Approximately 3,000 mountain men roamed the Rocky Mountains between 1820 and 1840, the peak beaver-harvesting period. While many were free trappers, most mountain men were employed by major fur companies.

Mountain men lived aux aliments du pays, French for “nourishment of the land”, surviving by using the provisions of nature.  Eating bull cheese (buffalo jerky) and galette, a basic flour and water bread made into flat, round cakes and fried in fat or baked before an open fire, they lived alone.

Remembering and reenacting that adventure attracts men such as John Puthoff, 74, known as Old Badger.  Puthoff spends every weekend being a mountain man so others can appreciate what his life must have been like 200 years ago.

TRIBUTARY

What attracts you to the mountain man lifestyle?

PUTOFF

I do it because I love it.  It’s been a part of me since I was a kid.  I ran these hills in Deer Creek Canyon (west of Denver) starting in my early teens (early 1950s).  I rode the school bus down old Highway 285 along South Turkey Creek to Bear Creek High School.  I got to be free as a bird roaming these hills with the same attitude as the mountain men had.  They answered to basically nobody.  They did what they needed to.

I always had an affinity towards being by myself and learning, watching and understanding things. When I was running the hills here as a kid, I carried a .22 caliber rifle in the leather sleeve that was fringed.  I had a tomahawk on my hip, which I still have.  I had a knife in a sheath and a pouch full of bullets.  What more did I need?

I lived in my own world up there.  There was one summer where I didn’t come out of the hills to go into town for probably four or five weeks.  I was living a dream that a lot of kids will never get a chance to experience.

When I dress in the mountain man way, I step back 200 years.  I try to be as historically truthful and real about the history and lifestyle from the mountain man era.  Everything on me is hand made to resemble actual equipment.  I carry an English folding knife that is more than 150 years old which my grandfather acquired somewhere along the way.

TRIBUTARY

You are wearing a leather totem of a badger track around your neck.  Why the badger?

PUTHOFF

(Pulling his hair back) I also wear badger claw earrings.  The native Americans believe each person has an animal guide that accompanies them through life.  There may be more truth to many of the Indian legends than many people want to believe.

Seeing badger tracks was a sign of future success to the Indians, a sign that all things are possible when we tap into our inner creative powers.  Watching and studying about the badger I have learned to walk my own path at my pace. Never mind what others may say. I have discovered that I am well equipped to take on whatever challenges I face. I also have an attitude like a badger on occasion.

Like my leatherwork.  It is from that era but no one taught me how to do it.  I discovered it on my own.  I’m self-taught.  My first day in high school my teacher set a rack of tools down in the middle of the table, backed up and said, “Boys those are leather craft tools. Have fun.”

My grandfather gave me a scrap of leather when I was a kid and the first damned thing I did was make a holster for a cap gun.

Since then I have never stopped creating leatherwork.  I have designed many things for many people.  I worked for Tandy Leather for about 20 years.  I was teaching classes, giving demonstrations, sales.  Traveled all over the west. I enjoyed working with people.  I am a teacher at heart.

TRIBUTARY

After high school you were on active duty with the Air Force and then you were a surveyor for the Denver Water Board.

PUTHOFF

I loved surveying and did it for about nine years.  I worked in a feed store for a number of years. Then started selling my own custom leatherwork.  I worked on my own after that for about 30 years.  I sold most of my work at gun shows and took a lot of orders for custom designs.

TRIBUTARY

When did you get involved with the rendezvous and what attracted you to those events?

PUTHOFF

I was doing mountain man rendezvous from the 1970s on.  I made a buckskin leather outfit back then.  Made it in 1975.  I would sell my leatherwork there as well.

A rendezvous is a place to relax and enjoy myself and partake of a time period with others who enjoy the same thing.  We would trade things.  I did some teaching.  I love actually showing people how to do something, especially in leather.  I have been an educator, a leather craft teacher, since I was a kid.

It’s re-enacting, recreating and stepping back in time to a less stressful situation where you are with like-minded people who are craftspeople and historians.  They understand what they are doing.  They teach others.

When my wife was alive, we’d go to some of them and spend two or three days.    The Rendezvous I still like to go to that is close by is in Fort Lupton.  The other one I like is here at The Fort coming up on May 18 and 19 — the 13th Annual Indian Market and Powwow.

TRIBUTARY

It sounds like you lost your best companion when she died.

PUTHOFF

She died Christmas Day 2009 suddenly.  She wasn’t feeling good.  Had an upset stomach.  It was about 8 am and I was giving her a back rub.  She said it felt great.  I took her dishes back out to the kitchen and when I came back she was laying over on her side.  She had had a seizure.

It left me lost in space for a while.  I dearly loved the lady.  She was part of my life for 30 years.  I have since re-learned that my world is the one that I am in now.  I’m a loner and I am finding out now that is where I belong.  That’s where I am comfortable.  I am a loner by choice.  My traits, my actions since I was a kid, is a loner.

TRIBUTARY

On the other hand you love talking with people here at The Fort and being an educator.

PUTHOFF

Well, but I do it at my pace.  Not somebody else’s.  If I need to walk away for a while, I do.  This is the world I believe I existed in once before.  The mountain man was very solitary.

TRIBUTARY

You seem to enjoy being in these red rocks overlooking Denver.

PUTHOFF

I am walking over the same ground that the native Americans walked over 200, 300, 400 years ago.  I stand here and look out over the same countryside that they did.  I have the same feelings within my heart, the spirituality of everything around me and how the Indians respected all these things, I try to do the same.  (Pausing) If I choke up, I’m sorry.  It happens.  This is the time period and the world in which I am extremely comfortable being a part of and being able to share with other people.

TRIBUTARY

Is there somehow a sense that you were there back then?

PUTHOFF

Very definitely.  I’ve been here before.

TRIBUTARY

Your leatherwork business card lists your name as Jacob T. Dof, not John Puthoff.  Where does that come from?

PUTHOFF

It’s an acronym for “Just A Cantankeros Old Bastard That’s Damned Old Fashioned.”

TRIBUTARY

Would you describe what you are wearing?

PUTHOFF

The knife I wear around my neck is hand made out of a saw blade.  This turtle emblem represents longevity and the Indians used it to represent the American continent.

This is the Cross of Lorraine.  It would be carried as a trade piece to give to the Indians.  The silver braclets and turquoise, that’s simply me.  I’ve worn them since the Sixties.  I will not part with them.  Mountain men did have earrings and bracelets but not to the extent that I have.

TRIBUTARY

Kind of a Hippie thing.

PUTHOFF

No. Beatnik.

This is my possibles bag.  It has fire starting equipment, parts for the guns, whetstone, flint and steel.  Your life would have depended on what was carried in the bag. Extra flints, a tin of priming powder.  Sometimes a bullet mold.

The post Mountain Man Badger Puthoff appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

Marjorie Lansing Porter

Journalist Marjorie Porter watched the old woman’s wrinkled hands spinning yarn and listened to the tune she was quietly humming as she worked.  A cool breeze from across Lake George was stirring the humidity in the shade.  It was 1941, and Porter, 32, had spent many summers with her family at the lake. Today, this exhibit of pioneer life in the Adirondack Mountains brought her to the spinning wheel of Lily Delorme.

“Mrs. Delorme, I’m Marjorie Porter.  I’m a reporter for the Plattsburgh Daily Press (today’s Plattsburgh Press Republican).  “That song you are humming, is that a Lake Champlain ballad,” Porter ventured.

“Grandma” Lily Delorme, as she was known, nodded yes, not pausing from her spinning or humming. Other visitors stood by watching her work.

Porter, wrote in her subsequent article, “Her story of pioneer life in the Adirondacks was set to a musical hum as she paced, now close to the big wheel, now away from it.”

“Would you allow me to record the song,” Porter asked. “Do you know the words?”

“Oh yes,” Delorme smiled looking up from her task.  “I know a bunch of them.”

“Do you happen to know, by chance, a ballad called “The Banks of Champlain,” Porter asked.

“Why, yes, it went this way, ‘Twas autumn and round me the leaves were descending…”

“Her thin, reedy voice told the whole story in a score of verses, ” Porter wrote. “Grandma’s saga continued in lively conversation as I drove her home. She spoke of her grandfather, a Vermont pioneer named Gideon Baker, veteran of the War of 1812, and of his muzzle-loader and bullet mold from the war.  We talked about how The Banks of Champlain was written by the wife of General Alexander Macomb during the Battle of Plattsburgh.

TRIBUTARY

Marjorie Porter was born in Port Henry on Lake Champlain in 1891, the daughter of Charles and Helen (Prescott) Lansing. Her great-grandfather, Wendell Lansing, founded the Essex County Republican in 1839 in Keeseville, as an organ of the Whig Party and its anti-slavery platform.  They also owned the Plattsburgh Sentinel of which her grandfather, Abram Lansing, was editor.  The paper became the Press-Republican in 1942.

She married Howard Guy Millington in 1912, and then Homer Porter in 1922. She had five children: Helen Millington (1913), John Millington (1915), Mary Elizabeth Millington (1918), David Porter (1922) and Philip Porter (1924).

Surrounded by journalists and other storytellers in her own family, she was naturally fascinated by the family stories about the Adirondack Mountains region of northern New York, and northern Vermont, forming the valley for Lake Champlain.  Her many articles captured wonderful details which reader’s enjoyed.  She became, over time, the region’s official historian, and began expanding her efforts to collect ballads and oral histories.

Porter wrote later that this encounter with Lily Delorme was “the seed for a constructive activity – the collection of folksongs, ballads and lore illustrative of life in the Adirondack Mountains and the adjacent Lake Champlain Valley.” She recorded more than 100 of Delorme’s songs (click link to hear original recording) on her new SoundScriber Recorder.

By the time Porter died in 1973, that collection consisted of 33 reel-to-reel tapes that held more than 450 recordings of folk ballads, lyrical folksongs, early hillbilly pieces, French Canadian songs and fiddle tunes from steamboat captains, loggers, farmers, lumber jacks, and trappers.

Porter’s SoundScriber recorder

Copies of the recordings are at Archive of Folk Culture in the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.  The originals, along with Porter’s manuscript and photo collection, are at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh Special Collections where Porter’s SoundScriber discs have been digitized.

Porter recorded another “tradition bearer” named John Galusha, or “Yankee John” as he was known locally.  He worked his whole life in the Adirondack mountains as a logger, farmer, forest ranger and guide. Starting at age sixteen and for decades afterwards, he’d spend the fall and winter months in the lumber camps, then work the Boreas, Hudson, Moose and Beaver Rivers in the springtime driving logs downstream to the mills. Summers were reserved for guiding and/or farming, and in later years, fire observing on Vanderwhacker Mountain. Then, back to the woods in the fall.

