"Just a Piece of Tin..."

 

Just a piece of tin, lying in the dirt.

To the finder it meant nothing, to a family, more hurt.

For removal and return proper steps were to follow.

To a community back home more pain, grief and sorrow.

A journey of  time and in decades lost

Of a round trip in miles and of the thousands it cost.

Of the man who had worn it so many of us knew,

A young man on our streets just like me and you.

Of a life never lived, or adventures untold

Of one life to give, a young never to grow old.

Just a piece of tin, lying in the dirt.

I photographed this  poem framed and on the wall in a museum back east while on a trip. It was penned by Charles Stage, 30 May 2016. It quite touched my heart and I saved it to share with you in our "memorial month."  

Ask Google if you'd like to know more fascinating history of U.S. military dog tags. 

****Bet you didn't know this "dog tag" trivia: People in the 1950s lived under constant threat of nuclear war and had tags made for their elementary age school children in districts across the U.S. New York City was the first public school system to issue the "identification tags" in Feb 1952, spending $159.000 to provide them to 2.5 million students. 

Wheat for Washington

We eat wheat most every day in some form or another. And mankind has been eating wheat for thousands of years. (Did you have toast, bagel or cereal for breakfast?) 

 How many types of wheat are there, would you guess? How many types are grown in Washington? Well, there are six main types or classes of wheat with many sub-categories under each of the six.

Wheat was first planted in the U.S. in 1777 and is still today the primary flour for U.S. grain products. Wheat is grown in 42 U.S. states with Kansas as the largest producer. Our own Whitman County produces on average 32 million bushels of wheat annually. Lincoln County produces 22 million bushels. (Need I remind you that many of our ancestors came to Eastern Washington back in the 19th century primarily to grow wheat?)

What's the best wheat for what product? 

Hard Red Winter wheat: general all-purpose

Hard Red Spring wheat: breads, rolls, croissants, bagels, pizza crusts

Soft Red White wheat: cakes, pastries, Asian noodles, flat breads

Hard White wheat: Asian noodles, tortillas, flatbreads

Durum wheat:  with a high protein content, perfect for pasta 

It's a real science to today's wheat farmers to know what to plant, where and when. Which type is best for their fields; which types best resist disease. Each farmer has to make a decision, sometimes field by field, about which wheat variety will work for  them. 

**Amazing wheat factoids: In 2022, the U.S. shipped 205.3 metric tons (about 250,000 pounds) of wheat overseas; this wheat export had the value of $7.3 billion; and the U.S. is the 5th in the list of wheat exporters. There are about 100 different varieties of wheat crackers to be found in your favorite supermarket. 

Warm Fuzzy Genealogy Stories

 

(Thank you Facebook for the photos.)

I confess that I only read the human interest stories in our local newspaper. And the funnies, of course! Those are usually so heart-warming. So I will share two recent ones with you today.

Originally from the Washington Post:  John Mills never gave his surname much thought until he learned that many of his ancestors were enslaved. His great-great-great grandfather, Ned Mills, was the first of the name which was given to him by the man who enslaved him. Ned Miles grew up on a Georgia plantation in the 1830s and after the Civil War, when he was a free man, spent the rest of his life as a farmer and blacksmith. 

After finding his own family history, John Mills founded an organization to help other previously enslaved people to find their family history too. "My great-great-grandfather lives on in me," and gives Mills the inspiration to help others.

Story #2:  Sandra Poindexter was at an auction in Lynchburg, Virginia, when she spotted a pair of bridal portraits and was "just mesmerized by them." Sandra won the portraits for a bid of $5 thinking "these are special to somebody." So Sandra began her search to find the couple or a descendant.

The photo was taken in 1959 and wonderfully the bride's name was written on the back: Harriet Elizabeth Marshall (Galbraith). Enlisting the help of a more seasoned genealogy researcher, Harriet's son was located in one day! And Harriet was still alive and living in Texas!

