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    • An Island of Two Names

      I got to spend a little time on Rhode Island, in the State of Rhode Island, on Friday and Saturday.  It wasn’t a long stay, but with my son living in Portsmouth and working in Newport, it was a worthwhile one.  There are three towns on the island; these two and the appropriately named Middletown between them.  There are three bridges connecting the island to the rest of the state.

      The Narraganset called this island Aquidnet, and this evolved into the English calling it Aquidneck Island.  But like so many places where one population gave way to another, this island has that other name too – Rhode Island.  So the smallest state in the nation shares its name with its biggest island.  In fact its the origin of the name for the state.  Newport and Portsmouth were the original settlements and things just grew around them. But why have two names when you can just call the island Aquidneck and the state Rhode Island?  Because that’s the way Rhode Islanders like it.

      A close-up of that 1677 John Foster “Mapp of New England” shows the name as Rhode Island.  Newport is noted, and Portsmouth is shown as a town though not named.  Mount Hope is just across the water and Providence is further inland.  The map is oriented with West up and North to the right, and things are out of scale but you can clearly see Rhode Island as they knew it.

      Portsmouth was settled by a group of “Christian Disidents” seeking religious freedom.  The most famous of whom was Anne Hutchinson.  They noted their intent in the Portsmouth Compact on March 7th, 1638:  They noted their intent in the Portsmouth Compact on March 7th, 1638. This, according to Wikipedia, was the first document in American history that severed both political and religious ties with England:

      The 7th Day of the First Month, 1638.
      We whose names are underwritten do hereby solemnly in the presence of Jehovah incorporate ourselves into a Bodie Politick and as He shall help, will submit our persons, lives and estates unto our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, and to all those perfect and most absolute laws of His given in His Holy Word of truth, to be guided and judged thereby.

      The most famous of the three towns was and is Newport of course.  It was founded after Portsmouth by some of the settlers who moved from that town down the island.  Newport’s fame came when it became the playground of the wealthy who tried to outdo each other with their summer homes, the Newport Mansions.  That wealth brought in sports that the wealthy pursued; It was home of the America’s Cup for years, and home of the Tennis Hall of Fame, complete with grass court.  Newport has a certain upper crust vibe to it, much like Nantucket.  Middletown and Portsmouth are more working class, but with equally beautiful waterfront views. The main route through all of them has evolved to be strip mall heavy, but as with many places, once you get off the retail strip things improve greatly.

      This island was occupied by the British during the Revolutionary War, and held by them for three years.  As with Manhattan and Philadelphia it was an excellent port that worked to the strengths of the British Navy, allowing them to stage troop movement against the Americans. The American Army tried to displace the British once in that time in the Battle of Rhode Island with the support of French ships blockading the British.  This was the first engagement of the combined American and French forces against the British.  It didn’t go as planned as the French weren’t particularly aggressive in the naval engagements and the Americans were driven away when British reinforcements were able to land.  British naval might may have gotten into the heads of the French, who had the tactical advantage at the time. One other notable first from the battle was the very first mixed-race regiment, the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, had their first action of the war on the island.

      I’ve got a few connections to this island, but it remains a place I haven’t spent enough time in.  The last couple of years has changed that, and perhaps I’ll explore the island even more over the next few.  But as is my nature, I’ll most likely do it in the off-season when the crowds die down a bit.  There’s a history worth exploring on Aquidneck Island, er, Rhode Island… or whatever you want to call it.

    • Easy Like Sunday Morning

      Sipping coffee in the garden while watching the bluebirds fly between the feeder and the birdhouse I put up for them last year. Summer is finally here, the tea roses are blooming and the next round of garden perennials are about to burst in color. Monarda, hosts, day lilies, geraniums and rugosa roses are up soon. The garden is a delight of change.

      Morning is for reviewing what’s working and what needs work. I’ve filled in the holes in the garden and now maintenance is the rule of law. Easy like Sunday morning, but the rest of the day was filled with chores. Indeed, there are no breaks for the gardener in June. Pruning tree limbs, weeding, dead heading, staking, planting fill-ins, and house chores to round out the list. No, Sunday isn’t a day of rest for me. But the days fly by as I’m lost in the work, and most days I can’t say that about my chosen career. But its time to wrap this up – as you might expect I have work to do.

    • Elbow Room

      I’m not sure what my best life is, but I know that it doesn’t involve sitting in a car by myself stopped in relentless traffic.  But that’s where I found myself twice in the last 24 hours.  Friday getaway traffic in the rain was understandable.  Saturday logjam on two different highways was less expected.

      The older I get, the less I want to participate in the engineered world we’ve built around us in the United States.  I’m not particularly interested in sitting on a crowded beach, or going to the Esplanade on the 4th of July, or shopping on Black Friday, or commuting to anywhere on Route 128, or the Financial District, or really anywhere a lot of people are trying to congregate.  I don’t like traffic lights all that much, especially the ones that aren’t synced to have traffic flow logically.

      Crowded attractions aren’t my scene. Going to a Patriots game or a concert at Gillette Stadium is wonderful when you’re tailgating or in your seat watching the action.  Shuffling through security lines, lining up to go to the bathroom, shuffling back to your car to wait in traffic on Route 1?  I think not.  Irish Cottage on St. Patrick’s Day?  No Way.  Hampton Beach on a hot July Saturday?  Rain check.  Disney in peak summer crowds?  Been there, never doing it again.  Standing in line to get the best picture of St Mark’s Campanile in Venice?  No thanks.  Times Square?  I’ll walk three blocks around to avoid it.  Stand in a cue to summit Mount Everest?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  No, I’m an off-season kind of guy.  If I can’t get away with off-season, then you’ll find me up early before the crowds blow up your day.

      The planet is getting more crowded.  More people have disposable income that allows them to travel to the top sites in the world.  And I’ve got my own bucket list that includes some pretty popular places; Hawaii, London, Paris, Rome, and yes, Venice.  But I’ll find off-season if at all possible, thank you.  I’m not a hermit, I love a great conversation, a boisterous party, and the energy of a great concert.  But there’s no solitude in a line, and there’s great upside in a little elbow room.  So tell me how it goes at the opening weekend for the Encore Casino in Everett.  Expecting 50,000?  Lovely – I promise I won’t make it 50,001.  If there’s any upside to that, it’s that I’m giving someone else a little more elbow room at the slots.  You’re welcome.

       

       

    • Soggy with a Chance of Rain

      There are places in the world experiencing severe drought.  This is not one of those places.  New Hampshire is one of many states experiencing significant rainfall.  The rain seems to be with us day after day after soggy day.  I don’t mind the rain at all, but I like a little balance with my weather.  And so does the garden.

      The lawn looks as good as it’s going to look.  Most of the foliage is thriving in the garden as the plants are drunk with rain water.  The constant rain has also greened up the forest, providing deep shade that the ferns seem to thrive in.  A walk in the woods right now would require rain pants as much as a rain coat.  The drawback of course is that the rain has delighted the mosquito population.  I keep emptying the birdbath so they don’t use it as a breeding ground, but lets face it, there’s no shortage of wet places for mosquitos to breed this month.

      And not all plants love the rain.  The tomatoes are growing but being constantly wet isn’t good for them.  Likewise, the Supertunias are suffering from the constant wetness on the flowers and leaves.  The cilantro looks genuinely annoyed with the weather.  These are plants bred for hot sunny days, not April showers in June.  But that’s the state of spring in New England most years now.  And so we make the most of it, the plants and me too.

      If the garden accelerates with the rain, traffic does the opposite.  Things slow to a standstill when you add water to roads, and this week has been tough for commuters.  People drive more slowly, and people that drive carelessly have less room for error, resulting in more accidents.  Indeed, the highways are more unpleasant with this weather, and so are the people on them.

      But the garden offers refuge.  A little rain doesn’t stop a gardener, and I was out in the garden early this morning surveying things before getting to work.  And things are looking up.  The plants, for the most part, are thriving.  My water bill will be lower this June than in years past.  And the weekend looks like a return to sunny days.  Things are looking up, even in a downpour.

    • Clean Water or Jobs?

