Alethea Williams ~Western Historicals~: 2013

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Knowing the Score

Lying in bed reading while the local high school football game was going on, I realized that there were several different announcers broadcasting the action. In addition to the amplified voice of the announcer on the field which required proximity to receive, and the local radio broadcast which required equipment and electricity and the act of turning it on to listen, after every successful play for the home team there was an another audible message that most people in town can hear, most ignore, and few these days can decipher. It came to me out of my subconscious: I was hearing Morse code.

Comparison of historical versions of Morse code with the current standard. 1. American Morse code as originally defined. 2. The modified and rationalised version used by Gerke on German railways. 3. The current ITU standard.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5a/Morse_comparison.svg/350px-Morse_comparison.svg.png

Morse code? With cell phones, satellite communications, radio towers, fiber optic cable—who uses Morse code today? Think Morse code, and the telegraph instantly comes to mind. Developed in the 1830s, use of the telegraph exploded with the transcontinental railroad.

Morse-Vail telegraph key

National Museum of American History,

Kenneth E. Behring Center

http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?max=120&id=SIA-74-2491

The military and transoceanic shipping used Morse code. At one time, it was common to see the telegraph poles with their glass insulators along every railroad track.

Paul Strand, Telegraph Pole, 1915, photogravure, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1974.32.3

https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/telegraph-pole-23413

There is still a Western Union® company and it’s still possible to “wire” money at your bank. But the telegraph poles following the track have mostly disappeared, and the insulators on the remaining abandoned poles have been used for target practice and left in shards alongside the tracks. According to Wikipedia, The United States Coast Guard no longer uses Morse code and no longer monitors radio frequencies for the code. So who is left? Ham radio operators use Morse code, its continuous wave transmission bandwidth footprint is small compared to other uses of the radio bands. Radios to communicate with others worldwide can be constructed on the cheap. According to Code Quick, pilots still use navigation beacons, lost hunters and stranded motorists use flashlight Morse code to transmit the SOS signal, people who can’t otherwise communicate can blink messages, and modern code enthusiasts use cell phones and an iambic keyer. Who knew?

SOS, the standard emergency signal, is a Morse code prosign.

Image from Wikipedia

I’ve lived in railroad towns all my life, and train horns are just everyday background sounds that long-time residents ignore and people new to town complain about. Train engineers blow their horns for safety at crossings, and in towns built alongside the tracks with a lot of crossings that’s a lot of horn blowing.

Railroaders will snicker, but until the connection came home to me during the football game, the facts that the railroad still uses Morse code and that the blasts of the train horn were conveying messages were buried under more immediate sensory input. Who in these modern times except newcomers pays attention to train horns?

Who, you may ask, except those who want to know the score.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

A Catholic School Girl

In Rawlins in the 1950s, dads worked on the railroad, as guards at the state penitentiary, for government, or in a few cases owned or were employed by local businesses. My parents were descendants of Catholic immigrants, German farmers in the 1850s on Dad’s side and Tyrolean Austrians in the first part of the twentieth century on Mom’s. My dad’s family included several nuns and at least one priest who went on to become a bishop. So it was a given that their children would attend Catholic school since one was available.

Photo of St. Joseph's Catholic Church

by Brigida Blasi

A drive to collect the money to build a Catholic School in Rawlins began in November 1949. Six weeks later an extraordinary $101,000 had been raised toward the quarter million dollar effort to erect St. Joseph’s Catholic School. The entire population of the south central Wyoming town in 1950 was 7415, and of course only a fraction of that population was Catholic. The average salary was $2,992 and in general there was only one wage-earner in a family at that time, so the success of the fund drive to build a school and give the parish’s children a religion-based education really was remarkable.

Photo of St. Joseph's Parochial School

by Brigida Blasi

The school, at 222 West Spruce, sat on the busy business loop of US 30. A squat yellow brick structure built behind the fancier St. Joseph’s Church with its cupola dominating the downtown skyline, the school was utilitarian in the extreme, sparing little for fancy design. The original plans called for six class rooms, boy and girl rest rooms, a library, dining room and kitchen, a gym, and the principal’s office, where hid the paddle with holes drilled in to make sure we felt the whacks.

