#Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
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Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day commemorates the start of the California Gold Rush, which began on January 24, 1848, when James Marshall discovered gold while building a saw mill for John Sutter, near what is now Coloma, California. The day has its roots in International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and was inspired by Prospectors Day, which was once held at Knott's Berry Farm each year on January 24. It also was inspired by an episode of the Simpsons with the following exchange:
Bart: That ain't been popular since aught-six, dagnabbit. Homer: Bart, what did I tell you? Bart: No talking like a grizzled 1890's prospector, consarn it.
Common examples of characters talking like grizzled prospectors in popular culture include Dallas McKennon narrating Disneyland's Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland and Big Thunder Mountain, Gabby Hayes—both drunk and sober—in many Western films, Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles, Will Ferrell as Gus Chiggins on Saturday Night Live, and Walter Huston in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Prospectors first came to the Sacramento Valley after Marshall found flakes of gold in the American River near Sutter's Mill, at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At the time there were less than 1,000 non-native inhabitants in California. Newspapers began reporting the discovery of gold, and by August, 4,000 miners had descended on the area. The first people that came from outside of the territory came by boat, and arrived from Oregon, the Sandwich Islands—soon to be called the Hawaiian Islands, Mexico, Peru, China, and Chili.
In December 1848, President James K. Polk announced a report by Colonel Richard Mason which spoke of the abundance of gold in California; this prompted more prospectors to travel to the territory. Throughout 1849, thousands arrived, either traveling by sea or over land, and became known as '49ers. Mining towns popped up in the area, and with them came shops, saloons, and brothels. Many mining towns became lawless, and San Francisco became an important city in the territory. By the end of 1849, the non-native population had swelled to 100,000. The Gold Rush helped California gain statehood in 1850, and gold discovery peaked in the state in 1852. In all, more than 750,000 pounds of gold were extracted during the Gold Rush.
The implication of a grizzled prospector is of one who has stayed so long searching for gold that their hair has turned gray. Some prospectors refused to quit the profession and continued to live in the Western territories. So, when Bart Simpson mentioned a grizzled prospector from the 1890s, he was referring to a prospector that had stayed more than forty years after the Gold Rush happened, still trying to find gold, or other commodities such as silver, oil, radium, and uranium. Besides a gray beard, the stereotypical grizzled prospector had faded clothes, missing teeth, a pickaxe, and a mule. They had bouts of gold fever, and were suspicious of whoever came close to their claim.
How to Observe Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Celebrate the day talking like a grizzled prospector. Here are a few words prospectors commonly used, that you could use today:
Dadburn: to curse; e.g.: "Dadburned boll weevil done 'et my crop!"
Hornswoggle: to embarrass, disconcert, or confuse; e.g.: "I'll be hornswaggled!"
Consarn: the entirety of something, also a curse word.
Dumbfungled: all used up; e.g.: "This claim is dumbfungled! There's no gold left!"
Bonanza: a mine with lots of gold.
Borrasca: a mine with no gold.
Baby buggy: wheel barrow.
Muck: to dig with a shovel.
Powder monkey: a miner who used dynamite to make holes.
Johnny Newcome: a miner new to camp.
Blackjack and saw bosom: coffee and bacon.
Paydirt: land rich in gold.
Panned out: if they had found gold while sifting through dirt with a mining pan, then things had "panned out."
Flash in the pan: something shiny in pan that turned out to be nothing, or just a small piece of gold.
Stake a claim: claim a piece of land as your own as a place to search for gold, must stake the land with wooden stakes when you arrive.
The day could also be spent watching films such as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, or old Western films starring Gabby Hayes. A visit to the Sutter's Mill replica and the Gold Discovery and Visitor Center in Marshall Gold Discovery State Park could also be planned. The days' Facebook page could also be explored.
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#Calico Ghost Town#California#Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day#travel#USA#NationalTalkLikeAGrizzledProspectorDay#24 January#vacation#original photography#sculpture#public art#tourist attraction#landmark#Sweden#Falun Mine#Gruvabetaren by Helge Zandén#Nevada#Carson City#Tribute to Nevada Miners by Greg Melton#Big Bill Murphy by Adam Skiles#Tonopah#Klondike Gold Rush - Seattle Unit#Seattle#Washington
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Holidays 1.24
Holidays
BCPB (Black & Can’t Play Basketball) Awareness Day
Bell Let’s Talk Day (Canada)
Bull Day (French Republic)
Change a Pet's Life Day
Colorist Appreciation Day
Economic Liberation Day (Togo)
Fiesta de Ekeko (Bolivia)
Foreign Intelligence Service Day (Ukraine)
Global Belly Laugh Day (at 1:24 pm local time)
Gold Rush Day
Heart to Heart Day
International Day of Education
International Day of the Endangered Lawyer
International Mobile Phone Recycling Day