      In 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire.  It wasn’t the only time – the river had caught on fire at least 13 times in 100 years.  This wasn’t a case of a temporary oil spill sparking a fire, it was a case of a river so polluted that it would just CATCH ON FIRE.  Time Magazine described it as the river that “oozes rather than flows”.  The 1969 fire had one benefit, it was a catalyst for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.  People had had enough of disregard for the environment and this gave enough political will for Congress to do something about it.

      Closer to my home, the Nashua River famously changed colors daily depending on what they were dumping into it that day.  There’s a great story in the Huffington Post that describes how the efforts of one woman inspired other to join in to save the Nashua River, once, like the Cuyahoga River, one of the ten most polluted rivers in the country.  When people questioned the reasoning of companies dumping waste into the rivers, which was legal until 1962, one industrialist smugly replied to an employee; “Which would you rather have—clean water or your jobs?”  

      The Nashua River flows into the Merrimack River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean.  Cities like Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, Massachusetts tap into the river for drinking water.  I still remember when I went to college in Lowell in 1984 and first smelled the water.  It was a smell you got used to, but it wasn’t comforting.  And that was almost twenty years into the cleanup of the Nashua River and other upstream tributaries.

      The Housatonic River is a Superfund site because GE dumped PCB’s into the river for years…  after all, it was legal to do so, and what would you rather have – clean water or jobs?  Onondaga Lake in Syracuse was considered the most polluted lake in America because of a lovely combination of human sewage and Honeywell PCB’s and other chemicals being dumped into the lake.  Boston Harbor was considered the most polluted harbor in the country back in the 80’s until a massive cleanup effort and the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant finally began operating in 2000.  So why the hell did we let our waterways be treated so badly for so long?

      There are different categories of disregard for the environment, running from casual disregard to malicious intent.  Most people fall into the ignorant category.  People who throw their trash out the window of their car are no different than the person dumping chemicals into the river.  Their problem goes away, but it becomes someone else’s problem.  Selfish, narcissistic behavior that requires societal intervention ranging from public shaming, to fines to prison time.  Tossing your McDonalds bag of trash out the window might make your car cleaner, but it’s an eyesore for the rest of us.

      Not in my backyard.  It doesn’t matter that the river is bright orange as long as I’m not tapping into it for drinking water.  It doesn’t matter how many PCB’s are flushed into the lake because I don’t live on that lake.  Its okay to have more coal burning power plants because I won’t be around when the planet is a vast wasteland.  It’s okay if we erode the power of the EPA because shareholder value increases when enforcement gets swept under the rug.

      I had a roommate in college who got all of the people in the apartment together at the beginning of the semester to agree to a dirty dish enforcement policy.  If your dirty dishes where left on the counter or in the sink instead of cleaned after you made a meal the dishes were put into your bed.  This proved to be surprisingly effective, because it was hard to ignore a pile of dirty dishes piled on your bed.  It’s easy to ignore things until it directly impacts your quality of life.  That applies equally to a pile of dishes as it does for a polluter or litterer.  There’s a great video of a person sweeping the road when someone throws their trash out the window right at the feet of the person sweeping.  Another guy sees this, walks up and borrowed the broom and dustpan, swept up the trash that was just dumped out and dumps it into the car of the litterer.  It’s viral because most of us would love to do that to the person dumping the trash.  It’s the equivalent of putting the dirty dishes in the bed of the offender.  I’m all for taking the CEO of GE or Honeywell and having them swim in the Housatonic River or Lake Onondaga, or taking those PCB’s and dumping them in that CEO’s pool.

      The world is a fragile place.  We only have the one planet, but there are too many people who think the world is flat, that climate change is a scam or political ploy, that jobs are more important than clean water.  When Marketing genius Seth Godin proposed changing the discussion point from “Climate Change” to “Atmosphere Cancer“, there were some indignant bloggers whining about the insensitivity towards people with cancer.  They completely missed the point as usual.  At one point when the Cuyahoga River caught fire and the Nashua River flowed a different color every day we reached a critical mass of people who said enough is enough – we don’t want orange rivers or rivers of flamable sludge.  We don’t want to be forced to wear a pollution mask when we take a walk.  We’d like to have things like coral reefs and glaciers and plastic-free oceans.  The race is on, will we reach the resolve needed to course correct, or will we slide into Exponential View’s Climate Calamity.  The choice is ours.

