Gutenberg

Johannes knew metals.  His father had been goldsmith for the Bishop of Mainz.  And Johannes knew that if you took a fine punch to a sheet of copper and pounded an intricate image in it, treated with some oil, you could then pour tin solder (tin, antimony and lead) into the negative of the mold design and get a positive that was durable, yet melted at lower temperatures, making the replication process easier. Using the copper mold repeatedly, you could replicate cast images which could be used to press a stamp onto other things. And what did Johannes want to cast? Small backwards letters.

            His last name was Gensfleisch which in German means “goose flesh”.  Johannes was embarrassed by the name so he used the name of their house, Gutenberg, “mountain estate”.  Many of his childhood years were spent in Strasbourg, France as a result of the family being political refugees. His father read Latin and derived much peace from reading the Bible.  That’s what Gutenberg wanted to replicate in an inexpensive way.  None of his techniques were entirely new.  Typography, printing with moveable type, had been used as early as 1041 in China.  In 1314 Wang Chen used 60,000 moveable wooden type characters to print a book on agriculture. He even experimented with metal type.  But with a language of no alphabet, there was no advantage to moveable type. Chinese newspapers today have 45,000 characters for which a typesetter must locate with each new word.   Laurens Coster of Haarlem, Netherlands is said to have printed with metal type in 1430 but it didn’t hold ink well.  Gutenberg found an oil-based ink, invented a rack to retain the letters, and hooked them to a press that farmers used to press grapes or olives.  Bingo, the printing press.  Yet we don’t know much about his Strasbourg trials and errors.  Were his first copies made with some other clamping method since early letters were so crooked? After moving back to Mainz, he secured a loan from the wealthy Johann Fust.  A German poem was printed in 1450 and indulgences in 1451. In 1455, Fust sued and bankrupted Gutenberg and slyly took control of his business.  Then in 1456, Gutenberg set up another shop and printed his dream, 4000 copies of The Gutenberg Bible. Several are still in existence, two in British museums. It has no chapters, verses, or paragraphs. There were no copyrights and making money was very difficult, but the printing press changed the world forever. 

            Before printing, the Church held closely to education.  Hand copied books were costly and full of errors. Authors could not reach a wide audience.  Europe’s largest libraries were about 300 books.  But monasteries began to increasingly record trial-and-error derived methods to improve life in the 1300s, schools multiplied and literacy rose. Businesses wanted literate bookkeepers and wealthy women loved stories of chivalry and romance. Demand drove the market.  Muslims brought Chinese paper-making methods to Europe, and linen rags were found to provide good fibers. Doubtless, the printing industry would have arisen even without Gutenberg, but his genius was to put methods together in a device and a commercial process.  Authorship thereupon became lucrative and influential.  Books were a cheap education. Scholars could work in concert in remote places by referencing specific pages of certain editions. Printing made the Bible a common possession and paved the way for Luther’s appeals. Finally it promoted writing in native languages rather than Latin because most readers could not speak the dead tongue.  But on a personal note, books were the magic that unlocked the world to this deaf ranch kid who couldn’t hear birds sing or make out adult conversations.  And by the way, I have far more than 300 books and need to clean house one of these days.

Powell

There is something undomesticated in the heart of a man.  Eve was created in the Garden of Eden but Adam was created in the outback and has never since stopped exploring.  As a child who grew up in the Flint-Osage Hills, I can still visualize what my dog and I discovered along Mill Creek.  A rock table on a hillside where rattlers used to sunbathe, a chesnut stump still trying to regrow, despite dying from the Great Chesnut Blight of the 1890s, and the only existing surface expression of the Nemaha Fault, a 60 foot cliff.  I was told not to get too near the cliff.  I used a lariat to go down over a lesser side.

            John Wesley Powell was the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher from New York.  The family moved to Wisconsin and then Ohio, then Boone County, Illinois.  Little John didn’t miss a thing.  He walked for 4 days to cross Wisconsin.  When he turned 20 he rowed from Decatur, MN to the sea on the Mississippi River.  Then he did the same thing on the Ohio from Pittsburgh and the Des Moines River and the Illinois River.   His dad didn’t want him to study naturalism, but John took after Adam to go where no man has ever gone before.  He studied at Wheaton College, a Christian Liberal Arts college but didn’t get a degree.  The Civil War had started and he joined the 20^th Illinois volunteers.  Such forces were put in light duty and he was an engineer.  Stationed at Cape Girardeau, he recruited an artillery battery and was transferred to the east.  At Shiloh, he lost an arm and the raw nerve damage left him in pain for life. Despite his loss of an arm he returned to fight at Vicksburg and then in the battle of Atlanta. Faithful, wounded vets get government appointments and Powell was appointed to teach at Illinois State U. and also serve as professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan and be curator of IL. St. Museum of Natural History.  But Powell was itchy.  He went “West, young man.”

