Previous William Thomas Sherman Info Page postings, quotes, observations, etc.
["ROBINSON CRUSOE HERMOSOdivinoBELLO"]
["Drawing Heaven" -- "This video was featured on CNN of a young girl with incredible drawing talent," and who receives visions from a person who looks like "Jesus."]
The above, you understand and if you've followed my writings on spirit people, requires no comment from me.
["An poc ar Buile - Liam Devally"]
For a version of this same by the Chieftains (but which I can't embed), see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAGhiW3qQvQ&feature=related
Oh, I see! So he wants to have it both ways! He wants a world where there are these poor, helpless animals and children are present, while at the same time his beloved Satan, chump the magician, and billion-dollar Oafmore are tripping the lights fantastic of empire, cruelty, and bad movies! I told him therefore I will have none of it, and, indeed, (referring to his spirit people) will kill him and all his people at the first opportunity.
Although William Cullen Bryant is most well known to us as a poet, he was, in addition to being a journalist, an occasional writer of short stories. This past weekend, I got through reading two these, "The Skeleton's Cave" and "Medfield," inserted in the 1832 anthology Tales of the Glauber Spa (others included in the same two volumes are "Le Bossu" by Catherine Sedgwick, "Child Roeliff's Pilgrimage" and "Selim" by James Kirke Paulding, "The Block-house" by William Leggett, "Mr. Green" and "Boyuca" by Robert Charles Sands.) Despite the panning or reservation of critics, I found Bryant's tales, and allowing for the customary prolixity of 19th century authors generally (and which will permit you some browsing, rather than "reading," of a paragraph here and there), to be quite affecting, and in the case of "Skeleton's Cave" spiritually wholesome and refreshing. The experience was similar to how it is with some foods -- while we eat, our appetites are not especially taken by the given fare; and yet the after-taste, an hour, say, or shortly following our repast, is something wonderful and gives us a hearty feeling. (His second "Glauber Spa" story, "Medfield" and which concerns a man harassed by spirits, while good in it's way, I found less agreeable as it struck too close to home and to [my own] real life.)
Thinking therefore that some might also be interested, here then is a .doc file of the first of Bryant's two Glauber tales, "The Skeleton's Cave," or if you prefer in .pdf.
["Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young live aid two songs" -- "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "Cost of Freedom"]
Let me try to put this as succintly as possible. The idea is to murder the opposition -- literally -- then replace them with people whom you have bred and subsequently raised on junk movies and junk television. And if they object that this is immoral, tell them that if God permits it, who is to gainsay God?
["How Do You Mend A Broken Heart-Barry Gibb And Olivia Newton-John-Sound Releif"]
One of the many excellent songs (and excellently constructed they most truly are) from Lionel Bart's "Oliver!"
"I am a dry tree. I will die here" - Chief Daniel Nimham
We so take as a given the wide scale involvement of the Native American in the Revolutionary War, and yet might events have resolved themselves quite differently for the Indians (than they did) had they not been so actively enlisted into British service? For example, the mid-war invasions by the Iroquois, the Cherokees, and Creeks soon enough became a pretext for the Americans to subsequently and ruthlessly maul and devastate those nations; so that by the same token had these tribes not been used to attack, might they have ended up surviving the conflict much better than they did? Such a what-if cannot serve but to entice our wonder. But as is usual with such speculations our answers are or can at best only provide us with tentative surmises. Yet if we do assume an affirmative to the question, should then the Americans be blamed for not making much more of an effort to sway the Indians to their own side or a least to a neutral one? The answer to this second question, may also very well, and tragically, be yes; with there being evidence to suggest as much. Notwithstanding, it may have been simply gold, or the lack of, that finally determined the matter, and in that contest the rebelling Americans were easily and hands down the losers.
There were a few Indians, despite this, who did fight alongside Washington's army, most notably the Oneida, the Seneca, the Catawba, and the Wappingers or Mahicans; and it might come as a surprise to some that the latter were not only not merely an invention of James Fenimore Cooper, but indeed a number of the descendants of that tribe are still alive today -- thus happily making the title of Cooper's most famous novel, in real-life, a misnomer.
The story of the Mahican or Stockbridge Indians as they were also called is both a fascinating and moving one that certainly equals, if not surpasses, any fiction could tell or convey. The following then are links to some well done articles on or related to this very topic.
* The first is a article located at (the late and much esteemed) Ed St. Germain's AmericanRevoluion.org written by Richard S. Walling which provides a more complete than usual account of the Stockbridge Indians specifically, and for which see: http://www.americanrevolution.org/ind3.html
* For those with less free time available to them, here is a brief yet still useful recounting of the same tribe's involvement in the Revolutionary War by author and journalist John Kershon. http://www.examiner.com/history-in-new-york/stockbridge-indians-massacred-the-bronx-1778