Click link to hear “Yankee John” Galusha singing one of his songs.

Word of her collection spread in folk music circles and Pete Seeger found his way to her home to hear some of the recordings.  They provided the source material for albums by Pete Seeger (1960) and Milt Okun (1963). On “Champlain Valley Songs”, Seeger sings, The Banks of Champlain, which was originally sung by Delorme and recorded by Porter.

2008 interview with Pete Seeger by Porter’s granddaughter June Millington.

TRIBUTARY

Kathy Gill, daughter of Helen Millington, spent summers traveling with her grandmother, the ballads collector.  She recently wrote this letter to her cousins who were meeting with the Special Collections staff to turn over personal photos and papers to the Porter archives. The letter offers many insights into the personality of Marjorie Porter.

GILL

She drove her trusty ’48 Studebaker coupe as we traveled to the newspaper offices in Keeseville and Plattsburgh where she dropped off her weekly columns. I remember climbing a long flight of rickety stairs at the back of the Keeseville press with the AuSable River thundering by underneath and shaking the stairs and even the door knob on the back door.  I felt only those with real stories to tell would dare to enter. The door would open to a huge grimy room alive with monstrous, roaring machines pounding out the news with words typed all over these sheets of newsprint as they spewed them out in a deadline glut. I felt my humble nine-year old heart bow in respect. I had discovered my religion; my forebearers smiled and so did Grandma.

We visited ancient, ancient people way back in the hinterlands.  She had a little machine which would record important stories and their versions of old, old ballads on a wax cylinder. She would mail it to a place in New York City and it would all be transferred to a small flexible bright-green disc which could be played on a record player. The ballads were sung by elderly folks with scratchy voices and they were hard to understand, but Grandma knew all of their folks songs and taught some of them to me as we drove along in the sweet little coupe, which was traded in, I might add, to my horror, in 1957, on a brand-new black Studebaker Skylark with red-leather interior.

Folk singers, such as Pete Seeger (who did not like kids!) came to visit now and then and I think Milt Oaken did also. She always fed them her delicious waffles or pancakes with real butter and maple syrup. She made the best doughnuts in the world.

She loved nothing more than talking to, and teaching others, about the history of the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain. She knew the North Woods right down to the pine needles on the forest floor and was glad to share all she knew with others. Her eyes would light up with delight and a zeal that was far beyond her normal interaction with others.

She loved to hob-nob with others of like mind and could talk with zeal for hours.

She was the one who taught me about birds and the woods, old stories and ballads and she made the best egg-sald sandwiches in the world.

Marjorie Porter photo by Michael McNamara, grandson

I will always love her for opening a whole different world for me, by the Grace of God.  And I will never forget how she would stomp across Route 9 in Keene as we’d be leaving after Sunday services at the old Methodist church, muttering, “Ye gods, people. Don’t any of you know how to sing?” People would turn and look at her with mouths hanging open, they were so shocked!

She always smelled good, like soft put-away clothes from a cedar chest.

When she tucked me in at night, her breath was warm against my face as we said goodnight prayers and she would sing the first stanza of ‘Thank Thee Our Father’, a beautiful old-lady voice with a spring to it.

Her little vanity in her bedroom had a three-part mirror behind it with simple things at hand; a comb, a sterling silver hairbrush and the most simple and beautiful sterling silver hand mirror with her initials waltzing across the back. I would stand in her doorway and just stare at that scene; so spare, yet so beautiful, just as her best paisley dress was, and her poor mis-shapened spectator pumps.  (She suffered from bunions.)

One time I dared reach over and pick up the mirror and look in it, then quickly tried to put it back just as it was.  I wanted to see if I were beautiful, also. I only saw a kid with scraggly hair staring back with eyes too big. But, I knew her reflection was beautiful, yet stern.

And she was so tiny.  I towered over her by the age of 10 or 11.  Many times, she had to buy her clothes in the children’s department because there was nothing in her size in the women’s section. It was very frustrating for her.

I wish all of you could just hear how beautiful her voice was as she sang different goodnight songs each evening just before sleep came.

My happiest moment was the summer I arrived and I knew I finally really belonged in her library because I could read all by myself. I couldn’t wait to devour all the books I could possibly reach on tiptoe. I will forever be grateful to her for that wonderful, wonderful door to the rest of the world and beyond. She, in her somewhat stern way, totally changed my outlook on life in certain ways and it was good, and predictable and safe.

TRIBUTARY

Porter wrote a regular column on the history and folklore of region for these newspapers for many years. This excerpt is from the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, October 27, 1943.

PORTER

It was one of those hazy September days when mountain outlines are obscure against a smoky blue sky, sunshine lies hot on fields golden and red with stubble of oats and buckwheat, maples wave scarlet banners here and there along winding dirt roads on the hillsides, blue birds make splashes of color on nail fences, and calls of jays and crows are muted in the pines.

We were driving up the valley of the Saranac in mid-afternoon, our objective High Falls Gorge, just above Moffittsville and 18 miles from Plattsburgh. One more “some day” trip had materialized and the gorge, of which we had heard so many tales, was near at hand.

Here it was that in lumbering days, almost a century ago, river drivers fought those sudden terrible log jams, when immense sticks piled high in wild confusion between rock walls, and a single man must step out on the heaving mass to set the key log free. The other end of a rope tied around his waist was held, by a companion on shore, who watched with the utmost vigilance to snatch him into the air and back to the river bank, if he misjudged his step in leaping to safety. If he fell into that roaring inferno of water, boiling around grinding, tossing logs, he was lost, though he be the bravest river man of all and perhaps well-loved in camp for his Irish blarney and his gusty songs.

TRIBUTARY

Marjorie Porter left very little about herself. She wrote mostly about other people.  ”The recent family donations completed the collection and gave insights into the personality of Marjorie Porter, ” commented Debra Kimok, Librarian of Special Collections.  ”The folk music and oral histories are just rich with information. The visit of the grandkids helped my staff and I learn more about her and fill out the collection a bit more.”

Hannah Harvester, Program Director at Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY) commented, “Marjorie Lansing Porter’s music collection is an extremely significant resource for anyone with an interest in traditional music or the cultural heritage of the Adirondacks and Champlain Valley. It was very helpful for us at TAUNY when we created our Adirondack Music website module, as it contains songs from diverse groups such as loggers, miners, Irish, Iroquois, and French Canadian groups, as well as oral histories recorded with many of the singers. Many of the songs were recorded just in time, before the tradition bearers passed away.”

Enjoy Pete Seeger’s recording of “Isabeau S’y Promeneau” (Isabeau went walking) a French Canadian ballad recorded by Porter.

SUNY Plattsburgh Special Collections Guide to the Marjorie Lansing Porter Papers:

Photographs - Recordings - Papers

Photo credits:  SoundScriber by Debra Kimok, SUNY Plattsburgh Special Collections.

Black and white portrait of Porter in front of window by Michael McNamara, grandson .

The post The ballads collector of Lake Champlain appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

Richard Lamm was governor (1975-1987) when Carol Keller started giving tours of the Colorado capitol building 25 years ago.

She waits quietly for her next tour group to gather.  She says good morning to Gov. John Hickenlooper as he enters the Executive Chambers near the capitol tour guides desk.  It’s Friday, 10 a.m., according to the Mickey Mouse watch on her graceful wrist.  Time to start.

At age 87, she’s entertained thousands of school children, senior citizens, visitors from Europe and Japan revealing history and trivia about her home state and its capitol building.

She will tell you about the five-foot thick walls of granite quarried near Gunnison, Colo., and the likeness of George Washington in the pink rose onyx, quarried near Beulah, Colo.

The capitol building’s floors are Yule Marble from Marble, Colo.

Born in Greeley, Colo., she spent her first career as a Registered Medical Technician at Denver General Hospital, now Denver Health.

At age 62, she took the capitol building tour and thought she might like to be a tour guide.  Today she has many stories to tell about the state capitol building, designed to commemorate Colorado’s Gold Rush days, and the pioneers and miners who helped build the state.

KELLER

Each of the governors is a little bit different.  Gov. (Roy) Romer was nice. If he walked by he would always stop and talk to the groups and so would (Bill) Owens.   One funny thing happened recently with Gov. (John) Hickenlooper.  The security people told us (tour guides) that the governor was busy and doesn’t want to talk to the tour groups.  I told the kids if the governor came out he was very busy and couldn’t talk but they could wave to him.  So out comes Gov. Hickenlooper and walks up to the kids and asks where they are from and did they want to have their picture taken with the governor out on the steps.  So we go out through the governor’s security entrance, which we never do, and they had their pictures taken.

When I came back in I looked at the security guard and said it was not my fault.  So the rules change with any given situation.

I lived through a number of the capitol building evacuations when Gov. Dick Lamm was in office (1975 – 1987).  We were having some bomb threats due to his position on extending the lives of the elderly. He was kind of in the doghouse with the public over the “duty to die” issue.

TRIBUTARY

When we got to the Colorado Quilt and the Women’s Gold Tapestry on the tour you seemed to stand taller and be very proud of them.  Did you help sew both of them?

KELLER

The Colorado Quilting Council has a show in the capitol every two years.  There were 240 quilts the last time and you could hardly see the building for the quilts.  I have always made quilts and so I would help with the show and lead tours.

Edna Pelzmann was in charge of the capitol tour guides and had the idea to put together a Colorado Quilt.  So she and I chaired it and recruited 25 capitol volunteers.  We started in June 2007 and it took us about 250 hours.  Each person chose one of the state symbols and could do that section however they wanted to.  The border is 38 stars since  we were the 38^thstate admitted to the Union.

TRIBUTARY

The Women’s Gold Tapestry depicts 18 women who made contributions to Colorado history.  How did that get started?

KELLER

The project was started by Eve Mackintosh from Idaho Springs.  It started out as a church quilting project.  Then, during the state’s centennial in 1976, Eve worked very hard to get the tapestry finished. I think she had more than 3,000 people put stitches on it.   It traveled the state for two years. All hand stitched. She was quite a go-getter.

TRIBUTARY

Who is your favorite woman in the tapestry?

KELLER

Mrs. Crawford, the lady who didn’t want to come here.  (Pointing at the tapestry) This is her standing in a wagon.