    • Samuel Mott; General and Justice of the Peace

      I love random events that introduce me to people from the past.  It’s a dance with a ghost, a handshake with history.  This is one of those stories…

      I’d driven by this monument several times over the last few years whenever I went to Foxwoods Casino for meetings.  Shaped like a pawn on a chessboard, it was big and different and meaningful when placed on this spot, but seemed largely neglected and ignored by the thousands of cars that drive by going to and from the casino.  I’d glance over and contemplate stopping to read the engraved tributes on the monument, but the driveway was tight and not particularly welcoming for someone zipping by in a line of cars.  From the road I could read the dates on the top of the front face of the monument – 1861 1865 – the American Civil War.  Just about every town that was a town during the Civil War has a monument to those who served, and in many cases died there.  I resolved to pull into the tight driveway on my return from my meeting for a quick visit.

      By all accounts, this monument isn’t a big draw.  I may be the first person to pull into the driveway to walk around it in months.  It’s lovely and all, but let’s face it, most people aren’t thinking about the Civil War and World War One veterans of Preston, Connecticut.  The monument is right up on the road, but there are no flags commemorating those who fought, and on this rainy day no flag on the flagpole behind the monument either.  The monument was sited on the grounds of the former mansion of General Samuel Mott, who lived here and apparently, like seemingly every soldier in the Revolutionary War, hosted General George Washington.  His home is long gone, but the library that replaced the building stands watch.  The library in turn has been replaced by a newer building somewhere else in town and the old one, like the monument, doesn’t appear to have a lot of visitors.

      Of the four faces on the monument, two are dedicated to the Civil War veterans from Preston who served, one to the guy who paid for the monument in 1898 (That guy gets a nod if only for preserving his name for the life of that monument for a modest cash donation.  Hey, you can’t take it with you…), and one face was dedicated to General Samuel Mott.  That face was facing the old library, meaning it was facing away from the road…  meaning that very few people ever read his name anymore.

      This monument marks the dwelling place of General Samuel Mott

      Eminent citizen

      Upright Magistrate

      Soldier of the Revolution

      Friend of Washington

      To honor the Civil War veterans, the town offered these two tributes:

      “From this town obedient to the call of patriotism and humanity went forth one hundred and fifty men as soldiers in the Civil War.”

      “In grateful memory of those citizens of the town of Preston who served their country in arms in the war for the preservation of the Union.”

      Interestingly, the town decided to bolt on a bronze tablet honoring the men from Preston who served in World War One below the “grateful memory” engraving.  I imagine there are other memorials in town to the veterans of each war, but I found it curious that they turned the Civil War memorial into a general “War Memorial” after WWI.  There’s likely a story about the bolting on of the tablet buried somewhere in the town’s history, but it speaks to Yankee frugality.  At least they faced it towards the road so people could see it.

      “Colonel (afterwards General) Samuel Mott, at whose house General Washington is said to have called, lived in Preston City; his house occupied the spot where now (1922) stands the Public Library of that town  …  Samuel Mott was appointed an Engineer in 1776.  He was Lieutenant-Colonel when he served in the Northern campaign at Ticonderoga, Crown Point and Quebec…” The Descendents of Governor Thomas Wells

      Samuel Mott wasn’t a big name in the Revolutionary War, but he served his country in some of the most critical battles in the early part of the war.  Being promoted to general was a highly political business during the war, but it does speak to some level of respect for his accomplishments to that point.  I’m sure he knew Benedict Arnold well, being a fellow Connecticut guy, and likely served under him on those early campaigns when Arnold was still a complicated hero.  Arnold led troops to Quebec through Maine and was met there by General Richard Montgomery, who came up from Lake Champlain.    The soldiers who laid siege on Quebec faced starvation, smallpox, and a determined enemy.  They barely escaped with their lives when the British sailed up the St Lawrence River in the spring to reinforce Quebec and drive out the Northern Army.  Mott is a guy who saw a lot in his time in the army.

