Waniyetu Wowapi: Lakota Winter Count

 Tonight we had our first snow. For the Lakota Native American tribe in the Northwestern United States, this would mark a new year, and a picture representing the past year would be painted on a communal calender.

The Lakota had no written language. Waniyetu wowapi or "Winter Counts," were pictoral records used in conjunction with extensive oral histories to create a community record. For the Lakota, one year was from the first snowfall to the next first snowfall after a spring, summer and fall. Each year one event, not necessarily the most important event which occurred, but the one that most people of their society would remember and identify with, was chosen to be painted to represent the year. This picture would represent the entire year and any other events which occurred that year would be identified by the event in the picture.

The Lakota are best known for their participation in the winning of the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. 

I think that the first-snow-starts-a-new-year concept is purely magical. It is neat that the new year is unpredictable, it can happen at any time. When it started yesterday, I was knitting with my friends in a cozy atmosphere. What a good way to start off a new year?

I have decided to start my own collection of Winter Counts, in the Lakota tradition. I had hoped to have finished my Winter Count in time for the new year, but I am not done yet. The event I chose is personal and would not represent the best identifiable event to all American people. I concluded that my Winter Counts would only represent my family unit. I have included my unfinished Winter Count and will hopefully finish it soon: it represents the trip to Ireland that Andy and I  took and the new instrument we acquired there. Enjoy the new year!   

The Smithsonian has a lovely online exhibit about Lakota Winter Counts.

What is a Winter Count is a good site that describes Winter Counts much better than I do.

Native American Radio This site offers a station filled with Native American musicans and music (traditional and modern.) It is worth a listen if you like Native American music.


*Note: Turning Bear's death (by train) is being added to a Winter Count in the first picture. The second picture is of Rain-In-The-Face, a Lakota warrior who participated in the Battle at Little Big Horn. Sorry my drawing is blurry, I had to photograph it.

Braum Brose: Medieval Vegetable Broth from Ireland

In Ireland, Andy and I went to a Medieval style banquet at a real castle. It was the first castle I had ever seen or been in. Ascending the cold stone spiral staircase was fun but inviting. Everyone was cheerful and there were costumed ladies pressing mead into the hands of the unsuspecting visitors at the top. I naively didn't know what it was and, when told, handed it back instantaneously. The next room had real Medieval tapestries, furniture from Medieval times and costumed performers playing the harp and the fiddle and proposing toasts to the king.

Dinner was held in a banquet room, down the stairs. There were many long heavy wooden tables and benches for us as well as glazed clay plates, bowls and cups. There was no silverware.

In Medieval times, small knives were frequently brought to banquets by the diners to do the work that both the knife and the fork do today, anything eaten with a metal spoon today was drank straight out of a cup or bowl or less commonly, eaten with a wooden or horn spoon. Two-pronged forks were used for cooking but forks for diners did not come into popularity in  Western Europe until the 14th century, starting in Italy.     

At our banquet, vegetable broth (Braum Brose,) chicken, potatoes, honey-glazed ribs and a dessert that couples had to feed to each other was served. The whole experience was not as hokey as we thought it would be. When we saw it on the itinerary, we imagined a "Dixie Stampede" style dinner with bad food and entertainment, geared toward little kids. However, It was a lovely atmosphere with good performers and relatively good food. We especially loved the Braum Brose, which was not quite like any broth we had ever had before. Andy asked the waiter what it was and we searched frantically for a recipe for it when we got home but nothing came up for it. We did a lot of research and ended up recreating it exactly, we were most pleased! Even though we have the food, we would recommend seeing the performance, it was very worthwhile, just disregard the zippers on the performers outfits and you will have a delightful night!

Our Recipe for Medieval, Irish, Braum Brose:

 Ingredients:

2 Tablespoons Butter
2 Parsnips (peeled and diced)
1 Onion (peeled and diced)
1 Potato  (peeled and diced)
1 Clove Garlic (crushed or minced)
1 teaspoon Curry Powder (add more to taste)
1/2 teaspoon Ground Cumin
1-2 sprigs of Parsley (chopped fine) 
4 cups of hot vegetable broth (cans or cubes)
1/4 cup of Light Cream
2 or 3 dashes of White Pepper

Instructions:
Peel and dice the parsnips, potato and onion. Melt the butter in a large pot, add the parsnips, potato and onion. Cook covered over a low heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft. Add the garlic, parsley, curry and cumin and cook for a few minutes. Pour in the hot vegetable stock and simmer until the vegetables are tender. Puree mixture in a blender until smooth, and return to pot and add the pepper and the cream. Do not allow the soup to boil after the cream is added. Serve and Enjoy!

Recipes for Honey-Glazed Ribs similar to those served at the banquet:
Pork Ribs with Honey
Restaurant Recipes: Pork Ribs

Other Medieval Recipes and Cooking Resources:
Medieval Recipes
Medieval Cookery
Medieval and Renaissance Food
Medieval Cooking Recipes ( A good collection that covers food from all over the world.)









 *Note: Andy took the lovely photo, second from the top. He is also in the picture on the right, enjoying the soup.

Tin Whistles, Penny Whistles, Irish Whistles and Fifes

           I have always loved the sounds of flutes and whistles. I learned to play the flute in Middle school and was so bad, I was asked to leave the band. I have to say, I don't like modern flutes as much I love tin whistles, Irish flutes and fifes. They have such an old-fashioned, simple, and romantic sound. The tin whistle is rather easy to learn. The fife and Irish flute take a little more practice of breath control but they both have the same finger positions as the tin whistle.  Fifes started to be used for military moral-lifting and for military commands in the 1600s and were highly utilized by Napoleon.  Tin whistles (also known as penny whistles, flageolets, and Irish whistles,) have been used at least since the 1500s. They were historically used by vagabonds and urchins in street performances but were not made of tin until 1843. By the 1860s whistles were popular children's toys and an adult amusement popular in Irish music.  

For those who wish to learn, I have charted out the finger positions and some simple songs to start out with. A lot of people have fifes and tin whistles but have never learned to play.

Some good resources to learn online are: 
Whistle Away

Whistle This (A really good site for hearing different renditions and playing styles that does not get updated anymore.)
Tin Whistle This site has videos on how to play.

Resources for Historical songs:
O' Neill's Music of Ireland This site is good because it has the sheet music as well as MIDI files to listen to.

 Old Fort Snelling Instruction Book for Fife With Music of Early America by Donald Mattson and Louis Walz
in whistles, but have never learned to play.

The songs I have diagramed are simple and recognizable tunes that everyone can learn easily. All of them were written before 1870:

Mary Had a Little Lamb is probably one of the most recognizable songs in American history. It was said to have been written by Sarah Josepha Hale (of Godey's Lady's Book) as a poem and later put to music. It was based a true story about Mary Sawyer who took her Lamb to school and the havoc that ensued. It was so widespread that Thomas Edison used the first stanza of Mrs. Hale's poem to test his invention, the phonograph, in 1877.  

Yankee Doodle  is said to originally have been written by British officers to mock the Colonial commanders that they served with during the French and Indian War. The Macaroni mentioned in the song refers to the prestigious Macaroni "Club" in England which consisted of educated, over-fashionably dressed lads with enormous hairstyles who were known for their drinking and gambling. In the song, the British made the remark that the Colonists were so low class that they thought someone who had a feather in their hat was of this elite high society.       

The Rising of the Moon, was written in 1866 to the tune The Wearing of the Green (1798.) The Wearing of the Green described the uprising  in 1798 in County Kildare in Ireland.Green was the color of the Society of United Ireland who wished to end British rule in Ireland. Rebels wore green shamrocks in their hats to proclaim their dissatisfaction with British rule.  

Facts Not Fiction: The First Thanksgiving Celebration

The time has come for cranberry sauce, stuffing and a lot of turkeys to meet their ultimate demise at the hands of millions of feasters. I personally dislike the holiday of Thanksgiving. The idea of giving thanks has been overshadowed by cooking and entertainment stress as well as eating so excessively that we feel we will “explode.” We can never give too much thanks. There is so much to be thankful for that it is silly that we pile it on one day a year. In the 1620s, Puritan days of thanksgiving were observed by—fasting! Fasting, while the exact opposite of what is done today, really would peel away the festivities to the heart of the celebration—to give thanks. We are all eternally indebted for everything we’ve been gifted. This year at thanksgiving, give true, heartfelt thanks.

Enough about today’s celebrations, what really happened at that “first thanksgiving” that we learned about as children? The story has been embellished and euphemized for so long that most of us have no idea what really happened or if it even really happened—it did!

When was the first Thanksgiving celebration? 

• The first Thanksgiving celebration (Pilgrims and Native Americans) occurred in the autumn of 1621. 

 Who was there? 

• About 65 “Pilgrims” from Holland, settled in Plymouth Colony and about 90 Native Americans with their chief, Massasoit from the Wamponoag village.

What was eaten at the first thanksgiving celebration?

• Deer, Fowl, Corn, Eels, Muscles, Cod, Bass, Wild Turkey, and Wine are the only things listed officially. Turkey was only listed in the 1630s, about 9 years after the celebration.

