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| The Lewis and Clark Expedition returned to St. Louis on September 23, 1806. When people in the settled portions of the United States heard that Lewis and Clark had returned from the West, they could barely believe it.
Most people had given them up for dead. If wild animals, hunger, harsh weather or Indians hadn't killed them, perhaps they had gotten lost, they thought. Of course, none of those things happened. Lewis, Clark and nearly all their men returned to St. Louis as heroes. The Corps of Discovery disbanded in St. Louis and their detailed descriptions of the journey, maps and the numerous specimens they had collected were sent to Philadelphia to be housed in part at the American Philosophical Society and later at the Academy of Natural Sciences. |
| September 19, 1806
"only came too once for the purpose of gathering pappows, our anxiety as also the wish of the party to proceed on as expeditiously as possible to the Illinois enduce us to continue on without halting to hunt. a very singular disorder is takeing place amongst our party that of the Sore eyes. three of the party have their eyes inflamed and Sweled in Such a manner as to render them extreamly painfull, particularly when exposed to the light, the eye ball is much inflaimed and the lid appears burnt with the Sun, the cause of this complaint of the eye I can't [account] for. from it's sudden appearance I am willing to believe it may be owing to the reflection of the sun on the water." September 20, 1806 ( Camped at LaCharette ("Charriton"), Warren County Missouri, which the party passed on May 25, 1804.) "as three of the party was unabled to row from the State of their eyes we found it necessary to leave one of our crafts and divide the men into the other Canoes, we left the two Canoes lashed together which I had made high up the River Rochejhone, ... we met a perogue with 5 french men bound to the Osarge Gd. village. ... "we saw some cows on the bank which was a joyfull Sight to the party and caused a Shout to be raised for joy at ... we came in Sight of the little french Village called Charriton (Charrette) the men raised a Shout and Sprung upon their ores and we soon landed opposit to the Village. our party requested to be permited to fire off their Guns which was alowed & they discharged 3 rounds with a harty cheer, which was returned from five tradeing boats which lay opposit the village. we landed and were very politely received by two young Scotch men from Canada ... all of those boats were bound to the Osage and Ottoes. those two young Scotch gentlemen furnished us with Beef flower and some pork for our men ... we purchased of a citizen two gallons of Whiskey for our party for which we were obliged to give Eight dollars in Cash, an imposition on the part of the citizen. every person, both French and americans seem to express great pleasure at our return, and acknowledged themselves much astonished in seeing us return. they informed us that we were supposed to have been lost long since, and were entirely given out by every person &c. ... the American inhabitants express great disgust for the govermt. of this Teritory." September 21, 1806 (Camped at St. Charles, Missouri) "colected our men several of them had axcepted of the invitation of the citizens and visited their families. ... passed 12 canoes of Kickapoos assending on a hunting expedition. Saw Several persons also stock of different kind on the bank which reviv'd the party very much. at 3 P M we met two large boats assending. at 4 P M we arived in Iight of St. Charles, the party rejoiced at the Sight of this hospita[b]l[e] village plyed thear ores with great dexterity and we Soon arived opposit the Town ... we saluted the Village by three rounds from our blunderbuts and the Small arms of the party, and landed near the lower part of the town. we were met by great numbers of the inhabitants, ... the inhabitants of this village appear much delighted at our return and seem to vie with each other in their politeness to us all." September 22, 1806 " this morning being wet and the rain still continuing hard, and our party being all sheltered in the houses of those hospitable people, we do not think proper on until after the rain was over. At 10 am it ceased raining and we collected our party and set out and proceeded on down the cantonment at Coldwater Creek, about 3 miles up the Missouri on its southern banks. We were honored with a salute of guns and harty welcom." |
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WE ARRIVED IN SIGHT OF ST. LOUIS, September 23, 1806
MICHAEL HAYNES http://www.mhaynesart.com/ About noon, on this rainy early Autumn day the Corps of Discovery hove into sight of St. Louis, their final destination. The citizens of that growing village gathered on the bank just down from Roy's mill to enthusiastically receive this band of hardy adventurers who had long been given up for dead. As they approached, the Captains had three volleys fired as a salute to the warm welcome. By now the men of the Corps were a rough and disreputable looking lot and were later described as 'Robinson Crusoes' as they pulled to shore. Most were wearing little but buckskins though a few had traded for hats and cloth shirts during the previous few days with traders they met who were going up river. What must have been the thoughts going through their minds as they made their last paddle or oar stroke and the bow bumped to shore for the last time? Most were probably ecstatic, proud and relieved. In the bow of the white pirogue William Clark waves his battered round hat as Meriwether Lewis releases his grip on his eager Newfoundland, Seaman. Both men wear the vestiges of their rank. York, William Clark’s slave, probably mingled fear and resignation with the excitement of his return. Would he continue to enjoy the freedoms he'd earned on the trek or would life return to as before? His uncertainty is reflected in his gaze and pose. Perhaps looking back out onto the great-plains or mountains where even a black man could be free. Sheheke, the great Mandan chief and guest of Lewis and Clark, points out something of interest to his astonished wife. Surely Lewis and Clark saw this as the beginning of another phase of their expedition. It was now time to collect their thoughts and begin to share and explain the knowledge and material culture collected along the way. In many ways this new phase proved to be the most difficult and least successful part of their endeavor. All of them recognized that what they had achieved was significant but few could probably guess that their efforts would become such an important symbol of the opening of the great American West. |
