sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you, and hope you all continue to over come your illness.
Story Neighbours
- Thread starter Lake Lili
- Start date
stjwelding
Veteran Member
Lake Lili I am sorry to hear that you and yours are under the weather I pray for a speed and complete recovery for all of you. Thank you for the new chapters, your story is one of the first one's I check to see if there are any updates. If i haven't said it before, this is one fantastic story, hoping for more soon.
Wayne
Wayne
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Sorry for the delay folks... lost the rhythm there and now the flow is gone and nothing is reading the way I want it to. I officially give up for the weekend and will start fresh with a clean screen tomorrow. So go read The Linder Legacy - its great to have Kathy writing again!
maineforlife
Contributing Member
Hope you had a good weekend and everyone is feeling better. Mondays are dreadful enough without feeling unwell.
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 44 – Back in the Saddle Again…
The solar powered golf cart whisked them back to the Committee Room. Allison and Sarah were giggling in the back with periodic glances at the guards.
“Girls!” admonished John. “A little decorum please! I realize that it is your rumspringa… but really…”
“Grossdaadi?” Allison asked. “Are golf carts permitted within the Ordnung? It would be so much easier for you to get around the farm…”
“You’re not smiling about that…” teased Sarah.
Allison turned bright red and turned on Sarah.
“Mr. Hogart gave you his address and asked you to write…” tattled Sarah.
“Young man!” exclaimed John in mock horror. “Is this true?”
“Yes, sir,” sated Jeremy Hogart.
“Excellent choice young man,” John said with a smile. “One hopes that you will remember to ask permission next time.”
“Will do sir. Thank you sir,” said the young man smiling at Allison.
*****
John entered the room and made his way to the front slowly. On reaching the desk, he sat heavily in his chair, wishing for a nap and feeling all of his 110 years. ‘Man is not supposed to grow so old,’ he thought. ‘Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.’
The girls sat on the bench behind him. They all stood as the Committee members reconvened. Official formalities aside. John raised his hand to speak.
“Gentlemen,” he started. “I’m old and tired and I have spent the morning rambling through my remembrances as a 12-year old. Perhaps I was not always clear but very few of us remember in detail the occurrences of our youths. Truly I am still not always clear on why things happened or how, or who in the end benefitted. The opportunities to research things has not been available to me, so I will leave them to your historians. Now I am willing to give you the rest of the afternoon and then I am going home. My bones ache and I know that my time on earth is limited and I have no intention of spending the remaining days here. Obviously you have questions… so you ask and I will answer what I know.”
The Congressmen looked at each other silently acknowledging that they would have to make due. Then the Congressman from New York cleared his throat and spoke into the microphone.
“Mr. McConnell, you spoke just prior to the lunch break about the power disruption to your community. Could you elaborate of it’s effects.”
“Well Mr. Ryckmann, firstly it wasn’t a disruption… That implies a short term loss and people working towards rapid reconnection. What occurred was a catastrophic systems failure and an almost total loss of personnel. In combination with the War and the economic depression that followed, it was more than twenty years before efforts turned again to making the remaining dams work again. Unfortunately the flow of neither time or water is kind and between the deterioration of the unmaintained dams and the remaining components within, there was little left that was usable. Five of the dams on the Missouri were gone – taken out by water or more sabotage. By the time I was in my forties the Missouri flowed freely through Montana and there were only three dams left between our state border and St. Louis. There were only two dams rebuilt in Montana and neither was an aid to us.
“When the Libby dam went, we were impacted. The Kootenai River levels lowered slowly and the farm which had once been riverside was now up on a mesa. We bought up the land that lay below us and that is where my farm is today. It took a lot of hard work to clear up the mess left by the reservoir. We hauled off logs, old cars, and the general flotsam and jetsam that people throw into rivers. Flooded land contaminates the soils with all sorts of unhealthy organisms and it takes time to kill those off. It also takes time to bring back native plants and animals as seeds washed in from other locals can compete with native species and crowd them out. Until the native plant and insect life is re-established, small animals cannot move back in. It takes time and it was happening up and down the waterways.
“Eventually we were able to plow under the silt and by annually adding several tons of manure to make the whole thing healthy and growing green crops, we were able to use it as pasture for some years. I guess it was my son John-David who began to grow crops there about sixty years ago. He did a fine job.
“But the loss of power was a cascading, want-for-a-nail, kind of event. The leaders of the Red States had intended only to impact the Blue States. Their people had gone in and closed down the switches that linked systems, but karma has a way of biting back. As our systems overloaded and went down, they surged through still connected back doors of back doors and soon the Reds were going down too. With the discovery of what had been done to the Blue States infrastructure and the discovery of the mass graves of electrical workers, the Blue States went on the offensive and began to eliminate Red States infrastructure. The truth is that with the power gone, there was little anyone could do to keep things running. We were completely dependent on electricity.
“But the tit-for-tat nonsense had begun on a large scale. One side took out a legislative building, so the other side did too. Bridges, factories, libraries, schools (usually when empty), hospitals, harbours, highways… the continuing damage was high and each set the clock back yet again.
“With the power out, things got really local, really fast. A trip to Kalispell became a major event, and a trip beyond became unlikely. Cars ceased almost overnight as gas vanished and remaining stock was held for tractors. The diesel trains continued until the oil ran out and then they were converted to steam. With the Appalachian coal seams firmly in our grasp, the coal was available to run them. Coal mining became profitable and honourable again and the abuses of previous generations were largely mitigated by community ownership of mines.
“The Amish colonies and my mother set-up clinics, to help people learn how to plow with their riding horses. They also helped plow gardens and taught canning and home preservation techniques. The Amish blacksmiths and ferries were kept busy shoeing horses and building wood stoves. And yet as I discussed the exodus south in hope of warmth and food had commenced. The highways were choked with people seeking whatever it was they no longer had. Roadsides were full of discarded items and our community cleaned up our roads from the border to Whitefish. All the collected items were sorted, cleaned and housed in the arena for donation as people needed them. Horse rustling became capital offences, as did general livestock and garden theft. Some people objected to that one but when it was pointed out that theft of food was theft of food and that asking was still likely to get most people fed, the arguments died. There were gallows north and south of every town and judgment was swift and final.
“So much fell apart so fast and it was so extensive that it is difficult to explain that in the end nothing was left of our original lives. At home, little changed because we did not have electricity in the house, but for others it was an enormous struggle. Medications vanished as did drugs and booze and those who coped using any and all were soon struggling to face their own demons. Doctors and nurses were called up for front line service leaving communities to face childbirth, injuries and chronic illnesses without direction or assistance. An aging generation retired medical personal stepped up where possible but most had come through schools and worked in systems that were highly automated and few were used to making decisions without labs and endless consultations to back them up. Dr. P continued to serve our family and the wider community until his death.
“We had fed ourselves for some time and what we could not obtain for ourselves we received in compensation for the potato crops we sold to the Army. I always thought that my brother Martin was the most inventive. While he was technically a butcher, he would take trade for meat, so he would have things like thimbles, or cow bells, or fabric dye, or a quilt. And soon people were going to him with a dozen buttons and taking home ribbons and a pair of earrings… or a chisel for 3-lbs of stewing beef and a pork tenderloin. His wife was a wonder of efficiency and she knew where everything was. She always said that it was her job to know who needed what, to trade for it and have it available. She never charged more than the person could afford and she told me that the hardest thing to learn was when to forgive a debt and when to chase one.”
John stopped and took a sip of water. “Gentlemen you need to make your questions far more specific. Open ended ones like that may not give you the information you want.”
The solar powered golf cart whisked them back to the Committee Room. Allison and Sarah were giggling in the back with periodic glances at the guards.
“Girls!” admonished John. “A little decorum please! I realize that it is your rumspringa… but really…”
“Grossdaadi?” Allison asked. “Are golf carts permitted within the Ordnung? It would be so much easier for you to get around the farm…”
“You’re not smiling about that…” teased Sarah.
Allison turned bright red and turned on Sarah.
“Mr. Hogart gave you his address and asked you to write…” tattled Sarah.
“Young man!” exclaimed John in mock horror. “Is this true?”
“Yes, sir,” sated Jeremy Hogart.
“Excellent choice young man,” John said with a smile. “One hopes that you will remember to ask permission next time.”
“Will do sir. Thank you sir,” said the young man smiling at Allison.
*****
John entered the room and made his way to the front slowly. On reaching the desk, he sat heavily in his chair, wishing for a nap and feeling all of his 110 years. ‘Man is not supposed to grow so old,’ he thought. ‘Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.’
The girls sat on the bench behind him. They all stood as the Committee members reconvened. Official formalities aside. John raised his hand to speak.
“Gentlemen,” he started. “I’m old and tired and I have spent the morning rambling through my remembrances as a 12-year old. Perhaps I was not always clear but very few of us remember in detail the occurrences of our youths. Truly I am still not always clear on why things happened or how, or who in the end benefitted. The opportunities to research things has not been available to me, so I will leave them to your historians. Now I am willing to give you the rest of the afternoon and then I am going home. My bones ache and I know that my time on earth is limited and I have no intention of spending the remaining days here. Obviously you have questions… so you ask and I will answer what I know.”
The Congressmen looked at each other silently acknowledging that they would have to make due. Then the Congressman from New York cleared his throat and spoke into the microphone.
“Mr. McConnell, you spoke just prior to the lunch break about the power disruption to your community. Could you elaborate of it’s effects.”
“Well Mr. Ryckmann, firstly it wasn’t a disruption… That implies a short term loss and people working towards rapid reconnection. What occurred was a catastrophic systems failure and an almost total loss of personnel. In combination with the War and the economic depression that followed, it was more than twenty years before efforts turned again to making the remaining dams work again. Unfortunately the flow of neither time or water is kind and between the deterioration of the unmaintained dams and the remaining components within, there was little left that was usable. Five of the dams on the Missouri were gone – taken out by water or more sabotage. By the time I was in my forties the Missouri flowed freely through Montana and there were only three dams left between our state border and St. Louis. There were only two dams rebuilt in Montana and neither was an aid to us.
“When the Libby dam went, we were impacted. The Kootenai River levels lowered slowly and the farm which had once been riverside was now up on a mesa. We bought up the land that lay below us and that is where my farm is today. It took a lot of hard work to clear up the mess left by the reservoir. We hauled off logs, old cars, and the general flotsam and jetsam that people throw into rivers. Flooded land contaminates the soils with all sorts of unhealthy organisms and it takes time to kill those off. It also takes time to bring back native plants and animals as seeds washed in from other locals can compete with native species and crowd them out. Until the native plant and insect life is re-established, small animals cannot move back in. It takes time and it was happening up and down the waterways.
“Eventually we were able to plow under the silt and by annually adding several tons of manure to make the whole thing healthy and growing green crops, we were able to use it as pasture for some years. I guess it was my son John-David who began to grow crops there about sixty years ago. He did a fine job.
“But the loss of power was a cascading, want-for-a-nail, kind of event. The leaders of the Red States had intended only to impact the Blue States. Their people had gone in and closed down the switches that linked systems, but karma has a way of biting back. As our systems overloaded and went down, they surged through still connected back doors of back doors and soon the Reds were going down too. With the discovery of what had been done to the Blue States infrastructure and the discovery of the mass graves of electrical workers, the Blue States went on the offensive and began to eliminate Red States infrastructure. The truth is that with the power gone, there was little anyone could do to keep things running. We were completely dependent on electricity.
“But the tit-for-tat nonsense had begun on a large scale. One side took out a legislative building, so the other side did too. Bridges, factories, libraries, schools (usually when empty), hospitals, harbours, highways… the continuing damage was high and each set the clock back yet again.
“With the power out, things got really local, really fast. A trip to Kalispell became a major event, and a trip beyond became unlikely. Cars ceased almost overnight as gas vanished and remaining stock was held for tractors. The diesel trains continued until the oil ran out and then they were converted to steam. With the Appalachian coal seams firmly in our grasp, the coal was available to run them. Coal mining became profitable and honourable again and the abuses of previous generations were largely mitigated by community ownership of mines.
“The Amish colonies and my mother set-up clinics, to help people learn how to plow with their riding horses. They also helped plow gardens and taught canning and home preservation techniques. The Amish blacksmiths and ferries were kept busy shoeing horses and building wood stoves. And yet as I discussed the exodus south in hope of warmth and food had commenced. The highways were choked with people seeking whatever it was they no longer had. Roadsides were full of discarded items and our community cleaned up our roads from the border to Whitefish. All the collected items were sorted, cleaned and housed in the arena for donation as people needed them. Horse rustling became capital offences, as did general livestock and garden theft. Some people objected to that one but when it was pointed out that theft of food was theft of food and that asking was still likely to get most people fed, the arguments died. There were gallows north and south of every town and judgment was swift and final.
