Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You—Murfin Verse for the Water Protectors

North Dakota authorities used armored vehicles and overwhelming para-military force to attack the Water Protectors at Standing Rock in 2016.  Photo posted by Facebook from the Sacred Stone camp by Rob Wilson Photography.

Three years ago this past week combined, heavily armed paramilitary forces with armored vehicles, helicopters, and sound cannon attacked a large unarmed prayer service at a Construction site on the Dakota Pipeline.  Construction workers had abandoned their equipment and fled as Native Americans led by the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies approached the site.  There were reports of teargas canisters being dropped from the helicopters.  27 were arrested in one day.  It was a dramatic escalation of the use of state power against on-going protests which resulted in an unprecedented unity between Native nations from across the U.S.A., North America, and Latin America and support from aboriginal peoples across the globe. 

 Photo of a mural taken by my old college pal Bill Delaney at Art Alley Gallery in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Something very important was happening for the Earth, the environment, and for the Tribes and Nations who the exploiters and despoilers were once confident had been ground into helplessness.

Now three years later the pipe line was completed and has already leaked and polluted waters.  States are rushing to enact right wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation to make virtually any protest against energy companies felonies with long prison sentences and crush fines for those who even encourage or support the protests.  Indigenous people around the world continue to defend water and the earth and young native leaders have joined Greta Thunberg in her protests and in the Climate Strikes.

It is worth a look back at a poem I committed back then.

Jay Silverheels as Tonto on TV's Lone Ranger.

A note of acknowledgement—The title and the germ of the idea was borrowed from a long-ago monologue by the late, great George Carlin.  I don’t think he would mind.

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You

For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016

Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,

            and be beat to pulp by the bad guys

            on your fool’s errand.

Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body

            over your blonde locks 

            to save you from her Daddy’s war club.

Squanto will not show you that neat trick

            with the fish heads and maize

            and will watch you starve on rocky shores.

Chingachgook will save his son and lineage

            and let you and your White women

            fall at Huron hands and be damned.

Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way

            or introduce you to her people, 

            and leave you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.

Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West Show

            nor Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar

            in fetid Florida far from home.

They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,

            have gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors

            to dance on the holy ground, the rolling prairie

            where the buffalo were as plentiful 

            as the worn smooth stones of the Mnišoše,

            the mighty river that flows forever.

They are called by all the nations from the four corners

            of the turtle back earth who have gathered here, 

            friends and cousins, sworn enemies alike,

            united now like all of the ancestors

            to kill the Black Snake, save the sacred water, 

            the soil where the bones of ancestors rest,

            and the endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.

Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…

—Patrick Murfin

Flushing a Treasured Historic Myth

Thomas Crapper & Co. toilets are still in common use in the United Kingdom.

As a blogger who covers historical events and personages both great and small, it is my sad duty to occasionally disabuse you of your most cherished illusions.

Like this one:  The standard flush toilet was invented by Sir Thomas Crapper in the Britain in the 19th Century, lending his name to human solid waste disposal, the waste itself, and anything else that stinks for any reason because it was emblazoned on his products.

Wrong on two or three major counts, but containing the kernel of truth. 

On the other hand the self-appointed myth busters who claim that the whole thing is a lie and that there never was a Thomas Crapper are also wrong.

Thomas Crapper, plumber and "sanitary engineer" became a very successful manufacturer in  the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The very real Thomas Crapper was baptized on September 28, 1836 in Thorne, Yorkshire. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but babies were typically christened about two weeks after birth.  He was apprenticed to his older brother George as plumber. After completing his training and spending three years as a journeyman, he set up his own first shop near his brother’s Chelsea establishment in West London in 1861.

In addition to plumbing services Crapper advertised himself as a sanitary engineer and a brass foundryman.  He began manufacturing plumbing fixtures and obtained several patents that improved the already existing flush toilet.

The ancient Romans had continuously flushing toilets in their elaborate baths and in villas of the extremely wealthy.  The Dark Ages, however, had pretty well wiped out memory of them. 

Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harrington and a sketch of his Ajax flush toilet invention.

Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington was credited with a developing a flush toilet called The Ajax around 1596 which had a water shut off device.  The clever devise became the object of political controversy when Harington wrote a book about it, A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax in which he also satirized one of the Queen’s favorites resulting his banishment from court and the languishing of his invention.

Alexander Cumming obtained a patent on an improved flush toilet in 1775.  In 1778 Joseph Bramah obtained a patent on an improvement that replaced Cumming’s slide valve at the bottom of the tank with the familiar flap valve still seen in most toilets. By the late 18th Century water closets, as they were called, were being manufactured and installed in the homes of the wealthy.

Edward Jennings got another patent for further improvements on the flush toilet in 1851.  Thus when Thomas Crapper began producing and marketing his own water closets, he was joining an already established line of business.

In the 1880’s Crapper got the distinction of having Royal Warrants when he won a contract to install several Thomas Crapper & Company water closets in the country seat of Prince Edward.  He also supplied Edward as king and his successor, George IV.  The prestige boosted the sales of his appliances.

But Crapper did hold several patents, including two for key improvements.  The Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer was actually invented by Albert Giblin 1898 who was either an employee of Crapper or from whom the manufacturer obtained a license.  Crapper also held a patent, probably invented by his nephew on the ballcock or float valve that automatically closed the flap valve of the supply tank when the siphon filled it with water.

An advertisement for the Thomas Crapper & Co improved Water Closet.

Taken together, these improvements made the familiar flush toilet that can still be seen and used throughout Britain—an over-head, wall mounted reservoir tank whose flush mechanism is engaged by a pull chain releasing water through a pipe into the bowl below.  These were the models were proudly emblazoned with the badge of Thomas Crapper & Sons.

Thomas retired in 1904 and died in 1910.  He was a respected businessman but was never knighted.  The company passed into the hands of his brother and nephew.  Under a succession of owners it continued to produce Thomas Crapper toilets until 1966.

The legend that World War I Doughboys popularized the term crap for excrement based on seeing Crapper’s name on their facilities make so much sense that it is hard to deny.  But entomologists trace the use of the term as far back as the 1840’s when it first appeared in print.  It was probably in casual slang usage long before that.  Experts believe that it derives from the Old Dutch and German krappe for a “vile and inedible fish” and the Middle English crappy.  Still, it is hard to believe that Crapper’s name, ubiquitous on British porcelain, did not at least contribute to the popularization of the term.

Whatever the case, be grateful for you comfortable indoor plumbing facilities which whisk away your waste to a distant treatment facility.  Life would truly be full of crap without it.

Country Music’s First Hit Was a Train Wreck

The Wreck of the Old 97 by Thomas Hart Benton.

Watching Ken Burns’ epic six part documentary Country Music over the last two weeks was a god damn religious experience for me.  Except for a couple of brief periods I was never a guy whose ear was glued to country radio and bought over the decades maybe a couple of dozen flat-out country records.  But I realized, sometimes through tears, that the music from the beginning to the end was in my bones and soul.  

Some of it I came to from just growing up in Cheyenne listening to the acts that came in for Frontier Days like Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Patsy Montana, and the Sons of the Pioneers and taking in the old two reel westerns on TV.  We sang traditional Appalachian ballads and folk song in grade school out of Carl Sandburg’s American Song Book. 

Some of it I absorbed as folk music fan.  I came to a lot of it sideways from cross-over radio hits, to cross fertilization with icons like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and Emmy Lou Harris.  I actually got to see Jethro Burns, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, and Vassar Clemens at Chicago folk clubs.   Porter Wagoner introduced me to Dolly Parsons while I was sitting in Sandstone prison for my draft rap.  TV also brought the Glen Campbell Good Time Hour, Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters, Austin City Limits, and above all the Johnny Cash Show—my god Johnny Cash!

