Thursday, July 12, 2012

Homemade Laundry Soap: Cheap, effective, safe!

I tried out this recipe for homemade laundry soap. It has a clean smell with no fragrances or dyes, although you can add essential oils to give it a fragrance if you wish. It is more liquid-y than a store-bought detergent, and does not suds up like many detergents do. I put the whole mixture in a clean 5-gallon bucket with a tight fitting lid. I use a wooden spoon to mix it up before adding to the washing machine, and a dipping cup from an old jug of laundry detergent to measure out a quarter cup. It was quite easy to make! Homemade Laundry Soap Ingredients: 1 bar Fels Naptha 1 box Borax (usually 20 Mule Team brand) 1 box Washing Soda (usually Arm and Hammer brand) (These ingredients can usually be found at your local grocery store in the laundry detergent aisle. If you can't find them, try a hardware store, or ask the manager of the grocery to special order them for you.) Directions: 1. Grate 1/3 of the bar of Fels Naptha into a large soup pot. Add six cups of water, and melt the soap slivers over medium heat. 2. Add 1/2 cup of washing soda and a 1/2 cup of borax. Stir until dissolved, then remove from heat. 3. In a clean bucket 3 gallons or larger, pour 4 cups of hot water. Add the soap mixture in the soup pot, stirring constantly. 4. Add 1 gallon plus six cups of water, and stir. If you'd like to use essential oils, add several drops now. 5. Let the bucket sit undisturbed overnight, to allow the mixture to gel. This is a low-sudsing mix, so you won't see large bubbles. Stir before using each time, and use a half-cup per load of laundry. With the leftovers, you have enough to make three batches of laundry soap PLUS enough leftover for dishwashing powder detergent! For this, mix equal parts borax and washing soda. At my grocery store's prices, this laundry detergent cost me $3.40 for 64 loads.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Border Lands

Personally, I was always offended by the ninety-degree corners and audacious borders of Wyoming and Colorado. It seemed to me almost cocky, the way four corners were placed on the map irregardless of terrain. Today, as I live there, literally straddling the border, crossing this apparently arbitrary invisible line a hundred times daily, it continues to offend. Why, when the pass sits so nearby, did the border not conform to the mountain peaks? Or at least, why didn't it follow the Little Snake along its winding course, setting down one side of the valley clearly to Colorado and the other clearly to Wyoming? The imaginary boundary line brings political ramifications in our business. The valley's social constructions continue to defy the actual boundary, and while I am ensconced firmly in "Colorado" (despite more than 150,000 acres of the ranch in Wyoming), Slater, Colorado continues to be considered firmly "Wyoming" (even insofar as a recent Bureau of Land Management press release named it as Slater, Wyoming, which it hasn't been since 1888). Even the social constructions fit the topography; why can't the border line? “Wyoming, at first glance, would appear to be an arbitrary segment of the country. Wyoming and Colorado are the only states whose borders consist of four straight lines. That could be looked upon as an affront to nature, an utterly political conception, an ignoring of the outlines of physiographic worlds, in disregard of rivers and divides. Rivers and divides, however, are in some ways unworthy as boundaries, which are meant to imply a durability that is belied by the function of rivers and divides. They move, they change, and they go away. Rivers, almost by definition, are young. The oldest river in the United States is called the New River. It has existed (in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia) for a little more than one and a half per cent of the history of the world. In epochs and eras before there ever was a Colorado River, the formations of the Grand Canyon were crossed and crisscrossed, scoured and dissolved, deposited and moved by innumerable rivers. The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made. The Green River has cut down through the Uinta Mountains in the last few million years, the Wind River through the Owl Creek Mountains, the Laramie River through the Laramie Range. The mountains themselves came up and moved. Several thousand feet of basin fill has recently disappeared. As the rock around Rawlins amply shows, the face of the country has frequently changed. Wyoming suggests with emphasis the page-one principle of reading in rock the record of the earth: Surface appearances are only that; topography grows, shrinks, compresses, spreads, disintegrates, and disappears; every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments form other scenes. Four straight lines—like a plug cut in the side of a watermelon—should do as well as any to frame Wyoming and its former worlds.” (John McPhee, in his excellent biography of geologist David Love, "Rising From the Plains" p. 29) This makes me feel a little better about being stuck on the "wrong" side of the border.