      Mott moved to Preston in 1747, and came back after the war, where he served as the Justice of the Peace.  There’s a record online of the many marriages that he blessed from 1769 to 1811.  He died in 1813 at the ripe old age (for the time) of 78, and likely had quite a few people remembering him fondly as the gentleman who married them.  I think of that Jewish saying when I meet someone long gone randomly:  We all die twice; the day we stop breathing and the day people stop saying your name.   If that’s the case, Samuel Mott has a little more time with us.  I appreciated the call to go visit his old stomping grounds on a rainy June afternoon.  My dress shirt quickly darkened as the rain pelted down on me as I walked around the monument reading and taking pictures.  Drivers buzzing by surely thought I was crazy and they may be right.  But I’m glad I stopped, and I’ll be sure to give a nod to the General whenever I drive by that monument.

       

    • The Daily Whip

      My morning begins with exercise, however modest, moves to daily stoic, then reading whatever book I happen to be tackling, and some writing if time allows before I plunge into the daily routine of work and life. I’ve continued this long enough that it’s become habit, and there are worse things than beginning the day this way. I won’t win the CrossFit Games or Jeopardy, but I’m further along than I’d otherwise be.

      A month after Bodhi passed, the muscle memory of my routine with him is fading. I don’t look out the window to see if he’s ready to come in, but he’s still lingering somewhere in my mind. But underfoot is a newer morning dance partner; Mookie joined us when the Red Sox we’re making their World Series championship run last fall. Once chipmunk size, she’s a lanky teenager now; full of energy, mischief and spirit.

      Make no mistake: I don’t generally bond with cats. I’m a dog person, and always have been. But Mookie got hold of me early on, and I find myself picking her up and petting her when I might have ignored another cat (as I do with the older cat). So here we are, sharing our morning together once again.

      It starts from the alarm going off, and she follows me from the closet, down the stairs and at my feet while I hydrate. When I’m done with exercise and sit down with my coffee and book she bounces back into my life and inevitably finds her way behind my right shoulder, surveying the action out the windows behind me. And that’s when it starts… the tail flicks once, wacks me in the cheek. A second time, swatting the top of my head. And then a steady beat of rhythmic whipping begins as her eyes flit from robin to chipmunk to a hummingbird working the honeysuckle. It feels like a fight scene from the old Batman TV show complete with kitschy Smack! Bang! Pow! thought bubbles.

      And I tolerate it. I’d never tolerate it from another cat. But I tolerate it from this one. This cat has worked her way into my routine. Strange days indeed.

    • Keep Your Head Down and Sap That Fort

      The northeast United States is dotted with old forts that once played a critical role in our history.  Four of the most famous during the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War were Fort Duquesne, Fort William Henry, Fort Niagara and Fort Stanwix.   They were famous because they each occupied a critical point in the waterway transportation of the day, and because of their strategic important each was attacked (sometimes on multiple occasions).  Because they were protecting waterways, each was located on relatively flat land.  Without the high ground and hard ledge that prevented digging, each of these forts was attacked using the same tactic; siege trenching called sapping.

      The act of laying siege on a fort requires significant manpower, patience and a willingness to continue pressing forward towards the enemy, thus pressuring them to surrender.  A well-entrenched enemy isn’t going to wave the white flag and come out if they’ve got strong enough fortifications, enough food, enough manpower of their own, and enough ammunition to continue the fight… in short, if they have enough hope that they’ll prevail in the fight.  To diminish this hope, an army laying siege would deploy multiple strategies – negotiation, bombardment, psychological warfare, and sapping.  Sapping was the act of digging trenches closer and closer to the fortification, where bombs could be set to open up the walls.  Trenches were dug in a zig-zag towards the fort to avoid enfilading, which is devastating fire directed directly down the trench killing many people at once.