| September 23, 1806
"we rose early took the Chief [SEE BELOW] to the publick store & furnished him with Some clothes &c. ... decended to the Mississippi and down that river to St. Louis at which place we arived about 12 oClock. we Suffered the party to fire off their pieces as a Salute to the Town. we were met by all the village and received a harty welcom from it's inhabitants." |
| September 24, 1806
"I slept but little last night. We rose early and commenced writing our letters. Capt Lewis wrote to the President and I wrote Governor Harrison and my friends in Kentucky." September 25, 1806 "payed some visits of form to the gentlemen of St. Louis. in the evening a dinner and ball." |
| SHAHAKA/SHEHEKE (Shehek shote) White Coyote, or Shahaka/Sheheke, was the prominent civil chief of the first (lower) or principal Mandan village from 1804–1812. |  |
| Sheheke ("Coyote”), the principal chief of the lower Mandan village, Matutonka (or Matootonha), was nicknamed "Big White" by an unknown white man, evidently because of his size and complexion.
On October 20, 1804, two Mandan leaders, each considering himself the principal chief of Matutonka, came to visit the captains. Having missed the previous day’s meeting, they asked the Americans to repeat their speeches. "They were gratified," Clark reported, "and we put the medal on the neck of the Big White to whome we had Sent Clothes yesterday & a flag." The captains meant well, but as usual they acted hastily, and only worsened an enmity they would have to deal with later. Furthermore, they had sealed a relationship with Sheheke that would bear bitter fruit. Upon their return in late August of 1806, Sheheke reaffirmed his friendship, and promised that his people would "Shake off all intimicy with the Seioux and unite themselves in a strong allience and attend to what we had told them &c.” Amid good feelings all around, they smoked, and took a walk together. "The Mandan Chief," Clark observed, "was Saluted by Several Chiefs and brave men on his way with me to the river." The captains, still eager to fulfill Jefferson’s wish to show Indian leaders the advantages of American culture and civilization, invited Sheheke to return to the East with them, but their gesture only ignited old rivalries, and they had to rely on the able diplomacy of the trader and interpreter René Jusseaume to sort it all out for them. Sheheke finally agreed to go if he could take his wife and son, and if Jusseaume could take his family along, too. Because of resistance from Sioux and Arikara warriors, his return home required two attempts in two years, involving a collective force of more than 600 soldiers, cost a total of $20,000 plus four American lives and one limb (of George Shannon), and brought down the careers of at least two great leaders — himself, and Meriwether Lewis. The trip cost him his once respectable reputation among his people, perhaps because of his long absence, but also because his people didn’t believe his tales of the wonders he had seen. If it is true that Sheheke really wanted to spend the rest of his life among white people, then Jefferson's policy, as carried out by Lewis and Clark, was vindicated. The irony of his story, however, is that he was killed in his own village by Sioux raiders in 1832. |
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| ROADRUNNER pixdaus.com |
| The Vietnam Veterans Memorial recognizes and honors the men and women who served in one of America's most divisive wars. The memorial grew out of a need to heal the nation's wounds as America struggled to reconcile different moral and political points of view.
In fact, the memorial was conceived and designed to make no political statement whatsoever about the war. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a place where everyone, regardless of opinion, can come together and remember and honor those who served. By doing so, the memorial has paved the way toward reconciliation and healing, a process that continues today. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial accomplishes these goals through the three components that comprise the memorial: the Wall of names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women's Memorial. |
| After watching the film "The Deer Hunter" in 1979, Vietnam Veteran Jan C. Scruggs first conceived the idea for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A Yale architectural student, Maya Lin, submitted the winning design.
"The Wall" was built in Constitution Gardens in Washington, D.C., through private donations from the public, and dedicated in 1982. |
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| "...this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them." --- Maya Ying Lin, designer, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall |
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| This is an aerial view of the memorial. |
| Maya Ying Lin is perhaps most well known for this--her first public commission.