Monday, April 23, 2012

"If summer falls on a weekend, let's have a picnic." (Wyoming homesteader saying)

Monday, April 2, 2012

INSANITY DECREASING



Insanity has been decreased 60 per cent in the United States since prohibition went into effect. The reason for this remarkable decrease in insanity is that people of the nation are leading a more quiet life and the over exertion of the nervous system which is caused by the drinking of alcoholic liquors has been done away with.
-Routt County Sentinel, October 29, 1920

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

"The Usual Crime"


"The Decay of Lynching
(Grand Junction Sentinel)
Lynchings fell off in 1914. There were only fifty-two cases in the United States, the smallest number in any year since the records have been kept. Aside from this general indication of a growing respect for law and order, a scrutiny of the record develops some less gratifying facts. First of all, it should be noted that if “the usual crime” were ever regarded as a blanket justification for the institution of lynching, it must now be definitely discarded. Relentless statistics declare that only seven lynchings out of the fifty-two came within the category of chivalric murders for the protection of womanhood and only five of the victims in these cases were colored."

-Steamboat Pilot, January 27, 1915, page 4

A friend told me that sometimes when I write, I speak a different language. We traced the source to the constant research I do reading old newspapers. The quaint, archaic English practiced by turn-of-the-century papers is a far cry from the tight, concise writing journalism emphasizes today. Additionally, social mores required the use of strangely-turned phrases that wouldn't offend Victorian readers' sensibilities. For example, "the usual crime." This one is elusive. I have to imagine, by the context, that they refer to rape. Even better: "chivalric murders for the protection of womanhood?" Compared to the USA Today, these men were Shakespeare!

Monday, March 12, 2012

Women on a jury? Ha ha ha, how novel!



The case of inquisition in lunacy of Mrs. Elizabeth Hutchinson was heard in the county court Thursday. The novel feature of the trial was the the fact that the jury box was filled with women. Judge Morning gave Deputy Sheriff "Billy" Leahy permission to summon women as jurors. "Billy" was delighted and soon had a sufficient number of the fair sex subpoenaed to try the case. "Billy" is happiest when he can show his gallantry to the ladies. The jury was comprised of Mesdames Kate Starr, Katie Pully, Mary Criswell, Mrs. Charles McCormick, Alice Reagen and Miss Maud Keller. Mrs. Starr was foreman. Mrs. Hutchison was committed to the state insane asylum at Pueblo.

[From the Routt County Republican, July 1, 1910.]

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Anna Dudley, Pioneer


“Mrs. [Anna] Dudley was an ornery old gal, and just as tough,” Leonard Fleming said. Perhaps she had to be, for she was married to a criminal.

Carl Dudley was a miner and horseman, who supplemented his earnings by thievery. Married in 1900 to Mrs. Dunbar, of Baggs, Wyoming, he left her after a year to pursue the rumors of riches in the Battle Lake mining district. By 1903, he filed for divorce, but by 1905 he was married again, this time to the “ornery old gal” Fleming spoke of.

Anna Dudley had a grown son from a previous marriage, and was probably pregnant with Dudley's child when the two moved in together in 1905. The tone of their marriage is a sad foreshadowing of things to come: in January, Dudley is arrested for stealing provisions from a railroad tie camp in Hog Park, Wyoming. Dudley used a four-horse team and wagon, and tracks clearly led to his ranch. Some of the stolen items were found in the cabin when authorities searched. Lucky for the newlyweds, the case was dismissed due to the crime being committed over the state line.

In 1909, Mrs. Dudley's nineteen-year-old son died of unknown causes. He was apparently working at the Three Forks Ranch at the time of his death, and Mrs. Gardner (who was childless, and had recently lost her husband) buried him in the family plot with a grand granite monument, something Mrs. Dudley certainly could not have afforded. Mrs. Dudley inherited her son's homestead claim, which she proved up on in 1917. Knowing an opportunity when one is presented, Mrs. Dudley also filed on her own homestead claim, which she patented in 1910. By 1916, Carl Dudley had abandoned her and daughter, Mary, and when Mrs. Dudley tried to prove up on Carl Dudley's homestead claim, she was challenged in court. Making the best of the situation, Mrs. Dudley moved into Columbine to send Mary to school full-time. She took over as proprietress of the Columbine Hotel and Restaurant.

Rural Colorado could be a difficult place for a single mother, homesteading a ranch nine miles from town. “She would put a dog collar on her little girl's neck and chain her to the cabin,” Fleming reported. She wasn't above a little deception to make a dollar: “Mrs. Dudley asked Mr. H. R. Temple if he wanted to buy half a beef, so she sent it down by stage driver. She had a colt tied in the barn, and it jumped over the manger and broke its neck, so she butchered it out and sold it as beef!” This toughness was necessary in the wilderness: repeatedly, the stagecoach would fail to make it through, and Mrs. Dudley and her daughter would snowshoe the nine miles from Columbine to their home.