      “By persistently hanging on the enemy’s flank, we shall succeed in the long run in killing the commander-in-chief.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

      There are two ways to fire on the enemy; defilade was firing straight into the face of the force attacking you, and enfilade, which is flanking fire.  Enfilading is a favorite tactic for any army or navy as its lethally efficient.  One cannonball can take out a hundred soldiers as it flies down the column destroying everything in hits.  In the Battle of Trafalgar raking fire shot into the stern of the French ship Bucentaure resulted in 195 killed and another 85 wounded – simply stunning casualties in any battle, but particularly on a ship.  Enfilading creates carnage quickly.

      Forts were built with enfilading in mind.  Bastions protruding at the corners opened up fields of fire by eliminating blind spots, making them very challenging to approach.  Bastions provided defenders with an opportunity to apply cross fire into attackers, creating an enfilade.  A quick look at the Google Earth images for Fort Niagara, Fort Stanwix and Fort William Henry (rebuilt on original footprint) show the shape of the forts.  Fort Niagara, pressed up against a point on Lake Ontario, didn’t have the complete star shape because it didn’t have the threat of armies rolling up on their flank, but you can see how the walls offered fields of fire consistent with enfilading attackers.

      So sappers – trench diggers – had to contend with steady musket and cannon fire raining down on them from many angles.  This had to be one of the worst jobs in the army, especially in soil with heavy rocks and roots, to be digging a trench while someone is trying to kill you from an elevated position.  But sapping worked, and throwing bodies at a problem has historically been appropriate behavior with European armies.  To give sappers a fighting chance of finishing the trench, they used mantlets and other protective structures to shield them from enemy fire.  Eventually the fort they were digging towards would run out of ammunition, or the besieged would grow exhausted from constant bombardment, and momentum would shift from the inside to the outside of the fort.  There’s another definition for sapping, and that’s gradually draining the strength and energy from someone, and that’s exactly what a siege would do to the inhabitants of the fort.  Watching the enemy get closer and closer must have been incredibly stressful, especially when you knew some of those enemy chose not to take prisoners.

      Fort Duquesne, in what is now Pittsburgh, wasn’t the most robust fort to begin with, and quickly fell to the French siege to begin hostilities in the French and Indian War in North America.  At Fort William on Lake George, the British and American forces held until their cannon began to overheat and fail.  A failing cannon was a dangerous thing indeed, often exploding and killing the crew that was manning it.  During the Revolutionary War, Fort Stanwix famously held the siege off, but largely because the British, loyalists and Iroquois laying siege on them were scared off prematurely by Benedict Arnold’s deception (fed a rumor that he was much closer and with a much larger force than he actually had).  If it weren’t for Arnold’s ploy the fort may have fallen within a day or two.

      Sappers got the enemy to your walls, but cannon was the great equalizer.  Without cannon to pulverize walls and the people behind them, armies had to play a waiting game.  Basically starving the besieged out.  With enough stores the army might run out of time before they were able to get through.  The Shawnee tried this tactic on Boonesborough in Kentucky; burning crops and killing cattle to starve the settlers out.  When it didn’t work quickly enough they dug a tunnel towards the settlers walls to plant British gunpowder.  Heavy rains collapsed that tunnel killing many of the Shawnee and saving the settlers.  Tunneling, or mining, was different from sapping in that you’re completely underground and vulnerable to these types of collapses.  The most famous mining attack took place at the Battle of Messines in Belgium during World War One when upwards of 10,000 German soldiers were killed when a million pounds of explosives mined below the German lines were exploded.  Clearly, digging towards the enemy didn’t end with the Revolutionary War, and no war proved that like World War One.

      Having walked through a few forts in my time, I’m struck by the amount of work that went into their construction.  It must have been formidable and more than a little terrifying to be on the outside trying to fight your way in.  But being trapped on the inside surely wasn’t much better.  When you hear about the defenders of Fort Stanwix or Fort William Henry fighting to exhaustion, knowing the fate of many who surrendered to the Native American warriors in other battles, its clear there wasn’t much pleasure rendered on that side of the wall either.  Troops sent to relieve the besieged were often vulnerable to ambush, which is exactly what happened at La Belle-Famille during the siege on Fort Niagara and at Oriskany during the siege on Fort Stanwix.

