Lady Marilyn and daughter Ceili and I hit the Columbia Circuit Finals Rodeo at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds on Saturday night, while Ceili’s husband Jarod was off in the woods filming a culinary adventure.
The action was very Western, and included a blazing fast steer wrestling time of 4.4 seconds from a bulldogger who is also a pickup man.
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If you need a little enticement to plunge into MeatEater’s latest audiobook The Hide Hunters, The MeatEater Podcast has provided the first chapter for free. This is good stuff.
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The Union Scout.
Quixotic Mainer scouted up a must-read volume on, well, scouts. The scouts of the Army of the Potomac to be specific. Although I am much-delayed, I am still developing The Ranger Project, with a significant focus on irregular operations in the Civil War, so I downloaded it for free on Audible and will shortly order up a physical copy:
As Patrick O’Donnell demonstrated so well in The Unvanquished: Civil War marked the moment when the Frontier Partisan way of war entered the modern era.
The Union Army of the Potomac developed the first modern military intelligence apparatus — the Bureau of Military Information — replete with a cadre of analysts who processed intelligence provided by scouts who operated in enemy territory in Virginia, either in captured Confederate uniforms or civilian clothing. Most were civilian contractors. As such, they were subject to hanging as spies if captured.
William Wilson, a civilian scout with the Army of the Potomac.
A group of Army of the Potomac BMI Scouts.
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One of Knight’s key contacts was a remarkable Richmond socialite named Elizabeth Van Lew. She held abolitionist sentiments and was ardently pro-Union, despite living in a slaveholding family in Virginia. After hostilities commenced, she devoted herself to aiding Union prisoners at the notorious Libby Prison in Richmond. That led to helping prisoners to escape, which led, in turn, to her being recruited as a spy. By 1864, she was running a small network of spies in Richmond, providing intelligence of such value that she won commendation from General Ulysses S. Grant, who appointed her Postmaster of Richmond during his presidency.
She had a rough go of it in her later years, ostracized by Richmond society, where she was regarded as a traitor and a nutcase.
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I will pair the Knight memoir with this one:
Serving from late 1862 to the war’s end, Wade Hampton’s Scouts were a key component of the comprehensive intelligence network designed by Generals Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart and Wade Hampton. The Scouts were stationed behind enemy lines on a permanent basis and provided critical military intelligence to their generals. They became proficient in unconventional warfare and emerged unscathed in so many close-combat actions that their foes grudgingly dubbed them Hampton’s Iron Scouts.
The Confederate service was not as systematized and “modern” as the Army of the Potomac’s BMI, but the scouts of both sides operated in much the same fashion. From Scouting For Grant & Meade:
And that, right there, is classic Frontier Partisan action. Frederick Russell Burnham would approve…
The Union Scout by Johannes Certel.
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Eleven gory ghosts stood waiting to escort him to eternal shades.
— Jimmy Dolan on Billy the Kid, St. Louis Daily Globe
(via the Chasing Billy Podcast)
Art by Bob Boze Bell
As the Spooky Season continues, we venture to Lincoln, New Mexico, with the Chasing Billy podcast posse. If there is any frontier locale that is haunted, it would be Lincoln. Corruption and murder were the order of the day there, and the town has not paved over the restless graves of the men and women who walked its dusty streets. As no less an authority on the weird and haunted than Robert E. Howard well knew…
“I can offer no better description. A mummy town. Nowhere have I ever come face to face with the past more vividly; nowhere has that past become so realistic, so understandable. It was like stepping out of my own age, into the fragment of an elder age, that had somehow survived. In Lincoln I felt the Past, not as dusty, meaningless names, and the out-worn repetition of moldy heroisms, but as a living, breathing reality; it was as if a mythical giant, thought dead and forgotten, had suddenly reared his awesome head and titan shoulders above the surrounding mountains and looked at us with living eyes.
“Lincoln is a haunted place; it is a dead town; yet it lives with a life that died fifty years ago.”
—Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, July 1935
LeMay recounts Billy’s own ventures into spooky yarn-spinning. Billy Bonney was an Irish kid — a Celt — and it tickles me to think of him telling fairy tales and spooky stories to his Hispanic friends, who themselves have a long tradition of venturing out into Fennario.
The podcast guest is John LeMay, author of Haunted Lincoln County, New Mexico.
Thanks to its bloody range war, Lincoln County hosts a wide array of restless spirits. La Llorona glides across the Bonito River and stalks the streets of Carrizozo. Old Ruidoso, the ghost steer, bellows from the mountains, sparking tales of ill omens and the relocation of an entire town. The clang of the shackles that restrained Billy the Kid reverberates through the Lincoln County Courthouse. Shadow people inhabit dark corners of Fort Stanton, while the ghosts of Aztec mummies guard a treasure in the Capitan Mountains. And the clear waters of Bonita Lake hide the blood-soaked history of Bonito City.
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As for hauntings…
The ground where momentous and violent events have occurred carries some sort of strange power. Marilyn felt the room spin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC while looking into the box where Lincoln was shot. I was nearly overcome with a palpable and intensely physical sense of evil and horror on the grounds of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where the 1995 bombing took 168 souls. Craig Rullman describes an eerie sense of loss and pain experienced at the Big Hole Battlefield in Montana, where Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce were attacked by U.S. soldiers as they attempted to flee to Canada.
Perhaps it’s psychosomatic; could be that we carry our sensibilities about a place and an event with us and being on the ground intensifies them to an acute level. Perhaps it’s… something else. I cannot say. But I know what haunted feels like.