They all touched me—The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry and the other singing cowboys, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, of course Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, the Outlaws, Kris Kristofferson,  Guy Clark, Graham Parsons, Emmy Lou Harris, Towns Van Zandt, Rosanne Cash, my daughters’ beloved Garth Brooks, down to contemporary artists just flashed by including The Dixie Chicks, Alison Krauss, and even—some of my readers will want to shoot me for this—Taylor Swift.

But even Ken Burns had to leave something out with barely a passing mention—before the Carter Family or Jimmy Rogers there was an unlikely singer recording major hits in what indisputably belongs in the country music pantheon.  

There seems to be something about a train wreck that inspires a song.  Just about everybody knows Casey Jones.  Just two years after the disaster that inspired that tune, the Southern Railroad express known as the Fast Mail came barreling down a steep grade at a high rate of speed and overshot a tight radius turn right before a trestle sending the engine and train to a spectacular fiery crash at the bottom of a steep ravine.

Within 24 hours a witness/rescuer at the scene had penned a ballad set to the melody of a popular fiddle tune, The Ship That Never Returned, the same tune used latter for Charley on the MTA.  Just who that person was later became a matter of great controversy and an epic lawsuit.

The Fast Mail, designated as No. 97, ran on contract with the Post Office for service from Washington, DC to New Orleans via Atlanta.  That made it one of the highest volume mail trains in the South.  To encourage on time performance the contract included penalties for each minute the train arrived behind schedule at several stops along the route, including Spencer, North Carolina.  Railroad officials regularly pressured train crews to make up lost time to avoid the penalties.  As a result engineers often operated trains well above designated speeds.

The need for speed had contributed to a fatal accident in April of 1903 when the engine smashed into a boulder on the tracks near Lexington, North Carolina derailing the train and killing the engineer and Fireman.

Engine #1102 pulled the Fast Mail designated as No. 97.

On September 27 that same year a brand new Baldwin ten wheel 6-5-0 engine, #1102 which had been delivered just a week earlier was hooked up to No. 97.  For some reason, the train was already running behind schedule when it left Washington.  It rolled into Monroe, Virginia, a division point where train crews were changed, a full hour late.  The new engineer, 33 year old Joseph A. Broady, known to his friends and crew as Steve Broady, was handed orders to make up the time before the next Post Office penalty point at Spencer.  He was told to skip one regular junction stop entirely.  Although not explicitly ordered to go over the average 35 miles per hour limit between Monroe and Spencer, his bosses knew that he would have to exceed that.

Besides Broady the crew included Fireman A.C. Clapp, and apprentice Fireman John Hodge, Conductor John Blair, and Flagman James Robert Moody.  Also on board were Express Messenger W. R. Pinckney and 11 mail clerks.  Safe Locker Wentworth Armistead boarded the train at Lynchburg, Virginia making a total of 18 men on board.

The Mail clerks, express messenger and Armistead were all in the Post Office car attached directly behind the tender and ahead of the freight cars.

The scheduled running time for the 166 miles from Monroe to Spencer was four hours, fifteen minutes, an average speed of approximately 39 mph.  To make up the one hour delay, Broady would have to run at an average 51 mph over track known for its steep grades and tight curves.  Witnesses thought he was running at least 55 mph on the downgrade headed into the 45-foot high Stillhouse Trestle.  Broady applied his brakes but could not reduce his speed enough to make the sharp curve leading to the bridge.  

The wreckage of the No. 97 at the base of the Stillhouse Trestle. 

The engine sailed off the track smashing to the bottom of the gorge next to the trestle.  Fire quickly spread and burned out of control completely consuming all of the wooden cars and almost all of the mail.  A crate of live canaries broke open in the crash and the birds escaped before the fire consumed the car.  Many lingered in the area and became an odd reminder of the crash.

Eleven men died in the crash, including all of the train crew.  The two Firemen were burned beyond recognition and it was impossible to determine which body was whose.  Most of the 7 survivors were injured but survived because they jumped from or were thrown from the wreck.  The distraught express messenger went home and immediately resigned.  Some of the surviving mail clerks did return to service, though none again on the Fast Mail.