Sandra and Harriet exchanged many phone calls and stories concerning the back story of the "travels" of those portraits. "Seeing the portraits again brought back wonderful, happy memories," Harriet said. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer person and I'm glad to have been a little part of it," said Sandra.

Smarter Searching from Cyndi Ingle

 

Last February the EWGS program featured Cyndi Ingle. Her (too-short) time with us was fact-and-tip filled and her 8-page handout was a thorough reminder of what she taught us that day.

I'm typing in purple because (if you couldn't guess) purple is Cyndi's favorite color!

Some quick-and-always-good-to-review points to keep in mind:

• Records were and are created by humans.
• Humans make mistakes.
• Humans misspell things.
• Humans are inconsistent.
• Humans miscommunicate things.
• Just because many more things are digitized now doesn't mean that searching is really any easier than it was before. 
• We MUST think about ow and why humans created any set of records and the circumstances of their times and methods in doing so.
• We must consider how archivists and librarians catalogued their records' collections. 
• We must consider HOW those records made their way into the digitized world. 

Cyndi also explained that mysterious word database. What is a database? A database is a container filled with records. Think of a phonebook; it's a database filled with records, no? So Ancestry is a database of records, right? Then to be worthwhile, a database must be indexed for the words, fields and records to be searchable. 

With a big smile Cyndi said that "every database is unique depending on the data it contains and depending on the software used to create it. Everybody did it their own way!"

Then search engines. These are tools we use to search databases. And as with databases, every search engine is unique depending on the software and hardware used to make it.

** While Cyndi's handout from that day is not still available on our EWGS website, I'd bet you could ask your EWGS friend for a copy of theirs. 

Plants on the Oregon Trail, Part 3

 

This is Part 3; parts 1 and 2 were in the immediately-previous posts. 

The travelers remarked on the lovely larkspur flowers but quickly learned that wild larkspur was very bad for horses but okay for oxen and that chockcherry was bad for oxen. Animals, being animals, too often just munched away but were too important and valuable not to be watchful of.

The Oregon Trail travelers eventually learned about other plants:

• Western Buttercup - Indians used it to poison arrows
• Snakeweed - toxic to kidneys and liver
• Death Camas - white ones WERE deadly but BLUE ones were okay; only way to tell was when they flowered in spring, a luxury the immigrants did not have.
• Selenium - an element in the soil taken up into the plume grasses which cause digestive problems for the animals.
• Greaseweed - they started seeing these plants about Chimney Rock and quickly learned that it was good/safe for animals to eat in early spring but poisonous in summer.
• Horsebrush - this was toxic in many ways to animals
• Locoweed - there were many kinds of "loco weed"
• Texas Blue Bonnets - very toxic, producing birth defects in both men and animals
• Water Hemlock - growing vigorously along rivers but toxic
• Wild Parsnips - ditto
• Wild Milkweed - ditto

By the time they reached Owyhee County, Idaho, "there was scarcely a train without sick oxen on it" due to the many bad plants in the alkali areas which they couldn't keep the animals from eating. In the Blue Mountains of Oregon, the journal entries were pretty routine by this point. Little mention is made of plants except poison ivy. "They must have encountered this all along the way but only here is it often mentioned," Ms. Packard said.  

Following Grandma's advice that "if you don't know it don't eat it," was sound advice but to hungry people, they had to learn on their own. Children helped show the way!

Plants on the Oregon Trail, Part 2

 

This is Part 2, continued from Part 1 in the previous post.

Leaving time for the wagon trail was keyed to practicality: grass. Horses could bite short grass; cows and oxen could not. Horses eat by wrapping their tongues around longer grass. Journal entries spoke often of plants and grasses, which are remarkable considering they were seeing many new plants daily. The "tall grass prairies" had more feed than the "short grass prairies." Many wagon trains began with a high number of wagons but this number was reduced enroute simply due to the available grass factor for the animals. 