“So much fell apart so fast and it was so extensive that it is difficult to explain that in the end nothing was left of our original lives. At home, little changed because we did not have electricity in the house, but for others it was an enormous struggle. Medications vanished as did drugs and booze and those who coped using any and all were soon struggling to face their own demons. Doctors and nurses were called up for front line service leaving communities to face childbirth, injuries and chronic illnesses without direction or assistance. An aging generation retired medical personal stepped up where possible but most had come through schools and worked in systems that were highly automated and few were used to making decisions without labs and endless consultations to back them up. Dr. P continued to serve our family and the wider community until his death.
“We had fed ourselves for some time and what we could not obtain for ourselves we received in compensation for the potato crops we sold to the Army. I always thought that my brother Martin was the most inventive. While he was technically a butcher, he would take trade for meat, so he would have things like thimbles, or cow bells, or fabric dye, or a quilt. And soon people were going to him with a dozen buttons and taking home ribbons and a pair of earrings… or a chisel for 3-lbs of stewing beef and a pork tenderloin. His wife was a wonder of efficiency and she knew where everything was. She always said that it was her job to know who needed what, to trade for it and have it available. She never charged more than the person could afford and she told me that the hardest thing to learn was when to forgive a debt and when to chase one.”
John stopped and took a sip of water. “Gentlemen you need to make your questions far more specific. Open ended ones like that may not give you the information you want.”
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sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you. Hope everyone is on the mend.
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Okay... here is where story telling can get interactive... new format...
My next chapter will answer some questions posed earlier by a commentator. If you have questions you want answered Private Message me and I'll include them (if you include your state, I'll make them your Congressman's questions.) Let's see if we can have some fun with this!
stjwelding
Veteran Member
Great story Lake Lili I am really enjoying it I pray all is well with you and yours. looking forward to more soon.
Wayne
Wayne
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 45…
“Mr. McConnell, can you explain again why your family and the Amish community were moved?” asked Congresswoman Smith from Alberta.
“Well I quite freely admit that what the original goals of the exercise were is unknown to me," said John. "I understand why the US would find the western Provinces and northern Territories attractive – land, lots of land, deep sea ports, network of waterways, but for the life of me I can’t understand why they’d want to take on the mess that was Quebec. I don’t believe that there has been much improvement in the Maritime regions of Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. They were always poor and economically challenged. Although it is my understanding that the development of their oil reserves has allowed them to pay their own way for once rather than be a drain to others. But the truth is I don't pay those places much mind now, so its hard to say if life has improved for them.
“Originally, we were advised that southern Ontario was to be turned into a large prison. It is my understanding that anyone who wouldn’t pull themselves together, get a job, and pay their way would get sent there... the chronic generational welfare families… but it collapsed pretty quickly once the war started.
“As for scooping up the farmers, well they didn’t take all the farmers. All the corporate farms remained in place. That accounted for somewhere around 80% of farms. The Army was only interested in the non-mechanized ones. I believe, and you will have to get the General to confirm this, but I believe that was an Army initiative to put in place a linkage of farms who could be relied upon regardless of the infrastructure situation to produce food for the Army. But again, outside of the group that came to the Rexford area, I don’t know how many others came west before the War started and that ground to a halt. They must have had other farmers with whom they had an exclusive relationship. I know that they bought heavily from the Hutterites. There were 188 colonies in Alberta at one time and more than half sold food products exclusively to the US Army. It was a good contract and once the lights were out, their picking up from us, saved us. If we’d had to truck the potatoes far, we would have failed.
“Not all Hutterite colonies would trade with the Army as some felt it crossed the line of absolute pacifism, but as with the Amish and Mennonites, their young men had also been drafted and no excuses were permitted. They were loaded onto buses at gun point and gone. In justification of their own failures, the Elders held the young men responsible, and in many colonies the young men were not permitted to return. One such was a man named Keith. Big fellow… had worked on a sod farm. His Colony cast him and fifteen others out. My mother met his wife at a farmers market in Cardston. Nice couple but under so much pressure. They didn’t want to leave but they were forced out with no place to go. So my mother arranged for them to come down here to join up with the other Wehrpflichtiger.
“I do know that the Army steered well clear of the Doukhobors, who many felt were just this side of completely unstable. Perhaps it was the temperament difference between German and Russian pacifists, or perhaps it was a difference in what was grown. I don’t know.
“So in answer to your question… we were moved because we were non-mechanized farmers and the army directive of the time was to secure non-mechanized farmers for the production of food for the troops. I am fairly certain that they did not expect to need us so quickly, but I suspect that having a secure source of food allowed them to move ahead. The contract was a God-send for us as it gave us the freedom to operate with a secured market and guaranteed payment. It allowed my mother to do all sorts of things that we might not have otherwise been able to do.
“For instance, we always need glass jars. So my mother found the Valley Recycling Depot in Kalispell. She was unable to find the manager, but she did find the operations manager, a Mr. Appleyard. They went through the facility and pulled all the glass cullet - both washed and unwashed. They removed all the jars that could be safely reused and then prepared the rest to be ground down to be melted. Working with a very talented local glass blower, a Mr. George Bland*, ten young people were apprenticed for the purpose of learning to produce canning jars, salve containers and drinking glasses. It was a huge success and filled a void. Eventually as lids grew scarce, the apprentices began to also produce glass lids. My mother was very good at seeing these holes and finding ways for us to fill them. Not all communities were so lucky.”
=====
George Bland is an extremely talented glass artist living in Kalispell. His work can be viewed at http://www.mthouseofglass.com/store/pages/About-Us.html I hope that he will not mind that I have recruited him to the survival of the community.
“Mr. McConnell, can you explain again why your family and the Amish community were moved?” asked Congresswoman Smith from Alberta.
“Well I quite freely admit that what the original goals of the exercise were is unknown to me," said John. "I understand why the US would find the western Provinces and northern Territories attractive – land, lots of land, deep sea ports, network of waterways, but for the life of me I can’t understand why they’d want to take on the mess that was Quebec. I don’t believe that there has been much improvement in the Maritime regions of Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. They were always poor and economically challenged. Although it is my understanding that the development of their oil reserves has allowed them to pay their own way for once rather than be a drain to others. But the truth is I don't pay those places much mind now, so its hard to say if life has improved for them.
“Originally, we were advised that southern Ontario was to be turned into a large prison. It is my understanding that anyone who wouldn’t pull themselves together, get a job, and pay their way would get sent there... the chronic generational welfare families… but it collapsed pretty quickly once the war started.
“As for scooping up the farmers, well they didn’t take all the farmers. All the corporate farms remained in place. That accounted for somewhere around 80% of farms. The Army was only interested in the non-mechanized ones. I believe, and you will have to get the General to confirm this, but I believe that was an Army initiative to put in place a linkage of farms who could be relied upon regardless of the infrastructure situation to produce food for the Army. But again, outside of the group that came to the Rexford area, I don’t know how many others came west before the War started and that ground to a halt. They must have had other farmers with whom they had an exclusive relationship. I know that they bought heavily from the Hutterites. There were 188 colonies in Alberta at one time and more than half sold food products exclusively to the US Army. It was a good contract and once the lights were out, their picking up from us, saved us. If we’d had to truck the potatoes far, we would have failed.
“Not all Hutterite colonies would trade with the Army as some felt it crossed the line of absolute pacifism, but as with the Amish and Mennonites, their young men had also been drafted and no excuses were permitted. They were loaded onto buses at gun point and gone. In justification of their own failures, the Elders held the young men responsible, and in many colonies the young men were not permitted to return. One such was a man named Keith. Big fellow… had worked on a sod farm. His Colony cast him and fifteen others out. My mother met his wife at a farmers market in Cardston. Nice couple but under so much pressure. They didn’t want to leave but they were forced out with no place to go. So my mother arranged for them to come down here to join up with the other Wehrpflichtiger.
“I do know that the Army steered well clear of the Doukhobors, who many felt were just this side of completely unstable. Perhaps it was the temperament difference between German and Russian pacifists, or perhaps it was a difference in what was grown. I don’t know.
“So in answer to your question… we were moved because we were non-mechanized farmers and the army directive of the time was to secure non-mechanized farmers for the production of food for the troops. I am fairly certain that they did not expect to need us so quickly, but I suspect that having a secure source of food allowed them to move ahead. The contract was a God-send for us as it gave us the freedom to operate with a secured market and guaranteed payment. It allowed my mother to do all sorts of things that we might not have otherwise been able to do.
“For instance, we always need glass jars. So my mother found the Valley Recycling Depot in Kalispell. She was unable to find the manager, but she did find the operations manager, a Mr. Appleyard. They went through the facility and pulled all the glass cullet - both washed and unwashed. They removed all the jars that could be safely reused and then prepared the rest to be ground down to be melted. Working with a very talented local glass blower, a Mr. George Bland*, ten young people were apprenticed for the purpose of learning to produce canning jars, salve containers and drinking glasses. It was a huge success and filled a void. Eventually as lids grew scarce, the apprentices began to also produce glass lids. My mother was very good at seeing these holes and finding ways for us to fill them. Not all communities were so lucky.”
=====
George Bland is an extremely talented glass artist living in Kalispell. His work can be viewed at http://www.mthouseofglass.com/store/pages/About-Us.html I hope that he will not mind that I have recruited him to the survival of the community.
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Old Gray Mare
TB Fanatic
delete
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you 
, makes me smile as you see.
, makes me smile as you see.
Dosadi
Brown Coat
Thank you. I cannot see an Alabama Senator fitting into the story over well. The two big things I'd like to know about is what became of the michigan guard and that congressmans ancestor.
And did the country form two governments, with differences, or did it become one big one with a winner and a looser.
Great story.
I took time to put Beefstew at a reasonable stopping place, and am going to take a brief rest on it. I may do some simple side stories for a bit, or just rest as there are a lot of real life happening at the moment. Getting garden ready, new animals, etc. And some family drama that has to resolve itself.
When I get loaded down with real life I just sometimes can't face a keyboard for a story that I"m loving.
I hope You both add more to this, and consider other stories. I truly found a lot to think about in this one.
Maybe a spin off on his "girls" and the man who wanted them to write. (PAW romance
)
And did the country form two governments, with differences, or did it become one big one with a winner and a looser.
Great story.
I took time to put Beefstew at a reasonable stopping place, and am going to take a brief rest on it. I may do some simple side stories for a bit, or just rest as there are a lot of real life happening at the moment. Getting garden ready, new animals, etc. And some family drama that has to resolve itself.
When I get loaded down with real life I just sometimes can't face a keyboard for a story that I"m loving.
I hope You both add more to this, and consider other stories. I truly found a lot to think about in this one.
Maybe a spin off on his "girls" and the man who wanted them to write. (PAW romance
)
Laurane
Canadian Loonie
You nailed it Lili, regarding the "why" - makes sense, and John would only be familiar with what happened in Montana, not the nether regions to the frozen north. And Quebec still was nonsensical - no other word for it.
My daughter-in-law's mother is a Social worker in BC around that New Denver area (Castlegar), and she has to visit Doukhobor women in the jail (or did have to - don't know if those same women are still in there). When she arrived, the woman would take all her clothes off in protest of a government visit, fold them on a chair, welcome her, then dress again and they would take tea. Happened every time - and these were old ladies who had been doing nude protests for decades. "This side of unstable" and not very pretty! - good description.
The Hudderites are really Hutterites (pronounced with a "d") and my brother in law in Sask has about 6 of them working for him year-round and seasonally.......They really do shun the young men and it is sad when a couple wants to be married, but the "old guy" running the Colony won't allow it for some specious reason. So these men go outside and work and they have to sneak home to see their Mutters (mothers) and often marry outside the religion. They often are poorly educated, as one asked my daughter who was going to Hawaii, if she could get there by the train......and my niece taught at a Hutterite school in SK, where to boys didn't want to learn and girls were discouraged from doing so. But the ones who leave the Colony sure can pick up computers/cell phones etc pretty quickly.
I like your reference to the MT glassblower, and I come from a long line of Yorkshire glassblowers - big bags of wind my parents jokingly called them.
My daughter-in-law's mother is a Social worker in BC around that New Denver area (Castlegar), and she has to visit Doukhobor women in the jail (or did have to - don't know if those same women are still in there). When she arrived, the woman would take all her clothes off in protest of a government visit, fold them on a chair, welcome her, then dress again and they would take tea. Happened every time - and these were old ladies who had been doing nude protests for decades. "This side of unstable" and not very pretty! - good description.