Margaret Crawford came with her husband during the Gold Rush from Missouri.  In the bottom of the wagon she insisted they bring a rose bush and a lilac bush from home.  They ended up in mining camp near Steamboat Springs.  She began cuttings of the yellow roses to all the mining camps.  That’s why the tapestry was named Women’s Gold because the miners nicknamed those yellow roses “the women’s gold.”

TRIBUTARY

Any ghost stories?

KELLER

Well my ghost story involves a gang of banditos down in southern Colorado called the Espinosa Gang.  They were really bad.  They had murdered some people so the governor put a bounty on their heads.  The bounty hunter cut their heads off to send to the capitol but the governor had since left office.  The state never paid the bounty for the heads.  The heads were put downstairs in the tunnels.  At that time the caretaker lived in the tunnels.  He discovered the heads and decided there weren’t going to be any heads in his domain so he threw them in the furnace.

TRIBUTARY

So the Espinosa Gang could be wandering through the state capitol?

KELLER

Without their heads!

That same caretaker was very frugal and wanted to be paid in silver dollars.  The story goes that he was stashing the silver dollars in the tunnels somewhere.  Since then many have searched for the hiding place but found nothing.  So we don’t have any big fortunes in the tunnels.

Then there is the story about the guy who stole gold from the capitol dome.  The dome got it’s first coating of 24-karat gold in 1908 and the second one in 1950.  By this time it was chipping very badly from weather damage.  So this guy would put a bucket under the down spout and catch the flaking gold after a rain or hail storm.   So when they redid the gold on the dome, they also changed the downspout so that wouldn’t happen again.

TRIBUTARY

When the legislature is in session is there a different feeling to the place?

KELLER

Yes it changes where people can go.  We used to be able to bring groups into the observation area on the main floor of the House and Senate Chambers but we can’t do that anymore.  We now go into the upper galleries and walk across on the tour.  If visitors want to come back and watch what is going on they can.

There are many more people here conducting business and it’s all fun and games until budget time and then things get a little tense.  You can feel it in the elevators and watching people.  It’s gotten a little tighter than it was years ago when the state was doing well.  The legislators are here for business and they know it.  I’m non-political.  I don’t like politics.  We have to be neutral as tour guides.  You can’t really know all the legislators.  I haven’t changed but look at how many times they change every year.

TRIBUTARY

Other favorites?

KELLER

Did you know some of the Perry Mason episodes were shot in the Supreme Court chambers.  I like trivia.

On my 75th birthday we got to go clear up to the very top of the capitol dome to where the airplane lights are.  There are some real rickety ladders that take you up into the dome and then get out on the roof.  We went all the way up there.  So I have literally been from the tunnels to the roof of the capitol building.  There are more than 150 rooms.

In the two legislative chambers I love the stained glass windows and the large chandeliers.  The chandeliers used to be all gas but now they are electric.  They let them down on a pulley to polish them and pull them back up.

TRIBUTARY

Do you have to memorize all these details to be a capitol tour guide?

KELLER

When we train new guides we tell them to find what interests them and find those stories to tell.  So each of us highlights what we find interesting.  So I spend a little extra time at the two quilts.  I’m sure the male guides talk about different things than I do and the college age guides have their interests.   We all have to hit the big highlights but the rest is up to us.

__________________

_____________

State Capitol Art and Memorials Guide

State Capitol Virtual Tour Guide

2011 Capitol Quilt Show 

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The post Capitol building tour guide appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

Jason Morse was following a narrow snow path to his neighbor’s house for Sunday brunch.  It was one of those crunchy, my-breath-almost-froze-in-front-of-my-face Minnesota winters. The couple treated him like their grandson.

Using their finest silverware, silver pitchers and china they covered the large dining room table with pastries and salads, meats and vegetables.  It was all very elegant.

Jason watched his reflection move up and down on the side of a silver pitcher as he tilted his head back and forth. He asked his neighbor if he could help her in kitchen where the laughter and the aromas came from. Wow!  This is cool, he thought to himself as he worked alongside her.

Helping with Sunday brunch got him thinking about being a chef. His neighbor was the chef for the governor of Minnesota.  He was in sixth grade.

By the time he started high school he had worked in a starter restaurant job and wanted to learn more.  He found a local restaurant to sponsor him for credit through DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America).  By the time he graduated he had become the youngest kitchen manager the local chain had ever had.

He moved on to a large volume conference hotel where the head chef mentored him for three years.  With support from his mentor, and grandparents he decided to attend the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University, Charleston, S.C.

From there his career took him as a head chef to high-end hotels, restaurants, resorts and country clubs and landed him in Denver.  And then in 2010, he was one of seven head chefs from the Colorado Chef’s Association, and more than 3,000 American chefs, invited to the White House by Michelle Obama for the kickoff of the “Chefs Move to Schools” initiative — an opportunity for chefs around the country to adopt a local school lunch program to help solve the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation.

MORSE

I was sitting there about five feet from Mrs. Obama and listening to her speech and I thought wow, I think I’m being asked to do something different with my career.

“We are going to need everyone’s time and talent to solve the childhood obesity epidemic and our Nation’s chefs have tremendous power as leaders on this issue because of their deep knowledge of food and nutrition and their standing in the community,” Obama said.

Soon after I came back to Denver it was Christmas bonus time.  I’m driving home with my bonus from the country club where I worked and thinking about starting my own business.  I had gotten to a point in the country club world where working 80 hours a week was keeping me away from my two children.

So I took the money and formed 5280 Culinary, and became a consulting chef and developed my own line of spices.

Through the American Culinary Federation/Colorado Chef’s Association, I got involved with the Wendy White at the Colorado Department of Agriculture and that led to developing recipes for their newsletter and local media.  I also work with the Beef, Potato and Lamb Councils.  I love agriculture.  That’s like my niche in life.  I love going to the farms and helping.  I’ve worked on a dairy farm and in potato fields.  I wanted to know what life on the farm was like.

I’ve done recipes for eight years now for the Department of Agriculture’s Colorado Proud program.  I also teach apprentice chefs for the Colorado Chef’s Association Apprenticeship Program.

After the trip to the White House I met the folks at Douglas County Schools (DCSD) and began consulting with them to get the Chefs Move to School lunch program underway.  And then in 2011, I joined the staff as Executive Chef and we now plan and prepare meals for 74 schools — 35,000 meals a day.

TRIBUTARY

What’s different about creating school lunch recipes?

MORSE

Kid friendly.  Easy for parents to produce at home.  Chefs are notorious for 800 ingredients in a recipe and methodologies that people look at and say, What?

We need to keep kids in mind when we are trying to eat healthy and find recipes.  If mom can make it, and kids love it, that’s a smashing success.

So I have to take a cool recipe that I want to do and make it work with fewer ingredients.  My experience with coming up with recipes for the various statewide agricultural groups has taught me a lot about writing recipes for consumers.

Prior to the Chefs Move to Schools program, schools were just serving meals.  Now, the staff does a wonderful job of getting inside the kid’s head to figure out what they might like.  We’re not happy just serving food.  We want kids to have a good experience and enjoy our product.

Who suffers when mom and dad are working and taking care of business are the children.  Kids are left to their own devices and mom and dad load up on what the kids want.  If I can have a student go home and say, I want what we had for school lunch.  Holy crap!  That is incredible.  There is no better rush for me than that.  Who tells their mom they want to eat the same food that they eat at school?  That is humbling.  That is a huge honor for me.

You would think that going to work for a school lunch program would restrict my creativity.  Well, it does not.  Kids come up with new games on the playground.  They are constantly crafting new things among themselves.  We are just like them and the kitchen is our playground.

Here’s an example – grapesicles.  The kids said this tastes like candy.  It was just frozen grapes.  If you freeze a grape it tastes different than a fresh grape.  So I am always testing and trying to get better products and recipes for the consumer.  And here at DCSD, I have to work on keeping the kids interested in new tastes.  So I use my two kids (ages seven and nine) as testers for the school lunch program to see what they like.   They are brutally honest with me.

I just try all kinds of things, like the pickled cantelope recipe.  I held a competition with my 18 ACF apprentice students.  I was teaching them how to write consumer recipes.  Let’s use cantaloupe and you can only use what we have here in the school kitchen.  You don’t want to write recipes that people have to go out and buy 20 ingredients for because no one will do it.

They had everything from cantaloupe salsa to roasted cantaloupe.  One of my guys knows that I love everything that is pickled.  I love the complexity of it.  So he came up with picked cantaloupe.  So he knew his audience and wrote a recipe for that audience.

With my ProStart kids we developed a full artisan pizza line that was able to replace the commercial pizzas that were being brought in.  Now we do our own pizzas in the school lunch program and they have been beyond well received.

TRIBUTARY

Has this increased your budget?

MORSE

There is some federal reimbursement but the rest is up to us.  We still have to do this to make money.  We loose or make money literally by pennies a serving.  Imagine if the 35,000 meals we do a day cost 5 cents more.  That adds up in a hurry.  We did raise school lunch prices by 25 cents and have the support of the parents.  They are saying, this is what we want our kids to eat.  We need this change.

It cost money to eat healthy.  My family of four spends $600 a month on groceries.  If you want to buy junk food it’s cheap because there is usually a bunch of garbage fillers in it.  It costs more to buy local rather than just accepting what gets shipped in.  The yellow squash I buy locally costs maybe twice as much as what I used to buy shipped in from California.

But now the local growers realize they have expanding local markets.  And what I see is that when people find out you are a Colorado company, they will buy locally.  Colorado is a wonderful place for supporting the local economy.

TRIBUTARY

There is a commentary about a culture from its cuisine.  Is our American cuisine shifting in relation to fresh food and home cooking?

MORSE

I truly believe our economy right now is righting itself because we have been foolish in thinking that everything has to be cheap, cheap, cheap.  Cheap means garbage.  You look at what other countries eat. They spend 20 to 30 percent of their income on food – fresh, wholesome, delicious and grown locally.  Then you look at us and I think the figure is 12 percent spent on food.  That contributes to childhood obesity.  Cheap food is not always healthy food.

TRIBUTARY

The grocery stores have greatly expanded their promotion of local produce.  What’s going on?

MORSE

It’s what the consumers want.  There is no better way to drive the local economy than to embrace and support the local economy.  These growers work their butts off to give us beautiful products.  We produce gorgeous things here and we want it to stay here.

Several years ago the San Luis Valley didn’t grow enough potatoes to sustain our usage for a whole year.  When we (the Colorado Chef’s Association) began talking to the growers they would ask, well what do you need from us?  We need an uninterrupted supply of potatoes.  If I am going to declare on a school lunch menu that we only serve Colorado potatoes then I better have Colorado potatoes year round.  Now we are sustaining potatoes for the whole year.  They reacted and have really increased their production for us.