Conceived of when she was still an undergraduate at Yale University, the memorial is remarkable in that it proposes neither winners nor losers, but only the names of the dead inscribed in a polished, black granite. A corner submerged into the earth, the work is welcoming in its open-ended, book-like form, and yet disconcerting to those who realize that to read the names is to stand below the horizon - six feet under - conversing in the space of the dead. The work is outspoken and angry in the way in which it functions as a visual scar on the American landscape, cutting aggressively into the Washington Mall, and yet is dignified for the way in which it carves out a space for a public display of grief and pain. These emotions, necessary to the healing process, have a place in Lin's work and are as natural as the cycles of the earth. Attentive to the individual life of every man and woman who died in the war, the memorial is also responsive to the individual experience of the visitor. There is no wrong way to approach the "Vietnam Veterans Memorial" as it makes no grand statements about politics or American ideals. Its sole proposition is that the cost of war is human life. Spread out horizontally (in contrast to the verticality of the Washington Monument to the east and the Lincoln memorial to the west), every inch and every name of the memorial is within grasp. The two 247-foot walls of the monument expand laterally, hugging close to the earth, depending on the landscape for support as much as they mark it as a site for human suffering and reconciliation. The date "1959" is engraved on the upper left hand corner of the first panel on the east side of The Wall. At the lower right corner of the first panel of the west side, we find the date "1975." When the memorial was finished, in 1982, some people expressed surprise at those dates. The Vietnam War, they thought, started in either 1964 or 1965 and ended in 1973 with the withdrawal of troops following the Paris Peace agreement that resulted in Nobel prizes for Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. Thanks to the efforts of our own historians it is known that the origins of the conflict go back much earlier in the century. |
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| Approach to the wall. |
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| THREE SERVICEMEN STATUE One of the three components of the memorial. |
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| The Vietnam Women's Memorial stands near "The Wall" and honors the military and civilian women who served and sacrificed during the Vietnam War. Some of their names are with their brothers' on "The Wall."
Diane Carlson Evans, RN, is the founder of this Memorial project. She served in the Army Nurse Corps from 1966 to 1972 and was in Vietnam from 1968-69. The sculptor is Glenna Goodacre, who created the Women's Memorial in bronze. |
| Some of Glenna Goodacre's words and thoughts about the memorial: "Beyond the purpose of honoring the women who served during the Vietnam War, the bronze is designed to be true sculpture in the round. The triangular composition of four figures is interesting from all sides, with the standing woman at the apex, visually uplifting the entire piece."
"I strived to join the figures into a mass creating a solid statement without the interruption of negative spaces. Too, the women who served worked closely together. In this memorial their closeness is exemplified by the proximity of the figures themselves. Sandbags provided the 'furniture' of war, and I've included them to form a natural base, connect the figures and add volume to the sculpture." |
| The Vietnam Women's Memorial was dedicated over Veterans Day weekend of November 10-12, 1993, to honor the nine military nurses and 58 civilian women who died in Vietnam. In an era of universal polemics and political unrest---with no thought of glory, with no fanfare or public notice---265,000 women volunteered to go where they were needed, to do what was needed. There has never been an official count of how many women actually served in Vietnam, but a reasonable estimate is thought to be about 7,500. That may not seem like a large number, but veterans would not hesitate to agree that their role was far disproportionate to their numbers. |
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| The kneeling nurse in the rear of the sculpture is often identified as the "HEART and SOUL" of the piece. |
| "What was it like to be a woman in Vietnam? We saw the worst that man could do to man, and we saw the very best of the human heart."
--- Jeanne Youngstrom Diebolt, MSN, RN |
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| Thomas Cole, born in Lancashire, England, was trained as an engraver of woodblocks used for printing calico.
Because he did not have any formal education in art, his aesthetic ideas derived from poetry and literature, influences that were strongly to mark his paintings. The Cole family emigrated to America in 1818, but Thomas spent a year alone in Philadelphia before going on to Steubenville, Ohio, where his family had settled. He spent several years in Steubenville designing patterns and probably also engraving woodblocks for his father's wallpaper manufactory. He made his first attempts at landscape painting after learning the essentials of oil painting from a nebulous itinerant portraitist named Stein. In 1823, Cole followed his family to Pittsburgh and began to make detailed and systematic studies of that city's highly picturesque scenery, establishing a procedure of painstakingly detailed drawing that was to become the foundation of his landscape painting. |
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| View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) |
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| Fort Taylor, Florida was one of the most important fortresses of its time. Originally positioned 1200 feet off shore from Key West, it was built as part of the Third System of fortifications to defend Key West Harbor.