      Sapping offered refuge from the designed killing fields that star shaped forts created.  It was a harsh, horrific, exhausting slog digging under fire from the perimeter to the fort walls.  The alternative was an exposed, high-casualty ground level attack.  Given the choice, I’d probably have grabbed a shovel myself.  Thankfully, I can just stroll the grounds and contemplate the violence that took place around these forts early on in our history.

    • Treaty of Canandaigua

      This week, on my drive from Buffalo to Seneca Falls, I made a quick detour to visit a rock.  I live in the Granite State, so I know a thing or two about rocks, but the rock I was visiting is unique because of a tablet mounted to it commemorating the Treaty of Canandaigua on November 11, 1794.  The location of the 1902 monument, on the lawn of the Ontario County Courthouse, is roughly where the treaty was negotiated between representatives of the United States, the Iroquois Confederacy and Quaker moderators trusted by the Iroquois.

      After the Revolutionary War, American sentiment towards the Iroquois Confederacy was at a low point. The Iroquois were significantly weakened after the war, and the Americans were operating from a position of strength when they signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784. The location is notable, as it was five miles from the site of the Orinasky ambush that wiped out many of the men from this county. Western Iroquois tribes with loyalists participated in that ambush, and seven years later a treaty was being negotiated at the fort those ambush victims were marching to relieve. The treaty ceded massive tracts of land from New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio to the Americans in an agreement known as “the Last Purchase”. The Six Nations refused to ratify the treaty but the damage was done.

      Fast forward ten years and growing tensions between the United States and Native American tribes on the western border threatened to blow up into war. Suddenly the Iroquois Confederacy seemed a significant threat should they side with western tribes and declare war on the United States. President George Washington sent Colonel Timothy Pickering, a Bunker Hill veteran from Salem, Massachusetts, to negotiate a new treaty with the Iroquois.  The location for the meeting to negotiate the treaty was chosen by another Massachusetts man, Israel Chapin.  When Chapin died a few years after the treaty was ratified, Red Jacket, once an enemy of Chapin’s during the war, gave a eulogy at his gravesite.  I wrote briefly about Red Jacket practicing his speech for Canandaigua at the spectacular She-Qua-Ga Falls previously.  There’s a deeper dive that needs to take place into the lives of these three men in particular, but also the incredible list of names on the tablet.  I can’t wait to learn more about Heap of Dogs.

      The treaty is called both the Pickering Treaty and the Treaty of Canandaigua and is still in use today.  Every year on November 11th there is a ceremony and celebration at the monument to lasting legacy of the treaty.  It undid some of the damage from the Treaty of Stanwix, and reserved land for the Iroquois that is still protected.  The land rush that took place after the Revolutionary War was like a tidal wave sweeping over New York westward.  That they were able to set aside significant tracts of land for those who called it home before Europeans settled here remains a notable achievement.

    • The Sound of the Paper

      When I was younger, straight out of college, I took a trip to Washington, DC for a conference. I thought reading the paper in a chair in the lobby of my hotel was the most glamorous thing in the world. I crossed my legs, open up one of the papers stacked in the lobby and thought I was living large. As a regular business traveler now, I know that the only people sitting in a lobby reading the paper came in to use the restroom and are waiting to pick someone up.

      When I started traveling in earnest for work, I remember waking with a start at a scraping at the door deep into my REM state. I’d flip on the light, look at the door I thought was being infiltrated by a burglar, and realize it was the daily newspaper being slid under the door. In hotels with a narrower gap between the door and threshold the paper would be dropped neatly in front of the door like a doormat. You’d open the door and there it was, welcoming you to a new day. I’d tune in to that sound too, and track the progress of the night manager by the thump of paper moving down the hall.

      In some hotels that scrape of paper was the invoice being slid under the door on your last night. Folded neatly, it would politely serve notice that it was time to pack up and leave. That paper would slide right into my plastic envelope of receipts for my next expense report.

      Everything is done online nowadays. Receipts are easily downloaded or emailed to you. News is scanned on your phone now, and if you want the paper it’s usually stacked in smaller piles near the elevators or in the lobby. Business travel has changed as the world has changed, and I’ve changed a lot too. But I still like to slow down and read the paper now and then.