TRIBUTARY

There are many recipe sources on the Internet.  Can you recommend a site or two?

MORSE

One of my favorite recipe websites is All Recipes. This recipe website is driven by the consumers, mom and gramma house maker that have been making their world famous apple crisp for 60, 80 years and now they are passing them down.  In general their recipes are simple and when you need some inspiration or that favorite blue ribbon state fair recipe, that’s the place to go. I will take those recipes and tweak them to make them mine.  Like, I’m a vanilla junkie.  There is always vanilla paste in every kitchen I have ever had.  It’s very complex and for me is the epitome of vanilla.  So I am always trying vanilla paste in my recipes.

______________________

 – from A Taste of Home.com

___________________

After school snacks

Recipe for carrot cake pancakes

Colorado three onion soup

Other Colorado produce recipes

Colorado Proud monthly Farm Fresh recipes

Middle Eastern Colorado Lamb sliders

Sous Chef Series Website

Shop Indie Bookstores

The post School Lunch for 35,000 appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

Thompson often finds the edge between shadow and light, moving away to a place of solitude, examining the place without distraction, interruption or…It is so vast and yet reachable, a place where inspiration finds you.

Cole Thompson has learned to work alone.

 THOMPSON

The real key is to find your own style.  I can’t be a great portrait photographer and great landscape photographer and a great still life photographer.  So I have accepted that and now and I do what I love best, create images in my own style of fine art photography.  This was a great life lesson that I learned; appreciate and focus on what you are good at and don’t be envious of what you’re not good at.

To do this I had to stop caring what others thought.  I’m not creating for them.  I’m not doing this to earn a living. I’m doing it for me.  So I divided my work into the two piles; ones that I really loved, and ones that I didn’t, and from then on I only focused on images that I had a passion for.  So even if people loved those other images, or they were published, or sold well, I quit producing work that I didn’t love.  This approach led me to a style and look that said:  this is a Cole Thompson image.  My style is very specific.  It’s very dark, very contrasty, dominated by blacks.

 TRIBUTARY

That takes some courage to abstain from seeking inspiration from the work of others and deciding you are going to go on alone.

THOMPSON

We’re trained to think of certain people as experts and to hang on every word they say.  As well intentioned as these experts are, they are giving advice from their perspective.  Their advice may be good, but it may not be good for my vision and my definition of success.

I am a businessman and I see this all the time.  I read a book that argued that the IBM culture of professionalism, wearing dark suits and white shirts was the best way to achieve success.  But you could turn around and look at the Apple model with a casual work environment where everyone was wearing sandals and shorts.  I’m not sure any one way is right but there is value in creating a plan that fits your goals, and outlook on life, and then pursuing it with conviction.

Five years ago I stopped looking at other photographer’s work.  The reason I did that was because I found myself constantly imitating others people’s work, style and images.  I used to say that this was how I learned but really all I was doing was imitating instead of finding my own vision.  So now I practice photographic celibacy.  This approach may not work for you but it works for me.

 TRIBUTARY

How did you make the transition from photo documentation to creating fine art?

 THOMPSON

My piece called “The Angel Gabriel” is the first time I had created an image versus taking a photograph.  It was the first time I molded the image that my eyes saw into the vision I had.  I created something that was unique and mine.  As I created this image, I learned an important lesson about following other’s advice.  I love the centered image and when I showed it to my mentor she told me, never center an image, and suggested I crop it.  I remember thinking how this advice didn’t feel right but since she was the expert, I went back put the image off center.  It looked horrid and almost made me ill.  This was not how I envisioned the image.  It didn’t feel right.  So, I learned not to listen to other people’s advice because it comes from their point of view and their vision, not mine.

 TRIBUTARY

You have a lot of attachment to this image.  Is there a story that goes with it?

 THOMPSON

I met him on the Newport Beach pier.  I was photographing the pier and it was a very busy day.  Because I was doing a long exposure, most of the people would disappear. I could see the shot needed a subject.  I looked around and saw a man eating French Fries from a trash can.

He was homeless and hungry.  I asked him if he would help me with a photograph and in return, I would buy him lunch.  He agreed and I did a couple of shots but then he, Gabriel, wanted to hold his bible in the shot.   This turned out to be the image I chose.

Gabriel and I then went into a restaurant on the pier.  He was dirty and carrying his bedroll and bible. He ordered steak with mushrooms and onions and told me he hadn’t had one in years. When it came, he ate it with his hands.

I asked Gabriel how I might contact him, in case I sold some of the photographs and wanted to share the money with him.  He said I should give the money to someone who could really use it.

“I’ve got everything I need,” he said and he walked away with his bedroll and his bible.

 TRIBUTARY

Where does your inspiration come from?

THOMPSON

I keep a list of about 50 ideas to pursue for projects.  What I’ve found is that I’ve never been successful in turning one of those ideas into a portfolio.  Every success that I’ve had has come in a moment of inspiration and I immediately pursued it.  Like “Ceiling Lamps.”  I’m in Akron, Ohio, standing in a hotel lobby and I looked up and saw a ceiling lamp, a simple, round lamp but standing directly beneath it, it took on this wonderful abstract shape.  So I pushed away the table and couch below the lamp and just laid on the lobby floor looking at it.  I thought, this is my next portfolio.

A lot of people tell me that they are working on a project but it’s a struggle to get motivated.  I find that if I am not excited about a project and I have to force myself to work on it, then I have the wrong project.

 TRIBUTARY

Your most well-known portfolio is  “The Ghosts of Auschwitz.” How did you create these images?

 THOMPSON

I had no intention of photographing at the camps.  I was there simply as a tourist.  The first place they take you on the tour is in a room with a piles of children’s shoes, a pile of glasses, a pile of hair and other personal items taken from the victims.  A few minutes into the tour I felt claustrophobic and couldn’t breathe.  The presentation was so depressing that the air seemed sucked out of the room.

So I went outside to find relief but couldn’t.  Every time I took a step I couldn’t help but wondering, who has stepped here before me and now is dead?  Who had walked in the same path and been murdered.  I started thinking, I wonder if their spirits are still here?

That is when the idea of photographing their spirits came to me.  I had been working with long exposures for several years, mostly with water and clouds, but I had the basics down.  I had 45 minutes left in the tour so I rushed to create long exposures of the other visitors at the camp. The long exposures turned the visitors into ghosts, proxies if you will, for those who had lived and died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It was difficult to get these long exposures because the Europeans are so polite and would move out of my way when they saw me photographing.  That is exactly what I didn’t want.  So I had to devise ways to fool the people into thinking I wasn’t photographing.  I had a cable release so I would turn my back and pull out my cell phone and act like I was on the phone so people would move back into the area.  Even then it was difficult to get the images where everyone kept moving.  For every photograph that worked, four didn’t.

My goal was to portray Auschwitz-Birkenau differently than I had seen it portrayed in the past.  I didn’t want to create historical photographs of this place, or treat it like an old museum.  I wanted to show that real people lived and died here.  I wanted to make people think.  This is an example of how inspiration just hit me.

TRIBUTARY

So many people are interested in photography today.  When they create an image that pleases them what should they do next?  Frame it? Stick it in a box?  Go to the closest gallery?

 THOMPSON

Well how would you define success for you?  The normal definition for photographers seems to be selling for big dollars, getting into a gallery or having a book published.  Many automatically go down that path believing that will make them happy.  So when I went down that path and had some success the resulting euphoria was fleeting and the satisfaction momentary.  I realized that this definition of success was not working for me.

For me success is the freedom to create what I want and loving what I do.  It is having a creative outlet that brings balance into my life.

I recently posted an article on my blog where I said,  ”I would rather my art be in thousands of homes than sell it for thousands of dollars.”  I’m glad my goal isn’t to to earn a living from my art because then I would feel pressured to produce images that others wanted and not what I was passionate about.

I do enjoy exhibiting  in galleries and I have a very simple requirement:  the gallery loves my work and invites me.  There is one galley in a small southern Colorado town that I exhibit in every year.  Why?  Because they love my work and invite me.  Being wanted and having my art appreciated is more important to me than anything else.

 TRIBUTARY

So a person doesn’t need to find an audience, just worry about yourself as the audience.  Isn’t there a desire to have some kind of audience besides your family?

 THOMPSON

We all like praise.  We all like to have our art appreciated.  There is no harm in that.  But when you create for others your work lacks something.  It is not as powerful or convincing as the art you create for yourself.  When you create for yourself then the praises and accolades you receive are a wonderful extra.  I call it the cherry on top that makes success even more sweeter.

_________________________

Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a daemon in my view —

           – Edgar Allen Poe, 1875

_______________________

RELATED LINKS

The Lone Man – A Cole Thompson portfolio

The post The Lone Man appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

Along Clones Road sat an old nursing home where another storyteller was born in 1951. A nun wrapped the infant, Mick Bolger, in a blanket and placing her hand on his head, whispered a prayer in Gaelic that the Lord would guide his steps.

Mick listened to many stories over the years in the places where Irish stories are shared; living rooms of neighbors, on the bus to school and later in the pubs. The Irish would call him a seanchaí (pronounced shan-a-kee), a teller of Irish stories. He ended up marrying a lass who played the fiddle and together they developed Colcannon, an Irish group that artfully weaves traditional Irish music with their own tunes and of course Mick’s endless stories.

Formed in 1984 in Boulder, Colorado, Colcannon has released eight CDs encompassing various forms of Irish music on the Oxford Road Records label in Denver. The band’s recent CD, The Pooka and the Fiddler, is a story by Mick Bolger with original music by Colcannon which received the Parent’s Choice Award for artistic merit from the Parent’s Choice Foundation.

The Emmy®-award winning PBS special, “Colcannon in Concert,” filmed at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts has aired nationwide. Colcannon was named ensemble-in-residence at Colorado College, the first non-classical Irish music group to be awarded this position.

TRIBUTARY

It seems like you love to hear stories as well as tell them. Where did you start hearing the old stories?

BOLGER

When I was a kid there were certain houses in every neighborhood that were known as céllí (pronounced kay-lee) houses. Céllí has to do with the notion of coming together. It was a place where people would drop in and socialize. In the evenings neighbors would just walk in, no knocking on the door. Knocking was kind of rude. They would have a cup of tea and chat, share stories and sing songs. Stories about local lore. I loved to just sit and listen. Even in high school the songs were around. If we went somewhere on the school bus a lot of that singing would go on. Everybody just knew the old songs. And a lot of these songs were the ones I sang when Colcannon first formed.