            His goal was to explore Colorado and travel the Green and Colorado Rivers.  In 1868, his team became the first to climb Long’s Peak in Colorado.  Despite the fact--no because--nobody had ever lived to navigate the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and everyone said it couldn’t be done, Powell wanted to do it.  With 4 wooden boats and a homemade life preserver, the one-armed man took 9 men down the rapids. One man quit and 3 others were lost, but 930 miles later they emerged at the Virgin River.  Powell knew that he had descended into a geologic cut-bank that went a mile deep into the heart of the continent. One trip was not enough to get photographs and samples of rocks and plants.  So a year later Powell led a larger team to retrace part of the journey. Powell’s notes on the Indian tribes of the area led to the establishment and his appointment as Director of Bureau of Ethnology. Though his ideas were 19^th Century, his works assisted later Indian Reform Movement leaders and anthropological studies and protections.  He served over a decade as head of US Geological Survey.  Powell disliked plans of the railroads to place settlers in the arid West.  With time, his foresight of conservation and water rights problems proved true, especially after the Dust Bowl era. But his scientific advancements pale in the hearts of males everywhere, compared to the memory of the brave guy with one arm who went down the whitewater of the Grand Canyon in a fishing boat.  For men are created in the image of God, Wild, Dangerous, Unfettered and Free. 

Irish, Scots, Welsh

Why were the Irish so persecuted in early America but the Scots and Welsh were not? All were Gaelic-speaking Celts with a similar culture 2000 years ago. Celts were unusual in that they were never able to create a central government.  Distrust set in once the group got larger than the clan/tribe. Yet they hung together closely in small circles. Rome invaded and remade the Bretons and Welsh into Romans.  Then they left as their empire declined leaving the population to defend themselves. At a time when the Irish became Christians (after 410), pagans swamped the Bretons who fled to the mountains of Wales or to Brittany, France.  Anglo-Saxon invaders never did conquer rocky Wales. Conquering and making cultural change in a people who hang together in clans and have no king is very difficult.  Wales was finally made partly British by Edward III, 1284, who introduced the English language. In Luther’s time, Scotland was what the isles had been before Rome—Gaelic, fierce local justice and feuds, agriculturally backwards (same pointed stick “plow” used as in Mesopotamia 3000 years before), houses were 12X12 foot shacks without furniture, and people were mostly barefoot or wore animal skins as shoes. There were just 2 towns greater than 1000 people, no skilled labor and a barter economy. Did I mention they had no soap?  Common livelihood: raiding Yorkshire farmers to the south. A writer of the era called Scots, “A savage untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine and exceeding cruelty.” England had launched an invasion in 1292 over this lawless frontier but couldn’t fully integrate it until 1707.  But British law and order and technology was tempting.  Lowland (southern) Scots adopted all the new ideas they could. Protestant faith had a lot to do with it.  So did English learning.  The Scottish Presbyterian church eagerly adopted universal education so that Christians could grow.  As they came to America, the Scots were adapting like Brits.  The Ulster Scots (‘Scots-Irish’) who had been relocated to Northern Ireland, were somewhat more backward and became perfect American pioneers.  Close-knit and marshal, they settled the west indomitably against the Indians.  (A key group coming behind was the Germans who built the towns and started businesses.)  In the late 1700s the Scottish Enlightenment led to domination of English universities.

            Ireland was much like Scotland in 1500.  Of the 3 things Scotland and Wales used to assimilate with the English—language, Protestantism, free economy—Ireland chose only language.  Yet the wholly Catholic label is not quite so.  10% adopted Protestantism.  However, a tragic rebellion against Cromwell in 1649 became a watershed in Irish history.  40% of the population died during the English Puritan put-down.  Prior to that, Irish owned 3/5 of the land.  That shrank to 1/5 as Cromwell confiscated lands to give his supporters.  The Irish became people without rights on their own land, unable to hold public office and harshly taxed.  By the 1830s it was estimated that the expected Irish lifespan was 19.  It was 36 for American slaves of the time. The slaves of USA had a wider diet, more meat, while the Irish had potatoes.  Slaves slept in bigger houses on mattresses, instead of straw like the Irish.  Then came the 1842 potato blight and 2 million Irish fled to America, living in the worst slums, doing the most menial jobs, and people characterized them as dirty, feisty and dumb. While the Scots established themselves as bankers, Dublin had no banks prior to 1793.

