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| CHROMODORIS RETICULATA |
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| The Hemingway House in Key West, Florida, was built in 1851 and became Ernest Hemingway’s home in 1931. Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell To Arms while living there. |
| Hemingway was an inveterate cat-lover because he admired the spirit and independence of cats. Hemingway acquired his first cat from a ship's captain in Key West. This cat, which may have been a Maine Coon, had extra toes. Some of the cats who live on the museum grounds are descendants of that original cat.
Ernest Hemingway decided to build a wall around the Hemingway House for privacy when his house was added to a Key West tourist guide. It also helps keep the famed 6-toed cats on the property. This cat has 6 toes on each front foot. |  |
 | The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum is home to approximately sixty cats.
Normal cats have five front toes and four back toes. About half of the cats at the museum are polydactyl, which means they have extra toes. Usually, the cats have extra toes on their front feet but sometimes on their back feet as well. It may look as if they are wearing mittens because they appear to have a thumb on their paw. |
| Ernest Hemingway was given a six-toed cat by a ship's captain and Key West is a small island and it is possible that many of the cats on the island are related. |
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| The cats, which have roamed the grounds freely since the house became a museum in 1964, are known to be "fiercely independent." |
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| The cats are fed by caretakers of the museum. They are given excellent quality cat food. They are occasionally given treats of canned food or catnip, and a few are given canned food daily due to tooth problems resulting from old age or injury. Well-meaning visitors are not encouraged to feed the cats, since their diet is supervised. |
 | All of the cats are named. Cats are capable of learning and responding to their names, particularly if they have an affectionate relationship with the person who calls them.
The museum maintains a complete list of the cats who live there. If one of the cats needs medical attention, it is taken to the vet by a staff member. Routine procedures such as ear mite treatment, flea spraying, and worming are performed at the museum. |
| Annual vaccinations are administered by Dr. Lisa Bramson and her staff from All Animal Clinic on-site. There is also a mobile vet, Dr. Edie Clark, who visits the location weekly and performs routine animal health maintenance.
Recently the Pfizer Company has come forward to provide Revolution® for the cats to protect them from heartworm, fleas and other harmful parasites. |  |
| The vet comes to the museum to administer their yearly shots.
The whole procedure is somewhat like a "cat rodeo," with cats being rounded up by means of treats, and the vet administering shots as fast as possible with the help of staff members. The job must be done rapidly, since the cats soon sense that something is amiss and will begin howling warnings, and slinking and scurrying in all directions. The vast majority are vaccinated the first day and their names are checked off on a list to avoid confusion. The vet returns the following week to inoculate the few who are missed the first time. |
 | The vast majority are spayed (female) or neutered (male). There are a couple of females and a few males who are not fixed in order to produce one or two litters of kittens per year.
This ensures that the Hemingway cat line will be continued and to replace the few cats who die each year due to illness, old age, or accidents, but keeps the number of cats at about sixty residents. |
 ONE HUNDRED FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (TOKYO) NUMBER THIRTY-FIVE |
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| SUIJIN SHRINE AND MASSAKI ON THE SUMIDA RIVER |
| The double-petalled cherry blossoms--a baroque and fragrant late-blooming hybrid--is rather out of keeping with normal Japanese taste. It is not surprising that Western connoisseurs have admired this print more than their Japanese counterparts.
The people on the lower left are walking toward the Hashiba Ferry and in the middle distance we see a lumber raft and two cargo ships making their way around the broad bend of the Sumida River below Senju as it shifts its course from east to south. On their way the boatmen will have marked and paid silent homage to the shrine that we see at the lower right, its entrance shown by the lantern-flanked stone torii. |
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| SHELLING OF THE REBELS NEAR CHICKAMACOMICO, NC BY THE MONTICELLO October 3-4, 1861 in Chicamacomico, North Carolina |
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| USS Monticello, a 655-ton screw steam gunboat, was built at Mystic, Connecticut, in 1859 for civilian use.