Pat Packard said she'd never found mention of their finding, picking and then cooking any kind of greens along the route. She did find mention of fruit (in late summer) such as chockcherries and currants. While the adults avoided unknown berries when they saw the red-berry smears on the faces and fingers of their children, they realized that berries weren't poisonous. Packard did mention the finding of wild onions, at least on the plains, but not in the far west. Fear of "death camas" was real and the pioneers hadn't the knowledge to see the difference between wild onion and death camas. Cactus was mentioned as bein new and so pretty but not to eat....and stepping on them was rarely mentioned. 

On they they learned to make was "mincemeat" most likely of berries and chopped buffalo meat. This was a pemmican-like product that they learned about from the Indians. 

By the time they reached the Rocky Mountains, they were hungry for fresh greens but none was to be had. They were still somewhat fearful of unknown berries and then they encountered the huckleberry! Again, their unafraid children showed them the way. By the time they reached the Rocky Mountains signs of scurvy were really showing up. The "bloom" of the trip had definitely worn off and also by this point "pretty plants" were seldom mentioned in the journals.

Also by this time the grain was gone as was the wild-grass-seed-grass so the horses were really in a bad way. This ongoing problem of feeding the animals dictated every decision made along the trail. Sometimes this led to making river crossings at dangerous fords (like the second crossing of the Snake in southern Idaho). They also had found that in the deserts of the West, everything "sticks, stings or stinks." Ms. Packard got a big laugh at that one. 

In 1852, some 72,000 people crossed the plains in more than 20,000 wagons. Imagine: 20,000 times four oxen or horses is a huge animal population needing feeding and leaving dung everywhere. No wonder the trail spread out with all those animals...and dust.... ahead of you. And remember that likely the children walked barefoot. 

Ms. Packard also explained the physiology of why plants affected horses and oxen differently. Horses take the food straight down into their stomach, where any in-plant poisons could immediately affect the animal. Oxen would take the food down into their "holding tank" stomach where the poisons could be neutralized before the food passed into the digestive stomach. 

TO BE CONTINUED.....................

Plants on the Oregon Trail, Part 1

 

In preparation for our EWGS May meeting, I thought I'd share something I submitted to our BULLETIN back in March 2009:

These are notes that I took in August 200-8, when I attended the Oregon California Trails Association (OCTA) Conference in Nampa, Idaho. Pat Packard was one of the featured speakers. She spoke on the plants of the Oregon Trail and how the folks perceived the plants and used them as they went along. I thought our EWGS readers might enjoy "hearing" her too. 

Plants fueled the trip for both men and animals. Plants dictated the route, the leaving times, the stopping times and points for the entire trip. They could not pack and carry with them enough food for their animals as they went along; horses and oxen had to eat along the way. 

Most of these families had already moved an average of five times. They thought of themselves as "movers." Because of that, they had experience with new plants in new places. Also because of that, they had developed a theory that if they didn't know what the plant was, and could not name it, they it was to be considered poisonous and not to be eaten. 

Most think they did glean and eat along the way. Not so, according to Pat Packard, for these reasons: 

(1) they were often in desert country where there was nothing to eat

(2) they travelled in summer when food-plants were less abundant

(3) they constantly encountered unknown plants and were fearful

Their basic diet was beans, bacon and biscuits. This is a diet high in carbs and protein. There was very little Vitamin C, and scurvy was the third highest cause of death on the Oregon Trail. English sailors had long ago discovered that limes helped and could be carried on long voyages. They got the idea that acid/sour substances were the cure for scurvy. The immigrants didn't have limes, but they did have vinegar. In her research, Ms. Packard found little mention of the pioneers searching to find vinegar or pickles to pack and take with them. This seems obvious to us now but not to them then. They really needed fresh fruit and greens. They had some dried fruit but unfortunately drying the fruit destroys the Vitamin C. They kept in mind the old advice about beware of poisonous plants and even as they saw various fruits and greens, they were fearful to use them. On the Mormon trains it was better because in many cases folks had been over the same trail before and their advice was passed along to new immigrants. Nearly 100% of the Mormon pioneers utilized the wild plants they found. 

TO BE CONTINUED