This fort was the island's principal defense in the Civil War, and administrative headquarters to the Federal Navy’s East Gulf Coast Blockading Squadron, making it arguably the most important fort in Florida during the Civil War. Construction of the fort began in 1845 as part of a mid-19th century plan to defend the southeast coast through a series of forts. The fort was named for United States President Zachary Taylor in 1850, a few months after President Taylor's sudden death in office. Yellow fever epidemics and material shortages slowed construction of the fort, which continued throughout the 1850s. At the outset of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, Union Captain John Milton Brannan seized control of the fort, preventing it from falling into Confederate hands and using it as an outpost to threaten blockade runners. Originally, the fort was surrounded by water on all sides, with a walkway linking it to the mainland. The fort was completed in 1866. |
| Holland vs. the Netherlands
There is often confusion about Holland. Some people refer to the Netherlands as Holland, but they are not correct. Holland is only a small part of the Netherlands and like the Dakotas, Carolinas and Virginias, there are two Hollands. There's "North Holland" (Capital city is Haarlem) and "South Holland" (Capital city is The Hague). The Hague is the Dutch seat of government and the city Queen Beatrix calls home, but it's not the Dutch capital (Amsterdam is). And no matter what anyone tells you, it's not in a country called Holland. Rather, The Hague is in South Holland, one of the 12 provinces that make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The two provinces, North Holland and South Holland, were one before 1840. That region has been the economic and political heart of the Netherlands for centuries, but "Holland" and "the Netherlands" are not the same. In fact, the distinction is key if you want to understand the importance of The Hague. Planting the Hedge During the Middle Ages, today's Netherlands were officially part of the Holy Roman Empire. In practice, however, Low Country locals remained loyal mainly to their cities and counties, including the county of Holland. Back then, "county" was still something ruled by a count, and the counts of Holland were among the region's most powerful men. In 1248, one of them, Count William II, built a castle in a woodland area where he and his noble pals hunted that came to be called 's-Gravenhage ("the count's hedge"). Thanks to the local elite's regular presence there, a community grew up around the castle. Soon, 's-Gravenhage became the count's permanent administrative center, and 's-Gravenhage got shortened to "Den Haag," or, in English, "The Hague." Reaping the Revolution In the 16th century, Spain's King Charles V became Holy Roman Emperor and nominal ruler of the Netherlands. Charles was basically hands-off, but in 1555, he passed control over the Netherlands to his son, Phillip II, who sought to centralize power and re-Catholicize his Low Country subjects. By that time, the Protestant Reformation (primarily in Calvinist form) was spreading rapidly through the Netherlands. In 1566, Protestant groups rioted, smashing images in Catholic churches and generally decrying their monarch's faith. In response, Philip sent Spanish troops to suppress the Calvinists and curb local leaders. Soon much of the Low Countries was in open revolt. Meeting at a Neutral Site At first the war went poorly for the Protestants. In 1579, however, five Dutch cities and counties--Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, and Zutphen--formed the Union of Utrecht, an anti-Spanish alliance. The following year, several other Dutch cities and counties joined up. A new nation had begun to emerge. That new nation located its government (which came to be called the States General) in The Hague--not only because The Hague was already an established administrative center, but also because it wasn't a chartered city. Most of the major Dutch cities were parties to the union. Naturally, none of them wanted to see the government located in any of the others. The Hague was still basically a village, and not entitled to a seat in the States General--which, of course, made it the ideal seat for the States General. In 1648, after years of intermittent war, the Spanish finally recognized the independence of "the republic of the United Provinces"--or, more simply, the Dutch Republic--and the Dutch enjoyed a golden age of art, culture, and commerce. "The Count's Hedge" has been an important city--and seen as something of a "neutral" place--ever since. |
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| MULE DEER FAWN |
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| VOLUNTEER HOLLYHOCK |
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| Salsify (Oysterplant) Tragopogon porrifolius Tragopogon derives from the Greek tragos, goat, and pogon, beard; pratensis means of meadows. The large, fleshy taproots of these plants are used for food, since they are nutritious, and when cooked taste like parsnips, though some say somewhat like oysters. The salsifies were cultivated in Europe, introduced in America by the early colonists, spread rapidly, and were soon used by the Indians as food. The Indians chewed the coagulated juice of the several species of Tragopon. As the juice is considered a remedy for indigestion, it is quite possible that they were more interested in its medicinal properties than in its use as a gum or confection. The round white seed heads make striking flower decorations for the home and will last a considerable time if carefully handled and sprayed. |
 | Conspicuous migrants, Tree Swallows are often seen in large numbers in the fall in eastern North America; they are generally the first swallows to return in spring when still susceptible to freezing weather. At such times, they may feed on seeds and berries. Found across North America, this large swallow usually forages near bodies of brackish water such as ponds, small lakes, marshes, or wet meadows. They nest in cavities. Ann Telling Photo |
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| There are 8 eggs in this nest box in our rock garden. The normal number per clutch is 6. |
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| These little swallows are developing feathers. |
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| They are just about ready to leave the nestbox. |
| 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. |  |