How long was the celebration?

• Three days of celebration and entertainment, although it is said that the “Pilgrims” killed enough fowl on their hunt to feed the town for a week. They did not eat for three days straight but had decent meals throughout the days along with other festivities such as music and games.

How do we know this?

• There are only two written primary documents from “Pilgrims” that mention a good harvest feast in which around ninety Native Americans attended. Only one of them was written at the time of the feast, the other was a few years later. Both sources amount to about a paragraph each.
• The first source is "Mourt's relation or journal of the plantation at Plymouth"  By William Bradford and Edward Winslow (1622) Reprint (1865).
• The second source is “Of Plimoth Plantation” By William Bradford ( c. 1630) Reprint (1904).
  
  
  
   Thanksgiving as a National Holiday:
  

     George Washington suggested a day of thanksgiving in 1789 but it didn’t catch on. Thomas Jefferson deplored the idea. It was the efforts of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale (of Godey’s Lady’s Book) who popularized the idea in her writings for 40 years before Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November would be an annual Thanksgiving celebration and was the first president to “pardon a turkey.”
  

            Most of our Thanksgiving traditions come from the Civil War period and a little before. Period soldiers' letters talk of how they missed cranberry sauce, turkey and dinner with the family. Turkey was said to be plentiful in New England and could have possibly been eaten at the First Thanksgiving. There are plenty of recipes for cooking it from that time period, but no "Pilgrims" mentioned it at the time. Cranberry sauce was certainly not on the menu for the Pilgrims (although the Native Americans ate cranberries in general.) The word "cranberry" does not even appear in print until the late 1700s and cranberry sauce recipes only started to surface in the 1840s. During the siege of Petersburg in 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant thought it was such a necessary part of the thanksgiving celebration, that he had it ordered for his troops-- something unheard of after three years of war food shortages. 
  
  
  

  
  

  A Recipe from Mrs.Sarah Josepha Buell Hale from Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book (1857.):
  

  
  

  "Cranberry Sauce-- This sauce is very simply made. A quart of cranberries are washed and stewed with sufficient water to cover them; when they burst mix them with a pound of brown sugar and stir them well. Before you have removed them from the fire, all the berries should have burst. When cold they will be jellied, and if thrown in a form while warm, will turn out whole," (252.)
  
  

  *Note, Image 1: "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe.  Image 2:  Engraving, Library of Congress
  
  
  

Spencerian Ladies' Hand- Mid-1800s Handwriting Part II

This is a continuation of an earlier post about Spencerian Handwriting which can be found here. This post includes the uppercase letters.

Knowing how to read and write in the Spencerian style is fun but also helpful. I have found that being able to read and write in the Spencerian style has allowed me to read  old letters and the inscriptions in books and on the backs of photographs easily. It takes a bit of practice but it is worth the effort. Reading Civil War soldier letters isn't such a struggle anymore. I loved to read the letters before, but now I love it so much more. It is immensely helpful if you have to read any large amount of period writing at a time. It is a beautifully romantic script I urge anyone that wants to learn to give it a try.

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This is the guide for lowercase letters in the Spencerian script.










Some tips on writing:

* Press as lightly as you can for the thin parts of the letters. Apply a small bit of pressure  for the darker parts.

*If your dark parts of the letters are not as dark as you need them at first, you can go over them again until you can do it naturally in one stoke.

* It helps if you mark out lines on the page in pencil to keep all of your letters straight.

*You can also print out guide sheets.

This is the stroke guide for writing the lowercase letters. Please forgive its blurriness, I could not get it any clearer.









Remember if you mess up there are two acceptable period corrections you can use:

1. You can “go with it.” Just leave it as it is, if it isn’t a big mistake, no one may notice it. If you don’t believe me, take a look at America’s most famous document: The Declaration of Independence.

Timothy Matlock for whatever reason messed up the ‘A’ in America. Millions have viewed the document and rarely do we see what is really there: “The Declaration of Independence of the United States of Жmerica.” No one really knows why he didn’t just use the normal round hand script ‘A’ every time he wrote America but he did for other words starting with ‘A.’ He also used a carrot to insert the word “only” as well. Don't fear mistakes, you may be the only one who notices. 

2. Cross it out with ink. This was done frequently in informal letters. In the 1800s a lot of things were still spelled as they sounded to the common people. Even the very educated made spelling mistakes. Accidental ink drops were fairly common too.
 Example
Another Example

*Note: The engraving is from The Payson, Dunton, & Scribner manual of penmanship (1873.)