TRIBUTARY

Irish lore ascribes the talent of the seanchai as gift from a higher power, maybe even from the fairies.

BOLGER (Laughing)

There’s certainly a tradition of thinking of music in Irish terms as not so much composing it as almost channeling it. That if you listen in the right places and at the right times, tunes will be given to you. It’s not a way of apply knowledge to construct something but applying a knowledge to gather it in. And there is a feeling that having done that, it really doesn’t belong to you. It was given and you were the receptacle. That’s how we feel in Colcannon as a group. It’s an odd sort of situation, like being in a céllí house, it’s not competitive and its not show-offy. None of us is interested in geewhizzery where people are saying, “Wow what great players.”

What we would like to hear is, “Wow what a great tune.” And we try and mix it up so that one song has you in tears one minute and the next song has you laughing, next one feeling something dramatic, and the next one more reflective just as an evening in somebody’s house. Nobody there is showing off and everyone is contributing to that atmosphere. And their storytelling is about stuff that happened to them or people they know or stories about places round about. They pass them on. Certain stories belong to certain geography. Or a song that someone sang at a funeral that everyone remembers.

So the storytelling is not separate in any way from the people. And when one tells a story another might top it off with a quip. And it’s all very unselfconscious. If you want to learn more about this read “Passing the Time in Ballymenone,” by Henry Glassie He lived in one area of Ireland for a number of years and closely observed the social interactions. It’s basically anthropology. How the culture worked. It is absolutely fascinating. How conversation works between Irish people.

TRIBUTARY

Does your music do that, or is it the story set to music. Do you attempt to make music move around like an Irish conversation?

BOLGER

Irish tunes are very short. They are also very simple and repetitious. They are good for dancing that way. What happens is we will go through a tune several times but we will make slight little variations on it. After awhile even a simple tune will be repetitious. So what we do is go into another one. We will do a medley of two or three tunes. We will know because we have it all worked out. To find the variation in the first tune and then find the next tune that will fit in with it takes a lot of work. So we definitely try to create variations and take the crowd to a sad place and then to a happy place.

TRIBUTARY

Sort of an extended story.  A journey to many places.

BOLGER

The Irish appreciate a good story well told.  They are very verbal people.  I think there is something very therapeutic about stories.  It involves a journey with many experiences and that gives one power.  The idea of theater is that we can vicariously experience somebody else’s life.  By being able to experience that, and stay removed from it, it’s not actually real anyway, it does evoke the emotions.  By going through that process it helps to heal us and give us power in those situations where we may feel powerless.

A lot of the songs that I like are either funny, bawdy or really sad and personal.  I think there is an event that happens here that is at the core of storytelling.  It is a way of developing skills to deal with shock, grief, torture, love… so that when they come up in real life you are better able to handle that. Stories take us through emotional occurrences that allow us to handle those situations.

I remember a quote from Oscar Wilde:  “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

Stories also take us away from that dreadful loneliness that surrounds us.  Loneliness is probably the very worst human affliction.  I think it is why we are so terribly afraid of death.  And storytelling helps us feel that we are not alone and not disconnected.  We are not so powerless.

TRIBUTARY

What brought you to the U.S.?

BOLGER

Ireland was very Catholic, very paternalistic.  There were all kinds of authorities to obey and your best hope if you stayed was to become one of those authorities that other people obeyed. The limitations of that were terribly galling to someone who is 17 years old.    I was expected to go into the priesthood or get a good job in civil service, or go onto university but pretty much you were tracked toward a certain type of life.  None of that appealed to me.

I was very lucky because I escaped the political troubles.  Some of my brothers were pressured to join the IRA, pressure that they resisted.  (Mick has four brothers and three sisters and he is the oldest).  My mother was threatened by the IRA because we lived right on the border between northern and southern Ireland.  It would be the border between County Donegal and County Tyrone.  This is a political boundary, not religious.  Twenty-six of the counties are known as the Republic of Ireland and are independent from Britain.  Six of the counties are known as Northern Ireland and are British, part of the United Kingdom.

The rallying call at the time was “One man. One vote”.  You had to own a house in Northern Ireland to be able to vote.  But if you were in a Protestant area, no one would sell to Catholics, so the Catholics didn’t have votes.  So it started out as a civil rights issue around voting but it quickly reverted to the old conflicts of a united Ireland versus a northern province that wanted to stay British.

In the mid-1960s I was sent to a secondary boarding school near Dublin taught by Franciscan priests.  Just about the time I finished school in 1969 was about the time of the beginning of The Troubles.  Riots had started in Derry.  This was about 10 miles from where my family was living in Donegal.  By Sept. 1969, I had found work in England in construction and left.

With the money I earned working in England I traveled abroad for while.  I was a hippie at the time.  I was just a kid trying to see what was going on the world.  I spent six months in Portugal making horseshoe nail jewelry and selling it on the streets.

Then I went back to England and decided to go to the University of Lancaster. There were a lot of American students there from the University of Colorado in Boulder who spent their junior year abroad studying at Lancaster.  And every year the University of Colorado offered a scholarship to graduating Lancaster students to come and spend a year in the U.S. that I applied for and received.  So I came over here (1979) and have pretty much been here ever since.

I became a citizen in 2011.  I’m not sure why I didn’t do it earlier.  I think part of me has never taken my coat off in America.  Even now at the age of 60 some part of me thinks, well when I’ve gone through this phase, I’ll go back to Ireland and make something of myself.

TRIBUTARY

How did Colcannon come about?

BOLGER

Somebody told me about this pub in Boulder, the James Pub and Grill, where they had Irish music on a Monday night.  The pub in Ireland is much different than the bar in the U.S. It’s like the communal living room.  People meet and chat and tell jokes and have a drink.  And it may be a lot warmer than your own house in the winter. Basically I was hoping it would be akin to something that I was used to.  And there were musicians there, wouldn’t you know. I started hanging out with the musicians and would sing the occasional song or tell a story.  But it turned out I knew a lot more traditional Irish songs than anybody else.

So I would sing with different small groups and met other musicians and gradually Colcannon got formed.  Then in 1984, the James had an opening for a regular house band.  So we became the house bad for nearly nine years, mostly on weekends. By 1991 we were making our first CD in a big studio with a proper producer.  And by then we were writing our own music.  We were still firmly based in Irish traditional music but we were moving away from what would be expected from a pub band that would be more of the Clancy Brothers songs.

TRIBUTARY

And the storytelling continues through Colcannon with or without vocals.

BOLGER

Absolutely.  That’s what human beings do.  Storytelling.  We spend our lives talking and telling stories.  When we’ve taken care of shelter and food and reproduction that’s what we do next. Storytelling is what the human condition is about.  I would say that we put roofs over our heads and get food so that we can do this.

________________

RELATED LINKS

Mick Bolger sings Crooked Jack

Colcannon recordings

Shop Indie Bookstores

The post An Irish Storyteller appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

Lawrence Egan is fluent in Spanish but his Queens, New York, accent still comes through. His second-generation Irish father was not enthused about Larry becoming a priest.  He became decidedly less enthused when Egan told his parents he had signed up to be a Maryknoll missionary.

Father Egan arrived in Guatemala in 1964, just as the anti-government revolutionary movement was beginning and as the government was increasing its brutal reaction.  While Egan was trying to help Maya Indians in the hills of western Guatemala, the government began to bomb their villages in the eastern regions trying to suppress the guerrillas, many of who were ex-military and former government officials.

By the time he transferred to El Salvador in 1967, observers estimated between 3,000 and 8,000 Guatemalans were killed.  It was only the beginning of what would become known as The Silent Holocaust.

He recently published “Maryknoll in Central America, 1943–2011” which chronicles the difficult work of Maryknoll personnel to navigate the treacherous paths through the jungles of politics, ethnic struggles and Catholic church policy.

He left the priesthood in 1977, married a former Maryknoll Sister and came to Colorado where he worked in bilingual education for the Colorado State Department of Education.

In 1991 went to Vietnam, and later Myanmar (Burma) to serve as the Country Director for International Development Enterprise (IDE), a non-governmental organization specializing in the transfer of low-cost technology to developing countries.

Since 1999, he has owned a bookstore in Littleton called ABBS VOLUME I, where his book is for sale (303-347-9460).

TRIBUTARY

Your first parish was in Guatemala in the western highlands at Huehuetenango.  What was it like?

EGAN

It was the end of the line.  We were on the border with Mexico.  We had no electricity except for a small generator, which we used for a short time at night.  There were no health services and no schools.  But I was 26 so it was an adventure.

Our parish was made up both of Maya Indians and Ladinos.  Ladinos are a socio-ethnic category of Mestizo or hispanicized people.  The Indians speak a native language, wear traditional Maya clothing, many without shoes.  Ladinos speak Spanish, do not wear Maya dress and can afford shoes.

The Ladinos exercise economic and political control at all levels of government throughout the country.  They are the townspeople.  The Maya are subsistence farmers.  They exist on a daily diet of corn and beans.  They were mostly illiterate.

For the Maya, religion was a vital part of their everyday life.  The Ladinos were what we called cultural Catholics who for the most part appeared for baptisms and Holy Week and not much else.

The Maya were already baptized Catholics but the in some of the villages practiced “la costumbre” a mixture of folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian Maya rites.  They had their own “chimanes” or shamans, who were part healers and part religious leaders.  As you would expect there was some antagonism between the established shamans and us as new priests.   We had some compromising to do in order to coexist.  It was an old conflict dating to the Spanish Conquistadores. The farther away the villages were from the central towns, the more traditional was the religion.

TRIBUTARY

The chimanes could have stopped you in your tracks if you had not been careful.

EGAN

One of the new ideas that came out of Vatican II was that the “seed of God’s word was already present in cultures before the coming of Christianity.”  This caused missionaries, professors and church leaders to question the need to challenge the beliefs, practices and understanding of the indigenous people.  So we adapted.  The U.S. model for how the church works could not have succeeded in this setting.  We learned from each other and found common ground, even friendships.

I went with Jesus in my knapsack to give Him to the people but I discovered he had already beaten me there and he was a different Jesus than I knew — the Jesus of the poor and dispossessed.

TRIBUTARY

You spoke Spanish but the Maya didn’t.  How did you overcome the language barrier?

EGAN

Each village had Mayan lay people who were all volunteers and they basically did all the teaching.  They knew everyone and they knew who was more Catholic or more costumbre.