Engine #1102 was salvaged, repaired, and put back in service.  It ran for 32 more years before the Southern scraped it in 1935.

The railroad, of course, placed all of the blame on the engineer, and even issued a report exaggerating his speed.  They never acknowledged any culpability for issuing the orders that made speeding inevitable.

The Fast Mail continued to run until 1907 when service was canceled in a re-alignment of mail contracts.

Among the many local residents who flocked to the scene of the accident to assist in rescue efforts was Fred Jackson Lewey who worked at a cotton mill near the base of the trestle and who was the cousin of Fireman Clapp.  He said he sat down and wrote lyrics the day after the wreck.  His friend Charles Noell contributed to the words and suggested the tune.  The Wreck of the Old 97 was widely played in the area and became a standard at barn dances across the South in the next 20 years.

The first recording was made for Victor talking Machine Co. by the nearly blind primitive fiddle player G.B. Grayson and his partner Henry Whitter who played guitar, harmonica, and sang.  Whitter also altered the lyrics.

The label of Dahlarts' Victor recording.

Not long after that in 1924 Vernon Dalhart that sold more than seven million copies and his version became the bestselling non-holiday recording of the first 70 years of the industry.  It is the record that is usually cited for the birth of successful commercial country music.

Dahlart was born in 1883 and grew up on a Texas ranch where he cowboyed as a young man.  But he was trained as a classical singer at the Dallas Conservatory of Music.  After moving with his family to New York City and after performing in light opera like H.M.S Pinafore he was signed as a recording artist by Thomas Alva Edison.  From 1916 until 1923, he made over 400 recordings of light classical music and early dance band vocals for various record labels.  Eventually he sang on more than 5000 78 rpm singles for many labels, employing more than 100 pseudonyms.  

Vernon Dalhart was one of the first, and most prolific, early recording artists.  He came to hillbilly music two decades into a career as light classical and popular dance music singer.

But his by-chance recording of The Wreck of the Old ’97 for  Victor using his own Texas accent which he admitted sounded “like a Negro” was an astonishing hit.  The record was the first Southern or hillbilly record to achieve national success.  Naturally Dalhart found more such songs to record.

Victor was eager to expand a new found market and the success of the record led directly to the famous Bristol, Tennessee sessions in 1927 which first recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.  The rest is history.

Success like that often brings people out of the woodwork claiming a piece of the pie.  In David G. George, 1927 a former brakeman, railroad telegrapher, and week-end musician claimed that he was on the scene for the rescue efforts and penned the original lyrics himself.  He sued Victor and won a judgment for past royalties from Victor $65,295.  The company appealed three times, losing each time until the case got to the Supreme Court, which overturned the judgment.

Today experts are divided between the conflicting claims but most side with Lewey and Noell.

The song has become a staple of country music, bluegrass, and the folk revival.  It has been covered scores, maybe hundreds of time by artists as diverse as Jimmie Rodgers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Flatt and Scruggs, Charlie Louvin, The Seekers, Carolyn Hester, Hank Snow, Box Car Willie, Johnny Cash, Patrick Sky, and Nine Pound Hammer.

First Colonial Newspaper Quashed as Soon as it Appeared

Back in the days when I was in school one of the little factoids that I learned that stuck with me was that the first newspaper in the Colonies was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick which was issued on September 25, 1690 in Boston.

What I was not told in school was that within days of first appearing and before any second addition could be printed, it was suppressed by the Governor and Council of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  

This 20th Century illustration show a boy peddling newspapers on the street which are eagerly being picked up by readers.  No one know is Editor Benjamin Harris employed news boys.  More likely he or apprentices from Richard Price's printing shop circulated them to water-front coffee houses and taverns and at the Public Market.  The gentlemen shown are attired in the garb of the American Revolutionary era, decades after the first newspaper appeared.

It was also, depending how you define it, not really the first newspaper.  Single page broadsides containing local news and reports picked up from merchant ships about affairs in the Motherland and in Europe, were sporadically printed earlier.  What differentiated this effort, which was printed by Richard Pierce and edited by Benjamin Harris, was that it contained multiple pages and was meant to be issued regularly—monthly “or, if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener.”—under  the same title. 

