I expect that some of us will be spending considerable time yarnin’ around the electronic campfire with Hammerson Peters. I recently discovered his YouTube channel, which is rife with the kind of tales I revel in, where frontier history and folklore intersect.
Peters describes himself as “a Western Canadian writer, woodcarver, and fiddle player with a passion for history and the unexplained.” He’s written several books on Canadian folklore, as well as producing wood carvings in the totemic style of the Pacific Coast First Nations peoples. In addition to that, he’s delved deeply into the Métis fiddle tradition.
I started taking violin lessons from my uncle at the age of five, and have been playing ever since. Although I’m classically-trained, I prefer to play fiddle music, and have taken a special interest in Metis fiddling in an effort to get in touch with my Orcadian-Cree roots.
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In a world where young women pay a premium for denim jeans that are more rip and hole than fabric, there ain’t nothing surprising about some dude paying $87,400 for a pair of jeans some miner left behind in diggings in New Mexico.
From The Daily Mail:
A vintage pair of Levi’s from the 1880s found down an abandoned New Mexico mine have been sold at auction for a whopping $87,400 – among the most expensive pair of jeans ever sold.
The pair of jeans, which were discovered some years ago by denim historian Michael Harris in an abandoned mineshaft in the American West, would have been worn by a miner from the authentic gold rush era and have been described as the ‘holy grail of vintage denim collecting’.
They feature suspender buttons on the waistband, selvedge denim badges, a single back pocket and wax flecked over the legs from where the original owner labored under candle light.
Well, not gold rush-era, exactly, but…
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