Mrs. Dudley made the acquaintance of homesteader Barney Chesterman sometime before 1917, and took a certain liking to one another. Apparently, they were not very discrete about the relationship, and in July, 1918, the pair were jailed for “maintaining improper relations” as one local newspaper delicately put it. Bluntly stated, it was adultery, and after paying their $750 bonds, Mrs. Dudley filed for divorce on grounds of desertion from Carl Dudley. In April, 1919, Chesterman and Anna Dudley married in Steamboat Springs. Whether they had more children, were happy or unhappy, or simply found life easier together than apart, is unknown.

Monday, February 13, 2012

"A Rocky Mountain Recipe"

When the wily Steamboat horseman
Wants to “do” a tourist, he
“Gets a move on” in accordance
With this simple recipe:
Take a horse of fifteen winters;
File his teeth and roach his mane;
Dose him with condition powders;
Feed him chop or boiled grain.
Give his coat an oily lustre
(This is done with linseed meal!)
Use the currycomb and brush with
Ardor that will make him squeal.
Should he then, in your opinion,
Be a little short of “slick,”
Give him air of roundness wanting
With a course of arsenic!
Follow closely these instructions—
Also, then, (if you are bold)
Underneath his tail a bur put—
And you have a four-year-old.
C. F. Davis
Steamboat Pilot,
August 18, 1897, page 4

Friday, January 27, 2012

Honyockers


They’d come to the land and tried to shape it according to their imported ideas of science, progress, community, landscape. Now it began to shape them. Its message to the people was blunt: live here, and you will live barely and in isolation. It shook itself free of the littler of surplus bildings, the fence posts and barbed wire with which the Lilliputian homesteaders had tried to pin it down.
The land would wear just so much architecture and society, and no more. In the Platonic republic of the United States, the land of limitless imagining, where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities, nature was not supposed to dictate the terms on which mankind could live with it. Of course, nature often struck petulantly back at man, with earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and fires; but this inflexible drawing of lines and limits was alien to the American temper. The prairie was not amenable to problem solving; it wasn’t going to be fixed by new farming methods, or turned green by applied electromagnetism. It was what it was, which was not at all what people had conceived it to be.
Swallows nested now in the wrecked houses of the theorists and high-hopers, and in the abandoned cabins of the rolling stones.

(Jonathan Raban, from Bad Land: An American Romance)

Saturday, January 21, 2012

The economics of staying alive

"Change before you have to." (Jack Welch)

