May 19, 2011

"We make a pretext of difficulty to excuse our sloth." - - - Quintilian

Lophornis verreauxi

THE TRAPPER'S CAMP

BATTLE OF BIG HILLS Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiments

MURDER OF LIEUTENANT BEEVER BY SIOUX

GEN. SIBLEY'S INDIAN EXPEDITION—PURSUING THE SIOUX OVER THE COTEAU DU MISSOURI, DACOTAH TERRITORY, AFTER THE BATTLE OF THE BIG HILLS, JULY 24, 1863 6th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment

In the east, the Santee Sioux were inundated with white settlers constantly wanting more of their land and defrauding them. During a disagreement about how the situation was being handled, four braves killed five settlers.  In August of 1862 the Santee Sioux opened the war with raids on white settlements and trading posts.  Little Crow, chief of the Santee, led several assaults on Ft. Ridgely.  The troops inside the fort fired howitzers at the Indians, killing as many as 100 warriors.  The Santee continued to raid, drawing the ire of General Henry H. Sibley who arrived at Ft. Ridgely with 1500 troops. Little Crow led more successful raids, but finally Sibley moved against the Santee and at Wood Lake the warriors were no match for the artillery of the army. Many of the scattered Sioux escaped and fled to the Dakota Territory or farther on to Canada.  Those who stayed were ordered hanged by President Abraham Lincoln. On December 26, 1862 at Mankato, Minnesota, the largest mass execution in American history took place.  Thirty-eight Santee Sioux were hanged. General Sibley continued to pursue the Santee remnants.  In the spring of 1864 General Alfred Sully defeated a coalition of tribes at Whitestone Hill and Killdeer Mountain.  Once again Native Americans paid dearly for trying to keep their lands.

WHEEL OF FIRE

STILL LIFE WITH DRAPERY

Edo--once also spelled Yedo or Yeddo--is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo, and was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868.
The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the last masterwork of the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige (also known as Ando), is a series of landscape ukiyo-e prints whose subject matter is views of the city of Edo and its outskirts. It is composed of 118 prints designed by Hiroshige I, one print by Hiroshige II and a Table of Content, totaling 120 prints as a complete set. The series, along with his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, is not only the most renowned polychrome woodblock prints of famous placesby Hiroshige, but also, with its bold compositional contrast between foreground and background and assimilation of the Western linear perspective, represents an apex of the landscape ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period.	Its superb artistic quality was also recognized in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, and the marked influence it exerted on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters such as Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin is well-known. Furthermore, since the Tokyo Association for the Crafts of Traditional Woodblock Printmaking completed its project of reprinting the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 2003, the number of exhibitions and publications related to the series has risen. At the same time, new scholarly works on its development of pictorial compositions and its place in a wider historical background have been undertaken in recent years, showing its continuing vitality as an object of research.

ONE HUNDRED FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (TOKYO) NUMBER FIFTY-THREE

ZOJOJI PAGODA AND AKABANE

While Kan'eiji in Ueno to the north was the official temple of the Tokugawa regime, Zojoji in Shiba to the south was the personal temple of the Tokugawa family. By the end of the Tokugawa era, each of these establishments housed the graves of six different shoguns, but those at Zojoji, with their ornate attached temples, were by far the more splendid and were, until their annihilation in a bombing raid in May 1945, one of the great sights of modern Tokyo. The pagoda here was part of the mausoleum of the second shogun Hidetada, the most magnificent of all the graves at Zojoji and a fit rival for those of his father, Ieyasu, and his son, Iemitsu, at Nikko.  The pagoda lay at the southern edge of a hill above the tomb itself.  The two stories we see here were the uppermost of five; the dense mass of evergreens pressing close around the building below served as protection against fire. The view is to the southwest, with Akabane Bridge spanning the Furukawa River in the center.  The broad road beyond runs past the long barrack-lined facade of the mansion of Arima, lord of the domain of Kurume in Kyushu. The Arima mansion was well known to the citizens of late Edo for two landmarks that they would have immediately spotted in this print.  The more obvious is the soaring firetower to the left, known as the highest in Edo and celebrated in a children's song.  Here its jutting black form, backed by a delicate wisp of yellow cloud, serves as visual counterpoint to the upswept eaves and red bracketing of the Zojoji pagoda. More subtle are the six vertical banners rising from behind the stylized cloud bank in the center.  These are a sign of the famous Suitengu Shrine within the Arima compound.

Karma Sangria	Mabel Ann

Tyrannosaurus Tyrannosaurus ("Tyrant lizard") is a genus of theropod dinosaur. The famous species Tyrannosaurus rex, commonly abbreviated to T. rex, is a fixture in popular culture around the world. It lived throughout what is now western North America, with a much wider range than other tyrannosaurids. Fossils of T. rex are found in a variety of rock formations dating to the last three million years of the Cretaceous Period, approximately 68 to 65 million years ago. Like other tyrannosaurids, Tyrannosaurus was a bipedal carnivore with a massive skull balanced by a long, heavy tail. Relative to the large and powerful hindlimbs, Tyrannosaurus forelimbs were small, though unusually powerful for their size, and bore two clawed digits. Although other theropods rivaled or exceeded T. rex in size, it was the largest known tyrannosaurid and one of the largest known land predators, measuring up to 13 metres (43 ft) in length, up to 4 metres (13 ft) tall at the hips, and up to 6.8 metric tons (7.5 short tons) in weight. By far the largest carnivore in its environment, T. rex may have been an apex predator, preying upon hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, although some experts have suggested it was primarily a scavenger.

Life-sized model of a tyrannosaurus rex at the Fort Peck Interpretive Center in Montana.

Fort Peck Dinosaur Museum is an architecturally impressive building located next to the Fort Peck Dam in Fort Peck, Montana, which opened in 2005. Only about 40 Tyrannosaurus rex have ever been found, most of them in Montana. One of these is the so-called Peck's Rex, a replica of a dinosaur found in 1997 southeast of the museum (the original fossils are kept in a sealed vault). Montana is ideal for finding dinosaurs, says Fort Peck ranger Michele Fromdahl. "It's not that there were more dinosaurs here, it's just that conditions at the time were perfect for preserving them. "It was a swamp then but it's really arid and dry now, which makes it perfect for discovering dinosaurs. The terrain was perfect then and it's perfect now.'' People have an inherent fascination with dinosaurs, Fromdahl says.  "Part of it's their size, they're just so big. And they're just not around anymore.'' Fromdahl says the Peck's Rex is unusual because he is believed to be 65-75 percent intact  It's thought that Rex may have had an arthritic jaw or suffered a fatal mouth infection, something of a liability for a T-rex, and starved to death.

GINGER JAR	PALACE URN

VIEW OF CAPRI

Vintage Wings of Canada (VWC) is the owner and operator of this beautifully restored Chance Vought (Goodyear Built) FG-1D Corsair (BuNo 92106), a movie veteran, which is available for airshows, flybys and film.

Conceived in early 1938 in response to a US Navy requirement for a high-speed, high altitude fighter, the prototype inverted gullwinged XF4U-1 Corsair first took to the air in May 1940 and immediately proved itself to be one of the fastest fighter aircraft in the world. In June 1941, the Navy issued the first production contract for the somewhat revised F4U-1 model and the basic design continued in production until January 1953, at which time over 12,800 Corsairs of all models had been built. The FG-1D is virtually identical to the Chance Vought F4U-1D Corsair, and was built under contract by Goodyear to keep up with demand for the design, which first flew in 1940.

Although the Corsair (often known as the "Whistling Death" by the Japanese because of the noise that it made in high-speed flight, the "Bent-Winged Bird" by its crews because of its wing design or simply "Old Hose Nose" because of its very long nose) enjoyed an extremely long production run by the standards of its era.  The aircraft, primarily because of economic considerations, did not become as popular on the civil register as some other fighters such as the North American P-51 Mustang. Nevertheless, there are still a few Corsairs airworthy around the world and, from time to time, racing versions of the big fighter have even bested the more numerous and streamlined highly modified Mustangs in unlimited air races.

"I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from." - - - William Faulkner

Hairy Clematis Clematis hirsutissima Pursh (Other names:  vase flower, sugar bowl, leather flower)

Clematis hirsutissima is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family known by the common name hairy clematis. It is native to much of the western United States, from Washington to Nebraska.  It is a small, erect plant which, unlike other Clematis, does not generally produce vines. It is quite variable in appearance, especially across varieties.  In general the hairy stem reaches up to about half a meter tall and has many hairy leaves divided into lance-shaped lobes.  The inflorescence appears at the tip of the stem and bears a solitary flower. The flower is made up of an urn-shaped cup of deep purple-blue petallike sepals, which are fuzzy and have pointed or rounded tips.  Rare individuals have white or pinkish sepals.  There are no true petals. The fruit is a hairy achene with a very long beak and a plume on the end.

A decoction of the leaves of sugarbowl has been used to treat headaches.  The Navajo Indians used the root in the treatment of congested nose pain.  Although no reports of toxicity have been seen for this species, some if not all members of this genus are mildly poisonous.  The toxic principle is dissipated by heat or by drying.

In 1781 the settlement known as "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula" (City of the Queen of the Angels) was founded in California. It is now known as Los Angeles.

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