There Were Mastodons Under My Feet!

Red cream soda and chocolate ice cream AND fossils on the same day?!? This turned out to be a top-tier holiday!

Mastodon State Historic Site preserves the Kimmswick Bone Bed, an incompletely excavated paleontological site that contains both mastodon fossils and Clovis points, giving evidence that early humans hunted them here:

There was apparently a long history (starting in at least the 1800s!) of unscientific fossil digging at this site, and the lack of preservation was further exacerbated by the full lifespan of a rock quarry. If I understood the signage correctly, everything below the level of the bluff was excavated by the quarry--

--and if that is indeed true, then it makes me physically sick to think about, because what other countless wonders must have been hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing?

In the 1970s, the entire remaining site was almost hauled out and crushed into gravel without anyone noticing, when a state highway was being planned for that exact spot. Fortunately, a public campaign saved it and helped the Missouri Department of Natural Resources buy it, but you can see from this Google Earth screenshot how close it is to the bone bed:

The bottom right of the loop trail is an extension that goes through the former dig sites for the bone bed. It's SO close to two access roads and the highway! To the south, just off-screen, is Rock Creek, which is actually where the earliest mastodon bones were reported, having been seen weathering out of the bank. The scientist who excavated and prepared them turned them into a sideshow Voltron-esque super mastodon that he exhibited around the world and later sold to the British Natural History Museum... where it was disassembled and reassembled into a proper mastodon skeleton, lol.

The Mastodon State Historic Site Museum had so many mastodon fossils excavated from Kimmswick and the neighboring Barnhart site!

This tusk is a product of rescue paleontology conducted by volunteers on the site of a car dealership that was trying to expand. Here's a former volunteer's interesting take on that excavation:

I found a travel blogger's post about visiting this museum before the tusk was conserved, so you can see how it was previously mounted and its darker appearance.

Ugh, if I was trying to build ANYTHING, I do not care what, and I uncovered a fossil, I would stop what I was doing forever and instead spend the rest of my life grubbing in the dirt with all my brand-new fossils!

So many of my favorite things all in the same frame:

I feel like often, state park sites lose out on the best artifacts, so that the visitor centers for even the most amazing state sites are somewhat sparse. Not this place, though! Check out some of their very many Clovis points!

And then much later, we get to my favorite native peoples--the Mississippians!

This site is actually just a few miles and across the river from Cahokia, which makes me wonder what Mississippian settlements might have been right here, out in the Cahokian suburbs.

On top of the bluff, above the quarry site, there is apparently also a cool cave:

With even more cool stuff found inside it!

It doesn't seem like any of these sites have been excavated since the 1980s, which in some ways is a huge bummer because who wouldn't want more mastodon bones and Clovis points in the world? But I guess if nobody has a research question that can only be solved by excavating here, then it all might as well stay tucked safely away in its soil and caves!

Okay, one more picture of the tusk before we hike!

This shelter on the hiking trail is the historical marker for the Kimmswick Bone Bed--

--but the actual excavation sites are unmarked and fully grown over. Here's where they're supposed to be:

The hiking trail basically follows the edge of the Possible Distribution of Clovis Age Sediments from the northeast down and then west to about the near edge of the Concrete Foundation of Lime Kiln. So hiking back, basically everything to the right of the trail is assorted old dig sites, and everything to the left of the trail is potential Clovis evidence.

Sounds interesting, but it actually all looks like this, lol:

But hey, that just means that mastodons and Clovis points could be ANYWHERE. They were probably right there under our feet sometimes!

Here's me with definitely a mastodon skeleton with a Clovis point sticking into it right there under my feet:

Afterward, we did everyone's least favorite thing to do when they're hot and sweaty and grubby and tired--we got back in the car and drove for another five hours, sigh.

But at least we had plenty of Southern Missouri/Northern Arkansas wildlife to entertain us:

Only one of the several alarming bumper stickers is legible in this photo, but I assure you that they were all nasty.

Next up: an old fort and a new musical!

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I Hate Pa Ingalls the Most, but Laura Might Hate Ma

Schoolhouse from the time that we visited the Ingalls' homestead in De Smet, South Dakota.

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Because if she doesn’t, then why is she always painting her as such a bigot? We all know by now that Ma hates the native peoples from whom the government stole the land they’re living on, so we’re not surprised by this iteration on that theme:

“What Indian?” Ma asked him. She looked as if she were smelling the smell of an Indian whenever she said the word. Ma despised Indians. She was afraid of them, too.

We know that Laura does not share this particular bigotry, or at least not to the extent that Ma does, both because she sometimes portrays native peoples positively in her books, but also because she portrays Pa as explicitly NOT bigoted against them. Pa is her ideal, and I can’t think of a single instance in the entire series in which he’s portrayed in a way that Laura would think was negative.