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The biathlon season got underway in a unique way last weekend. Munich hosted an elite-class roller-biathlon event in its Olympic park. Urban biathlon. No snow. The athletes competed on roller-skis in super-sprint events. Munich knows how to put on a festival, and this thing looked absolutely wonderful; 20,000 fans in attendance. The Italian Lisa Vittozzi, whose season last year was cut short by a back injury, took the title for the women, while Frenchman Eric Perrot won the men’s event.
This is just so cool…
Matthew says
Lots of good stuff here.
Rick Schwertfeger says
I certainly felt the spirits when touring the Antietam Battlefield. The site of America’s bloodiest single-day battle, the famous Sunken Road and Burnside Bridge over Antietam Creek seemed especially haunted. it is the most eerie place I’ve ever been.
JimC says
Civil War battlefields seem to carry a particular potency.
Quixotic Mainer says
I have the book on the Iron Scouts too, picked up on a foray to South Carolina. It’s a good read also. I would send it out to you if you want it. Those guys were more combative than their BMI rivals, and were dedicated shotgunners in battle.
On the topic of eerie places, I sometimes am more put off when a place doesn’t have one that could. In the course of my duties I often return to a house or apartment where I know something horrible unfolded, but now it’s cleaned up with new and brighter lives led there. Odd stuff. My last real disturbance in the force was Wier Point at the Greasy Grass though. Absolutely something there.
JimC says
I’m stealing your reference to “a disturbance in the Force” in this regard, because it is right in the x-ring. I’ll take you up on that offer. My address is:
P.O. Box 461
Sisters, OR 97759
Thank you!
Quixotic Mainer says
I’m out after grouse and timberdoodle in the morning, but I’ll send it along once I get clear of the woods. Happy to help.
JimC says
Fire up some Turnpike Troubadours to set the mood…
The Bird Hunters
J.F. Bell says
There holds a thread I heard some time ago (re: battlefields) that the particular heat of a battle opens the pores of the world, and into whichever piece of ground hosts that particular fight seeps alongside spilled blood the anguish and desperation of the show, and though the armies move on and the trenches and breastworks fall to decay the ground is forever altered.
Sort of a blood-memory for dirt, one imagines. I doubt one could prove such, and have no designs on trying, but I confess it appeals to the frayed nerves of the battered romantic and probably a couple of other types.
If I may pose a question in similar vein…I half-wonder if any here are familiar with a the occasional sense of an evil on the other side of the door. I’ve felt it now and again, and in prior work knew a few in the martial or first-response lines who’d brushed up against similar from time to time. For one reason or another the concept has been flitting around the periphery lately.
Idle wonderings of the exhausted mind, most like.
JimC says
The image of the pores of the world opening and the anguish and desperation seeping in certainly describes the way the Oklahoma City Bombing site felt to me. I was palpably struck the minute I walked on the site — sweating, nauseous, aware of a palpable sense of evil. I’ve never felt like that so suddenly and powerfully anywhere else. Marilyn was a little concerned about me. I had to sit down and compose myself. It was very strange, especially as the memorial is designed to impart a sense of peace, with a reflecting pool and all that. I would describe it as definitely something in the ground.
JimC says
Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear emphasizes the value and validity of intuition. We know when something it “off,” but layers of social conditioning and the dulling of senses from civilized living and the ambient noise of all of that interfere with the signal. I suspect that some are more attuned than others, and that the attunement can be consciously developed.
Matthew says
I’ve been slowly going through a book called The Master and the Emissary by psychologist Iain Mcghilcrist. It is about how the brain and its two hemisphere’s work. Contrary to what people think the left brain isn’t the more logical and accurate one and the right the creative but more delusional. Rather the right sees the whole context and the left see an artificial part of the whole. (He has a lot of scientific evidence to prove this.) Meaning that intuition and imagination are perfectly valid ways of understanding the world. (For record, Einstein came up with his theory of relativity by imagining what it was like to ride a light beam. Science is filled with examples of people using intuition and imagination to discover things.)
Mcghilcrist also comments that people and society seem to have been dominated by the left hemisphere and thus a simplistic representation of reality. I am skeptical about social commentary in general, but this explains a lot about our society. Why people take extremes in politics et cetera.
JimC says
Very interesting. There is also some interesting study going on regarding the gut as a “second brain,” and the role of the enteric nervous system in mood and brain function. “Trust your gut” may have more literal implications than we tend to “think.”
There is also a school of thought that posits that what we think of as “rational thinking” is more akin to rationalization — we retroactively fill in rational reasons to affirm our emotional reactions to things.
All of this points, of course, to a complex, connected system that can’t be viewed as merely a sum of its parts.
John M. says
They say we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor. I’m convinced we know more about the ocean floor than we do about what’s actually going on between our ears–and through our whole bodies. There’s excellent evidence that certain things that Westerners conceive of as happening in our brains actually being stored in other organs. There are numerous cases where organ transplantees have received taste preferences and even memories from their organs’ prior hosts.
Quixotic Mainer says
I’m convinced of the existence of such a sense. It can’t ever be 100 percent, like any other sense, but there’s much the intuition can tell us in “interesting times.”
When I’ve been lucky enough to feel it, it seems like a sinking or darkening feel that gets stronger as we draw closer to a bad tactic or decision. Call it survivorship bias, but I always listen and find another way. And I’m not dead yet! Haha.
Padre says
It’s both my personal and professional opinion that there are certain ‘thin places’ (and times) where the division between the seen and unseen realms is minimized, for reasons unknown to us.
There are certain places that have an effect on me. And lest one should presume that my vocation makes me more inclined to imagine such things, my spidey senses have kicked in when I had no idea what I was walking or driving by until after the fact.
JimC says
I believe this to be true. It may be, too, that some have more acute “spider sense” than the norm.