The Hudderites are really Hutterites (pronounced with a "d") and my brother in law in Sask has about 6 of them working for him year-round and seasonally.......They really do shun the young men and it is sad when a couple wants to be married, but the "old guy" running the Colony won't allow it for some specious reason. So these men go outside and work and they have to sneak home to see their Mutters (mothers) and often marry outside the religion. They often are poorly educated, as one asked my daughter who was going to Hawaii, if she could get there by the train......and my niece taught at a Hutterite school in SK, where to boys didn't want to learn and girls were discouraged from doing so. But the ones who leave the Colony sure can pick up computers/cell phones etc pretty quickly.
I like your reference to the MT glassblower, and I come from a long line of Yorkshire glassblowers - big bags of wind my parents jokingly called them.
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 46…
Congressman Charles from Iowa looked down the table and cleared his throat.
“Mr. McConnell, I am particularly interested in educational matters. I would like to know how your community managed its educational issues during the War. Few records have survived from that period. I would appreciate any light you can shed on this.”
“Well Congressman, I was in Grade Six when we were relocated and I was homeschooled up to that point,” John leaned back and recalled. “When we first came to Eureka, we were enrolled at the local schools. There were far too many of us for mother to homeschool on her own. I loved going to school and since we had kids in virtually every grade every year for about two decades, as a group my mother was able to ensure that we were listened to and had our needs met. The kids ran the spectrum from being learning disabled to card carrying members of Mensa…”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the Congressman. “But what is Mensa?”
John laughed. “Today people are judged by the contributions they make and the skills they have. And while that was also true in the century prior to the War, most people identified themselves by saying that they were better than anyone else at something. Everyone had to be better at something. Everyone had to be incredibly special and being normal was considered a copout. For those who were extremely bright, there was a group called Mensa. Their intelligence was measured by something called IQ and to be a member you had to be in the top 98%. Problem was that often they were really bright about only one or two things and dumb as stumps about the rest of life.
“In our family it was Drew Cody who was a Mensa member. When it came to maths, he was scary bright. He loved nothing more than to play with numbers. But he was barely literate. He hated to read and it was a huge chore for him. But he was part of the Three Amigos and those boys covered for each other. It took a while for my mother and the teachers to see what was happening and they quickly got him into a remedial reading program. It took a couple years but he was reading just fine in the end.
“For some reason Eureka had a lot of older teachers, so none of them were called up. Instead, the school became a fee paying school. Some parents paid in wood for the wood stoves in winter. Some parents paid in food for the teachers. Some paid in jars or clothing or animal feed. Everyone paid something and the teachers were told that it was their job to teach. A board of parents was elected… naturally with everything else on her plate, my mother was one of the elected. The high school became a trade school and most of the skilled trades spent time and took on apprentices. I say most, because in the way of the world not even the end of the one we knew would make the self-centered generous.
“People like Old Mr. Fuller who repaired farm implements. He refused to take on apprentices. He was as hide bound, nasty and cantankerous as one could possibly be. He was the reason my mother and two others made the long trip east and north seeking skilled trades. There were a bunch of trades we were short and we were proactive in looking to fill the gaps. Of course initially the gaps didn’t show but we were short some pretty specific ones. For example we didn’t have a saddle maker. There had been one. A Mr. Earl Twist in Kalispell, but he had been called up. The Army isn’t generally given to short-sightedness and they snapped him and his tools up before anyone could sneeze. Further down Highway 2 near Marion, MT, by Little Bitterroot Lake was the Montana Pack & Saddle company. The Army stripped them of saddlees too. So we were desperately in need of saddle and harness makers. The Amish stepped up and helped here. They brought in their saddlees and cordwainers and took on English apprentices.
“We were also short on horses for the community at large. As war and the lack of electricity took its toll, everyone needed horses. So a big trip was taken down to the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center in Lovell, WY. Now those folks were not happy to have people coming in to take the wild horses and we understood that, but in a choice between wild herds and human survival, man’s generosity to letting wild animals be has never been a strong point. We used some of our last gasoline to make that trip, so it lets you know the importance we placed on those horses. We brought back 30 horses.
“Now one of those quirks about the CoKL Amish is that they rarely broke their own horses. They usually bought racehorses that were deemed unfit or too old to race. So they usually came broke to traces and often to buggies. So the couple, the O’Sheas maybe, at JM Performance Horse in Eureka – that woman was gold when it came to handling those horses. She really had a magic touch. They did the breaking. But the gem was a guy named Doc Hammill. He could train teams of horses and mules. I signed up for his clinics. It was a privilege to learn from him. It took time but they took those wild mustangs and we were able to put them to work but really they were still wild, so eventually they became community breeding stock and were allowed to run wild again.
“There were so many things to learn just to allow us all to survive. For the first couple of years, most of those learning trade were girls. The young men continued to be conscripted as they turned 18 and that made it a challenge. As men came back maimed, they had to be trained too. We ended up with some fine cobblers and weavers with boys who had lost a leg. Initially the guys thought weaving was for sissies but when it was pointed out that most weavers in the UK in the 1800s were former soldiers, it took the sting out of the sitting.
Soon we had apprentice farriers too. There were six of those and they were all sent to the MSU Farrier School. It was an 11-week program followed by a one-year apprenticeship. Over time though, our biggest problem became getting the materials for the horseshoes, and not the skilled farrier to make them. We also had young people apprentice as vets. They too were worth their weight in gold.
“Life was never identical but it was good. We all had purpose and were busy. Everyone could read and write. Letter routes were continued. The cost of a letter was an egg. So the post office workers also traded eggs. Theft of mail became a hanging offence, so the mail carriers were rarely if ever touched.
“Now I’ve made it sound like my mother was the center of all this but she wasn’t. Or rather she was but she wasn’t alone. There were seven or eight churches in Eureka, plus the Amish bishops. So the Church Council played a big role in social event and spiritual issues. Then there was the existing political infra structure – Mayor McDoyle and his four person council, a JP, a Sheriff and two patrolmen, and of course the dogcatcher. Mom played a role in the Community Council as a part of the School Board. She loved it.
As I said it was a busy a fulfilling life. Or at least it was until the fourth year of the War. That was when some troubling diseases began to make a comeback. The first was influenza. I think they finally decided it was an H1N1 variant, regardless it hit hard. Fully a quarter of the community died and that changed everything again. Many fled the area taking it with them, which is likely how it reached us. Others shut their doors and died at home. It hit the children hard. We lost Samuel and Inga to the flu. Samuel had been a real joy – a bright energetic kid who took life as it came. Every day was like a bowl of ice cream to him – rich, sweet and fulfilling.
“It seemed to take everyone a long time to come back from that and as a community it took us time to find our feet. Into the recovery came our first problems. We had heard about the Bosozoku, the violent run tribes, from others who came through, but they had never come here before. They were simply destruction on motorcycles. Soulless… they torched houses, killed children in front of parents, slaughtered animals, ruined gardens… they were destroyers. They never stole. It was their code. They paid for what they took but they left the rest in ruins. They were often followed by the Kaminari Zoku – the thunder tribe. They stole. Mostly they stole women, enslaving and selling them down the line. They targeted the Amish communities because of the skills of their women. We sent the Sheriff and his posse out after them and they were able to recover some girls but not all. The other’s disappeared into the maelstrom of the War.
“Amos Yodder lost his three youngest daughters in one of the Kaminari Zoku raids. The youngest was recaptured but the oldest two were gone. I should say though that about forty years later a man came through the area looking for the Yodder family farm. He was directed out there and met the frail 98-year old Amos. We heard later that he had been Esther Yodder’s oldest son. She had been sold to a man down in Alabama. He had married her and she had raised-up nine children for him. This grandson had brought back his mother’s prayer cap as proof. He stayed for a bit and went home again. I don’t know if they stayed in touch.
“Between the War, the flu, the Bosozoku and their devil kin the Kaminari Zoku, we were a small remaining group. The population was probably only 1/3 of the pre-War population maybe even only a quarter. So if there are few records about education, I am not surprised. I am intrigued that there are any. It took about ten years for the systems to come back, until that time, most kept their children close and taught them at home.”
=====
Notes:
Earl Twist is a real-life saddle maker in Kalispell, MT. He can be reached at 406-752-4650 and is located at 55 Parklane Drive.
Montana Pack & Saddle of Marion, MT - http://montanasaddle.com/
Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center of Lovell, WY - http://www.pryormustangs.org/aboutus.shtml
JM Performance Horse of Eureka, MT - http://jmreining.com/
Doc Hammill Horsemanship of Eureka, MT - http://dochammill.com/
MSU Farrier School - http://animalrange.montana.edu/horseshoe.htm
The Bosozoku and the Kaminari Zoku are Japanese motorcycle gangs. Their names translate as given. Membership in them is illegal.
Congressman Charles from Iowa looked down the table and cleared his throat.
“Mr. McConnell, I am particularly interested in educational matters. I would like to know how your community managed its educational issues during the War. Few records have survived from that period. I would appreciate any light you can shed on this.”
“Well Congressman, I was in Grade Six when we were relocated and I was homeschooled up to that point,” John leaned back and recalled. “When we first came to Eureka, we were enrolled at the local schools. There were far too many of us for mother to homeschool on her own. I loved going to school and since we had kids in virtually every grade every year for about two decades, as a group my mother was able to ensure that we were listened to and had our needs met. The kids ran the spectrum from being learning disabled to card carrying members of Mensa…”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the Congressman. “But what is Mensa?”
John laughed. “Today people are judged by the contributions they make and the skills they have. And while that was also true in the century prior to the War, most people identified themselves by saying that they were better than anyone else at something. Everyone had to be better at something. Everyone had to be incredibly special and being normal was considered a copout. For those who were extremely bright, there was a group called Mensa. Their intelligence was measured by something called IQ and to be a member you had to be in the top 98%. Problem was that often they were really bright about only one or two things and dumb as stumps about the rest of life.
“In our family it was Drew Cody who was a Mensa member. When it came to maths, he was scary bright. He loved nothing more than to play with numbers. But he was barely literate. He hated to read and it was a huge chore for him. But he was part of the Three Amigos and those boys covered for each other. It took a while for my mother and the teachers to see what was happening and they quickly got him into a remedial reading program. It took a couple years but he was reading just fine in the end.
“For some reason Eureka had a lot of older teachers, so none of them were called up. Instead, the school became a fee paying school. Some parents paid in wood for the wood stoves in winter. Some parents paid in food for the teachers. Some paid in jars or clothing or animal feed. Everyone paid something and the teachers were told that it was their job to teach. A board of parents was elected… naturally with everything else on her plate, my mother was one of the elected. The high school became a trade school and most of the skilled trades spent time and took on apprentices. I say most, because in the way of the world not even the end of the one we knew would make the self-centered generous.
“People like Old Mr. Fuller who repaired farm implements. He refused to take on apprentices. He was as hide bound, nasty and cantankerous as one could possibly be. He was the reason my mother and two others made the long trip east and north seeking skilled trades. There were a bunch of trades we were short and we were proactive in looking to fill the gaps. Of course initially the gaps didn’t show but we were short some pretty specific ones. For example we didn’t have a saddle maker. There had been one. A Mr. Earl Twist in Kalispell, but he had been called up. The Army isn’t generally given to short-sightedness and they snapped him and his tools up before anyone could sneeze. Further down Highway 2 near Marion, MT, by Little Bitterroot Lake was the Montana Pack & Saddle company. The Army stripped them of saddlees too. So we were desperately in need of saddle and harness makers. The Amish stepped up and helped here. They brought in their saddlees and cordwainers and took on English apprentices.
“We were also short on horses for the community at large. As war and the lack of electricity took its toll, everyone needed horses. So a big trip was taken down to the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center in Lovell, WY. Now those folks were not happy to have people coming in to take the wild horses and we understood that, but in a choice between wild herds and human survival, man’s generosity to letting wild animals be has never been a strong point. We used some of our last gasoline to make that trip, so it lets you know the importance we placed on those horses. We brought back 30 horses.
“Now one of those quirks about the CoKL Amish is that they rarely broke their own horses. They usually bought racehorses that were deemed unfit or too old to race. So they usually came broke to traces and often to buggies. So the couple, the O’Sheas maybe, at JM Performance Horse in Eureka – that woman was gold when it came to handling those horses. She really had a magic touch. They did the breaking. But the gem was a guy named Doc Hammill. He could train teams of horses and mules. I signed up for his clinics. It was a privilege to learn from him. It took time but they took those wild mustangs and we were able to put them to work but really they were still wild, so eventually they became community breeding stock and were allowed to run wild again.
“There were so many things to learn just to allow us all to survive. For the first couple of years, most of those learning trade were girls. The young men continued to be conscripted as they turned 18 and that made it a challenge. As men came back maimed, they had to be trained too. We ended up with some fine cobblers and weavers with boys who had lost a leg. Initially the guys thought weaving was for sissies but when it was pointed out that most weavers in the UK in the 1800s were former soldiers, it took the sting out of the sitting.
