Word: slaving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mutual curiosity helped too. York, Clark's black slave, was a hit with the Indians, hamming it up to break the ice. In time, relations grew friendly, even intimate. The men of the corps were soldiers, not saints, and their commanders were realistic men, not cartoon superheroes. Lewis carried a stockpile of medicine, including potions to treat venereal diseases. He found more than a few occasions to administer the stuff...
...European Americans who joined the journey, then left or completed it, often without monetary or historical compensation. Considering the time and place, I imagine those 45 were illiterate, low-skilled laborers subject to managerial whims and 19th century downsizing. And it is most certainly the story of the black slave York, who also cast votes during this allegedly democratic adventure. It's even the story of Seaman, the domesticated Newfoundland dog who must have been a welcome and friendly presence and who survived the risk of becoming supper during one lean time or another. The Lewis and Clark Expedition...
...wonder if colonization might somehow be magical. After all, Miles Davis is the direct descendant of slaves and slave owners. Hank Williams is the direct descendant of poor whites and poorer Indians. In 1876 Emily Dickinson was writing her poems in an Amherst attic while Crazy Horse was killing Custer on the banks of the Little Big Horn. I remain stunned by these contradictions, by the successive generations of social, political and artistic mutations that can be so beautiful and painful. How did we get from there to here? This country somehow gave life to Maria Tallchief and Ted Bundy...
...settled in St. Louis, reacted badly. He allowed York to return temporarily to Louisville to rejoin his wife, who had a different master. But Clark wrote to his brother Jonathan, "if any attempt is made by york to run off, or refuse to provorm his duty as a Slave, I wish him Sent to New Orleans and Sold, or hired out to Some Severe master untill he thinks better of Such Conduct." Outraged bewilderment rings from this and other letters included in the new book Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark. Clark had known York since they...
...Houston with a pump jack for a metronome. But the Depression was then. This is now. Political correctness is addicted to committing the sin of anachronism--imposing the current sense of racial and environmental decorum upon earlier times. Consider Thomas Jefferson's descent from Enlightenment philosopher and naturalist to slave master and debaucher of Sally Hemings--a fair enough revisionist correction, if kept in disciplined perspective. Of course, one age's evil is another's routine. Meriwether Lewis, as specimen-collecting naturalist, blasted away at a condor--a barbarous breach of ecological etiquette today. (He missed.) Audubon slaughtered a thousand...