Don't Call Me A "Sidewinder"

Rattlesnakes. Just the very word makes a lot of people uneasy and anxious. As a western historical writer, nature lover, and all around information geek, I’m fascinated with the critters, so when Dearest Husband attended a Continuing Education meeting (required to maintain his veterinary license) that had a lecture on rattlesnakes living in Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Colorado (same general area I wish I lived), I grabbed his lecture notes as soon as the meeting was over.

There are more than 24 known species of rattlesnakes in the US of which the Mojave Rattlesnake is the most venomous. It has venom which can kill a person if antivenin is not administered. These rattlesnakes are aggressive toward humans and will bite without provocation. Although rattlesnake venom isn't as deadly as some other snakes, the volume of the injected venom makes rattlesnakes particularly dangerous. The venom is haemotoxic, meaning that it prevents blood from clotting and destroys tissue.

Most of what I write is set in what was the Wyoming Territory—now the great state of Wyoming. Only two rattlers live in Wyoming, according to the Wyoming Department of Fish and Wildlife: the prairie rattler and the midget faded rattler. The prairie rattler can be found just about everywhere in the state below 8000 feet. The midget is found only in the Flaming Gorge area and is endangered.

Of the two, the midget (what’s midget about a venomous snake that can be as long as 20 inches fully mature?) is much more venomous, more prone to bite, and definitely aggressive. It is an absolutely gorgeous snake—liver and orange colored.

The prairie rattler, on the other hand, has a huge distribution area. These snakes are robust, less aggressive than their midget or Mojave cousins, and aren’t as venomous. Unless cornered or actually threatened, they’ll just slither away through the sage brush and grasses. Most mature prairie rattlers will also prefer, if forced to strike, to deliver a warning, dry bite. (And if I’m ever in a situation where I’ve accidently cornered a prairie rattler and receive a dry bite, I’m still dead because the heart attack will kill me.)

Now, I’m off to go research rattlesnakes in the Big Piney area of Texas for my next romance novel.

One Potato, Two Potato

Oops. I woke up this morning with a vague sense of something not right and logged into my e-mail and then FB. All seemed okay there, so I checked that the blog post I scheduled went live…Wrong blog. Wrong post. Wrong day.

So, I deleted the post. No harm, no foul, right?

Wrong. I didn’t back that post up when I wrote it. So, I’m recreating this one from scratch, rather like the subject of my post—making yeast when there isn’t a grocery store for miles and miles or a few more decades of time.

Making yeast was something every cook, wife, and baker probably knew how to do in the time period we’re talking about. Without yeast, you’ve got flatbread. And if you didn’t know how to make yeast, you couldn’t just run to the grocery store. Even if you could just run into town, what we know as grocery stores still didn’t exist.

The simplest recipe to make yeast involves potatoes, sugar, and flour. Boil your potatoes as you usually would, except save three cups of the water. Divide the water in half. Stir in about a tablespoon of sugar and about a cup of flour into a cup and a half of the water, or until the mixture is sort of stiff. Cover and leave overnight in a warm place and it should be bubbly and yeasty-smelling the next morning. If not, you’ll need to start over. (That’s where the other half of the boiled potato water came in.) If you don’t have flour, you can boil an extra potato and plan to smash that potato and use as the starter for the yeast.

Have you ever heard when selecting potatoes for cooking (other than baked) that it’s one for me, one for you, and one for the pot? The one for the pot was so the cook could make yeast.

After all this talk of boiled, smashed potatoes…I’m hungry.

Throw What?

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a “lasso.”  You may lasso things with lariat, but you cannot carry a “lasso” because lasso is a verb.

The American cowboy learned the use of la riata from the Mexicans, and he shortened the name and called it lariat, which has become the accepted name among Americans. Cowboys call it simply a rope, and when he lassos a steer he says he “roped it.”

Common wisdom of the period (and even today) claimed the very best lariats were made of raw hides. The raw hide is first cut into strips as long as the hide will allow. The hide is half- tanned without removing the hair. The strips are next soaked in water and stretched over a block, after which they are neatly braided into a rope. During the latter process they are carefully pulled as tight as possible. When this is done the rope is buried in the ground and allowed to remain in the earth two weeks to soften, after which it is dug up and again stretched over a block by means of heavy weights. After the hair has been sand-papered off, the rope thoroughly oiled or greased with mutton tallow and properly noosed (with a hondo/honda/hondoo—all depending on which source I looked at for reference, but all pronounced “onda”), it is ready for use.

Learning to throw it is a whole other thing. To do that, start with a noose only a foot or a foot and one-half in diameter, allowing the rope to slip and the noose to grow larger as you swing it. Take your position in front of a target, a post for example.  Run the end of the rope through the ring or "honda," as it is called.  Coil the rope in your left hand, carefully leaving about six feet of loose rope between the coil and the noose, and see that there are no kinks in the line and that the coils will slip easily off when the noose is thrown. Take hold of the noose with your right hand about a foot from the ring, and with the same hand grasp the rope the same distance below the honda.

Allow your wrist to move easily as you swing the noose over your head from right to left. Let your wrist act as an axle, and swing the rope as if it were a wheel revolving horizontally around your wrist and over your head. When you feel that the proper time has arrived for making the cast, choose the moment as your swinging hand comes around from back to front, take a quick step forward, bring your hand, with palm down, forward and down to the level of your shoulder, let it stretch to a full arm's length without interrupting the swinging motion of the noose, and let it go. Try to keep the noose as level as possible the whole time, also, until you actually let the rope fly. Then, the right side of the loop should be lower than the other so when it hits the post, the opposite side of the loop will flip over the target.  

That all sounds easy enough.

Nothing Else Like It

Building the transcontinental railroad was an unprecedented feat of engineering, extraordinary vision, and raw courage. The railroad was the hope and dream of Abraham Lincoln, but he would not live to see its completion. Investors risked their businesses and money; a few politicians understood its importance; engineers and surveyors risked and some lost their lives; Irish and Chinese immigrants, many of the defeated Confederate soldiers, and other laborers did the backbreaking and dangerous work of laying track. The transcontinental railroad was a huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat. Upon its completion, there was nothing else like it in the world. 

Two companies were pitted against one another to create a railroad that is still used routinely today. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads competed with one another for funding. Speed was tantamount and caution was thrown to the wind. Most of the building of this railroad line was done by hand—from excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, fillings gorges, and blasting tunnels through the mountains.

The workforce approached the size of the Civil War armies at its peak. As many as fifteen thousand workers toiled on each line. For the Union Pacific, most of those workers were Irish. On the Central Pacific, Chinese immigrants filled the ranks.

Work began in 1863 and as the tracks were set, tent cities rose. Some of those “towns” faded into oblivion as the rails continued away across the landscape. Others became cities in their own right—places like Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins Springs, Green River…and in 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, the last spike was driven, completing the ribbons of iron that would join a nation from one coast to another.