Chartered by the Navy in May 1861, she was named Star for a few weeks and then reverted to the name Monticello. She was purchased by the Navy in September 1861. Her Civil War record was a busy one, involving active employment in the blockade of the Confederacy's Atlantic seacoast and the capture of several prizes. She took part in early wartime actions in the James River area of Virginia and in the August 1861 capture of Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina. In 1863-65, Monticello was commanded by the celebrated naval hero William B. Cushing, and members of her crew were involved in many of his exploits. She accidently rammed and sank the gunboat USS Peterhoff on 6 March 1864. In December 1864 and January 1865, she participated in the attacks on and capture of Fort Fisher, North Carolina. USS Monticello was decommissioned in July 1865 and sold the following November. She subsequently became the merchant steamer Monticello, and was so employed until she sank off Newfoundland in April 1872. |
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| ADIRONDACK TWILIGHT Samuel Colman, Jr. (1832-1920) |
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Although Samuel Colman's name is often spelled with an "e," the family spelled the name "Colman," and the Aldine Press in its art column (1868-79) referred to the artist as Colman.
He studied under Asher B. Durand and became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1854 and a full academician ten years later. In 1866 he helped found the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and was its first president. He became interested in etching in 1867 and, in 1877, at the founding of the New York Etching Club, exhibited a number of landscape etchings. |  | |
| Colman spent the summer of 1856 in Jackson, New Hampshire, sharing a studio with his brother-in-law, Aaron Draper Shattuck. The Crayon of that year noted: "Mr. Colman has made wide advances on all his previous studies ... He has a study of Mote [sic] Mountain and the Ledges at North Conway, with a wheat-field in the foreground."
As early as 1853, he exhibited at the National Academy of Design and shortly thereafter at the Boston Athenaeum. He was also a frequent exhibitor at the Brooklyn Art Association. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman wrote of Colman, "to the eye of refined taste, to the quite lover of nature, there is a peculiar charm in Colman's style which, sooner or later, will be greatly appreciated." Implicit in Tuckerman's statement is his observation of a strong individualism in Colman's style. He visited Spain and Morocco and painted scenes in a combination of pastel and gauche. He was a partner of Louis Comfort Tiffany in interior design and worked on Samuel Clemens's house in Hartford, Connecticut. For a time he was a member of the Century Association but resigned in 1884. Colman's paintings are represented by the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Union League Club among other prominent collections. |
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| WHOOPI (Caricature) |
| The koala's nose is one of its most important features, and it has a very highly developed sense of smell. This is necessary to differentiate between types of gum leaves and to detect whether the leaves are poisonous or not.
The koala's digestive system is especially adapted to detoxify the poisonous chemicals in the leaves. The toxins are thought to be produced by the gum trees as a protection against leaf-eating animals like insects. Trees which grow on less fertile soils seem to have more toxins than those growing on good soils. This could be one reason why koalas will eat only certain types of eucalypts, and why they will sometimes even avoid them when they are growing on certain soils. |
| When approaching a tree to climb, koalas spring from the ground and catch their front claws in the bark, then bound upwards. Claw marks are usually visible on the trunks of trees regularly used as home trees by koalas.
In the safety of their home trees, koalas assume a wide variety of sitting and sleeping postures, and they will move around the tree during the day and night to catch the sun or the breezes. On hot days it is common to see them with limbs dangling in an effort to keep cool, and during colder times, curled up in a ball to conserve body heat. When descending a tree, koalas come down bottom first. They regularly descend to the ground to change trees, and it is there that they are most vulnerable to predators such as dogs, foxes and dingoes, and also to the risk of injury or death from cars. They walk with an awkward-looking gait and can also run. Koalas have sometimes been observed swimming, but this is not a regular occurrence. |
| Koalas use a range of sounds to communicate with each other over relatively large distances.
