration Company, a fly-by-night developer based in Topeka, Kansas.
The NML&IC promised a land of milk and honey, and also to pave the roads and build a hotel. The land, of course, was as hardscrabble as the rest of the region, and the roads and hotel never materialized.
Obar made a go of it for a few years, attracting a couple of hundred settlers, all of whom moved on to better things, a little poorer and, one hopes, wiser for their trouble.
Sometime later, a little monument was erected by some thoughtful people to commemorate Obar, which you can see today, at the intersection of U.S. 54 and Quay Road K.


Obar

For the definitive history of Obar go to The Link Family Chronicles.

Heroism of the "Texas Division"

Litter bearers bring back wounded during attempt to span the Rapido
River near Cassino, Italy.” 23 January 1944 (Wikipedia)

(Texas Day by Day) On this day in 1944, the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division, nicknamed the "Texas Division," began its "two-day nightmare," the crossing of the Rapido River in Italy.
General Mark Clark needed pressure on the German defensive line below Rome to prevent the Germans from counterattacking the projected Allied beachhead at Anzio. Further, an Allied breakthrough into the Liri valley would facilitate the march toward Rome. Continued

Roadside Grave, Tolar, NM

(geneologytrails.com) ... The story begins with Charles and Mozella Trotter moving from Palmer, Oklahoma with their two daughters, Elsie and Charlene, and their 18-month old son Loral Eugene. The family packed their belongings, chartered a boxcar and headed west.
In the passenger car, the stove kept going out and according to Mozella Trotter, it was "cold, cold." She wrapped Loral Eugene tightly in a blanket. ... But the cold and the harsh elements took everyone down with colds; little Loral Eugene became seriously ill. They summoned a doctor who diagnosed bronchial pneumonia. The boy died February 16, 1907. Continued