In 1977, the editors of Mother Earth News published a sprawling "Economic Outlook" that present a number of bold, disturbing assertations that emphasized our need for a new economic model:
-Capitalism, as we know it, is designed to exploit newly discovered resources and will flounder when we run out of new frontiers to conquer.
-The human population continues to grow rapidly.
-We can recognize and predict coming shortages of oil, irrigation water, and arable land.
-The health of our current world economy is contingent upon continued population growth and the discovery of new natural resources.
-We need new economic systems to support a "steady state" economy-- an economy of stable size with only mild flyctuations in population and consumption of energy and materials.
To suppor their thesis, the editors quoted historian Walter Prescott Webb, whose 1951 book The Great Frontier warned that when we run out of natural resources, our economic systems will stop working.
[The editors] wrote: "Western man's clever technology, self-motivation, work ethic, economic system, and regard for the individual all came after and are all solidly rooted in the windfall resources and profits of The Great Frontier... And now that most of the cream has been skimmed from that windfall, capitalism (the economic system so ideally suited for the exploitation of a seemingly endless storehouse of natural riches) will decline, prosperity will slip through our fingers...
"Western Man's 450-year expansionary binge-- which was fueled by inexpensive, plentiful energy and other natural resources--is now drawing to a close. And, just as Walter Prescott Webb predicted... the industrialized nations of the world are having a difficult time understanding what is happening to them."
It is now 2012, 61 years after Webb's warning. The global recession is now about 4 years old. Are we "having a difficult time understanding" what is happening to us? Yes, I think so.
Do we still need to invent a so-called "steady-state" economy? Yes, I think so. We need it now more than ever.
Humanity faces a dilemma. On one hand, our habitat won't allow the human population to expand forever. Resources will eventually run short. But if the global human population stabilizes, we will face an unprecedented economic problem. Prosperity, as we've known it, depends on an expanding human population to support an expanding economy.
A Ponzi scheme, also known as a pyramid scheme, is a scam in which a con artist promises big returns, which he fradulently generates from the contributions of later investors. Bernard Madoff is the most notorious recent perpetrator of such a scam. He raised ens of billions of dollars from thousands of investors before he went to jail in 2009.
Every Ponzi artist faces a day of reckoning. Eventually, he runs out of new resources.
Brown quotes a 2002 study by t he U. S. National Academy of Sciences that concludes we have been consuming resources we cannot hope to replace since about 1980. Brown points out that, as of 2009, all the world's major aquifers were being depleted for irrigation, we were pulling fish out of the sea faster than they could reproduce, and we were draining our reserves of cheap energy while not investing much in new energy technologies.
Modern strends are proving Webb and Brown correct. Lifestyles are eroding while basic resources such as food and energy get more and more expensive. In our present recession, each time a tidbit of positive employment news is revealed, fuel prices spike and new jobs dry up. The housing market is in the dumps, but farmland values are soaring.
It begins to feel liek we're encountering a natural limitation to our expansion, doesn't it?
The connection between population growth and economic prosperity was clearly recognizable 600 years before our Economic Outlook was published. One of the earliest recorded treatises on economic expansion was writted by Arabian philsopher Ibn Khaldun in 1377:
"When civilization [population] increases, the available labor again increases. In turn, luxury again increases in correspondence with the increasing profit, and the customs and needs of luxury increase. Crafts are created to obtain luxury products. The value realized from them increases, and, as a result, profits are again multiplied in the town. Production there is thriving even more than before... All the additional labor serves luxury and wealth, in contrast to the original labor that served the necessities of life."
More than six centuries ago, this Arabian philosopher understood the basic machinery pretty clearly. Economic growth has been generated by population growth, augmented by technology and motivated by improving lifestyles.
So what do we do when population growth is no longer sustainable?
We must create new systems for distributing value and maintaining prosperity for a stable human population. But we've never had to do that before. Maintaining prosperity in a stable population will require new tools.
Instead of stubbornly clinging to economic models that aren't working, we should be hard at work inventing new ones. Unfortunately, much of our energy is being channeled into various forms of denial.
The spectacular collapse of the $100 billin energy corporation Enron at the beginnign of hte 21st century offers a chilling illustration of our capacity to ignore evidence in favor of comfortable self-delusion. The smarted financial analysts in the world's most successful economy bought into Enron's manager's wild validations because they profited fromt hat belief. In spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, Wall Street believed Enron represented about $70 billion in assets because that belief temporarily benefited all of them--management, bankers and investors. For a time, skepticism profited no one. When those assets were finally called up on to generate cash, however, billions in shareholder value evaporated in just a few weeks.
Financial experts tend to believe what it's profitable for them to believe.
It is not popular to suggest that our planetary asset are not sufficient to cover our long-term needs. No one is making a profit from this kind of skepticism. We are exaggerating the durability of our natural resources because, in the short term, it's profitable-- and soothing-- to do so.
So far, technology has accommodated and augmented human population growth. We've seen our "green revolution" spread across the globe and feed multitudes. But now we know there were hidden costs, and that modern agriculture must adapt to natural limitations in order to be sustainable. And, indeed, the green revolution spurred more population growth.
In our fantasies, space travel solves our problems. One attraction of science fiction is its ability to extend the human frontier to the limits of human imagination. Star Trek's mission statement declaimed our potential to "explore strange new world... to boldly go where no man has gone before." In a fictional world, our current economic theories and philosophies might carry us on, uninterrupted, to flourish across the universe.
Unfortunately, right now we can fly no farther than our own small, sterile moon, and lately we've concluded that we can't even afford to take an occasional exploratory jaunt into our own upper atmosphere. We're too busy rebuilding levees and guarding oil wells down here on the ground.
Our economic tools will be obsolete long before we perfect intergalactic space travel.
In fact, they are obsolete today. It's time for new ideas. The founders of Mother Earth News offered some examples 34 years ago.
-Learn how to grow our own food and generate our own power
-Convert to wood heat, solar hot water and passive solar architecture
-Build a greenhouse, plant a garden, start a flock of chickens, feed leftovers to a pig, raise rabbits, get some milk goats
-Learn a basic trade and set up a home-based business
-Dig a root cellar
These ideas are still new, because they haven't yet been popularly acknowledged. The same goes for the writings of Walter Prescott Webb from 60 years ago. Today visionary writers such as Umair Haque (author of The New Capitalist Manifesto) and Michael Strong (author of Be The Solution) are adding their voices to the conversation, suggesting that capitalism itself needs to adapt.
"And what if the worst never comes to pass? What if our leaders really do... work their magic so well that times... do nothing but get better and better from now until eternity? Wonderful! But keep right on tending that garden and converting yourself to solar energy anyway... you'll still be ahead of the game. It's hard to beat the satisfactions of self-sufficiency and independence."
(From Mother Earth News, Dec 2011/January 2012, by Bryan Welch)

Friday, January 20, 2012

Identifying the mystery graves...