Ma, however… Ma is also bigoted against immigrants!

She did not like to see women working in the fields. Only foreigners did that. Ma and her girls were Americans, above doing men’s work.

But then, of course, Ma “lets” Laura help Pa with haying regardless, as long as nobody sees them, because Laura is the most parentified child in all the land.

This latest re-read of The Long Winter, just after finishing the non-fiction book The Children’s Blizzard that discusses the climate in the Dakota Territory and how unsuited it is to the settlers’ farming techniques and lifestyles and how especially dangerous it is in the winter, was startling. I had not remembered exactly HOW dark this book is, how bleak, how close to dying this family genuinely must have come, how these several months of starvation must have harmed them, physically and emotionally, for the rest of their lives. Grace was a toddler who spent seven months living in two rooms, being constantly too cold, and eating mostly wheat and a little fat. Carrie was only ten. Laura was only thirteen. Laura doesn’t mention rickets or scurvy or other signs of malnutrition, but I think historical record tells the tale well enough, in that all three younger sisters died of diabetes, while Mary died of a stroke.

Ever since I read Prairie Fires and have started learning all I can about the VERY contentious relationship between Laura and Rose, and the subtext of Laura’s relationship with Almanzo, I’ve been very interested in how Laura depicts her family in her books. She wrote these books in conversation with Rose, so I’m curious if any of these depictions might have anything to say about their relationship. She wrote them as fiction, but sometimes only lightly fictionalized, so I’m also curious about what she might have tried to tell more truthfully and what she might have fictionalized harder. And because she had SUCH a difficult relationship with Rose, and because Rose so clearly did not like Laura, I’m very curious about how Laura depicts Ma, in particular. I think she mostly wants to treat her as a perfect parent, but she does show her with flaws.

Other than the bigotry, Laura also depicts Ma’s impatience a couple of times, along with her own. Mary is never depicted as impatient or rude, but Laura cleverly manages to write all of Mary’s dialogue as the smuggest, most mealy-mouthed, annoyingly know-it-all declarations so that you want to just step in and slap her face for Laura. Carrie is depicted in not an idealized light like Pa, but rather a sympathetic light that reads as even more loving than Laura’s constant Pa praising, and Grace simply exists. I don’t think Grace and Laura ever interact in this book!

I also think it’s very interesting how Laura depicts herself. She’s very dutiful, always ready to chip in and do more than her fair share of labor, ever the hardest worker in the family, but I don’t feel her taking a lot of pleasure in anything. Which is fair, since this IS The Long Winter. But other books, particularly the ones that I think are more influenced by Rose’s Libertarianism, are SO overtly about this self-reliance and the enjoyment of pleasures in the midst of hardship and the early 1900s political ideals that privilege the state of rugged individualism that it’s also a little surprising that Laura didn’t try to insert a few happier scenes. It’s possible that she was literally just that traumatized by her memories of that winter that she literally couldn’t. Or she used the Wilder brothers as her avatars of happy rugged individualism, instead.

But she did achieve her main goal, which was to never admit to anyone that Pa was a fool who dragged them out into the middle of nowhere, with only one single rail line between them and death. I bet that little house in the big woods that he made them leave behind was soooo cozy and comfortable that winter!

Unrelated to the rest of my review, but the scene in The Long Winter in which a blizzard strikes while the children are in school, and the children and schoolteacher try to walk back to town and barely avoid accidentally wandering off into the prairie to die instead, reads so much like the real events of the Children's Blizzard that I started that book thinking it was also describing this winter. But it's not! Buuuuut that Children's Blizzard was so widely written about in newspapers that I wonder VERY much if it informed Wilder's account here.  

Also unrelated, but you know the happy sunflower song that Pa sings every freezing winter morning? This is it!

And here's Captain Jinks!

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Nobody Was Rude To Me At Ulysses S. Grant's House... This Time

A decade ago, when I blogged about visiting the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site with my kids, I claimed at the end that I had "mostly forgiven" the park ranger there who had 1) told my child that the answer to a specific question in her Junior Ranger book could have been found by watching the park film if only she'd paid attention, when in fact that information was NOT given in the park film and I knew it, and 2) informed me that in her experience leading field trips, homeschooled children were "less curious" than public and private schoolchildren.

Saying that I'd mostly forgiven her was a lie, obviously, because I still bitch about that ranger regularly. I have never forgotten nor forgiven a single person who has ever been rude to me or my kids on the subject of homeschooling (or any subject, frankly), and I will still, with the barest of excuses, tell you the entire story, quoted dialogue and all, of that time that a random dude sitting next to me at a wedding told me that he didn't approve of homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a random woman at a party told me she didn't believe in homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a relative, a few months after I had started homeschooling, asked me if my four-year-old had "regressed in her academics" since she'd "dropped out of preschool."

And it's not like I was sitting there monologuing about homeschooling any of those times, either, but if a random person making small talk asked me back in the day what I did for a living, that's literally what I did!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site Junior Ranger book, with the contentious question:

Here are screenshots from the two relevant scenes in the park film, in which the man in question is referred to solely as "William":

If you could zoom in on that document in the film you could see his name, because that's his manumission paper! You cannot see it in the film, however.

As you can see, I have never gotten over even the smallest slight or forgiven any person for even the slightest wrongdoing ever in my entire life.

Nor do I intend to start now, apparently, since when Mr. Craft Knife, our older kid, and I were getting out of the car for this most recent visit to the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, I announced that if any park ranger dared to say one negative thing about homeschooling to me, I was going to burn down Ulysses' house.

Mr. Craft Knife was all, "We're literally just three fully grown adults here. Nobody is going to talk to you about homeschooling!"

And luckily for all of us, he was right!

I did nevertheless manage to be disappointed in the site since we were there on Juneteenth but there was no programming, or even acknowledgment, of the holiday there. Such a bummer, and I'm wondering if I should have gone to the Gateway Arch instead, because surely the park that held the Dred Scott trial would be having a Juneteenth celebration, but ah, well. I looked at a lot of stuff and read a lot of museum labels anyway!

I thought this ink blotter was super cool. They put a mirror underneath it so you could see all of the times Grant had blotted his signature there:

This is a historical recreation of Julia Dent Grant's wedding dress, watered silk and all!

There was some other Queen Victoria memorabilia elsewhere in the museum that, along with this wedding dress, gave me to understand that Julia Dent Grant was a fan of the Royals. Understandable, and also SAME, GIRL, but low-key scandalous in my opinion barely a hundred years after the Revolutionary War...

One of my favorite parts of visiting a national park site is collecting titles of books that I can spend the next few months reading. I found ebooks of this--

--and this--

--and I'll get to them pretty soon, but currently I am hyperfixated on George Washington Carver so it might take me a minute.

I don't really know what it is about daguerreotypes, but they are so life-like! Julia Dent Grant and her sons aren't even colored realistically, but to me they still look like they could step right off that metal plate. And bonus points for little boys dressed like girls!

It looked like most of the exhibit on slavery that we'd seen during our previous visit had been replaced by that exhibit on Julia Dent Grant, but a few artifacts were still there, including this bill of sale, which is easily the most upsetting item in the museum. Jefferson was only eighteen. Louisa was only seventeen, and described as a "mulatress," as well, signifying that she's already experienced generational violence. At least she's being trafficked with at least one of her children, a one-year-old, but clearly neither of these teenagers are the parents of six-year-old Kitty who is also being trafficked to Julia in this bill of sale. That poor baby...

I'm suspicious that Julia could possibly have been as naive as she's portrayed here, so I'll be curious to dive into that memoir!

That label also sent me on a different deep dive, because when I read it I was all, "They still had people enslaved here in 1864? But the Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863???" 

Okay, so for everyone else who was as underserved in their US History as I was (and apparently I underserved my children, as well, oops--you know us homeschoolers and our lack of curiosity!), the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, specifically freed only the slaves held in Confederate states. I knew that, and I knew that there were states that were both not in the Confederacy AND were slaveholding states, such as Missouri and Kentucky, but I guess I hadn't connected the dots. Juneteenth, which we were also celebrating on this day, was about the last enslaved people finally being told about the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865, and I'd assumed those were the very last slaves ever in the United States, but those were the last Confederate slaves ever. There were literally still people being legally enslaved for several more months! Missouri had already abolished slavery, although not until January 11, 1865, but Kentucky and Delaware, as well as New Jersey and its habit of apprenticing people for life, hung on until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.

So, new holiday idea: we also need to celebrate every December 6, because nobody's free until everybody's free!

Check out this notable coral fossil that was found embedded in some roots on the property:

And the summer kitchen, where enslaved people cooked and did laundry for the white members of the household:

 

I wanted to see where the enslaved people had lived, and the land where they'd labored, but that's all neighborhoods now:

Random, but this was on the bulletin board next to the bathrooms, specifically this dude's pose that is twinning with Grant, is genuinely the best thing ever:

I will NOT be driving back to St. Louis to attend his dinner and colloquy, however, because tickets cost ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS. 

Instead, we went to Fitz's--

--where I ordered something appropriately festive for Juneteenth:

And it wouldn't be a proper field trip if you weren't learning how something is made, so here's a look at their working bottling facility:

Oh, and his name was William Jones! 

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