I tried to visit each village once a month. Our area had 10 villages, five of which had to be reached by horse or donkey.  I would say Mass, teach and help the local lay people with daily routines. Some of the Maya within the parish spoke Spanish so we would teach them and they would teach others.  We had to use the local people as translators until we got better with the native language.

We were also training, and empowering, local parishioners to be lay ministers who would assume roles such as administering communion, preaching and baptisms, tasks that had been reserved for us as priests.

At the same time the church began the development of central training centers where people could come for courses in agriculture, basic adult education, community development and leadership training.  It also stressed the role of women.  From this gradually developed a number of Maya political activists who got involved in local elections.

TRIBUTARY

So the Maya were beginning to feel respected, the chimanes were tolerant and some of your American coworkers were adapting to these new ideas.  Was the government supportive of this work?

EGAN

The Catholic Church for years before then was perceived as a key government ally.  The Maya didn’t trust the Ladinos, the government, and by association, some of us. So that was one factor.

In 1960, a group of junior military officers pulled an attempted coup that failed.  They went into hiding and this became the nucleus of the forces that would fight the increasingly autocratic government rule. By the time I arrived (1964) the movement was growing but it did not include the Maya.

From 1966 to 1968 the government forces, led by Col. Carlos Arana Osorio, carried out the brutal killing of around 8,000 peasants in order to eliminate 100 to 500 rebels.  For years the government tried to maintain the status quo and was suspicious of any groups that organized people.  They labeled the insurgents as communists and declared a crusade to promote the “survival of Western Christian civilization.”

In reality it became genocide.  The military began to perceive the Catholic Church as the enemy because so many church workers stood with the Maya, defending their rights to land and life.  Many native priests and thousands of church workers were killed.  During this period more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, 90 percent at the hands of the military.

TRIBURARY

It sounds like what started as a modest effort to encourage the poor turned into a nightmare.

EGAN

The Church had been moving gradually away from its role as an indirect supporter of the established power groups to a role as the voice of the voiceless.   The government started accusing us of being “involved in politics” but the church had been in politics for 400 years.  But now we were changing sides.

This cost many of our friends their lives.  The lay leaders who we had been training became prime targets for the death squads.  Many would give valiant service in the midst of genocide.  They truly were the unsung heroes of that terrible time.

TRIBUTARY

Isn’t this ethnic and political pattern of conflict being repeated time and again all over the world, even now in the Middle East?

EGAN

That’s true and the moral decisions for the missionaries, the church and the non-governmental organizations are being repeated too.  Does one support a revolutionary movement with all its faults and excesses against a clearly unjust government in the process of persecuting its own citizens?  What are your options?

Active nonviolent resistance when faced with entrenched military dictatorships is one option.  Armed resistance, or active support of the opposition is the other.  And even if you choose nonviolence, as we did in Central America that will not stop the government from making church workers their main opponents. Non-violent resistance is still resistance.  The problem is you are a foreigner in someone else’s country and that only complicates matters.

The best presentation of the nonviolent option is Tom Melville’s biography of Fr. Ronald W. Hennessey, “Through a Glass Darkly:  The U.S. Holocaust in Central America.”

TRIBUTARY

You were transferred to El Salvador in 1967 and spent five years there.  Were the conditions similar?

Yes and no. I went from the mountains of Guatemala to an upper middle class parish where 60 percent of the men had a college education, many educated in the United States, and all the women had a high school education.  The community wanted American priests and there weren’t any in San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador) at the time.

Here it was not Maya against Ladinos.  It was poor against the rich and middle class.  The government was military-run like Guatemala, and it was also the peasants who were massacred by the troops.  And also similar, there might have been 50 or 100 guerillas in the area but thousands of the locals were killed in the attempt to get at the resistance fighters.

We took this parish because we felt the president of El Salvador might come out of this parish someday.  These were the people who eventually would be running the country at various levels and if you wanted to see change you had to work with them.

TRIBUTARY

Why did you leave the priesthood?

EGAN

Well celibacy when you are in a place like Central America with all this stuff going on, not being married is a plus.  You don’t have to think about family.  But when you are back in New York at a desk job, celibacy has less appeal.

Book by Lawrence Egan

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QUESTIONS FOR READERS

1.  How aware were you of the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1970s?

2.  Have you ever thought of being a missionary?

 Please respond using the Share your thoughts section below.

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Cowboys driving cattle after the Civil War cooked on hot, smoky coals and recited homemade poetry.  They flavored their beans with molasses and stories.  The chuckwagon was the kitchen cabinet.  Poems were the entertainment.  Mix in some rain and dust, add a heavy dose of lonesome, and a pinch of Irish storytelling, Scottish seafaring, Mexican horsemanship and African improvisation and you have the original recipe.

John Schaffner uses that recipe for his chuckwagon dinners.  He learned cowboy poetry as a child from an 85-year-old cowboy. He cooks potatoes, biscuits and peach cobbler in cast iron Dutch ovens covered with coals. He measures his coffee by the handful and uses an old whiskey bottle as a rolling pin, an historic detail he learned from other chuckwagon cooks, nicknamed “coosie.”

Schaffner cooks for family reunions, company parties, trail rides and charity events.  To reach him you have to do it the traditional way with a telephone. He doesn’t have a website. By the way he was the official cook for John Wayne’s 100^th Birthday Celebration at his birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, in 2007.

The poet cook was born in Ferriday, Louisiana on the Mississippi River.  The town is the birthplace of Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart.  Schaffner now lives in Wray, in northeast Colorado.

TRIBUTARY

How did you get started doing chuckwagon cooking?

SCHAFFNER

I got into the chuckwagon absolutely by accident.  I was at a farm sale about 20 years ago and they had an old farm wagon.  I told my wife I’d love to have that wagon.  I ended up getting it bought pretty cheap.  So we took it home and I put in the yard kinda like a yard ornament.  A couple weeks later a friend drove by and said you know what, I’ve got a chuck box from an old chuckwagon.  We ought to put that in the back of the wagon.

I told my wife if I’m going to have a chuckwagon, I’m going to learn to cook.  So I started practicin’.  I burnt a lot of biscuits.  I tell people I made a lot of hockey pucks.  Anyway I was just playing around for the fun of it.

One day a neighbor who had seen me cooking by the wagon asked me at church if I would be interested in cooking for the volunteer recognition banquet for the Head Start Program.  She figured there might be 35 people.  So I said I would do it.  She called back in a couple of weeks and told me the reservations were up to 75.  She asked me if I would still do it.  Well the cowboy way is that if you tell someone you’re going to do something, you do it.  So I got my friend who had given me the chuck box and his wife and my wife pitched in and by just pure luck we turned out a pretty good dinner.  About two weeks later somebody who’d been at the cookout called and wanted to know if I could do a chuckwagon dinner for a family reunion.  From there it took off.  We really have never done any advertising.  It’s all word of mouth.

A few years after that I was real fortunate to get acquainted with Michael Martin Murphey and we became real good friends so now I cook at a lot of his events.  I don’t sing.  I tell people I got a lot of music in me but none of it has ever come out.  I’m a prison singer – always behind several bars and never have the right keys.  Michael Martin Murphey says that the two of us work well together:  “I don’t cook and John doesn’t sing.”

TRIBUTARY

Where do you get your recipes?

SCHAFFNER

I always try to cook things that were authentic to the trail drivin’ days.  My most popular meal is beef tips with gravy.  I do cowboy potatoes in the Dutch oven.  And you gotta have beans.  That was just a staple on the chuckwagon.  Cowboys called ‘em “whistleberries.”  If you think about that long enough you’ll know why they called ‘em whistleberries.

TRIBUTARY

And the poetry, how did you get started there?

SCHAFFNER

As a kid growing up in Louisiana I was fortunate enough to meet an old gentleman, a guy by the name of Carter Wailes.  Most of the people in the area knew him as “Deacon” Wailes.  He was a deacon in the Methodist Church.   He was 80 something years old when I met him and I was 12 or 13 years old.  He was an old cowboy.  He had cows until the day he died and he died out in his pasture one day.  He always told me he wanted to die with his boots on and that’s what he did.

He was born in 1882 near Ferriday.  I tell people I’m a millionaire many times over not for what I got in my pocket but for what I’ve got in my head and my heart, the things that I learned from Mr. Wailes.  He was teaching me to cowboy but he was also teaching me life skills.  We did a whole lot of cattle work and put up a lot of hay.  He told me if I was going to work cattle I had to learn to think like a cow.

I didn’t know at that time that he was writing some poetry.  When I was in high school I hated writing poetry.  I was real shy at the time and didn’t want to get up in front of the class.  The poetry he wrote he just put in a dresser drawer.

I started about 25 years after I got out of high school.  I heard other cowboys tell stories and I had a few ideas of my own.  One of the first poems I wrote was about Mr. Wailes.  His second wife was still alive so I sent her a copy of the poem.  She sent me copies of some of the poems he had written.  Every poet has a certain style and the uncanny thing is that my style of writing and his are almost identical even though I had never read any of his poetry.  But there was something about our time together and the things he taught me that carried over.

I not only recite my own poetry but I have memorized a whole bunch of the old classic poems that were written back during the cattle drive era by Henry Herbert Knibbs, S. Omar Barker and Badger Clark. All from the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Knibbs was actually not a cowboy but a hobo that spent a lot of time in cowboy camps.  He actually published four books of cowboy poetry as well a bunch of novels about hobos.

TRIBUTARY

You told me you’ve memorized about 100 old cowboy poems.  Why memorize so much?

SCHAFFNER

Well I like to say them to myself when I’m out driving cattle or in my pickup.  Cowboy poetry is not a written language.  It has to be spoken.  I get more out of listening to a cowboy recite a poem than I do just reading it.  His personality comes through, inflections change.

TRIBUTARY

It seems like a lot of people are today doing cowboy poetry today.  Do some of them do it badly?

SCHAFFNER

Well their heart’s in the right place.  There’s people who have never lived the cowboy life that try to write poetry. I think it’s a lot harder for them to really put the feeling into it.  If you haven’t been out there on a horse and had a wreck and been busted up and haven’t taken care of cows and watched the baby calves be born, you cannot put that feeling in a poem.  I can pretty much tell whether they’ve been out there or whether they’re just reading it out of a book.

TRIBUTARY

What is it about the cowboy life?  The cattle drive era only lasted about 20 years but the heritage lives on.

SCHAFFNER

It’s just the fact of the Cowboy Code, the code of the West.  When you tell somebody you’re going to do something you do it no matter what it costs ya.  It’s one of those things that just born into you.  There’s just something about that way of life that people want.  The closeness to nature.  There’s absolutely nothing in the world like sittin’ on the back of a horse all day long;  sleeping out under the stars at night.

I wrote one called “Full Moon in the Cowcamp” it was written about a time we were out doing branding.  The neighbors would come and help.  You get out in the middle of nowhere where there’s absolutely no electricity, no light and you can see the stars and the moon very clearly.  So I woke up at midnight thinking I’d overslept but it was the full moon that was so bright that we could have actually gotten up and gathered the cattle in at midnight.

TRIBUTARY

You also do some preaching from time to time?

SCHAFFNER

I do a cowboy church service but I’m not a preacher.  My dad’s a preacher.  I do some fill in preachin’ at our church.  I like to preach and I always do a short one.  Cowboys have a short attention span.  I recite some of my gospel-type poetry.  I tell people that just like we like to watch our kids and grandkids have fun I think God enjoys watching his kids have fun.  You can’t have more fun that being a cowboy.  He puts cowboys out there to watch the animals.  Cowboys have a dry sense of humor.  After a bad wreck on a horse it’s maybe not very funny but after you’ve recovered from it you can look back and make a humorous story about it.

John Schaffner’s phone number – 970-630-3402

jschaffner51@yahoo.com

Order CDs directly or schedule a cookout.

POEMS RECITED BY JOHN SCHAFFNER

Me and Mr. Wailes 

Full Moon in the Cowcamp

Cowcamp (an ode to Coosie)

RELATED LINKS

Chuckwagon cooking and recipes

Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Durango Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Origins of cowboy poetry

Cowboy Poetry by Henry Herbert Knibbs

Ferriday, Louisiana.  Portrait of a remarkable American town…

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QUESTIONS FOR READERS

1.  Do you have a chuckwagon recipe you could share?

2.  What is it about being a cowboy that fascinates us?

 Please respond using the Share your thoughts section below.

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Karl Snyder has been driving from Boulder, Colorado (5,430 ft above sea level) to the top of Mount Evans (14,264 feet ASL) to shoot photographs ever since he got his first driver’s license way back when.  The Forest Service rangers know him.  The staff at the Echo Lake Lodge know him.  And anyone who has searched the Internet for information on the trip up the highest paved road in North America knows his website.

Coming out of the Ram’s Room, (men’s restroom. The women’s restroom of course is named Ewes) he says good morning to Barbara Day, the proprietor of Echo Lake Lodge.  She ran the Crest House on top of Mount Evans until it burned in 1979 and before that the café and gift shop on top of Pike’s Peak (14,110 feet).

After the Army and college, Snyder moved to the Silicon Valley in California (sea level) working as an accountant, computer programmer and Internet startup entrepreneur. He did a lot of early work with bar code technology.  When his mother got cancer, he came home to Boulder.

He started designing websites for lodges in Estes Park and that led to a new site promoting Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), which today has more than 300 pages.  In 1998, he started the Mount Evans site, which now has about 90 pages.   That effort brought him up the highway more than 20 times a year for the first two years.

SNYDER

I feel like an explorer every time I come up here.  I’ve been a photographer since I was ten.  You would think by now I have shot everything on Mount Evans that I can shoot.  But I think there are still 500 pictures I haven’t taken yet.  Every time you visit, even the same place, the weather is different, the trees are different, the animals are different.

By about June 20 the mothers and babies will be up here.  The kids are as cute as a button.  They play king-of-the-rock with each other, whatever animal games they play.  I love taking pictures of the babies.

TRIBUTARY

What do you tell people who have never been up here or are starting to take their photography more seriously.

SNYDER

I tell people to go as early as you can or late in the afternoon.   The really good light is in the morning since the route faces basically east.  That’s when the bigger animals will be out.  Anytime between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. up here the place is a zoo especially on weekends.  It’s the same way in Rocky Mountain.

I break animals up here into two categories.  LHMs (large hairy mammals) and CFCs (cute furry creatures).  LHMs typically eat early and sit down and chew their cud during the day, eat again before nightfall and then sit down.  They are most active during the first two hours of daylight and the last two.  And wherever they decide to sit down, they will just stay there and ignore humans until someone’s bow wow bothers them.  I’ve been sitting on a rock and goats get so close I can’t shoot them anymore because my lens won’t focus. The bighorn sheep, as opposed to the mountain goats, will actually come up and bang on your car. People hand them Doritos or cookies, which is not good for them, but they will go up and beg for it.  So I honk my horn when I see people passing out goodies.

TRIBUTARY

And what do they do?

SNYDER

They give me the Boy Scout sign.  I don’t mind.  A lot of people from Denver consider this their mountain.  When I first did the website people who contacted me were hostile.  “You’re going to bring all the tourists up here.  This is our mountain.”   Because of that they think feeding the animals is OK.  Their parents did it.  Their grandparents did it.  They feel it is their God-given right to feed the animals.

One interesting fact about the goats.  They were imported.  This is the only place in Colorado where they exist in large numbers that I know of.  I think they were brought down from Yellowstone or Canada.

TRIBUTARY

You have explored many aspects of Mount Evans that no one else documents or discusses in their sites.

SNYDER

The Mount Evans website is a labor of love.  The Rocky Mountain National Park site is where I make my money.  I’m hosting about 70 websites for the Estes Park area.  I tried to do the same thing down here but the commercial setting is different.

You know the original idea for the Mount Evans Highway was that it would be part of a peak-to-peak system from Long’s Peak to Pike’s Peak.  After building the road from Idaho Springs to the summit, the promoters gave up the idea.  This road was meant to drop over the west side to Grant on Highway 285 and continue to Pike’s Peak.

Some people say Mount Evans has the only true arctic tundra south of Alaska.  I’m not sure how you define tundra.  Is it the existence of permafrost?  I have to believe there are other areas.

I’ve studied about the alpine zones, and the trees.  On the RMNP site I did a whole section on the trees and shot a lot of photos of the bark and needles.  Surprisingly in September and October that is one of my most popular pages.  I found out that colleges are using them for reference material because my pictures are so good.

Many of the trees in the higher alpine area, say above the Mount Goliath Natural Area, are  Engelmann Spruce.  The pine beetle doesn’t attack them like they do the Lodgepole Pines.  So we are going to have this green frosting all around the top of the timberline in areas where the Lodgepoles have been killed by the beetle.

The bird watching here is limited to your normal five camp robbers which are the Stellar’s Jay, the Clark’s Nutcracker, the Gray Jay and Magpies.   Also the ravens.  Those are your big birds.  The rest are your basic small songbirds and God they are impossible to shoot even with a long lens.  You will see one on a rock and before you can even aim and focus they’ve taken off.  I have this desire to shoot more birds.  It is one of my 500 targets of opportunity.

TRIBUTARY

What keeps you so involved with Mount Evans and the website?

SNYDER

I define relaxation as total involvement.  I don’t care if you are playing golf or skydiving or motorcycles.  If you are totally absorbed in what you are doing then you have the ability to relax.  Often when I am out shooting in the dead of winter I don’t realize I’m cold until I get back in the Jeep.  My photography is my excuse to be in the mountains.

I’ve had days where I’ve shot several hundred shots and I didn’t have one keeper.  I started to look at what I thought I was doing wrong.  Now, I have my own rules of photography.  When I was in Korea (U.S. Army, Taegu area, 1973) we were out on a two-week exercise.  At the end of this the colonel of our unit got up and mentioned, not the 10 things we did wrong, but the ten things we did right and we should make sure we do them again next year.  It’s that way for me with photography.  I will put a picture I think is good on my computer screen as the wallpaper.   If I don’t get tired of it after two or three days then I consider that a good picture.

When I am out looking for photos, I always have my long lens on the camera.

Another rule.  Shoot animals at eyeball height or below.  If you shoot an animal above you, then he is more majestic.  A lot of times I don’t even look downhill to see if there are shots.

I often drive 10 miles an hour and if people get upset then they aren’t on vacation yet.  I just wave them around.

There is a phenomena I’ve discovered above timberline.  There are rock formations that mimic animals.  You’ll find pika rocks or bird rocks.  You get a closer look and discover someone has put a rock on top of another rock.  I don’t think they do it to actually imitate a bird but boys in the mountain only know how to do two things with rocks.  Throw ‘em and stack ‘em.

(Pointing at rocks on the edge of the road) Now most kids know what kind of rocks these are.  Do you?  They are “leaverrights” because mom has told you more than once to, “Leave ‘er right there.”

I usually set my camera on burst mode (multiple shots in a row).  I don’t know how many times I have shot single shots of animals and I get him with the jaw twisted sideways, half a tongue hanging out or an eye closed.  So now I just do a burst of three to eight pictures and in one of them you will get a good expression on the face.

The other thing I do after a day of shooting photos up here is stop at the lodge for one of their seven homemade pies.  My favorite is cherry.

 __________

Mount Evans, Colorado

from Wilderness (2000)

_______

RELATED LINKS

Karl Snyder’s Mount Evans Website

360 degree panoramas of Mount Goliath Scenic Area and Mount Evans

CDOT daily Mount Evans open/close report

How to photograph mountain goats by Jay Ryser

Mount Evans Ranger Talks Schedule

Today’s weather forecast for Mount Evans

Slide Show – August Morning on Mount Evans

Historic postcards of Mount Evans

Albert Bierstadt painting in the Mount Evans area

Thad Roan’s photo of Bristlecone Pine

Creation of the Castle in the Sky

Friends of Mount Evans and Lost Creek Wildernesses 

Mount Goliath wildflower tours by Denver Botanic Gardens

Growth increases for Bristlecone Pines

Long lens and digital camera rentals in Denver

Early photography by visitor to Summit Lake

Please buy these recommendations from our Sponsoring  Bookstores 

Foothills to Mount Evans.  West of Denver Trail Guide by Linda Wells Ringrose – 1980

To be a person is to have a story to tell.   – Isak Dinesen.

QUESTIONS FOR READERS

1.  What have been some of your most interesting experiences on Mount Evans?

2.  What are your personal thoughts about spending time in the alpine region above timberline on Mount Evans?

3.  If  you have attempted to ride your bicycle to the top what was it like?

4.  What hiking trails on Mt. Evans are your favorite?

 Please respond using the Share your thoughts section below.

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The post A Mount Evans fixture appeared first on Tributary: One Flows into Another.

It appears there is nothing left of Amache except a small cemetery with gravestones and other memorials.  The swirling wind doesn’t remember.  The prairie grass twitches indifferently.  The concrete barracks foundations are motionless.