The cemeteries on the ranch have been all but forgotten in the intervening since the last person was laid to rest in 1920. While the fences were maintained, the identities and stories behind the individuals were lost for so many years. In reconstructing the ranch's history, I've been able to put together a few of the memories of their lives, and only wondered about so many others. Hours of research every day turned up the answer to a new mystery today!

In the Three Forks (or Gardner) cemetery, two small natural granite stones, uncarved and unmarked, sit at the eastern end, under an aspen tree. Some surmised they were two infants, or perhaps a headstone and foot stone. A newspaper article from 1915 might hold the key to this grave's identity, lost and forgotten for nearly 100 years:

Steamboat Pilot, July 28, 1915, page 8
RANCHER DROPS DEAD
John N. Lane Succumbs to Heart Disease in Lonely Cabin
Friday morning John N. Lane left his brother’s home at Three Forks to go to his cabin about a half a mile away. He seemingly was in good health and spirits. He was building a cabin on his homestead and his brother thought nothing of it when he did not return during the day.
In the evening the brother, Frank Lane, became worried and went to the cabin. His brother was lying face downward on the floor and had been dead for some time. Coroner Bashor and Dr. Kernaghan were called and pronounced the death due to neuralgia of the heart, from which he long had been a sufferer. Burial was at Three Forks Sunday.
# # # #
I wish there was a way to know for sure!

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Another example of a pioneer's fortitude

How strong must this man have been to survive this incident? He did later die of his injuries, but the fact he lived so long was remarkable. Also, how merciful is the human brain to prevent him from knowing the extent of his situation?


Steamboat Pilot, October 11, 1911, page 8
MAN FALLS INTO CAMPFIRE
NO HOPE FOR RECOVERY
Alex Dunn of Threeforks Country, Sensitive Regarding Afflication, Lies in Cabin Three Days Before He Reveals Horrible Burns to His Neighbors
(From Monday’s Daily.)
With his right arm burned to a crisp, his back and shoulders literally roasted, Alexander Dunn, a pioneer of the Threeforks country, lies in a bed at the Sheridan hotel, cheerful and ready to converse with those who enter the room. Knowing that in all probability he can live but two or three days at the most, Dunn is resigned to his fate and, with the greatest patience, awaits the Grim Reaper.
Dunn, who has lived alone in a little cabin in the Threeforks country, has been engaged in doing ditch work for an irrigation project, and during the cold weather last Monday built a fire to dry his clothes. He has long been subject to epileptic fits and it is surmised that he was stricken and fell into the fire. How long he lay there no one knows. He does not know, and being sensitive regarding his affliction, thinks that his clothes caught fire and burned his body before he could extinguish the flames, but from the manner in which the body is burned, Dunn undoubtedly fell into the fire, his arm falling right into the blaze and the back and side of his body was slowly cooked until he regained consciousness.
With his body burned so terribly that death would have resulted in nine cases out of ten, Dunn managed to get up from his perilous and painful position and walk to his cabin. In some manner known only to himself he undressed and got into bed. Tuesday afternoon, becoming alarmed at Dunn’s absence, a neighbor by the name of Durnham went to the Dunn cabin and there found the unfortunate man in bed. Dunn said nothing to Durnham about his condition and he went away feeling that Dunn was probably slightly indisposed and would be about in a day or two. The next afternoon Dunn got up from his bed and went to the Durnham home where he told his neighbors of his condition. Horrified at the man’s terrible burns and astonished that he could talk rationally, Durnham immediately went to a telephone and summoned Dr. L. G. Blackmer who was asked to drive with all speed and meet the party which was on the way to Steamboat.
Dr. Blackmer met the Durnham wagon at Columbine and dressed Dunn’s injuries, after which he was brought to Steamboat and is now being given every attention possible.
Dunn, who is between 45 and 50 years of age, has a married sister somewhere in Arizona and a brother in the Klondike country.
Hank Fravert, an old-time companion of Dunn, is in constant attendance upon the unfortunate man.
Dunn does not realize that most of his body is burned to a crisp, but he does know that he is in a critical condition.