Photo of classroom at St. Joseph's Parochial School

by Brigida Blasi

The school opened in September 1951, with an enrollment of 183. Five Sisters of Loretto came from Denver to teach. In a diocesan report dated 1939-2000, in that latter year enrollment was 290 with six teaching Sisters, two lay teachers, and three priests, who teach religion and physical education. Men from the parish kept the football, basketball, and track programs going through volunteer services. Moms supervised the lunchroom after one was later added on, coached girl’s gym, and ran countless fund raising activities.

I attended kindergarten at the public school in Rawlins, and started elementary school in the first grade at St. Joseph’s. I went through all eight grades of parochial school in the 1960s, and well remember the strict expectations of the nuns. We did not wear uniforms, but girls wore only skirts and dresses below the knee. Boys had shirts tucked in to nice pants and wore belts.

We felt, and were, different from the public school kids whose playground faced ours across Pine Street. If we got a paddling in school, we could expect another to reinforce the lesson when we got home. We knew a smidgen of Latin from the Mass. We were better educated in English, but less so in science and math. We didn’t get dirty jokes, and were veritable sacrificial lambs when we graduated out of parochial school the spring following the Summer of Love...

Photo credit: Derek Redmond/Foter.com/CC BY-SA

....and just ahead of the Tet Offensive.

Photo credit:IcronticPrime/Foter.com/CC BY-ND

Sources consulted:

http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade50.html

http://www.dioceseofcheyenne.org/pdfs/history/Rawlins1939-2000.pdf

http://www.rawlins-wyoming.com/DocumentCenter/Home/View/570

Sunday, February 17, 2013

When Farmers Became Miners

The great influx of people from what was the Trentino region of Austria before World War I was driven by economics. After World War I when the Tyrolean Trentino region was awarded to Italy, lack of a way to earn an agrarian living only exacerbated the already entrenched out-migration of young people leaving for America.

Photo credit: josef.stuefer/Foter.com/CC BY

The Trentini people were farmers, eking out a living in the valleys of the Dolomite Alps. When they came to the United States they didn’t congregate in cities like their neighbors the Italians. They were a hardy outdoor people used to a life of solitude. Not miners by tradition, yet they adapted to the underground coal mines of America.

According to Bonifacio Bolognani, the author of A Courageous People from the Dolomites, most Trentini immigrants settled in Hazelton and Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania. West Virginia and Ohio received immigrants from Trent, as well as gold and silver mines and coal mines in Colorado. The coal mines of Wyoming, especially in Superior, welcomed a large contingent of people from Val di Non, which is from where both of my maternal grandparents emigrated.

As Phil Roberts says on his website A New History of Wyoming, “Even before there were cowboys in the ‘Cowboy State’ there was coal.” Trappers and explorers found, and burned coal. Surveying a route across the mountains for the army, Captain Howard H. Stansbury saw and recorded the presence of bituminous coal in the sandstone rock hillsides of present day Rock Springs.

Photo credit: Rock Springs sign by Georgio_flickr

Although the original route of the Union Pacific was farther north, Blackfeet, Arikara, and Sioux warriors drove the company to a more southern route controlled by the Shoshones led by Chief Washakie, who early on saw the futility of sacrificing his people to try and stop the influx of foreigners to the West. Moving to the southern Wyoming route was fortuitous for the railroad, as seam after seam of coal spawned coal camps populated by immigrant workers to mine the black diamonds that fired the steam engines.

First was Carbon, established in Indian Territory in 1868, mined by immigrants from Lancashire. Over six thousand tons of coal were produced that first year. Higher grade coal was soon discovered in Hanna, which was established in 1890, and by 1902 Carbon was almost a ghost town. Also in 1868 the Wardell brothers brought miners from Missouri to the alkali country of Rock Spring [sic], where the coal looked to be trying to burst from the rocky hills, just waiting to be mined.