But buried below this forlorn landscape are pieces of ceramic tea cups, Go game tokens, hair barrettes, eggshells, rounded stones from the nearby Arkansas River and residual pollen from plants grown on the site.  For archaeologist Bonnie Clark, Ph.D., these are glimpses into the daily lives of the more than 7,000 Japanese Americans removed from California and forced to exist in southeast Colorado during World War II.  Clues build stories, stories the internees have rarely shared.

After two summers of sifting shovelfuls of dirt, the story is unfolding.  What has she discovered and what can we learn from the University of Denver’s Amache Research Project?

CLARK

The most amazing single discovery we made was in one of the vegetable gardens near a barracks.  In the pollen samples we found pollen from Canna.

Canna is a relative of ginger and banana.  In Hawaii people eat the root of the plant like Taro.  And we found it at Amache.  Where on earth anyone would have gotten Canna during World War II is completely beyond me.  There is no way we could have found the pollen without the plant having been there.  This got me thinking about the tie between Amache and Hawaii.  The government did not intern the Japanese in Hawaii, even though that’s where Pearl Harbor happened, because the whole island would have shut down.  They needed all those people.  I suspect someone at Amache wrote to a friend or family member and had them send a little root.

These are the minute details we discover as we explore the routine of daily life.  You get this texture that people who were there don’t write down because it doesn’t seem important.  None of the accounts of Amache mention Canna, or how laundry was hung in the back, not the front yards. They didn’t think it was important to their story.

We begin to see the incredible effort it took to make this seem like home, to bring in things that allowed them that dignity.  The Japanese have a phrase, “shikata ga nai,” which literally means “nothing can be done about it.”  But what I hear them saying in that expression is, “You can uproot us and send us to the middle of nowhere but you are not going to destroy who we are.”

I find this incredibly inspiring.  The evidence of this kind of ingenuity is something their descendents today are very proud of.

TRIBUTARY

And what about the eggshells?

CLARK

In front of many of the barracks we found evidence of small personal gardens, called entryway gardens.  These are deeply rooted in Japanese culture.  In one garden we found crushed egg shells that were sprinkled throughout.  That’s not accidental.  We’ve never found that in any of the other places we excavated on the site.  So they are composting.  And not everyone has access to eggs.

Someone who worked at the mess hall, or at the ranch where they raised chickens, was connected to one of the residents.  Together they were turning trash into something valuable to make the garden beautiful.

This to me is a statement of human dignity. I can be in the mind of this person who was thinking, “I know how to make the earth a better place and I’m going to do it in this place, despite the fact that my country doesn’t think I have a right to be here.  And I’m going to do it in this quiet, quiet way.”

I love moments like this.   This is not a famous temple or a place of golden idols.  This story is very subtle yet powerful at the same time.

What we have seen in these entryway gardens at the camp are little concrete ponds some of which held carp from the Arkansas River.  They did not have access to koi.  People also caught snapping turtles and put them in the ponds.  They had graveled areas.  They also transplanted wild plants.  There is a real variety.  It was an expressive space where people could change that military landscape where everything was exactly alike.

These discoveries also helped us understand their networks.  In one garden they employed broken water pipe as planters.  The trash from the camp was dumped outside the barbed wire fence.  So this was somebody who knew somebody who was on the construction crew, or on the crew that picked up the trash.

TRIBUTARY

What else did you see at Amache that you didn’t expect?

CLARK

One of the things we found, and it’s still out there, is a mochi pounder.

This is an annual tradition during the Japanese New Year.  They get together as a community and make mochi sweets, which brings good luck.  I met a man who used the pounder to make mochi at the camp.  It typically is a carved bowl but at Amache they made it out of concrete.  You can still see on the outside the marks from the barrel staves.  They poured the concrete into the bottom half of a barrel and then busted the barrel off.

During one of the internee reunions I met a woman who showed me her scrapbook with pictures of mochi pounding.

TRIBUTARY

How did the University of Denver (DU) get involved with Amache?

CLARK

My idea for the project was in line with DU’s history of outreach to Japanese Americans.  The university has always been affiliated with the United Methodist Church although we are not a religious school.  The Methodist church throughout its history had done a lot of outreach to the Japanese American community.  During the war Caleb Gates, the Chancellor of DU, had written Colorado Governor Ralph Carr.

Gates was concerned that the talented, college-age kids, were behind this barbed wire and that they should be in college.  So with Carr’s blessing DU recruited students at the camp and brought them to Denver.  They could do that because they were a private university.  So seeing these Japanese Americans get what might appear to be preferential treatment would not upset the taxpayers.

After Amache was dismantled (1945), the hospital building was brought to the campus and used as temporary housing for returning GIs.

When I came back to DU to start teaching I had read the report of the first systematic exploration of Amache that had been done by an archaeology firm working with a Denver Japanese American organization.  I was just fascinated by what they said they were finding.  It was just about to become a National Historic Landmark, which meant to me that more people would start visiting the site and potentially this would cause damage to what had yet to be fully explored.   I wanted to get in on the ground floor as an archaeologist and start to protect the resources so they would be of value to everyone involved.  I was very lucky in my timing.

TRIBUTARY

Before your explorations at the Granda Camp you had excavated the home of Amache and John Prowers in Boggsville, CO, for your masters thesis.

CLARK

It’s funny how a thread was established before I even thought of the Amache Project. Amache Ochinee Prowers’ father was a Cheyenne sub-chief and religious leader who was killed at the Sand Creek Massacre.  She had married John Wesley Prowers (Prowers County is named after him), a cattle rancher. The mayor of Lamar suggested Amache as the name for the camp’s post office during the war since the town of Granada already had a post office.

It was certainly an apt name for the camp. Amache, especially after Sand Creek, was a woman caught between two worlds and one that she could never go back to.  So here are these Japanese Americans sent out on the plains of Colorado having left a world then cannot go back to. So, I think it was a fitting tribute to her.

TRIBUTARY

Were there extensive effects of the internment on the prisoners, or were they so good at making the adjustment that it did not bother them?

CLARK

In the long run the effect was a great deal of loss.  Most lost whatever they left back at home.  They lost their property.  Many of them destroyed any possessions that would link them to Japan.  The whole experience was traumatic to the point that many of the internees never talked about it.  Some of their children suggest the silence was in part because they didn’t want to poison them against the United States.  They also decided to put it behind them and just move on.  Shikata ga nai.

I have a friend whose parents were in camp and she knows almost nothing about Japanese culture and she blames that on internment.  She feels, “We would have more connection to our own history, to our ethnicity, if that had not happened.”

These people were a very transnational, global community.  Before the war, they would send their children back to Japan to be educated, to meet their grandparents, to do business, to learn Japanese culture.  They were involved in international trade and the war cut all that off.  It divided the Japanese Americans from the rest of the Japanese Diaspora.

The impact was not only economic but also psychological.  The internment experience for many was degrading and shameful.  This came out during the 1980s when a congressional commission investigated the reasons for the internment.  They invited internees to testify about the camps and this accelerated the process of reclaiming this history.  The government knew this was going to be traumatic so they brought in social workers to help them deal with the psychological effects of reliving the story.

So knowing this, the most important thing we do with our studies at Amache is provide a way for families and others who are connected to the survivors to reclaim that history and be able to start talking about it.  We can take them to the barracks where their parents were, or take the young children to the place where they grew up.

Two summers ago while at the site I took a man born at the camp to the first place he ever lived but had never been back.  He brought his kids and his grandkids and it was incredibly moving.

Two of my volunteers this summer were little girls in camp.  Their parents didn’t talk about it but they will be out there reclaiming that history shovel full by shovel full.  We’re bringing it back up and we’re having this conversation.

It’s a reminder that when people are feeling threatened that civil liberties are often the first thing to go.  Fear and racism are a very, very dangerous mix.

People often think we are just treasure hunters.  If that’s all we do then why can’t anyone just poke around and find treasures.  We are as much anthropologists and historians as archaeologists.  Archaeology is a way to draw people’s attention to a history or issues that they otherwise might not be interested in.  So we get their attention with the artifacts, but then we get to talk about the civil liberties lessons of a place like Amache.  And have a conversation about human dignity in the face of injustice.

I had always been interested in this issue of how do people live out their identities on a daily basis.  And specifically how do they do that in times when their identities are under siege.  So the day before Pearl Harbor these folks are a certain people and the day after Pearl Harbor, they wake up and they are the same person but all the politics around who they are have changed radically.  At that moment, do you still serve rice in a porcelain bowl from Japan?  Do you still drink sake?  Do you still celebrate Obon?

What are those decisions that you make?  The camp is a great place to explore these questions.  And, very quickly, it became clear to me that this was a chance to do a really different kind of archaeology where we do the exploration in conversation with people who had experienced that past themselves, or whose families had experienced it.

When we find these little glimpses, these for me are the magic moments that bring history down to that level where we can all understand it, where we all have shared the experience.  These are the windows that archaeology provides.

TRIBUTARY

Now that you have our attention, are there upcoming events that are open to the public, besides visiting the camp?

CLARK

On May 24 from 4 to 6 pm we will have a reception at the DU Museum of Anthropology Gallery (Sturm Hall, Room 102).  This will open a new collaborative exhibit of objects from our research at the camp called Connecting the Pieces:  Dialogues on the Amache Archaeology Collection.  This will be open to the public May 21 through July 20 from 9 am to 4 pm weekdays.

DU is returning for four weeks of research at Amache this summer.  On July 14, the last weekend, we will host an open house day at the camp.  This will be from 9 am until 1 pm at the camp, and then from 1 pm until 5 pm at the Amache Museum in Granada.  We will be showing some of the new things we find during survey and the excavation units will be open so people can tour that as well as the camp.

We want people to go and experience the camp as a lived space.  If you come across anything, you should feel free to take a look, but please put it back where you found it.  We only take things that are better understood with further research or are effective for exhibits.  Most of what we find we catalog where we find it and put it back.  This is a new philosophy for archaeologists.  We think it is the most respectful way to treat such a site.

By the way, there is a lovely children’s book now called “The Pink Dress.”  Leslie Kitashima-Gray, the daughter of one of the internees at Amache wrote it.  It is her mother’s story of her 9th grade graduation at Amache.

DONATIONS

Please consider a tax-deductible donation to the Friends of Amache to help with preservation efforts. Funds help maintain the site, create educational materials and assist other Amache-related preservation groups.  Send to: PO Box 1234, Denver, CO  80202.

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RELATED LINKS

Colorado State Archives on Camp Amache

DU Amache Research Project

Dr. Bonnie Clark DU Portfolio

Testimonies of Japanese incarcerated at U.S. camps

Photos of various Japanese internment camps

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