Golden dollars were the government’s attempt at the end of the millennium to once again circulate a dollar coin. (The previous attempt, the Susan B. Anthony, in 1979 and 1980, was a failure with the public.) The United States Mint introduced the golden dollar, bearing the likeness of Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide who twice saved the lives of Lewis and Clark, and her baby, Jean Baptiste, who was born on the trail, in January 2000.
I got interested in dollar coins after visiting Quebec in 1998. I bought something for about $3, paid with a $10 bill, and thought at first I was short-changed when I received only coins. Looking closer, I saw that I had been given $1 and $2 coins. Canada’s smallest paper money is the $5 note. Read the rest of this entry »

Columbus discovered America. That was the standard thinking on the discovery of our continent for a long time, ignoring the fact that Indians were already here and considered the land already discovered. Then we learned that the Vikings had preceded Columbus, moving west from Iceland to Greenland to what is now the coast of maritime Canada, but they left no lasting settlements so lost the credit for discovery. A lesser-known and possibly apocryphal expedition was that of Madoc o Cymru (Madoc of Wales). Read the rest of this entry »

The Blizzard of 1887

When the snow melted in the spring of 1887, thousands of cattle lay dead. Cowboys rode the range, finding death and disaster at every turn. Cattle, trying to find shelter from the blizzard, died from cold, thirst, and starvation, and the winter of 1886-1887, eventually called the Great Die-Up, changed the West. It started with complacency caused by wet summers and mild winters.
Ranchers in the 1880s ran cattle on the open range. They bought parcels of land with water and thus controlled the rest, which was useless without water. They owned monstrous herds and used no fences, some ranches numbering hundreds of thousands of acres in size. They bet their fortunes and the lives of their animals on weather that was too good to last. Read the rest of this entry »

The unofficial end of summer for me is the Great Trail Festival in Malvern. Yes, summer runs until the Autumnal Equinox on Sept. 22, but Labor Day and the start of school have long been considered the end of summer, when most summer activities are reluctantly abandoned and students return to their books.
I look forward to Great Trail Festival all summer while at the same time not wanting it to arrive because its arrival means summer is waning. I like the festival because it’s a place where other people wear weird clothes, and I fit in rather than look odd, and because I can hear and play my kind of music. Read the rest of this entry »

A springtime drive in a Pontiac convertible confirmed the route of an 18th-century footpath. Years ago while studying Indian and canal history, I learned about the Great Trail, a major Indian path from Pittsburgh to Detroit, and I started hunting for its crossing of the Tuscarawas River. The river flows generally south from Navarre, Ohio, toward Bolivar, turns sharply to the north, and, north of Bolivar, broadly loops east and back south.
Sandy creek enters the Tuscarawas where the river turns south, and the trail followed Sandy Creek in Columbiana, Carroll, Stark and Tuscarawas counties and crossed the Tuscarawas somewhere north of Bolivar, angling north toward Detroit after skirting the river. State Route 212 crosses the Tuscarawas three times in this area, but Indians did not build bridges or move trees. Their paths followed the bison and deer trails, taking the routes of least resistance. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Great Trail Festival time, so I decided to run an old column from the Alliance Review.

When four pairs of moccasins aren’t enough
August 21, 2007

Last year my plans to visit the Great Trail Festival were washed away. Steady rain fell on my only free day, so I stayed home, remembering the time a couple years before when I stood in mud halfway up my moccasins (not the knee-high ones) while choosing a peasant shirt sold by Spotted Pony Traders, a maker of colonial-style clothing.
That was the day after a soaker, not the day of, so last year as the rain fell I elected to stay home. Sitting at home in my dry clothes, I thought of my friends in the band Fare Passage, huddled under tarps, who, because they were performers, were required to endure the mud bath. Read the rest of this entry »

Everything was of gargantuan proportions at the fair that commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 included the first display of George Westinghouse’s alternating current generator, plush Pullman railroad cars and the Linotype machine.
The Exposition covered 686 acres of reclaimed swamp land in Jackson Park, Chicago, with canals and lagoons interlacing buildings. Frederick Law Olmsted was the landscape architect, and the chief architects were John W. Root and Daniel H. Burnham. It was called “The White City” because the main buildings were finished in plaster and fiber to glisten white in the sun and give the impression of marble. Read the rest of this entry »

My cousin photographed this flutterby on our butterfly bush on Aug. 1. Our summer has been hot and dry, and the leaves and insects act like the season is about two weeks advanced beyond the calendar. The corn stalks are turning brown, the spiders have been busy in late-summer mode for a few weeks. This weekend I saw maple trees with yellow leaves, and some leaves on our rose of Sharon bushes have turned yellow. We had some heavy rain on Saturday, the first in a good while.

Civil War action rarely visited Ohio, the most famous incident in these parts being Morgan’s Raid, but two plots were foiled that could have set Ohio ablaze. From the vantage point of nearly 150 years, we view the North as being all for Lincoln and the defeat of the South, but that is far from the truth, as shown by the Northwest Conspiracy of 1864. Read the rest of this entry »