Soon we had apprentice farriers too. There were six of those and they were all sent to the MSU Farrier School. It was an 11-week program followed by a one-year apprenticeship. Over time though, our biggest problem became getting the materials for the horseshoes, and not the skilled farrier to make them. We also had young people apprentice as vets. They too were worth their weight in gold.
“Life was never identical but it was good. We all had purpose and were busy. Everyone could read and write. Letter routes were continued. The cost of a letter was an egg. So the post office workers also traded eggs. Theft of mail became a hanging offence, so the mail carriers were rarely if ever touched.
“Now I’ve made it sound like my mother was the center of all this but she wasn’t. Or rather she was but she wasn’t alone. There were seven or eight churches in Eureka, plus the Amish bishops. So the Church Council played a big role in social event and spiritual issues. Then there was the existing political infra structure – Mayor McDoyle and his four person council, a JP, a Sheriff and two patrolmen, and of course the dogcatcher. Mom played a role in the Community Council as a part of the School Board. She loved it.
As I said it was a busy a fulfilling life. Or at least it was until the fourth year of the War. That was when some troubling diseases began to make a comeback. The first was influenza. I think they finally decided it was an H1N1 variant, regardless it hit hard. Fully a quarter of the community died and that changed everything again. Many fled the area taking it with them, which is likely how it reached us. Others shut their doors and died at home. It hit the children hard. We lost Samuel and Inga to the flu. Samuel had been a real joy – a bright energetic kid who took life as it came. Every day was like a bowl of ice cream to him – rich, sweet and fulfilling.
“It seemed to take everyone a long time to come back from that and as a community it took us time to find our feet. Into the recovery came our first problems. We had heard about the Bosozoku, the violent run tribes, from others who came through, but they had never come here before. They were simply destruction on motorcycles. Soulless… they torched houses, killed children in front of parents, slaughtered animals, ruined gardens… they were destroyers. They never stole. It was their code. They paid for what they took but they left the rest in ruins. They were often followed by the Kaminari Zoku – the thunder tribe. They stole. Mostly they stole women, enslaving and selling them down the line. They targeted the Amish communities because of the skills of their women. We sent the Sheriff and his posse out after them and they were able to recover some girls but not all. The other’s disappeared into the maelstrom of the War.
“Amos Yodder lost his three youngest daughters in one of the Kaminari Zoku raids. The youngest was recaptured but the oldest two were gone. I should say though that about forty years later a man came through the area looking for the Yodder family farm. He was directed out there and met the frail 98-year old Amos. We heard later that he had been Esther Yodder’s oldest son. She had been sold to a man down in Alabama. He had married her and she had raised-up nine children for him. This grandson had brought back his mother’s prayer cap as proof. He stayed for a bit and went home again. I don’t know if they stayed in touch.
“Between the War, the flu, the Bosozoku and their devil kin the Kaminari Zoku, we were a small remaining group. The population was probably only 1/3 of the pre-War population maybe even only a quarter. So if there are few records about education, I am not surprised. I am intrigued that there are any. It took about ten years for the systems to come back, until that time, most kept their children close and taught them at home.”
=====
Notes:
Earl Twist is a real-life saddle maker in Kalispell, MT. He can be reached at 406-752-4650 and is located at 55 Parklane Drive.
Montana Pack & Saddle of Marion, MT - http://montanasaddle.com/
Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center of Lovell, WY - http://www.pryormustangs.org/aboutus.shtml
JM Performance Horse of Eureka, MT - http://jmreining.com/
Doc Hammill Horsemanship of Eureka, MT - http://dochammill.com/
MSU Farrier School - http://animalrange.montana.edu/horseshoe.htm
The Bosozoku and the Kaminari Zoku are Japanese motorcycle gangs. Their names translate as given. Membership in them is illegal.
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you, good times and heart break.
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 47…
“Since you have already introduced the topic, Mr. McConnell,” said the Congressman from Alaska. “Could you tell me about the health care and disease impact on your community in the aftermath?”
“Well,” started John. “With all the issues and loss of life resulting from the combined attacks, disease and human, that bluntly decimated us, we had to rebuild again. It was hard with so many skills lost. Doc Hamill survived long enough to train several other teams of horses but he succumbed in the second round of flu. We will forever miss him.
“Oddly Dr. P survived. He was an amazing man. He began to work with the woman who was into new age hippie stuff. She danced around in long skirts with bells on and spoke in a wispy voice. She drove my mother nuts. My mother swore she prayed to crystals and that if she’d lived in the 17th century she’d have been burned as a witch. Dr. P found her amusing but swore that her mind when it came to the edible and medicinal plants of northwest Montana was solid. Apparently she had a whole string of certifications and degrees from reputable colleges and universities in biology and the like. She had even apprenticed as a midwife and for this reason alone, she was accepted in the community. She was desperately needed.
“Miss Hippie-dippy was properly called Melodie Hazel. Mom always said that a more sensible name might have led her in a different direction and then we’d have all been in trouble. With the loss of modern medicine, Melodie’s skill with native medicinal herbs was our lifeline and we all protected her carefully.
“For instance, she would dry the leaves of the bearberry plant and use them to strengthen the heart muscle and urinary tract, and to prevent uterine infection. She used it as a tonic for the sphincter muscle of the bladder, to help with bladder control problems. It was used by our midwives to return the womb to its normal size after childbirth. But most importantly with all the hygiene issues that arose with the collapse, its strong bacteriostatic action was used to combat the endless round of Staphylococci and E. coli infections. Those always drove her nuts. She swore there was never a need for being dirty.
“At her direction Sama and Andrea branched into soap making in a big way. Andrea loved putting rosemary in hers. The bars of soap weren’t cheap but two pounds of wood ash and a dozen eggs would get you a bar... Hmmm… Never thought about it before but I guess that eggs became a standard unit of currency…
“Currents were another of Melodie’s favourite. With the black currents, the raw fruits were regularly given as a treatment for colds, but mostly they were eaten as jams or dried for pemmican. She would use a decoction of stems and leaves for colds, sore throats, and for stomach troubles. For complaints of general sickness, she would dose you with a decoction of leaves and berries. But just the same, it was a plant that one had to be careful with because large quantities of northern black currants could be a strong purgative. If it was mixed with cranberries, it would cause vomiting at the same time. She believed that it had a calming effect on children, so sprigs of it were often wrapped in muslin and put in baby carriers.
“The roots of the black current could be used for the treatment of tuberculosis. White mountain heather was grown for the same reason. Luckily we didn’t have any of TB cases show up. But it was a trade item that we regularly sent to the Army because they did encounter it.
“The other two types of current around us were Wax and Golden currents. The wax currants were also used, but eaten raw they would induce vomiting. An infusion of the inner bark was often used as a rinse for sore eyes. It wasn’t Visine but it sure calmed eye irritation. Like the black currents, the golden currents were also edible and were turned into jams and syrups. But most often it was the bark of the golden currents that was used medicinally. Melodie would dry, then pulverize inner bark, and sprinkle it on sores. A decoction of the inner bark could also be used in the treatment of leg swellings. She would also make a poultice of plant parts to apply to snakebites.
“Once the last of the Bosozoku and their kin had cleared through town, we began to clean-up. It was heart breaking to pick-up the smashed pieces of people’s lives. Eureka had had a pre-War population of about 1,200 with another 2,000 in the surrounding area, including the Relocated. Afterwards our population was about 1,300. We worked together because the choice was to let things rot and there would be nothing more to replace it. One of the things we collected were the contents of people’s medicine cabinets and first aid kits. This gave Dr. P and Melodie something to work with. The Bosozoku had torched the Health Clinic and the Kaminari Zoku had stolen the two nursing assistants who had been there. Oddly though, the school had remained untouched. So the nurse’ station became the new clinic. The science lab next door provided the physical materials for Melodie to use to decant and measure and concoct her salves, syrups and pills. She took on three apprentices who helped her gather and prepare the plants she needed. A section of the school yard was plowed under and turned into a garden for the plants.
“In the garden she grew things like Choke Cherry, as its roots sooths a cough and acts as an expectorant and was extremely effective in dealing with dyspepsia. The parental favourite was that the bark could be used for things like pink eye. She also grew elderberry and Oregon grapes, comfrey, giant golden rod, and the Fairyslipper for the antispasmotic relief provided by chewing its bulbs. She was very careful in the growing of plants like henbane but our kids now had better things to do than waste their lives on hallucinogenics. Equally dangerous were the nightshade plants but again they were needed so the risk was worthwhile.
“Some plants like the Pale Comandra took a while to settle but the fresh roots could be used for sore eyes, but it had to be diluted in breast milk and so it wasn’t a favourite usage. But an infusion of the leaves was used to treat lung pains and to relieve the labored breathing caused by a cold or other illness. The juice of the plant was carefully extracted and was applied externally to treat cuts and sores. Melodie decocted the plant to make a wash for sores. She made my grandmother a foot bath for her ever painful corns. My mother liked the mouth wash Melodie made with a flavouring of mint for canker sores.
“I don’t know the whole list but somewhere in one of the journals, my mother wrote them all down. Many of those plants served to ease my father’s last months when the injuries to his brain had deteriorated his life to a point when he could no longer function. And if, as with years of experience with the dying behind me I suspect, they eased him home to the Lord that is between them and none cannot say that all was not given to him in care and love. He had been a kind and loving man and we remember him that way, not the broken man who came back to us. He was buried in the family cemetery on the farm. On his gravestone was carved a swallow.
“Disease-wise there were all the same coughs and colds that came with every winter. Influenza came and went and every year it seemed that it carried someone away with it. Traders brought chicken pox one year and that was a nasty one. I can’t remember which of my sisters was badly scarred by it but she survived and several others did not. Measles came in with another visitor. Scarlet fever found it way on the wind, although I suppose a visitor assisted it. For a world where transport was by horse, two feet or bicycle, people sure seemed to keep moving.
“The traders became a huge part of our life as much for the news they brought as the products they traded. There were two related trading clans who worked up and down the highway between Golden, BC and Missoula, MT. In Golden and Missoula they met up with other traders and exchanged goods for our route. We had one group through a week going north and south. They brought mail from and to the post office in Whitefish. With the train being the main source of transport, Whitefish had eclipsed Kalispell in importance. With the mail service running, we got mail all through the War from our boys. Like I had said earlier, they all came home except Eggie and Mary. One by one they came back to us. Wounded in body and spirit they had done their part. Melodie and Dr. P then did their parts to patch-up what could be mended and the mountains gave them the space to heal their minds. The boys all married and settled down to raise crops, animals and children… though not necessarily in that order. But they all seemed to settle eventually and I was glad that they were close by.
“I guess it was about a year after the War was over that a man walked up the drive. I was coming out of the barn with the team of Belgians when I saw my mother drop the laundry basket. She ran to meet him. They stood for a long time on the drive with their arms around each other before walking up to the house.
“My mother married Col. Tyler Donaldson the next Sunday afternoon in the little white community church. We had a pot luck feast in the yard and the whole community came out to celebrate. It had been a long road for both of them. We celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in the same church yard after a celebration of thanksgiving. They died within weeks of each other. She was 90 and he was 95. If you survive what life throws at you, you can live a long life.”
=====
For more information about the native and medicinal plants of Montana, please read http://montana.plant-life.org/
“Since you have already introduced the topic, Mr. McConnell,” said the Congressman from Alaska. “Could you tell me about the health care and disease impact on your community in the aftermath?”
“Well,” started John. “With all the issues and loss of life resulting from the combined attacks, disease and human, that bluntly decimated us, we had to rebuild again. It was hard with so many skills lost. Doc Hamill survived long enough to train several other teams of horses but he succumbed in the second round of flu. We will forever miss him.
“Oddly Dr. P survived. He was an amazing man. He began to work with the woman who was into new age hippie stuff. She danced around in long skirts with bells on and spoke in a wispy voice. She drove my mother nuts. My mother swore she prayed to crystals and that if she’d lived in the 17th century she’d have been burned as a witch. Dr. P found her amusing but swore that her mind when it came to the edible and medicinal plants of northwest Montana was solid. Apparently she had a whole string of certifications and degrees from reputable colleges and universities in biology and the like. She had even apprenticed as a midwife and for this reason alone, she was accepted in the community. She was desperately needed.
“Miss Hippie-dippy was properly called Melodie Hazel. Mom always said that a more sensible name might have led her in a different direction and then we’d have all been in trouble. With the loss of modern medicine, Melodie’s skill with native medicinal herbs was our lifeline and we all protected her carefully.
“For instance, she would dry the leaves of the bearberry plant and use them to strengthen the heart muscle and urinary tract, and to prevent uterine infection. She used it as a tonic for the sphincter muscle of the bladder, to help with bladder control problems. It was used by our midwives to return the womb to its normal size after childbirth. But most importantly with all the hygiene issues that arose with the collapse, its strong bacteriostatic action was used to combat the endless round of Staphylococci and E. coli infections. Those always drove her nuts. She swore there was never a need for being dirty.
“At her direction Sama and Andrea branched into soap making in a big way. Andrea loved putting rosemary in hers. The bars of soap weren’t cheap but two pounds of wood ash and a dozen eggs would get you a bar... Hmmm… Never thought about it before but I guess that eggs became a standard unit of currency…
“Currents were another of Melodie’s favourite. With the black currents, the raw fruits were regularly given as a treatment for colds, but mostly they were eaten as jams or dried for pemmican. She would use a decoction of stems and leaves for colds, sore throats, and for stomach troubles. For complaints of general sickness, she would dose you with a decoction of leaves and berries. But just the same, it was a plant that one had to be careful with because large quantities of northern black currants could be a strong purgative. If it was mixed with cranberries, it would cause vomiting at the same time. She believed that it had a calming effect on children, so sprigs of it were often wrapped in muslin and put in baby carriers.
“The roots of the black current could be used for the treatment of tuberculosis. White mountain heather was grown for the same reason. Luckily we didn’t have any of TB cases show up. But it was a trade item that we regularly sent to the Army because they did encounter it.
“The other two types of current around us were Wax and Golden currents. The wax currants were also used, but eaten raw they would induce vomiting. An infusion of the inner bark was often used as a rinse for sore eyes. It wasn’t Visine but it sure calmed eye irritation. Like the black currents, the golden currents were also edible and were turned into jams and syrups. But most often it was the bark of the golden currents that was used medicinally. Melodie would dry, then pulverize inner bark, and sprinkle it on sores. A decoction of the inner bark could also be used in the treatment of leg swellings. She would also make a poultice of plant parts to apply to snakebites.
“Once the last of the Bosozoku and their kin had cleared through town, we began to clean-up. It was heart breaking to pick-up the smashed pieces of people’s lives. Eureka had had a pre-War population of about 1,200 with another 2,000 in the surrounding area, including the Relocated. Afterwards our population was about 1,300. We worked together because the choice was to let things rot and there would be nothing more to replace it. One of the things we collected were the contents of people’s medicine cabinets and first aid kits. This gave Dr. P and Melodie something to work with. The Bosozoku had torched the Health Clinic and the Kaminari Zoku had stolen the two nursing assistants who had been there. Oddly though, the school had remained untouched. So the nurse’ station became the new clinic. The science lab next door provided the physical materials for Melodie to use to decant and measure and concoct her salves, syrups and pills. She took on three apprentices who helped her gather and prepare the plants she needed. A section of the school yard was plowed under and turned into a garden for the plants.
“In the garden she grew things like Choke Cherry, as its roots sooths a cough and acts as an expectorant and was extremely effective in dealing with dyspepsia. The parental favourite was that the bark could be used for things like pink eye. She also grew elderberry and Oregon grapes, comfrey, giant golden rod, and the Fairyslipper for the antispasmotic relief provided by chewing its bulbs. She was very careful in the growing of plants like henbane but our kids now had better things to do than waste their lives on hallucinogenics. Equally dangerous were the nightshade plants but again they were needed so the risk was worthwhile.
“Some plants like the Pale Comandra took a while to settle but the fresh roots could be used for sore eyes, but it had to be diluted in breast milk and so it wasn’t a favourite usage. But an infusion of the leaves was used to treat lung pains and to relieve the labored breathing caused by a cold or other illness. The juice of the plant was carefully extracted and was applied externally to treat cuts and sores. Melodie decocted the plant to make a wash for sores. She made my grandmother a foot bath for her ever painful corns. My mother liked the mouth wash Melodie made with a flavouring of mint for canker sores.
“I don’t know the whole list but somewhere in one of the journals, my mother wrote them all down. Many of those plants served to ease my father’s last months when the injuries to his brain had deteriorated his life to a point when he could no longer function. And if, as with years of experience with the dying behind me I suspect, they eased him home to the Lord that is between them and none cannot say that all was not given to him in care and love. He had been a kind and loving man and we remember him that way, not the broken man who came back to us. He was buried in the family cemetery on the farm. On his gravestone was carved a swallow.
“Disease-wise there were all the same coughs and colds that came with every winter. Influenza came and went and every year it seemed that it carried someone away with it. Traders brought chicken pox one year and that was a nasty one. I can’t remember which of my sisters was badly scarred by it but she survived and several others did not. Measles came in with another visitor. Scarlet fever found it way on the wind, although I suppose a visitor assisted it. For a world where transport was by horse, two feet or bicycle, people sure seemed to keep moving.
“The traders became a huge part of our life as much for the news they brought as the products they traded. There were two related trading clans who worked up and down the highway between Golden, BC and Missoula, MT. In Golden and Missoula they met up with other traders and exchanged goods for our route. We had one group through a week going north and south. They brought mail from and to the post office in Whitefish. With the train being the main source of transport, Whitefish had eclipsed Kalispell in importance. With the mail service running, we got mail all through the War from our boys. Like I had said earlier, they all came home except Eggie and Mary. One by one they came back to us. Wounded in body and spirit they had done their part. Melodie and Dr. P then did their parts to patch-up what could be mended and the mountains gave them the space to heal their minds. The boys all married and settled down to raise crops, animals and children… though not necessarily in that order. But they all seemed to settle eventually and I was glad that they were close by.
“I guess it was about a year after the War was over that a man walked up the drive. I was coming out of the barn with the team of Belgians when I saw my mother drop the laundry basket. She ran to meet him. They stood for a long time on the drive with their arms around each other before walking up to the house.
“My mother married Col. Tyler Donaldson the next Sunday afternoon in the little white community church. We had a pot luck feast in the yard and the whole community came out to celebrate. It had been a long road for both of them. We celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in the same church yard after a celebration of thanksgiving. They died within weeks of each other. She was 90 and he was 95. If you survive what life throws at you, you can live a long life.”
=====
For more information about the native and medicinal plants of Montana, please read http://montana.plant-life.org/
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sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you very good.
very good.
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 48…
Congresswoman Smith from Alberta smiled at John. “Thank you for telling me about your mother. I am glad that she found happiness...”
“I would like to know more about the security measures your community took,” interrupted Congressman Nichols from Colorado, who glared at his colleague for making such a girly comment.
“Thank you Mam,” replied John nodding his head towards Congresswoman Smith. “She and the Colonel were very happy together.”
“Now the truth is Sir,” said John, “I am not fully aware of the answer. I was a child at the start of all this and the tactics of the adults were to make us hide. But this was mountain country with lots of back valleys and interesting wildlife. One would have thought that with all the Amish around that there would have been a division between the armed and the unarmed. But the Amish own guns too and use them for hunting and pest control. They just won’t use them against another human, even to save their own lives. And that was a big problem when the Bosozoku and the Kaminari Zoku came calling. It is probably why so many Amish women and girls were taken by the slavers. And I do recall that there was resentment that it was okay for us to hunt them down and recover the girls but not okay to stop the stealing in the first place.
“Anyways… initially the Sheriff coordinated with the local Legion to bring retired soldiers on-line to organize an official defense policy. There were concerns that Washington State, officially a Blue State, would follow its eastern allies, but they didn’t. Many of the ultra-liberals of Seattle discovered to their horror that there was no support in the rural parts of their state. Many ran for Vancouver but were turned back at the border. Others ran for California but many others just pulled up their socks and got to work. The same thing happened in Oregon and Northern California. Southern California found itself isolated and under pressure from Mexico. Their Fifth Column of Mexican illegals brought them rapidly into Mexican control. Most of the wealthy ultra-liberals had never paid attention to who they hired and suddenly they found their support workers - housekeepers, gardeners, nannies, chauffeurs, janitors, and security staff – in control of their office buildings, houses and children. They folded like so many decks of cards and began a new life under Mexican control. Many found the tax situation far more to their liking. Others packed their bags and took the long trip through the Panama Canal heading for New York City.
“There were probably about 150 veterans of various wars – Korea, Vietnam, Bosnisa, Desert Storm I and II and Afghanistan – in the area. They had a good idea about the lay of the land but with the north-south artery running through the middle of town and us only being a day’s ride from Whitefish. Now most teams of horses will go about 25 miles a day, but by the end of the war our horses were used to long hauls and the 50 mile trip to Whitefish could be done in a day provded the wagon wasn’t heavily loaded. About half way inbetween was the old Highway Depot. An enterprising couple fortified it and turned it into a halfway house – an inn and tavern. The guy who organized it had served in the war and he brought home his whole unit. They settled in there. For all the world it looked like a palisaded fort with the soldier on guard.
Security was really an individual thing. We palisaded the farm, its yard and buildings. At night we brought our livestock inside the palisade. The cattle in the fields were guarded 24-hours a day. Occasionally, we’d get people snooping but it wasn’t kindly take to, so the snoopers were often given a lead welcome and an invitation to explain themselves to our Heavenly Father.
“I’m sure you’d like a full description of the hardware available but I don’t have that information for you. I can’t say that I know what everyone had. All we had were the long rifles that my mother had brought with us. They were single shot and more for hunting than defense. When the boys came home they brought their guns with them but ammunition was always hard to come by and one of the primary trading items sought. All that was eased slightly when one of the Colonel’s battle buddies joined us. He had been a gunsmith and he settled into a building in Eureka and began making rifles. They were gorgeous guns – the stocks were like silk and the engraving on the barrels and mounts was stunning. Some rich man once ordered a matched pair of hunting rifles from him and they were things of beauty. It hurt to see them go. He also made plain jane rabbit guns for the boys starting out and he always made a ceremony of a boy getting his first gun. I remember when Kurt got his. He was so proud and right puffed up when he brought Mom home his first rabbit. Good kid he was. Married one of the Yodder granddaughters. He kept their ways and raised his children up in their traditions but I don’t think he was ever baptized. He could never forgive the shunning his parents had endured and how in a time of need the Colony had extended it to him and his sisters.
“I think that it would be best to say that there was a loose association of neighbours who helped as needed, but nothing was ever particularly coordinated. That was why we were so vulnerable to the attacks by the Bosozoku and the Kaminari Zoku. Even afterwards it never really changed. There weren’t enough people, we were too spread out and the pacifism of our neighbours made it difficult to plan defenses. Mostly I think we all just prayed to be left alone. For the most part those prayers were answered.”
Congresswoman Smith from Alberta smiled at John. “Thank you for telling me about your mother. I am glad that she found happiness...”
“I would like to know more about the security measures your community took,” interrupted Congressman Nichols from Colorado, who glared at his colleague for making such a girly comment.
“Thank you Mam,” replied John nodding his head towards Congresswoman Smith. “She and the Colonel were very happy together.”
“Now the truth is Sir,” said John, “I am not fully aware of the answer. I was a child at the start of all this and the tactics of the adults were to make us hide. But this was mountain country with lots of back valleys and interesting wildlife. One would have thought that with all the Amish around that there would have been a division between the armed and the unarmed. But the Amish own guns too and use them for hunting and pest control. They just won’t use them against another human, even to save their own lives. And that was a big problem when the Bosozoku and the Kaminari Zoku came calling. It is probably why so many Amish women and girls were taken by the slavers. And I do recall that there was resentment that it was okay for us to hunt them down and recover the girls but not okay to stop the stealing in the first place.
“Anyways… initially the Sheriff coordinated with the local Legion to bring retired soldiers on-line to organize an official defense policy. There were concerns that Washington State, officially a Blue State, would follow its eastern allies, but they didn’t. Many of the ultra-liberals of Seattle discovered to their horror that there was no support in the rural parts of their state. Many ran for Vancouver but were turned back at the border. Others ran for California but many others just pulled up their socks and got to work. The same thing happened in Oregon and Northern California. Southern California found itself isolated and under pressure from Mexico. Their Fifth Column of Mexican illegals brought them rapidly into Mexican control. Most of the wealthy ultra-liberals had never paid attention to who they hired and suddenly they found their support workers - housekeepers, gardeners, nannies, chauffeurs, janitors, and security staff – in control of their office buildings, houses and children. They folded like so many decks of cards and began a new life under Mexican control. Many found the tax situation far more to their liking. Others packed their bags and took the long trip through the Panama Canal heading for New York City.
“There were probably about 150 veterans of various wars – Korea, Vietnam, Bosnisa, Desert Storm I and II and Afghanistan – in the area. They had a good idea about the lay of the land but with the north-south artery running through the middle of town and us only being a day’s ride from Whitefish. Now most teams of horses will go about 25 miles a day, but by the end of the war our horses were used to long hauls and the 50 mile trip to Whitefish could be done in a day provded the wagon wasn’t heavily loaded. About half way inbetween was the old Highway Depot. An enterprising couple fortified it and turned it into a halfway house – an inn and tavern. The guy who organized it had served in the war and he brought home his whole unit. They settled in there. For all the world it looked like a palisaded fort with the soldier on guard.