Photo credit: Miners and mule by j3net_flickr

In early days miners worked with a pick and seldom saw daylight, especially in the winter months, getting seven cents a bushel for coal. Each miner carried his own oil lamp, a shift of them looking like a swarm of fireflies as they made their way up the hill to work in the morning, and worked by the light of a carbide lamp attached to his cap. Mules, some worth upwards of $200, spent their entire lives hauling the coal carts on rails underground.

Children often worked in the coal mines as they had done in their home countries of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Stooped to work in the tunnels, ten or more hours a day, some had their spines fused in a bent-over position and that’s how they walked their entire lives. There was some effort to allow the mine boys to attend school, day classes in the summer and evening classes in the winter, with reports of some finishing the eighth grade. In those days a boy became a man in the mine and never left, often working his way up through various positions.

Rock Springs bills itself as the melting pot, and home to 56 nationalities. The reason for the city’s founding as well as its diversity, is the Union Pacific Railroad. In the days of violent labor unrest, many Chinese were brought in to work the mines and acquired the reputation of working for a lot less money and being able to survive on a bowl of rice. In 1885 there were 331 Chinese miners in Rock Springs and 150 of other nationalities.

The coal camp of Superior was founded in 1906, Reliance in 1911. Winton’s mines were bought in 1921. According to History of the Union Pacific Coal Mines 1868 to 1940, from coal mining’s beginning in Wyoming in 1865 when a total of 800 tons were mined to the end of the steam era, millions of tons of coal were mined in the state.

If you wish to connect with others of Tyrolean Trentino descent in America, check out the Facebook group Trentini News USA.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

INZARED QUEEN OF THE ELEPHANT RIDERS

I'm always enchanted by a historical novel that teaches me something I didn't know before. One of the best books I've read in the last year is L. Leander's INZARED Queen of the Elephant Riders. If you like historicals about the first half of the 19th Century in the U.S., novels about women overcoming the constraints of their time, or just want to escape in a book about running away to join the circus, I recommend this one.

Here's how Linda describes INZARED Queen of the Elephant Riders:

Sometimes life isn't what we wish for. A Gypsy circus comes to a small Appalachian community in 1843. A naïve, misunderstood farm girl is entranced by the sights, sounds and costumes and is persuaded to join the troupe. Late one night she leaves the only home she has ever known and follows the Gypsy wagon circus. She learns to ride the main act - an elephant named Cecil and she and the elephant form an instant bond. She is given the stage name of INZARED, Queen of the Elephant Riders and is delighted.

But all is not as it seems. There are undertones of danger and sadness lurking in the shadows, as foretold by the old fortune-teller Vadoma. Inzared finds true love and works hard to gain acceptance into the Gypsy world. Someone is sabotaging the circus - but whom? Inzared and Paytre (the boss handler) search for clues. What of the family Inzared left behind? Will they ever forgive her? Does she miss them?

This book is for anyone who has ever had a dream so big, so overwhelming that it consumed his or her every waking minute. Sometimes you just might get more than you bargained for and maybe it’s not what you really wanted after all.

About the author of INZARED Queen of the Elephant Riders, L. Leander:

L.Leander is an author who lives in Wisconsin with her husband, Ralph, during the summer months but spends the majority of the year in Mazatlan, Mexico. Ms. Leander is an award-winning singer/songwriter who has also won accolades for her needle arts. As a child, Ms. Leander loved the circus, hence, her debut novel, INZARED Queen of the Elephant Riders. The book follows the adventures of an Appalachian girl in 1843 who runs away to join a Gypsy circus and becomes a famous elephant rider. The author also has available a series of self-help books available for beginning writers.

Find out more about L. Leander and buy her books here:

INZARED Queen of the Elephant Riders Amazon Link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008FD5O1E

13 Extreme Tips to Self Publishing:

http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Tips-Self-Publishing-ebook/dp/B00AT17062

13 Extreme Tips to Marketing an eBook:

http://tinyurl.com/ar8ooc2

Video Trailer for INZARED Queen of the Elephant Riders:

http://youtu.be/lQHtsFQGAP0

L.Leander Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/L.-Leander/e/B008IVRNU8

Website: