Tonight

Road Trip! Chicago>Traverse City>and a meandering route back to the Twin Cities.

tcmn>chil>tcmi>tcmn

I leave you with this little ditty:

backstretch

Yesterday was the 147th anniversary of the murder of my great-great grandparents and their 3 year old daughter at the beginning of the Dakotah Conflict in 1863. Below is a blog post I wrote several years ago after Quinn and I made a pilgrimage to the Minnesota River Valley to look for the site of the massacre.

In March of 1862 my great-great grandparents, Johann and Kathryn Kochendofer with their five children, John, 11, Rose, my great grandmother, 9, Kate 7, Margaret 5 and Sarah 3, to a homestead located in Flora Township in the southwest corner of Renville county, Minnesota, just upstream and on the other side of the Minnesota River from Redwood Falls. The farm sat at the edge of the prairie, where it began sloping down to the river valley. It’s a beautiful spot for a farm, with fertile fields in front, and the backyard dropping off into a wooded hillside. They had spent the spring and early summer living in a tent while they broke the ground for farming and built a log house to shelter them for the winter.

Around noon on August 18th of that year, Johann and John had returned to the house from the fields for lunch, Kathryn was in the kitchen cooking and the girls were doing laundry when a group of Indians armed with rifles appeared. After a short conversation, one of the Indians took an axe that was leaning against the woodpile and threw it down the hill into the woods. Johann told John to get the axe and return it. As he stood speaking with the intruders, he had his hands on Rose’s shoulders as she stood in front of him. Suddenly one of the Indians shot him. Kathryn ran to the door of the house and was also shot. The girls ran into the house and hid under the beds but they heard John yelling for them to run for the woods. They all ran from the house except for little Sarah who would not come.

There is a steep ravine right behind where the cabin was. It’s easy to conceive of young children playing hide and seek in that dark wooded gulch to pass away the summer. The knowledge they gained would save their lives. As they ran into the woods, their dying father motioned to them to go to the Schwandt farm, there closest neighbor, below them in the valley. As the girls ran through the woods they were reunited with John and then started to make their way to the neighbors. When they cleared the woods and looked down, they saw that the Schwandt farm was also under attack and they witnessed the murders of the entire Schwandt family. A pregnant woman was cut open, the fetus pulled from her body and nailed to the barn door. What they didn’t know was attacks like these were occurring up and down the valley. It’s estimated that as many as a thousand settlers were killed in the next few weeks.

John remembered that his father had told him that Fort Ridgley was downstream from them, but they weren’t sure how far. But they decided that they had no choice other than trying to walk there. For the next several hours they made their way toward the fort, hiding in the tall prairie grass and stopping at stream beds to rest and drink. When the little girls were too tired to walk any farther, Rose and John carried them on their backs. Late that afternoon they joined several other settlers who where headed to the fort in ox carts. By nightfall they reached the fort, eighteen miles away, only to be told that they could not come through the barricades, for fear that the Indians would rush through with them. They spent the night hiding under the wagons and in the morning they were allowed to enter the fort.The fort was manned by 180 soldiers, with 250 civilians who had escaped the massacre. The fort was not in a good defensive position, sitting on high ground surrounded on three sides by ravines that allowed attackers to get unseen into rifle range. But it did have six artillery pieces, which were stationed on the four corners of the fort with the two lighter 12 pounders in the central parade ground to be moved quickly where they were most needed.On the 20th around noon they were attacked by a force of about four hundred Indians led by Little Crow, the commanding chief of the Indian forces. After a fierce battle they drove the attackers off. But little crow returned again two days later with 800 men. Out numbered four to one and facing wave after wave of Indians attacking from the ravine the soldiers fought for 6 hours using the canon to break the charge after charge. A final assault came at the Northwest corner of the fort, right were the biggest gun was waiting with a double load of canister shot. As the attackers came up from the ravine the big gun and both the twelves fired simultaneously ripping huge holes into the advancing line. At that point the fighting stopped and the Indians never returned to the fort. Casualties in the fort were three dead and thirteen wounded.

There are many stories to be told about the Dakota Conflict, stories of bravery, cowardice, brutality and sacrifice, on both sides. There were two other major battles, in New Ulm and at Birch Coulee. I haven’t spoken of the events that led up to the conflict, the Indians were provoked by cruelty and broken promises, they were starving and feared that their families would not last through the coming winter. If you are interested in finding out more of about the Dakota Conflict, Over the Earth I Come by Duane Schultz is an excellent read and covers the events very thoroughly.

After Henry Sibley arrived at the fort with reinforcements, parties were sent out to bury the dead. Johann, Kathryn and little Sarah were buried in unmarked graves near the house. In 1891,the man who had taken over the homestead found them while digging a post hole, John, by then an adult returned to the farm and brought the bodies back to St. Paul were they are now buried. The children made there way to St. Paul and stayed with relatives. A year later they were returning from a visit to St. Louis when the steamboat they were on caught fire and sank. Rose ended up going to stay at the Keller farm near Ellsworth, Wisconsin. She took a shine to one of the Keller boys, Ted, and they were married. They moved to South St. Paul where they owned an orchard. Rose lived into her eighties, long enough for my brother and sister to know her. I come from tough stock.

Way back when I first discovered the internet, one of the first things I did was start playing online chess. I’d been thinking about learning the game and I figured that could most easily be accomplished online. I found a great site, Caissa.com that offered both live and “correspondence” games as we

ll as all kinds of teaching tools. I bought some books, studied a couple of openings. I liked to use Ruy Lopez as white and the Sicilian Defense as black. I learned them out to about three moves (and all the permutations) but that really didn’t matter because playing at the level I was, no one stuck to the book, so you had to improvise. Those two do usually end up with a slight position advantage, if you don’t hose them up.

So it’s what, fifteen years later? And I haven’t learned squat. I was getting pounded on Caissa, but I think that the self limiting nature of the demographic that signs  up for online chess results in some bogus ratings. Bunch of nerds, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of good players and as time wore on there weren’t many people around who weren’t rated way above me. Plus guys I beat early on were thumping me regularly. I got frustrated and gave it up. Continue reading Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory →

It rained yesterday, so Rebecca and I decided to head to the local multiplex and see Robin Hood. It was a fine example of the swashbuckling kind, great battle scenes. I just finished reading Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which takes place in England about 75 years earlier, both i think did a good job of depicting the grittiness of Medieval life.

Some of you might notice that in the first scene when the boys raid the barn, Marion laments that they have no “seed corn.” Well, I was all over that, because I knew that there was no corn in Europe in 1199. what I didn’t know was “corn” in those days was a general term for any cereal crop, not just maize, which of course was a New World plant.

Looking out of my  office window, I saw a fox patrolling along the other side of my yard from the cemetery this morning. It was big and healthy looking with a thick coat. It stopped to check out the hole in the fence that the rabbits use and then continued up the line. That’s probably a great hunting technique. When it surprises a rabbit close to the fence it can pin it against the fence and shorten the chase. Kind of like fast food for foxes. A few years ago my garden was being devastated by bunnies, they mowed down my flowers almost as fast as they came up. I would get up in the morning on weekends and see a half dozen of the furry eating machines in my backyard. Then the foxes moved in. I haven’t seen a rabbit in the yard for several days now. I love foxes.

We also have a pair of great horned owls nesting in the neighborhood. That’s not hurting the cause either. Every once in awhile I come across a pile of fur or feathers in the yard and it makes me smile. I wonder how the varmint population control mechanism works. Some of the little bastards must survive to breed, or the killers would move on, not enough food. Maybe there really hasn’t been that much of a population decrease. Maybe the survivors are just a more cautious brand of bunny. I have noticed that when I do see a rabbit, they seem to be quick to move between areas of cover, rarely do I see them basking in the middle of the yard anymore.

Come to think of it there hasn’t been as many house sparrows around for awhile either. That’s probably the work of the cooper’s hawk that lives in the area. Although we have a flock of goldfinches that can empty a thistle sock in about 24 hours. But maybe they’re just more cautious. Cooper is a crafty predator. I’ve seen him fly low across the neighbors yard, hidden by the lilac bushes and swoop into our yard, which has several bird feeders, for a surprise attack. It’s fun to watch, one second the yard is full of noisy birds flitting around the feeders and suddenly they scatter in every direction. Some dive for shelter in the wild grape that covers the fence, and the hawk will follow them right in, flapping it’s wings and thrashing around in the vine looking for lunch.

It’s like I live in a cafeteria for predators.

We watched Che Part 1 last night with the family. It was interesting to watch it with young adults who were born after the end of the Cold War. There were lots of questions about why we were so freaked out about Communism getting a foothold in the Americas, and why we were so worried about the Cubans spreading the revolution to the rest of Latin America. I tried to explain the situation at the time, how the Soviets had openly proclaimed that their goal was world domination and that we were staring each other down, each with the power to annihilate not only each other, but maybe the human race. I was a in a bit over my head trying to explain.

I thought that Che was portrayed a little too sympathetically, too much the hero. In the context of the revolution and the overthrow of Batista he appears heroic, but in the context of history, he was dedicated to a system just as brutal as the oligarchy he fought against. That was our dilemma in Latin America, we supported oppressive dictatorships because they were on our side, against the communists. It was like making a pact with the devil. And the conditions of the people in those countries made them fertile soil for revolution. My brother, who spent most of his military career in Latin America, once told me that in the countries where the peasants did not own the land, the communists couldn’t lose, and in the ones where the peasants owned their land, they could not win. Hence, in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in the world, but where the land was owned by the peasants and not by an oligarchy, he was unable to muster support for his insurgence and was eventually killed.

The narrative was hard to follow, but I didn’t think that the action was as important as the glimpse into the mind of the man himself, for better or for worse.

What I’m thankful for:

My family. My wonderful creative daughters who have fled the nest and seem to be thriving and the young men they’re in relationships with, who are also creative and decent guys. My wife who is so many great things, beautiful and tolerant to name a couple. I’m thankful that I found someone to put up with me for these thirty some years.

My family’s health. And mine. I’m thankful that I’ve had Crohn’s for almost 40 years and my intestines are still intact. I’m thankful that after a nasty infection and five surgeries on my leg, I’m alive, have two legs that sort of bend and I can walk. And I’m thankful for the meds that my brain chemicals properly balanced and a safe distance from the brink.

I’m thankful for this country and the freedom and prosperity it’s provided. And to the men and women in the military who put everything on the line to defend it.

I’m thankful for the sound that my Strat makes with the switch at four, the tone turned all the way up, the reverb at 7 and the tone knobs at 10 on the Princeton Reverb amp, when I dig into the strings with the pick and just brush them with my thumb as it goes by. I’m thankful for my Carbon Acoustic guitar, which stays in tune and puts up with my neglect and still sounds great.

I’m thankful for Mac OS and Adobe.

I’m thankful for RH Donnely going into Chapter 11 and making my decision to leave so much easier.

I could go on and on.