There is a deep grunting bellow which the male uses to signify its social and physical position. Males save fighting energy by bellowing their dominance and they also bellow to allow other animals to accurately locate the position of the caller. Females do not bellow as often as males, but their calls too are used to express aggression as well as being part of sexual behavior, often giving the impression of fighting. Mothers and babies make soft clicking, squeaking sounds and gentle humming or murmuring sounds to one another, as well as gentle grunts to signal displeasure or annoyance. All koalas share one common call which is elicited by fear. It is a sickening cry like a baby screaming and is made by animals under stress. It is often accompanied by shaking. Koalas also communicate by marking their trees with their scent. |
| (1779 - 1814) Private, U.S. Army A Man by the Name of Howard Thomas Proctor Howard was born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, 20 miles east of Springfield, in 1779. He began a five-year enlistment in the U.S. army at age 22, and by 1803 had been posted to South West Point, Tennessee. The blue-eyed young Howard was one of a group of eight men assigned to the expedition by Captain John Campbell, of the Second Infantry Regiment. Clark rejected four of the eight who, he judged, were "not such I was told was in readiness...for this Com[man]d." He accepted only Howard, Hugh Hall, John Potts, and Richard Warfington. |
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| CHRISTMAS AT CAMP DUBOIS Michael Haynes http://www.mhaynesart.com/ |
| At Camp Dubois, Howard was one of Clark's couriers; he carried a letter to Lewis at Cahokia on January 27, 1804. The meaning behind the comment "never Drink water," beside his name in a list of unknown purpose written in early January of 1804, is open to question. If Clark suspected Howard was inclined toward drunkenness he was evidently mistaken, for the man never got into trouble on that account. |
| Since the journalists mentioned him only twice as a hunter, Howard evidently was not in the same echelon of nimrods as George Drouillard or the Field brothers. His problem was not necessarily with his marksmanship, as Lewis once had occasion to specify.
On January 23, 1806, Lewis dispatched him and William Werner to the Salt Camp on the ocean beach, to bring back a supply of salt. When they had not returned by the 26th, Lewis feared they had gotten lost. "Neither of them are very good woodsmen," he observed. However, the two men returned safely two days later, and confirmed Lewis's hope that only "the badness of the weather and the difficulty of the road had caused their delay." One of his better days on the chase, it turned out, may have been on the morning of July 28, 1806, when his was one of the two rifles whose "joyfull sound" greeted Lewis and his detail as they neared the Missouri after fleeing from their skirmish on the Two Medicine River. Howard and another man had gone ahead of the canoes to hunt, and he himself had killed two deer. Howard was the last among the eleven members of the Corps of Discovery to suffer the ignominies of courts martial. He committed his crime at Fort Mandan on the bitterly cold night of February 9, 1805. Captain Lewis recorded the incident in a suitably official tone: "This evening a man by the name of Howard whom I had given permission to go the Mandane vilage returned after the gate was shut and rether than call to the guard to have it opened scaled the works an indian who was looking on shortly after followed his example. I...convinced the Indian of the impropryety of his conduct, and explained to him the riske he had run of being severely treated, the fellow appeared much allarmed, I gave him a small piece of tobacco and sent him away Howard I had comitted to the care of the guard with a determineation to have him tryed by a Courtmartial for this offence." Lewis was deeply disappointed in Private Howard. This man, he wrote, "is an old soldier which still hightens this offince." Indeed, the potential consequences could have been serious. Whereas only one Indian had climbed over the pickets, at least two others had followed Howard home. If the officers had overlooked the soldier's bad judgment and word of the fort's vulnerability had gotten out, it could at best have encouraged the friendly Mandans to make nuisances of themselves, and at worst led to a surprise attack by the bellicose Teton Sioux. His court martial was held the following morning. Sergeant Ordway reported that the prisoner was found guilty. At sundown his sentence of 50 lashes was announced, and he was referred to the mercy of the commanding officer. By that point, more than eight months into the expedition, Howard must have displayed enough redeeming qualities to justify a suspended sentence, and the record of the trial was omitted from the Orderly Book. That alone would have been enough to garland his reputation as a worthy, if not particularly indispensable, member of the Corps of Discovery. Naturally, Howard was subject to the same risks as everyone else, but one supposes he may have been the cautious type, for he escaped debilitating injury and illness. He suffered frostbitten feet on one of his few assignments as a hunter, on a day at Fort Clatsop when the mercury rose no higher than 8° above zero. Later, on the return down the Jefferson River from Camp Fortunate, Howard was in the stern of Clark's canoe when the wind drove it under a projecting log and he "was Caught in between the Canoe and the log and a little hurt." In the apparently random list from which the captains drew, he was the thirteenth member of the Corps to have a stream named after him. On July 25, 1805, within the Missouri River canyon Lewis called the "Little Gates" of the Rocky Mountains, Lewis bestowed Howard's name upon "a bold runing stream" that nearly 80 years later came to be known as Sixteenmile Creek. |
| Photographer, conservationist; born in San Francisco. A commercial photographer for 30 years, he made visionary photos of western landscapes that were inspired by a boyhood trip to Yosemite. He won three Guggenheim grants to photograph the national parks (1944--58). Founding the f/64 group with Edward Weston in 1932, he developed zone exposure to get maximum tonal range from black-and-white film. He served on the Sierra Club Board (1934--71). |  |
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| CRATER LAKE, OREGON |
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| CRATER LAKE, OREGON |
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| THE HERD BOY Frederic Remington |
| Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry. |  |
| PART FIVE |
| In 1888, he achieved the public honor of having two paintings used for reproduction on U. S. Postal stamps. In 1900, as an economy move, Harper's dropped Remington as their star artist. To compensate for the loss of work, Remington wrote and illustrated a full-length novel, The Way of an Indian, which was intended for serialization by a Hearst publication but not published until five years later in Cosmopolitan. Remington's protagonist, a Cheyenne named Fire Eater, is a prototype Native American as viewed by Remington and many of his time.
Remington then returned to sculpture, and produced his first works produced by the lost wax method, a higher quality process than the earlier sand casting method he had employed. By 1901, Collier's was buying Remington's illustrations on a steady basis. As his style matured, Remington portrayed his subjects in every light of day. His nocturnal paintings, very popular in his late life, such as A Taint on the Wind and Scare in the Pack Train, are more impressionistic and loosely painted, and focus on the unseen threat. Remington completed another novel in 1902, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, a modest success but a definite disappointment as it was completely overshadowed by the best seller The Virginian, written by his sometime collaborator Owen Wister, which became a classic Western novel. A stage play based on "John Ermine" failed in 1904. After "John Ermine", Remington decided he would soon quit writing and illustration (after drawing over 2700 illustrations) to focus on sculpture and painting. In 1905, Remington had a major publicity coup when Collier's devoted an entire issue to the artist and his art, showcasing his latest works. His large outdoor sculpture of a "Big Cowboy," which stands on the East River Drive in Philadelphia, was another late success. His "Explorers" series, depicting older historical events in western U.S. history, did not fair well with the public or the critics. The financial panic of 1907 caused a decline in his sales and in 1908, fantasy artists, such as Maxfield Parrish, became popular with the public and with commercial sponsors. Remington tried to sell his home in New Rochelle to get farther away from urbanization. One night he made a bonfire in his yard and burned dozens of his oil paintings which had been used for magazine illustration (worth millions of dollars today), making an emphatic statement that he was done with illustration forever. He wrote, "there is nothing left but my landscape studies." Near the end of his life, he moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut. In his final two years, under the influence of The Ten, he was veering more heavily to Impressionism, and he regretted that he was studio bound (by virtue of his declining health) and could not follow his peers who painted "plein air." Frederic Remington died after an emergency appendectomy led to peritonitis on December 26, 1909. His extreme obesity (weight nearly 300 pounds) had complicated the anesthesia and the surgery, and chronic appendicitis was cited in the post-mortem examination as an underlying factor in his death. He was 48 years old. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Canton, New York |
| DISCLAIMER: Material used in Bitts and Bytes is gathered from various sources--mainly the World Wide Web.
Authorship cannot always be credited nor the source defined. Authenticity of material is assumed to be correct, but is not guaranteed. |  |