Security was really an individual thing. We palisaded the farm, its yard and buildings. At night we brought our livestock inside the palisade. The cattle in the fields were guarded 24-hours a day. Occasionally, we’d get people snooping but it wasn’t kindly take to, so the snoopers were often given a lead welcome and an invitation to explain themselves to our Heavenly Father.
“I’m sure you’d like a full description of the hardware available but I don’t have that information for you. I can’t say that I know what everyone had. All we had were the long rifles that my mother had brought with us. They were single shot and more for hunting than defense. When the boys came home they brought their guns with them but ammunition was always hard to come by and one of the primary trading items sought. All that was eased slightly when one of the Colonel’s battle buddies joined us. He had been a gunsmith and he settled into a building in Eureka and began making rifles. They were gorgeous guns – the stocks were like silk and the engraving on the barrels and mounts was stunning. Some rich man once ordered a matched pair of hunting rifles from him and they were things of beauty. It hurt to see them go. He also made plain jane rabbit guns for the boys starting out and he always made a ceremony of a boy getting his first gun. I remember when Kurt got his. He was so proud and right puffed up when he brought Mom home his first rabbit. Good kid he was. Married one of the Yodder granddaughters. He kept their ways and raised his children up in their traditions but I don’t think he was ever baptized. He could never forgive the shunning his parents had endured and how in a time of need the Colony had extended it to him and his sisters.
“I think that it would be best to say that there was a loose association of neighbours who helped as needed, but nothing was ever particularly coordinated. That was why we were so vulnerable to the attacks by the Bosozoku and the Kaminari Zoku. Even afterwards it never really changed. There weren’t enough people, we were too spread out and the pacifism of our neighbours made it difficult to plan defenses. Mostly I think we all just prayed to be left alone. For the most part those prayers were answered.”
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you, know about busy, we have been putting in posts today and concreting them in, General Conference tomorrow and Priesthood and work on the pen will take up the whole day. Plus running after 5 yr old grand daughter
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 48 cont.
“Actually, after the War security improved vastly,” John continued. “With the Colonel home and so many of Donaldson’s ducks relocating here and taking over abandoned farms and homes, things settled. Men with a natural eye towards personal security, extended it to their neighbours and the network spread. People worked hard to stabilize and build new lives and they were pretty cranky when other people tried to mess that up. People discovered they were good at all sorts of things they had never put much effort into before, so new services were offered, apprentices taken on, and we began to flourish with new vigour. Made us realize that perhaps the War had been a pruning that had allowed an old tree the chance to be renewed with a good pruning. Come the spring the tree was able to blossom.
“Of course there were set-backs. It was life not some blasted fairy tale. We were hit by con men, or a barn fire, or a flash flood or an early freeze. I don’t think we ever suffered a plague of locusts but there was always something climactic or insect-wise for the farmers to moan about.
“And for all the effort and all the good, there were still people who went bad. Some were just plain born that way and others… well… one of Connor’s buddies came back from the War and lost it completely. In those days before the War there would have been anti-psychotic medications, padded places and treatments for him. But when he snapped he became convinced that his family was inhabited by devils and the killed them all. His trial was swift and he was hanged. We were all sorry about him but there is no coming back from a place like that.
“One man, down towards the halfway house, was caught doing perverted things to a young boy. His wife swore he’d never shown sign of it before. So he was sentenced to two years hard labour breaking big rocks into road gravel with a mallet. But it seems he didn’t mend his ways, and three days after his release he was found hog tied and bleeding heavily on the front steps of the Sheriff’s station. He had been castrated and his genitals stuffed in his mouth. The Sheriff looked at him and put a bullet through his brain. There was no investigation. His widow and kin refused to claim his remains and he was buried in a shallow grave at Boot Hill, where he joined the horse thieves and cattle rustlers.
“Once we had a group of idiots who thought that robbing the train would be inventive. They forgot that every train was a military train. Really they must have had rocks for brains to take on a military convoy train. The Army however is not stupid. It had happened before in other places and they had a zero tolerance for it. They shot high, killing the robbers and saving the horses. The idiots went to Boot Hill and joined others of their ilk. The Army kept half the horses and the rest were donated to the local orphanage – that would be us.
“Mother’s fostering of War orphans had morphed into a proper orphanage. The sign on the gate read “The McConnell Home for Children” a handwritten note under the name said “Welcome to Bedlam! Please close the gate.” We had anywhere from 10 to 30 orphans at a time. Times were still tight and people were reluctant to take in more mouths to feed. Often relatives and neighbours took the kids in for a bit but the Children’s’ Aid lady, Miss Louise, still visited and she expected the kids to be in school or apprenticed. Using orphans for domestic labour or as unpaid field hands was not tolerated, so the kids were often turned over pretty quickly. Or other source of kids was the train.
“Back east, food was hard to come by in some areas and families would pool their money and buy a ticket west for their older kids. Sometimes there really were relatives at this end, often there was no one for the children to meet. Children would get off the train and be left standing at the stations. It happened a couple of times before the Station Master cottoned on to what was happening. He figured it out when he saw a known Tavern Keeper trying to chat up a young girl. The girl was crying and the Station Master intervened and the Sheriff called. The Tavern Keeper admitted that he had sometimes found his bar maids in this manner – that prompted a raid on his tavern and the freeing of several young girls. The Tavern Keeper was hanged for that - we’d learned from the last pervert that breaking rocks didn’t resolve that issue. The girls all came to my mother.
“Sometimes children would appear on the platform with notes for the Station Master. One of our policemen was Todd Stewart. He was the one we had brought with us from Chicago. I guess it was about five years after the War when three young children, ages six, four and a baby, arrived at our station. The note had read:
Hey T-man,
Marie and I survived this nightmare but she is sick and can’t travel yet. I’m sending you our kids. Please look after them until we can join you.
K
Karl Tanner and his wife Marie never made it and with seven of his own kids at home Todd and Ginny were out of space. So the Tanner kids came to us. There were a bunch of requests to adopt the baby but my mother never allowed siblings to be split-up. She felt it was cruel and left scars on the heart that could never be fixed. So kids stayed with us until the youngest were sixteen, or until they apprenticed or married.
“Sure the kids at our place worked. Nobody in the aftermath sat around. Television and computers were gone and there was no time, money or electrics to get them working again. Didn’t take long not to miss them... Life instead revolved around school, chores, friends, family, football, basketball, hockey, baseball, trail riding, campfires and wennie roasts, and playing music. Sunday night sing-a-longs were amongst the biggest social activities for young people. I met my wife at one.
“Anyways my mother believed that kids needed to be kids and that responsibilities grew with age. Every kid left our house being able cook, clean, plant a garden, preserve their food, handle livestock, mend their clothes, shovel the walk, split wood and build a fire. They also learned how to shoot. When young people left our house for an apprenticeship, they left with three sets of cloths and a gun. When they married Mom gifted them with household linens, basic kitchenware and their choice of a horse or a cow/calf. Because of that, people, including the Army, donated animals to us. Hilda took the two alpacas when she left to marry Henry Miller. She spun their wool and knitted sweaters from it. She had a good little business going.
“We heard that in other areas orphans ended up no better than slaves but it didn’t happen in our area. There was another orphanage down in Kalispell and my mother worked in conjunction with the couple that ran it. They ran on a similar model to ours. In Missoula, they had an awful time as the woman who ran the orphanage there was a spiteful old cow. Finally the Army removed her from the orphanage but it took a lot of work to fix the damage she had done to the children. My mother sat on the board there and went twice a year to check one it. You might not think that was often enough but it was 200 miles away and it was a 4-5 day trip getting there. So she would be gone for almost 2-weeks when she went to check on it.
“The thing about orphans in those decades after the War is that there was an almost endless supply of them. Disease, poor sanitation and nutrition, and sheer apathy, led to far more deaths than it needed too. But the worst was that many people had finally figured out that the easy life of before was never coming back, and they just couldn’t hack it. Some just lay down and gave up. Some went out in a blaze of glory. Some went out and took as many as they could with them. They almost all left children.
“Even before my Grandmother Jones died, Jamie and Sarai Cody had stepped in to help my mother. They had built a dawdi haus inside the palisade and had settled in there. They never had children of their own. So after raising Inga and the twins, who had been Sarai’s nieces and nephew, they began working with the orphans. When my mother and the Colonel died, they inherited the farm.”
“What!?!” boomed the Congressman from Colorado. “They did you out of your inheritance!?!”
John laughed. “Of course not! By the time my mother died, I had been farming the land along the Kootenai River for almost sixty years! You are forgetting timelines Sir. I was twelve when we arrived in Rexford. We started courting when I was eighteen and she was sixteen – the year after the War ended. We married when I was twenty. We were married for seventy years and I have been windowed for almost thirty years.
“I began working on that bottom land the year we began courting. My mother helped me buy it. I began to build our frame house that year. We were married the year I was able to put cattle on the land and could support us. My mother died some fifty years later. Jamie and Sarai had more than earned their inheritance. They also cared for my mother and the Colonel as they aged.” John stopped and smiled.
“As time went on caring for the aged became a big issue in the community. Those who survived the war and the waves of disease often lived long lives. Most stayed with their families but many could not, due to death or personality conflicts. Eventually one of the old two story strip motels on Hwy 93 was turned into a senior’s residence. It allowed for options. And perhaps as society moved along after the War, increased security and a stronger economy allowed for options like this to exist. The restaurant was cleaned up and reopened for meals and as a lounge. It became the social hub for seniors for card games, sing-a-longs and other activities us younger people did want to know about. Each family provided the furniture and food for their seniors and a young couple took over a house next door to provide cleaning, caretaking and cooking services. It had its glitches but for the most part it was a good solution.
“Truth was that all the way along the spectrum of life there were times when we need help and our family, friends and neighbours are the best ones to provide it. Learning to ask for and accept help was hard for many to do. It chaffed their view of their own invincibility. But that cliché of no man being an island it the truth. You need Our Heavenly Father and a community to make life work.
“Now our time together is coming to an end. I’ll answer a few more questions and then I am going home. It’s time to unlock the archives and let your historians in. So much of this they could have answered…”
John was feeling old and stating to feel argumentative. Allison opened her basket and brought out a large cookie and a thermos of coffee. A page moved over to stop her but she just glared at him. John ate and drank slowly and started to feel revived but all he really wanted was a nap.
“Actually, after the War security improved vastly,” John continued. “With the Colonel home and so many of Donaldson’s ducks relocating here and taking over abandoned farms and homes, things settled. Men with a natural eye towards personal security, extended it to their neighbours and the network spread. People worked hard to stabilize and build new lives and they were pretty cranky when other people tried to mess that up. People discovered they were good at all sorts of things they had never put much effort into before, so new services were offered, apprentices taken on, and we began to flourish with new vigour. Made us realize that perhaps the War had been a pruning that had allowed an old tree the chance to be renewed with a good pruning. Come the spring the tree was able to blossom.
“Of course there were set-backs. It was life not some blasted fairy tale. We were hit by con men, or a barn fire, or a flash flood or an early freeze. I don’t think we ever suffered a plague of locusts but there was always something climactic or insect-wise for the farmers to moan about.
“And for all the effort and all the good, there were still people who went bad. Some were just plain born that way and others… well… one of Connor’s buddies came back from the War and lost it completely. In those days before the War there would have been anti-psychotic medications, padded places and treatments for him. But when he snapped he became convinced that his family was inhabited by devils and the killed them all. His trial was swift and he was hanged. We were all sorry about him but there is no coming back from a place like that.
“One man, down towards the halfway house, was caught doing perverted things to a young boy. His wife swore he’d never shown sign of it before. So he was sentenced to two years hard labour breaking big rocks into road gravel with a mallet. But it seems he didn’t mend his ways, and three days after his release he was found hog tied and bleeding heavily on the front steps of the Sheriff’s station. He had been castrated and his genitals stuffed in his mouth. The Sheriff looked at him and put a bullet through his brain. There was no investigation. His widow and kin refused to claim his remains and he was buried in a shallow grave at Boot Hill, where he joined the horse thieves and cattle rustlers.
“Once we had a group of idiots who thought that robbing the train would be inventive. They forgot that every train was a military train. Really they must have had rocks for brains to take on a military convoy train. The Army however is not stupid. It had happened before in other places and they had a zero tolerance for it. They shot high, killing the robbers and saving the horses. The idiots went to Boot Hill and joined others of their ilk. The Army kept half the horses and the rest were donated to the local orphanage – that would be us.
“Mother’s fostering of War orphans had morphed into a proper orphanage. The sign on the gate read “The McConnell Home for Children” a handwritten note under the name said “Welcome to Bedlam! Please close the gate.” We had anywhere from 10 to 30 orphans at a time. Times were still tight and people were reluctant to take in more mouths to feed. Often relatives and neighbours took the kids in for a bit but the Children’s’ Aid lady, Miss Louise, still visited and she expected the kids to be in school or apprenticed. Using orphans for domestic labour or as unpaid field hands was not tolerated, so the kids were often turned over pretty quickly. Or other source of kids was the train.
“Back east, food was hard to come by in some areas and families would pool their money and buy a ticket west for their older kids. Sometimes there really were relatives at this end, often there was no one for the children to meet. Children would get off the train and be left standing at the stations. It happened a couple of times before the Station Master cottoned on to what was happening. He figured it out when he saw a known Tavern Keeper trying to chat up a young girl. The girl was crying and the Station Master intervened and the Sheriff called. The Tavern Keeper admitted that he had sometimes found his bar maids in this manner – that prompted a raid on his tavern and the freeing of several young girls. The Tavern Keeper was hanged for that - we’d learned from the last pervert that breaking rocks didn’t resolve that issue. The girls all came to my mother.
“Sometimes children would appear on the platform with notes for the Station Master. One of our policemen was Todd Stewart. He was the one we had brought with us from Chicago. I guess it was about five years after the War when three young children, ages six, four and a baby, arrived at our station. The note had read:
Hey T-man,
Marie and I survived this nightmare but she is sick and can’t travel yet. I’m sending you our kids. Please look after them until we can join you.
K
Karl Tanner and his wife Marie never made it and with seven of his own kids at home Todd and Ginny were out of space. So the Tanner kids came to us. There were a bunch of requests to adopt the baby but my mother never allowed siblings to be split-up. She felt it was cruel and left scars on the heart that could never be fixed. So kids stayed with us until the youngest were sixteen, or until they apprenticed or married.
“Sure the kids at our place worked. Nobody in the aftermath sat around. Television and computers were gone and there was no time, money or electrics to get them working again. Didn’t take long not to miss them... Life instead revolved around school, chores, friends, family, football, basketball, hockey, baseball, trail riding, campfires and wennie roasts, and playing music. Sunday night sing-a-longs were amongst the biggest social activities for young people. I met my wife at one.
“Anyways my mother believed that kids needed to be kids and that responsibilities grew with age. Every kid left our house being able cook, clean, plant a garden, preserve their food, handle livestock, mend their clothes, shovel the walk, split wood and build a fire. They also learned how to shoot. When young people left our house for an apprenticeship, they left with three sets of cloths and a gun. When they married Mom gifted them with household linens, basic kitchenware and their choice of a horse or a cow/calf. Because of that, people, including the Army, donated animals to us. Hilda took the two alpacas when she left to marry Henry Miller. She spun their wool and knitted sweaters from it. She had a good little business going.
“We heard that in other areas orphans ended up no better than slaves but it didn’t happen in our area. There was another orphanage down in Kalispell and my mother worked in conjunction with the couple that ran it. They ran on a similar model to ours. In Missoula, they had an awful time as the woman who ran the orphanage there was a spiteful old cow. Finally the Army removed her from the orphanage but it took a lot of work to fix the damage she had done to the children. My mother sat on the board there and went twice a year to check one it. You might not think that was often enough but it was 200 miles away and it was a 4-5 day trip getting there. So she would be gone for almost 2-weeks when she went to check on it.
“The thing about orphans in those decades after the War is that there was an almost endless supply of them. Disease, poor sanitation and nutrition, and sheer apathy, led to far more deaths than it needed too. But the worst was that many people had finally figured out that the easy life of before was never coming back, and they just couldn’t hack it. Some just lay down and gave up. Some went out in a blaze of glory. Some went out and took as many as they could with them. They almost all left children.
“Even before my Grandmother Jones died, Jamie and Sarai Cody had stepped in to help my mother. They had built a dawdi haus inside the palisade and had settled in there. They never had children of their own. So after raising Inga and the twins, who had been Sarai’s nieces and nephew, they began working with the orphans. When my mother and the Colonel died, they inherited the farm.”
“What!?!” boomed the Congressman from Colorado. “They did you out of your inheritance!?!”
John laughed. “Of course not! By the time my mother died, I had been farming the land along the Kootenai River for almost sixty years! You are forgetting timelines Sir. I was twelve when we arrived in Rexford. We started courting when I was eighteen and she was sixteen – the year after the War ended. We married when I was twenty. We were married for seventy years and I have been windowed for almost thirty years.
“I began working on that bottom land the year we began courting. My mother helped me buy it. I began to build our frame house that year. We were married the year I was able to put cattle on the land and could support us. My mother died some fifty years later. Jamie and Sarai had more than earned their inheritance. They also cared for my mother and the Colonel as they aged.” John stopped and smiled.
“As time went on caring for the aged became a big issue in the community. Those who survived the war and the waves of disease often lived long lives. Most stayed with their families but many could not, due to death or personality conflicts. Eventually one of the old two story strip motels on Hwy 93 was turned into a senior’s residence. It allowed for options. And perhaps as society moved along after the War, increased security and a stronger economy allowed for options like this to exist. The restaurant was cleaned up and reopened for meals and as a lounge. It became the social hub for seniors for card games, sing-a-longs and other activities us younger people did want to know about. Each family provided the furniture and food for their seniors and a young couple took over a house next door to provide cleaning, caretaking and cooking services. It had its glitches but for the most part it was a good solution.
“Truth was that all the way along the spectrum of life there were times when we need help and our family, friends and neighbours are the best ones to provide it. Learning to ask for and accept help was hard for many to do. It chaffed their view of their own invincibility. But that cliché of no man being an island it the truth. You need Our Heavenly Father and a community to make life work.
“Now our time together is coming to an end. I’ll answer a few more questions and then I am going home. It’s time to unlock the archives and let your historians in. So much of this they could have answered…”
John was feeling old and stating to feel argumentative. Allison opened her basket and brought out a large cookie and a thermos of coffee. A page moved over to stop her but she just glared at him. John ate and drank slowly and started to feel revived but all he really wanted was a nap.
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you kind lady . I know I am reading your story but General Con. doesn't start again for about 45 minutes.
. I know I am reading your story but General Con. doesn't start again for about 45 minutes.
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
I know... We're waiting for our ride. With the time change, its was almost midnight by the time we got home from the Priesthood meeting. I hope the guys enjoyed it because the ladies had a riot in the hall as the kids passed out from exhaustion on the gym mats... Lots of fun.
Laurane
Canadian Loonie
Now I need to know what provinces became part of the US......was it all called United States? Did the South ever rise again and did they use that Confederate money they had been saving? LOL.....
Did Eastern US ally with Quebec and did Texas join Mexico and California? Inquiring minds need to know........ John must have heard something.
This story is too close to reality for me, as we are going to be leaving Alberta for either British Columbia or Nova Scotia - each end of the continent. And we don't want to pick the wrong end......where would you suggest dear Lili, dear Lili. You seem to have the inside scoop?
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Also for the Conference watchers.......our internet connection stopped when Pres Uchtdorf was talking about the man going to the restaurant and not being happy with his service.......when it came back, the congregation was laughing and I missed the in-between - can anyone enlighten me please?
Did Eastern US ally with Quebec and did Texas join Mexico and California? Inquiring minds need to know........ John must have heard something.
This story is too close to reality for me, as we are going to be leaving Alberta for either British Columbia or Nova Scotia - each end of the continent. And we don't want to pick the wrong end......where would you suggest dear Lili, dear Lili. You seem to have the inside scoop?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also for the Conference watchers.......our internet connection stopped when Pres Uchtdorf was talking about the man going to the restaurant and not being happy with his service.......when it came back, the congregation was laughing and I missed the in-between - can anyone enlighten me please?
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
I love listening to Pres. Uchtdorf! The story was that the patron complained about there not being enough bread, so on each successive trip the waiter increased the amount of bread with no comment from the patron. Finally in desperation, the waiter took a loaf of French bread and cut it in half and served both pieces. The patron commented that they were back to serving him only two pieces of bread.
I really enjoyed Marcos A. Andukaitis of the Seventy's talk on the internet. A little punch and vigour was sorely needed as we were all trying not to fall asleep after a pot luck dinner. We have a missionary here from Raymond right now so it was great fun to listed to William R. Walker of the Seventy. While I always enjoy listening to Russell M. Ballard (Love his book!), I particularly enjoyed Quentin L. Cook's talk on the family. My calling is in our Family History Center right now so it had special meaning to me.
Laurane - thanks for the suggestions. Lili
I really enjoyed Marcos A. Andukaitis of the Seventy's talk on the internet. A little punch and vigour was sorely needed as we were all trying not to fall asleep after a pot luck dinner. We have a missionary here from Raymond right now so it was great fun to listed to William R. Walker of the Seventy. While I always enjoy listening to Russell M. Ballard (Love his book!), I particularly enjoyed Quentin L. Cook's talk on the family. My calling is in our Family History Center right now so it had special meaning to me.
Laurane - thanks for the suggestions. Lili
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Chapter 49…
“One of our biggest challenges,” John said taking control of the direction of the meeting, “was trying to figure out what we really needed versus what would be nice to have back. Before the power loss happened and the flu came and killed so many, things might be out of stock for a bit but the country... well there was never a concern that we might not be able to get something ever again. Some things seemed obvious, while others took a while to recognize. My mother, though because she had liked being prepared for all eventualities, recognized sooner than many of our neighbours that there was going to be a big problem. Just as she had back in CofKL she kept things stocked up and the money paid by the state for fostering the War orphans allowed her to expand the stocks.
The pantries that were built under the house were far more extensive than initially appeared. They had to be. We regularly had forty people at a meal and it didn’t take long to run out of anything. One of the things that got built was a separate bake house. It had six ovens and there were always things being baked. Lydie was the queen in there. She always had kids being trained in there. Our family moved on bread. When she left to be married there were plenty of kids trained up to take over, but few ever achieved her quality. For Lydie, baking was an art raised to her aspect. If you looked up the definition of baking her picture was there.
“The day the power went down, my mother hit CostCo in Kalispell. She took the older boys, all the trucks and trailers and the cube van she borrowed from a neighbour, and they went armed. She bought things like sugar – actually she bought two palates, she bought the same amount of flour, pickling salt. She bought jugs of vanilla, almond extract, molasses, flavourings like maple and mint, bbq sauce, ketchup, soya sauce, Worcestershire, and tabasco. She bought large containers of spices like garlic, cinnamon which comes from India, nutmeg – both ground and in nut form, ground ginger, paprika, pepper flakes, vanilla beans, and mixed spices – like Cajun and Italian. She bought huge containers vinegars – white, cider and pickling, and large metal cartons of cooking oils – olive and vegetable. She got large cartons containing boxes of baking powders and soda, packets of yeast, and bags of chocolate chips. Because the power was out, she also got large volumes of meat and frozen veg that were deeply discounted. She took every canning jar she could find. The boys worked hard to haul the loads home. Costco offered to deliver but my mother didn’t want any record of where we lived.
“They also hit the feed store buying up medications for the horse, cattle, pigs and chickens. They got supplemental feed for all of them and bales of barb wire and posts. Mom also took all the seeds and bulbs she could find. She checked the wall of for sale items at the tractor supply and picked up more chickens and several more sows with piglets. They contemplated the goats but as Andrea wasn’t with them, they just took the information if she wanted to follow-up.
“There were other things that at the time seemed weird to us kids. In the early days of the War, when things were still readily available, my mother panicked. As a writer, she was terrified of not being able to do so. So she went and cleared J2 Office Supplies and Office Max out of their paper and pens. She also bought notebooks – she seemed to need an endless supply of them, crayons, envelopes, and pencils. She bought so much that they delivered it to us. Her big concerns were preserving it because there are bugs that eat paper. But she had read that turpentine soaked rags in an otherwise dry space worked. Each case of paper was put on a slatted shelf allowing for lots of air around it.
“It lasted a long time, but the day came when most of it was gone. When she had got involved with the glass blowing, she had noted that there was a large amount of newsprint waiting to be recycled. A group of people along Hwy 2 in Kalispell had begun to experiment with making paper. They took control of the recycled paper at Valley Recycling. The quality of the paper varied from excellent to just this side of paper towel. It took time but they were finally able to establish themselves and they sent out paper men to buy paper. They used the military trains to buy more recycled news print and to create a market. From them, mom was able to get paper.
