Part Of Wounded Knee Massacre Site To Be Sold

by Sean McLachlan on


Part of the Wounded Knee massacre site, the scene of one of the worst attacks on Native Americans in U.S. history, may soon be sold to private interests, the BBC reports.

In 1890 in South Dakota, there were widespread fears among the white population that the Sioux were going to stage an uprising. A drought and insufficient government rations had led many Native Americans to the brink of starvation, and some had turned to the Ghost Dance religion, a revivalist faith that many whites interpreted as warlike.

The U.S. military tried to relocate the local Sioux to the Pine Ridge Reservation but one band refused to go and fled in the middle of the night. They were eventually tracked down to Wounded Knee Creek. On December 29, the soldiers tried to disarm them. One Sioux refused to give up his gun. A soldier tried to grab it and it went off. The nervous whites then fired into the crowd.

In the ensuing battle 25 U.S. soldiers were killed, but the death toll among the Sioux was far higher. It’s unclear exactly how many were killed but estimates vary from 250 to 300, with at least half of them being women and children who hadn’t resisted. One mass grave, shown here, was used to bury 146 bodies.

Ever since that bloody day, the massacre site has been of deep significance to the Sioux and the Native American community in general. Little has been built there, however, and now a 40-acre plot that’s owned by someone outside the tribe is up for sale.

Some Sioux are calling on President Obama to make the land, already a National Historic Landmark, a National Monument, a status that would give it more federal funding and protection.

The landowner says that he has tried to sell the land to the tribe but was rebuffed. He’s giving the tribe until May 1 to come up with the $3.9 million price tag before he puts it on the open market. Sioux leaders say the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the poorest regions in the country, has little money to spare and that the asking price is far above market price.

[Photo courtesy Library of Congress]

California Coast Redux

by Elizabeth Seward on

I was driving around the West Coast aimlessly in February of 2011. It was chillier than I hoped it would be, but I bundled up. I’d been thinking about California’s Highway 1 longingly ever since I drove down it in 2007 and I’d been hoping to replay the visuals I’d stored with such care in my quick-draw, long-term memory. I didn’t get far along Highway 1 before I was asked to turn back – the roads were flooding from the pooling of the incessant rain. When I was driving around the coastal roads of Oregon and California in 2007, I was driving south toward the launching city for my summer tour and sleeping in my van. In retrospect, I think I was trying to recreate that experience in 2011.

%Gallery-187004%I hadn’t booked any hotel rooms and wasn’t planning on it. I told my husband we could just sleep in the Chevy HHR we’d rented. So I bought some $15 throws at a Walgreens in San Francisco and we drove without destination. When we got too tired of our wandering, we pulled over and put the seats down in the back. Sleeping was difficult. It was much colder in February than it had been in June of 2007. I had a mattress on a lofted bed in the van back then. I had sheets, comforters, and pillows. And yet here I was, four years older with none of those things. My husband and I shivered through the night a few times before deciding that we should find alternative accommodations for my birthday, which was one day away.

We booked two nights at a place called Vichy Springs Resort that boasted naturally carbonated warm springs. Vichy springs is located in Ukiah, California, which now seems like a sleepy dream of a town. The naturally carbonated and warm springs are relatively rare. Vichy Springs is purportedly one of only two locations that offers both in North America. The place is 157 years old and calls 700 acres of land home. The springs were used by the Native American Pomo tribes for thousands of years. Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant all once spent time in the Vichy waters.

We drove the winding roads from the Pacific inland toward Ukiah, stopping every so often to photograph the mountains in the distance. It was night by the time we arrived and far too cold to even consider being outdoors with a swimsuit on, no matter how warm the springs. I was a year older by morning and sitting in warm spring water for the first time in my life. I volleyed between the pool and the baths, where the carbonated water from the faucets came straight from underground. My husband gifted me a massage and I dozed off in peace as the knots from sleeping on folded car seats for days were kneaded away. We left refreshed and early the next morning for Sacramento, from where we would return the car and find our flight back to Austin. As I was looking out of the window of the plane as it ascended over the lush hills of California, I wondered why I would have expected an old plot to unfold before old scenery when in fact, the scene had changed and so had I.

[Photo Credit: Elizabeth Seward and Ben Britz]

The Cabinet Of Curiosities: Collecting The Wonders Of The World

by Sean McLachlan on

Before there was the museum, there was the cabinet of curiosities. Starting in the 16th century as Europe expanded its horizons during the Age of Exploration, the rich and powerful began to collect curios and display them. Their collections were eclectic – everything from strange weapons from distant islands to beautiful coral formations.

The objects were all put together in no particular order in one room or cabinet, which was sometimes called a Wunderkammer (“Wonder Room”). This blending of natural history and anthropology with no accounting for geography or time period allowed the viewer to see the world as a whole in all its rich diversity. Many of these collections became the nuclei for later museums that are still around today, while others are still preserved in their original state.

Ambras Castle in Austria has the Chamber of Art and Curiosities, a collection most famous for its many portraits of “miracles of nature”, mostly people suffering from deformities, plus this guy who managed to survive a lance being stuck through his head. There’s also a suit of samurai armor, silk artwork, mechanical toys and plenty more.

The Augsberg Art Cabinet in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala is a beautiful little piece with all sorts of panels and drawers devoted to various themes such as life, death and religion. Click on the first link for a cool interactive exhibit.

The tradition of the Wunderkammer is kept alive by some museums. The British Museum in London has the Enlightenment Gallery, which is jam-packed with busts, fossils, Greek vases, rare books, weapons, and Asian religious statues. The Museum der Dinge (“Museum of Things”) in Berlin is a fascinating if somewhat random collection of, well, things.