            But come to America and you’ll sing a new song.  Scot-Irish established the Bible Belt and are the force behind Southern Gospel Music, Country and Western, NASCAR and Southern cooking. Welsh established coal mining in Appalachia and Iron in Michigan, without which USA would not have become an industrial power.  Irish were assimilated by language but early Catholicism had few schools, so they did not excel like Scots in STEM skills.  (Protestantism’s universal priesthood of believers = invitation to investigate everything and walk with God closely. Hence technical skills.)  But Irish clannishness became a political skill with union organization and urban precincts. “All politics is local”—Tip O’Neill.   The human relationship fields showed their talents—law, politics, writing, journalism. Today, USA’s universal education and religious tolerance, promotes as many Irish bankers as English or Scots.  And counting friends on my fingers, probably an equal number of scientists.

The Lost cities of Gold

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, governor of New Spain in 1541 decided to explore in a hunt for Cibola, the 7 cities of gold.  He took 1100 men, 1000 horses, herds of cattle, sheep and hogs, and set off north.  Raping and plundering across Arizona and New Mexico, they found nothing, but captured a slave, nicknamed Turk. Turk knew nothing of Cibola but he knew a city of gold, Quivira.  Everyone lived wonderfully and drank from gold cups.  Coronado headed east across the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma then north until they found what Turk was telling them about.  It was a system of villages of the Wichita Indians (Spanish called them Rayados) from Great Bend to Arkansas City.  Indeed their pottery was beautiful, people were living well, and they grew golden corn.  Furious, Coronado ordered Turk’s death and demanded the people there use a language they could not comprehend (Spanish) to swear allegiance to a leader they could not conceive (King of Spain). After 2 years Coronado had this to write, “What I am sure of is that there is not any gold.”

            Juan de Padilla, a friar who had been on the expedition, returned with 2 Indian converts and a Portugese soldier, Andres de Campo.  That marked the first Christian mission effort of a people north of Mexico. Soon the Kaws invaded their ill-fated mission and killed Padilla, and enslaved the others.  Those 3 eventually escaped, but it took them 5 years to travel to the Gulf of Mexico.  The reason was that to do penance, they carried a large wooden cross the entire route.  60 years later, Juan de Onate became governor of Northern New Spain and returned to Quivira in hopes of uncovering hidden riches.  His soldiers battled the Wichitas there in 1601—still no gold.  Then a few years ago, a kid from Arkansas City found a cannonball in the Walnut Valley bottoms east of the city. It came to the attention of Donald Blakeslee of WSU who studied all manner of artifacts found when KDOT built the 77 highway bypass across the bottoms.  Coronado and Onate’s old reports had just been re-translated and were more illuminating.  The Arkansas City site, Etzanoa, was a dead ringer for the location of Quivira (had been disputed for years), a settlement of 20,000 people. There are 4 miles of Indian settlements along the bottoms, more downriver, and then more “cities” all the way up the Arkansas to Great Bend. 

            Prior to horse culture, the Great Plains were almost uninhabited.  Wichitas were ancient plains people who learned 3-Sisters agriculture—corn, beans, and pumpkins grown together.  No potatoes. Those were wild plants.  Topeka is the Kanza word for “a good place to dig potatoes”.  The Wichitas also cultivated tobacco, pecans and hunted bison.  Evidently, their farming kept them fed when buffalo hunting was poor.  The villages were totally unguarded as there were few enemies across miles of empty prairie.  Kaws and Osages were an exception.  Wichita language is Caddoan, a common root language of many Great Plains dwellers including the Pawnee of northern Kansas and Nebraska.  Rayados means “striped” in Spanish.  Wichitas tattooed their faces in stripes and often around the eyes.  Thus they named themselves Kitikiti’sh meaning “racoon-eyed”. Some spoke a dialect called Kee-chi which is how the suburb of the city of Wichita, Kechi, is pronounced (ending in long “I”).  They traded widely, were more advanced in corn agriculture, and lived in permanent houses of grass thatch bound together by ribs that glowed golden in the sun.  Turk, it turned out, had actually told the truth.

            With numbers in the tens of thousands, they much outnumbered the semi-nomadic groups like Comanches, Kaws, Osages and Apaches but were often on the losing end of their raids. With much diminished numbers from disease and harassment, they retreated south in the 1700s along the Arkansas River into Kay county, OK and to Wichita Falls, TX. When Spain took over the Louisiana Purchase area, 1763, they targeted and destroyed Wichita settlements to destroy Indian trade and subjugate the plains people. By 1868, the population was recorded as being just 572. By the time of the census of 1937, there were only 100 Wichita officially left—the tribe that almost disappeared. After 1890 many joined the Ghost Religion, a mix of Christianity and their traditional beliefs in spiritual experience.  Today, about 2000 descendants farm and ranch on allotted land in Delaware Country, OK and just about everyone you meet seems to be a Methodist. A fellow Republican from Jay, OK, told this author, “When we have our church’s Thanksgiving it’s a real thanks to God that a remnant of us survived.” Meanwhile, Etzanoa is rapidly becoming one of the most important archeological digs in N. America, as of 2020, undiscovered by tourists and the media.