The paper had four six by ten inch pages.  Editor Harris could, however, only find enough news for to fill three of them.  Perhaps the need to pad the paper is what got it in trouble.  In addition to local gossip, like the grieving widower who hung himself, epidemics of “fevers and agues” as well as small pox, and a fire that had consumed much of the city, the big news of the day was the war with the French—King Williams War—and attempts by colonial forces and their native allies to invade Canada.

The editor objected to the use of Native auxiliaries in the invasion of Canada during King William's War after he heard reports of them torturing and killing captured French troops.

Harris had to rely on word gathered from travelers and rumor, including reports that native allies of the colonists had abused French soldiers taken prisoner.  The editor was outraged and suggested that colonial forces should abandon the use of native allies—“if Almighty God will have Canada ſubdu’d without the aſſiſtance of thoſe miſerable Salvages.”

Since it was virtually impossible for a European army to effectively fight in the wilderness without native auxiliaries, this report undoubtedly irked authorities.

There were several other reports of skirmishes, ships taken and the like gleaned from visiting ships.  And big news of a victory by William of Orange in Ireland.  To this report was amended a juicy bit of gossip—that the son of the King of France might ally himself with the Huguenots and rise against his father because “the Father used to lie with the Son’s Wife.”

That bit of scandal was too shocking for authorities.  Just four days after the journal hit the streets, on September 29, the Council issued the following order:

Whereas some have lately presumed to Print and Disperse a Pamphlet, Entitled, Publick Occurrences, both Forreign and Domestick: Boston, Thursday, and September 25th, 1690. Without the least Privity and Countenace of Authority. The Governour and Council having had the perusal of said Pamphlet, and finding that therein contained Reflections of a very high nature: As also sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports, do hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in; strickly forbidden any person or persons for the future to Set forth any thing in Print without License first obtained from those that are or shall be appointed by the Government to grant the same.

The paper became the first ever to be banned in Boston.

Some of my friends in Unitarian Universalist history circles are highly protective of the reputation of our Puritan forbearers.  They will tell you that the Puritans are misunderstood and misrepresented.  If you suggest that the Massachusetts Bay Colony at this late date—three generations from the founding in 1630—was still essentially a theocracy they will react as if you had laced their morning coffee with molten lead.

These historians will point out that the powerful clerics of the Standing Order had long since surrendered their role in civic administration of the colony, that voting and meetings of Towns were strictly separate from the Churches.  Church membership was no longer required for participation in government, although attendance at approved services was compulsory as was support of the Church through taxes.  But whether they held office or not, the clergy of Boston were the power behind any government.  Their relationship was much the same as the council of Mullahs on the Iranian government today.  

I will go ahead and call that Theocracy and blame the first act of public censorship of the press squarely on the shoulder of the religious establishment.

The action by the Council understandably deterred others from founding newspapers.  It took 14 years for a newspaper to finally be successfully established.  The Boston News-Letter, a single, double sided sheet, finally made its appearance on April 3, 1704.  It continued publishing under variations of the News-Letter name until February 1776.  Because of its Tory sympathies, it was suppressed when the British evacuated Boston and George Washington’s new Continental Army moved in.

The First Powered Flight Came Decades Before You Thought

Giffard's steam powered dirigible., 1854.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a recurring interest in innovations in transportation and communications—the things that have tended to tie together our shrinking world.  But sometimes I am stunned to discover an innovation years—decades—before I ever suspected.  Take the notion of powered flight—the ability to propel and control some kind of aircraft over a distance by a mechanical engine.  I assumed that it would require some sort of internal combustion engine.  I never even considered the possibility of steam—the engines themselves were heavy and required quantities of water and fuel, not to mention the inherit dangers of fire, heat, and flying cinders.

So imagine my astonishment to discover that just such a flight occurred on September 24, 1854 and that powered flight was just one of several innovations.

Henri Giffard.

That year Henri Giffard was a 27 year old French engineer.  Two years earlier he had his first experience with lighter than air craft when he collaborated with another engineer named Jullien to build an airship with a propeller driven by clockwork.  That craft had an elongated hydrogen filled balloon with ends that tapered to points.  But the clockwork propeller could not generate enough energy to move the balloon very far in perfectly still conditions—or for very long until the engine wound down.  It was also lacked any means of steering or controlling the movement of the flight.  But the effort had showed that a propeller could indeed, propel if a reliable source of power could be found to turn it.

In 1851 Giffard patented the “application of steam in the airship travel” and a year later built a remarkable small engine weighing just 250 pounds with a boiler and fuel—coke—that added another 150 Lbs.  That was light enough that a gas envelope could be built capable of lifting it and the weight of a single passenger/operator. Giffard built the first ever true dirigible—a term derived from a French word meaning steerable.  That meant an airship with a semi-rigid gas envelope as opposed to an inflatable bag, that could move under its own power, and that could be maneuvered.

The engine was just one of Giffard’s innovations.  It produced 2,200 watts or three horsepower to turn a three-bladed, rear mounted pusher propeller.  To put it in perspective, that is about the same power as generated by a modern steam iron, but it was enough.  The engine was mounted on a platform along with the operator which was suspended from a long beam slung below the 144 foot long envelope.  At the rear of the beam was a moveable triangular sail that acted as vertical rudder enabling the aircraft to maneuver. 

The trickiest problem was what to do with the cinders that would inevitably escape the combustion chamber and rise imperiling the highly flammable hydrogen in the envelope.  Giffard devised a long exhaust tube that pointed down and behind the engine instead of a top mounted smoke stack common in steam engines.  That directed sparks down and away from the envelope and hopefully the forward movement of the air ship would be fast enough to keep them from rising to the rigid bag.  All in all it was a remarkable construction.

Giffard took off from the Paris Hippodrome and flew 17 miles to Elancourt, near Trappes in three hours for an average speed of six miles per hour.  Along the way he made several turns and even flew in short circles to prove that his ship was controllable.  The original plan was to take on more fuel and water and return to Paris.  But Giffard found that his engine was not powerful enough to move the ship against even a light headwind.

Battery powered  La France on her demonstration flight in 1884.

The Giffard Dirigible never flew again.  Attempts to improve on it were stymied by the additional weight of steam engines powerful enough for practical use.   The future of the Dirigible had to wait until the development of light and practical engines.  In 1872 Paul Haenlein flew a hot air craft—a blimp—with an internal combustion engine running on the coal gas used to inflate the envelope.  The La France was launched for the French Army by Charles Renard and Arthur Contantin Krebs in 1884 propelled by a battery powered electric motor.  In its maiden five mile flight it became the first airship ever to complete a round trip.

A hydrogen-lift dirigible powered by the first use of such an internal combustion engine had to wait until 1888 when Dr. Frederich Wölfert built an airship powered by Daimler Motoren Gessellschaft gasoline engines, 36 years after Giffard.

As for the inventor, he had more innovation in him.  In 1858 he invented the injector, a type of pump that uses “the Venturi effect of a converging/diverging nozzle to convert the pressure energy of a motive fluid to velocity energy which creates a low pressure zone that draws in and entrains a suction fluid.”  Don’t ask me what that means—it’s all engineering Greek to me, but trust me it was an important technological breakthrough and made Giffard a very wealthy man.

Giffard was photographed over Paris in a captive hydrogen balloon in 1877.

In fact, he became something of a national hero for that and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’ honneur in 1866.  And he was not done with playing around with lighter-than-air-craft.  In 1876 he made a famous tethered flight over Paris in a hydrogen balloon which was captured in a famous early photograph.

Despondent over declining health, Giffard committed suicide on April 14, 1882.  He left his fortune to the people of France to be used for humanitarian and scientific causes.  He was so esteemed by his countrymen that he is among the 72 great notables whose names are inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.