%Gallery-186870%In Los Angeles there’s the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a bizarre collection of sculptures made from single human hairs and displays of dubious cures from the days before modern medicine. Strecker’s Cabinets of Curiosities in Waco, Texas, proudly displays its prize item, a humpback whale skull measuring 19 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds. An Iron Age jug sits nearby. Random associations are what Cabinets of Curiosities are all about.

But why not start your own? A bit of travel or rummaging through yard sales can get you a constantly growing collection that will become the envy of your friends. You can even open it up to the public like the owners of Trundle Manor in Pittsburgh.

[Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Shakespeare Slept Here: Hidden Old Room In Oxford Once Hosted The Bard

by Sean McLachlan on

Behind an eighteenth-century facade in downtown Oxford, just above a clothing shop, is a bedroom that was once used by William Shakespeare.

It was part of the Crown Tavern, owned by Shakespeare’s friend John Davenant. The Bard frequently stopped in Oxford on his trips between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. A nearby courtyard may have hosted his troupe’s performances.

Known as the Painted Room, it’s been remarkably preserved since Elizabethan times and still has hand-painted wall decoration from the late 16th century. This rare artwork survived thanks to oak paneling installed in the following century, and was only rediscovered in 1927.

Part of the decoration includes a religious text:
“And last of thi rest be thou
Gods servante for that hold I best / In the mornynge earlye
Serve god devoutlye
Feare god above allthynge. . .”

This week the Oxford Preservation Trust is offering guided tours of the Painted Room. If you can’t make it, BBC has posted a video tour of the room, led by some silly guy in an anachronistic tricorne hat. The Trust is also working on making the rooms permanently available to the public.

[Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Prague: A City With Claws

by David Farley on

I was at a laundromat in Santa Cruz, California, reading the New York Times travel section. It was the spring semester of my senior year of college, a period of complete uncertainty for me. I was about to graduate. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I only knew what I didn’t want: to stay in Santa Cruz or move to San Francisco and get an office job of some sort. I needed a purpose. I needed a direction.

And that’s when a life-changing thing happened to me at the laundromat. When the guy next to me, who was reading the main news section of the Times heard the buzzer to his dryer go off, he dismissively tossed the paper over his shoulder. It hit me in the face. Well, okay, it skimmed my face. Alright, it almost hit me in the face.The point is … I picked up the newspaper and the first article I saw was about how bird poop and pollution (poop-lution?) were combining to rot the statues on Prague’s Charles Bridge.

I’d been to Prague three years earlier. I was only there for three days but I was almost paralyzed by its beauty. It had a down-on-its-heels feel to it, having just come up for air from 41 years of Soviet negligence. I met a young American couple that told me there were thousands more like them there. Young yanks just hanging out. They had planned to open a pizza-by-the-slice placed and call it Brooklyn Pizza. I moved on to Berlin a few days later but I couldn’t stop thinking about Prague.

And then here I was reading the article about the city and its eroding statues. What was in the article was unimportant to me. I was having an epiphany, a realization that was so simple I never thought it was possible. I thought my life needed direction and I was going to take that literally. I needed change and it almost hit me right in the face. I would move to the capital of poop-lution: Prague.

So that’s what I did. I spent my days teaching English and my nights drinking beer with drunk old men in smoky pubs. I wandered the city’s narrow streets, gawking at the Baroque palaces. I took classes on the art history of the city. I stood around Charles Bridge – yes that same bridge that was supposed to be dying from asphalt cancer, and one of the most beautiful bridges in the world – staring up at the Prague Castle with the gothic St. Vitus cathedral plopped in the middle.

OK, so I still didn’t have a purpose. In fact, in Prague I had less of a purpose in life than I had in Santa Cruz. At least there I was getting a college degree.

But, while sitting in a café in Prague on a random Tuesday afternoon, I realized, that was sort of the point. Prague let me exist there; it let me hang out and do nothing except for live a rather debauched life, and it didn’t care. It didn’t judge me.

To be fair, though, I didn’t exactly move to Prague to live like a bohemian (and I mean that with a capital “B” and a lowercase “b.” I actually wanted to go somewhere slightly out of my comfort zone. I wanted to struggle a little – to learn something about myself. Yes, I could have chosen a more challenging place (Afghanistan, anyone?). But the beer and sausages are so much better in the Czech Republic. Anyone ever had an Afghan sausage? They’re TERRIBLE.

And so for three years I lived in Prague. I traveled around the country. I made friends. I even learned Czech. How I didn’t come away from there with a gorgeous Czech wife is a miracle. It doesn’t sound very challenging but three years later, I was a profoundly different (and, I hope, a better, stronger, wiser) person. And then one day I woke up and realized my life was so great in Prague there was nothing left to do but to leave it, to find another challenge.

And so I waved goodbye to the City of a Hundred Spires and did something else. But now over a decade since then, I still go back again and again and again.

Why? Because Prague is me. I am Prague. Prague is the reason I’m a traveler and a writer and a travel writer. I go back to get that reminder of the lesson that Prague first taught me: it’s OK to not live a normal life. It’s OK if you don’t have an office job and live in the suburbs (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s OK that I’m not making a six-figure salary. It’s OK to go out in the world and let yourself drift. You’re not a loser for doing that! Unlike my mom and dad, Prague never said: What?! You want to be a travel writer?! But they make no money and, really, they’re just losers who can’t do real journalism.

Kafka likened his home city to a mother with claws that won’t let you go. Perhaps. But to me, Prague is more like your friend’s cool mom who lets you party at her house. And after you drunkenly jump off her roof into the pool, she’s standing there waiting with a towel to wrap you in.

So, who else is ready to jump in the pool?

[Photo Credit: David Farley]