“She took me down to watch the process. They took the old newspapers and used a shredder off a document shredding truck the shred the old newspapers into smaller pieces. It was then put into a vat to soak. After an hour of soaking, white vinegar was used to white the paper, or food colouring was added to give it a more uniform colour. At this point, because the wet paper started out fairly finely shredded, the wet paper was the pounded again to give it an oatmeal-like consistency. All the liquid starch was removed from professional laundries and used to seize the paper. It was then spread evenly on large screens and set on a stack between layers of wool felt. The stack was then pressed to remove the water. The each sheet was hung on a large rack to dry. It was then cut into sheets of 8-½ by 11. The paper wasn’t cheap but it allowed for letter writing to continue. They told me it took three Harlequin romance novels to make a sheet of paper. That didn’t mean much to me but it always made my mother giggle. Although she thought they should become toilet paper. Actually they didn’t make toilet paper. Everyone had reverted to family cloths. Paper was just too expensive to drop down an outhouse chute.
“The source materials for paper were not endless. There was a lot of recycled newspaper that was bundles at recycling plants and it went first. Then people started to cannibalize books. It would be nice to believe that every word written was important. But we all know that it is not. The cheap paperbacks were in some cases more important than some hardbacks and decisions were made. Hemingway may have been a fine writer but unless you love his work beyond measure, a copy at the library is sufficient. And truthfully Dan Brown may weave a fine tale but there is a reason his books end up in the garage sale pile. Again a copy at the library is enough. And I truly believe that Harry Potter is fun for kids but a couple of copies in the school library will suffice, but unless the serial pony club books are teaching horse care, they can head for recycling. The decision making on this took for some tough calls. No one likes being called a censor or a destroyer, but the truth is that fifteen copies of any book in a small community or of a judgment on a minor crook - when the judge, lawyers, defendant, victim and jury are all dead, and in which no case history was made, is unnecessary. One copy might be kept but the other fourteen were recycled. Offices full of government busy work were recycled. Insurance firms ceased to exist and their papers were also recycled. I did hear the story of a man who tried to sue another because he fell on the sidewalk of the company’s store. The judge gave him fifteen days hard labour and told him to grow up. The point is that there was lots of paper for quite some time, and people began to see it as not quite so disposable. It was all saved and paper collectors travelled through communities buying paper scraps… the modern version of the rag and bone man.
“My mother also hit the fabric stores. She always bought denim and sheeting fabrics, and any thread, needles and buttons she could find. As those disappeared, the trading caravans became the source. They brought news in the fifth year of the War that surprised us all. The cotton fields of the deep south were being worked again. Slave labour technically didn’t exist but people indentured themselves for food and a safe place for themselves and their children. The people in the fields were White, Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. They all worked together. But cheap cotton from India was no longer available, so the fields were cleared and the crops went in. This time the mills were rebuilt in the south. There was no shipping it to the mills in the north. It never became cheap, but it was available. The fancier fabrics were gone. No one had time or money for silks, satins or brocades, or any place to wear them. The fancy stuff was made locally by our own weavers.
“Oddly most of our clothes were made from sheeting materials, denim and leathers. Initially kids wore whatever shoes they could find. As time passed, they wore tall moccasins with tire soles. In the winter they wore fur lined moccasins. The tall moccasins came almost to the knee. Girls wore them under skirts and boys wore them over pants. They protected the legs from things like deer ticks and the few snakes around. It took time to get used to them but then we never thought about them again. It was just the way that it was. The men mostly wore army boots and women did too, or they kept their moccasins.
“The most popular but hard to find foot wear were rubber boots. Rubber is a natural substance that comes from the sap of trees on the Malay Peninsula. As we imploded, that part of the world moved quickly into a series of hard-line Islamic states. But as all pendulums swing, things eased off after a couple of decades but I don’t think there was ever a resumption of trade. Then someone up in the Detroit area developed a process for melting the rubber out of tires and then dipping wood forms into the liquid rubber to make boots. I never owned a pair but I did see then on one of the trade caravans… pricey things. They looked like what my mother called Christopher Robin rubbers – black boots with a lighter brown band around the top.”
Sarah put a hand on his shoulder. Once of the Committee members looked at him closely.
“I think that a break is in order,” declared Congressman Charles. He stepped down and went over and spoke with Allison.
“Would you like me to get a doctor here,” he asked her.
“No thank you Sir,” she replied. “My great-grandfather is old and gets tired. He has spoken a lot today. Give him a few minutes and then perhaps a question or two more and we will have to call the day. He is ready to go home in more ways than one.”
The Congressman nodded.
“One of our biggest challenges,” John said taking control of the direction of the meeting, “was trying to figure out what we really needed versus what would be nice to have back. Before the power loss happened and the flu came and killed so many, things might be out of stock for a bit but the country... well there was never a concern that we might not be able to get something ever again. Some things seemed obvious, while others took a while to recognize. My mother, though because she had liked being prepared for all eventualities, recognized sooner than many of our neighbours that there was going to be a big problem. Just as she had back in CofKL she kept things stocked up and the money paid by the state for fostering the War orphans allowed her to expand the stocks.
The pantries that were built under the house were far more extensive than initially appeared. They had to be. We regularly had forty people at a meal and it didn’t take long to run out of anything. One of the things that got built was a separate bake house. It had six ovens and there were always things being baked. Lydie was the queen in there. She always had kids being trained in there. Our family moved on bread. When she left to be married there were plenty of kids trained up to take over, but few ever achieved her quality. For Lydie, baking was an art raised to her aspect. If you looked up the definition of baking her picture was there.
“The day the power went down, my mother hit CostCo in Kalispell. She took the older boys, all the trucks and trailers and the cube van she borrowed from a neighbour, and they went armed. She bought things like sugar – actually she bought two palates, she bought the same amount of flour, pickling salt. She bought jugs of vanilla, almond extract, molasses, flavourings like maple and mint, bbq sauce, ketchup, soya sauce, Worcestershire, and tabasco. She bought large containers of spices like garlic, cinnamon which comes from India, nutmeg – both ground and in nut form, ground ginger, paprika, pepper flakes, vanilla beans, and mixed spices – like Cajun and Italian. She bought huge containers vinegars – white, cider and pickling, and large metal cartons of cooking oils – olive and vegetable. She got large cartons containing boxes of baking powders and soda, packets of yeast, and bags of chocolate chips. Because the power was out, she also got large volumes of meat and frozen veg that were deeply discounted. She took every canning jar she could find. The boys worked hard to haul the loads home. Costco offered to deliver but my mother didn’t want any record of where we lived.
“They also hit the feed store buying up medications for the horse, cattle, pigs and chickens. They got supplemental feed for all of them and bales of barb wire and posts. Mom also took all the seeds and bulbs she could find. She checked the wall of for sale items at the tractor supply and picked up more chickens and several more sows with piglets. They contemplated the goats but as Andrea wasn’t with them, they just took the information if she wanted to follow-up.
“There were other things that at the time seemed weird to us kids. In the early days of the War, when things were still readily available, my mother panicked. As a writer, she was terrified of not being able to do so. So she went and cleared J2 Office Supplies and Office Max out of their paper and pens. She also bought notebooks – she seemed to need an endless supply of them, crayons, envelopes, and pencils. She bought so much that they delivered it to us. Her big concerns were preserving it because there are bugs that eat paper. But she had read that turpentine soaked rags in an otherwise dry space worked. Each case of paper was put on a slatted shelf allowing for lots of air around it.
“It lasted a long time, but the day came when most of it was gone. When she had got involved with the glass blowing, she had noted that there was a large amount of newsprint waiting to be recycled. A group of people along Hwy 2 in Kalispell had begun to experiment with making paper. They took control of the recycled paper at Valley Recycling. The quality of the paper varied from excellent to just this side of paper towel. It took time but they were finally able to establish themselves and they sent out paper men to buy paper. They used the military trains to buy more recycled news print and to create a market. From them, mom was able to get paper.
“She took me down to watch the process. They took the old newspapers and used a shredder off a document shredding truck the shred the old newspapers into smaller pieces. It was then put into a vat to soak. After an hour of soaking, white vinegar was used to white the paper, or food colouring was added to give it a more uniform colour. At this point, because the wet paper started out fairly finely shredded, the wet paper was the pounded again to give it an oatmeal-like consistency. All the liquid starch was removed from professional laundries and used to seize the paper. It was then spread evenly on large screens and set on a stack between layers of wool felt. The stack was then pressed to remove the water. The each sheet was hung on a large rack to dry. It was then cut into sheets of 8-½ by 11. The paper wasn’t cheap but it allowed for letter writing to continue. They told me it took three Harlequin romance novels to make a sheet of paper. That didn’t mean much to me but it always made my mother giggle. Although she thought they should become toilet paper. Actually they didn’t make toilet paper. Everyone had reverted to family cloths. Paper was just too expensive to drop down an outhouse chute.
“The source materials for paper were not endless. There was a lot of recycled newspaper that was bundles at recycling plants and it went first. Then people started to cannibalize books. It would be nice to believe that every word written was important. But we all know that it is not. The cheap paperbacks were in some cases more important than some hardbacks and decisions were made. Hemingway may have been a fine writer but unless you love his work beyond measure, a copy at the library is sufficient. And truthfully Dan Brown may weave a fine tale but there is a reason his books end up in the garage sale pile. Again a copy at the library is enough. And I truly believe that Harry Potter is fun for kids but a couple of copies in the school library will suffice, but unless the serial pony club books are teaching horse care, they can head for recycling. The decision making on this took for some tough calls. No one likes being called a censor or a destroyer, but the truth is that fifteen copies of any book in a small community or of a judgment on a minor crook - when the judge, lawyers, defendant, victim and jury are all dead, and in which no case history was made, is unnecessary. One copy might be kept but the other fourteen were recycled. Offices full of government busy work were recycled. Insurance firms ceased to exist and their papers were also recycled. I did hear the story of a man who tried to sue another because he fell on the sidewalk of the company’s store. The judge gave him fifteen days hard labour and told him to grow up. The point is that there was lots of paper for quite some time, and people began to see it as not quite so disposable. It was all saved and paper collectors travelled through communities buying paper scraps… the modern version of the rag and bone man.
“My mother also hit the fabric stores. She always bought denim and sheeting fabrics, and any thread, needles and buttons she could find. As those disappeared, the trading caravans became the source. They brought news in the fifth year of the War that surprised us all. The cotton fields of the deep south were being worked again. Slave labour technically didn’t exist but people indentured themselves for food and a safe place for themselves and their children. The people in the fields were White, Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. They all worked together. But cheap cotton from India was no longer available, so the fields were cleared and the crops went in. This time the mills were rebuilt in the south. There was no shipping it to the mills in the north. It never became cheap, but it was available. The fancier fabrics were gone. No one had time or money for silks, satins or brocades, or any place to wear them. The fancy stuff was made locally by our own weavers.
“Oddly most of our clothes were made from sheeting materials, denim and leathers. Initially kids wore whatever shoes they could find. As time passed, they wore tall moccasins with tire soles. In the winter they wore fur lined moccasins. The tall moccasins came almost to the knee. Girls wore them under skirts and boys wore them over pants. They protected the legs from things like deer ticks and the few snakes around. It took time to get used to them but then we never thought about them again. It was just the way that it was. The men mostly wore army boots and women did too, or they kept their moccasins.
“The most popular but hard to find foot wear were rubber boots. Rubber is a natural substance that comes from the sap of trees on the Malay Peninsula. As we imploded, that part of the world moved quickly into a series of hard-line Islamic states. But as all pendulums swing, things eased off after a couple of decades but I don’t think there was ever a resumption of trade. Then someone up in the Detroit area developed a process for melting the rubber out of tires and then dipping wood forms into the liquid rubber to make boots. I never owned a pair but I did see then on one of the trade caravans… pricey things. They looked like what my mother called Christopher Robin rubbers – black boots with a lighter brown band around the top.”
Sarah put a hand on his shoulder. Once of the Committee members looked at him closely.
“I think that a break is in order,” declared Congressman Charles. He stepped down and went over and spoke with Allison.
“Would you like me to get a doctor here,” he asked her.
“No thank you Sir,” she replied. “My great-grandfather is old and gets tired. He has spoken a lot today. Give him a few minutes and then perhaps a question or two more and we will have to call the day. He is ready to go home in more ways than one.”
The Congressman nodded.
Last edited:
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Thank you girl
Lake Lili
Veteran Member
Sorry for the delay folks...I've been pulling together all the paperwork to submit our Notification of Intent to Homeschool for the 2014/2015 school year. It a challenge since we've moved Provinces and the whole set-up is different here. Will try for something later today but most likely tomorrow.
sssarawolf
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Eee gads good luck and the Lords Blessings on all that. I love your story but I guess I can wait, (snicker).
A granddaughter asked me to make her some socks sooo I picked up the yarn yesterday and hit a sale on material. That is the only time I buy it the cost is getting utterly ridiculous if you ask me for both.
A granddaughter asked me to make her some socks sooo I picked up the yarn yesterday and hit a sale on material. That is the only time I buy it the cost is getting utterly ridiculous if you ask me for both.