Juan Pablo Duarte Day (Dominican Republic)
"Just Do It" Day
Macintosh Computer Day
Microwave Oven Day
Minimoog Day
Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day
National ALGS Awareness Day
National Compliment Day
National Girl Child Day (India)
National Heroes Day (Cayman Islands)
National Matthew Day
National Readathon Day
Paul Pitcher Day (UK)
Social Sipping and Nibbling Rehearsal Day
Square Dance Day [also 11.29]
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Tax Ruled Unconstitutional Day
Tricknology Day
TV Game Show Day
Uttar Pradesh Day (India)
World Day for African and Afro-descendant Culture
Zaevion Dobson Day (Tennessee)
Food & Drink Celebrations
Beer Can Day (a.k.a. Beer Can Appreciation Day)
Eskimo Pie Day
National Hot Cereal Day
National Lobster Thermidor Day
National Peanut Butter Day
4th Wednesday in January
Library Shelfie Day [4th Wednesday]
Weedless Wednesday (Canada) [4th Wednesday]
Independence & Related Days
Ziua Unirii (Unification Day of the Romanian Principalities; Romania)
Festivals Beginning January 24, 2024
The Blues of Achilles: Homer Iliad [Annual Raglas Lecture] (San Diego, California)
Iowa Pork Congress (Des Moines, Iowa) [thru 1.25]
Sioux Falls Farm Show (Sioux Falls, Iowa) [thru 1.26]
Sustainable Foods Summit (San Francisco, California) [thru 1.25]
Temple Bar TradFest (Dublin, Ireland) [thru 1.28]
Feast Days
Alacitas (Aymara Indian Pot-Bellied God of Property; Everyday Wicca)
Babylas of Antioch (Christian; Martyr)
Cadoc Day (Wales)
Cat Sacrifice Day (Aix-En Province, France)
Ekeko Festival (God of Abundance; Bolivia) [Lasts 3 Weeks]
Exuperantius of Cingoli (Christian; Saint)
The Fairy-Four Paganalia (Shamanism)
Feast of Our Lady of Peace (Roman Catholic)
Feast of Seed-Time (Feati Sementini; Ancient Rome)
Felician of Foligno (Christian; Martyr)
Francis de Sales (Christian; Saint) [Journalists, Editors, Writers]
Gillis van Coninxloo (Artology)
Invent a God Day (Pastafarian)
John Belushi (Hedonism; Saint)
Jools Holland (Humanism)
Klaatu Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Konstantin Bogaevsky (Artology)
Macedonius of Syria (Christian; Saint)
Paganalia: Gaea’s Day (Celebration of the Country Farmer; Pagan)
Pendulum Dowsing to Find Lost Things (Starza Pagan Book of Days)
The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb (Novel; 1934)
Pratulin Martyrs (Greek Catholic Church)
Robert Motherwell (Artology)
Sailing of Bast (Ancient Egypt)
Sementivae begins (Ancient Roman festival honoring Ceres (Goddess of Agriculture) and Tellus (Mother Earth)
Solomon (Positivist; Saint)
Stanley the Mouse (Muppetism)
Suranus of Umbria (Christian; Saint)
Timothy, disciple of St. Paul (Christian; Martyr)
Twrch Trwyth Day (Boar hunted by King Arthur; Celtic Book of Days)
Vasily Surikov (Artology)
Hebrew Calendar Holidays [Begins at Sundown]
Tu BiShvat [14-15 Shevat]
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]
Premieres
Alice Foils the Pirates (Disney Cartoon; 1927)
Amerika, by Franz Kafka (Novel; 1927)
Chicago (Film; 2003)
Clement Lorimer, by Angus Reach (Novel; 1848)
The Courier (Film; 2020)
Danse Macabre, by Camille Saint-Saëns (Tone Poem; 1874)
Farewell My Ugly or Knots to You (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 18; 1960)
Fierce Creatures (Film; 1997)
Go Ask Alice, by Beatrice Sparks (Novel; 1971)
Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum (Novel; 1929)
The Grapes of Wrath (Film; 1940)
Hairless Hector (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1941)
A Hollywood Detour (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1942)
Ideas on the Aesthetics of Music, by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubert (Essays; 1787)
Jirel of Joiry, by C.L. Moore (Novel; 1934)
Mickey’s Toontown (Disneyland Attraction; 1993)
Mouse-Placed Kitten (WB MM Cartoon; 1959)
My Chauffeur (Film; 1986)
The 19th Hole Club, featuring Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1936)
Noah’s Outing, featuring Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1932)
Pluto’s Playmate (Disney Cartoon; 1941)
Setting Free the Bears, by John Irving (Novel; 1968)
Shift: Third Shift — Pact, by Hugh Howey (Novel; 2013)
Skid Row, by Skid Row (Album; 1989)
Snake in the Gracias (Tijuana Toads Cartoon; 1971)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Film; 1948)
21, by Adele (Album; 2011)
Two for the Ripsaw or Goodbye Mr. Chips (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 17; 1960)
Waco (TV Mini-Series; 2018)
The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl (Philosophy Book; 1969)
Today’s Name Days
Franz, Thurid, Vera (Austria)
Bogoslav, Felicijan, Franjo (Croatia)
Milena (Czech Republic)
Timotheus (Denmark)
Naima, Naimi (Estonia)
Senja (Finland)
François (France)
Bernd, Franz, Thurid, Vera (Germany)
Filon, Polyxene, Polyxeni, Xene, Xeni, Zosimas (Greece)
Timót (Hungary)
Francesco (Italy)
Eglons, Krišs, Ksenija (Latvia)
Artūras, Felicija, Gaivilė, Mažvydas, Šarūnas, Vilgaudas (Lithuania)
Jarl, Joar (Norway)
Chwalibóg, Felicja, Mirogniew, Rafaela, Rafał, Tymoteusz (Poland)
Xenia (Romania)
Timotej (Slovakia)
Francisco, Paz, Xenia (Spain)
Erika (Sweden)
Roxanna, Roxoliana (Ukraine)
Oral, Orel, Tim, Timmy, Timon, Timothy, Vera, Verena (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 24 of 2024; 342 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 3 of week 4 of 2024
Celtic Tree Calendar: Luis (Rowan) [Day 4 of 28]
Chinese: Month 12 (Yi-Chou), Day 14 (Ding-Hai)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 14 Shevat 5784
Islamic: 13 Rajab 1445
J Cal: 24 White; Threesday [24 of 30]
Julian: 11 January 2024
Moon: 99%: Waxing Gibbous
Positivist: 24 Moses (1st Month) [Solomon]
Runic Half Month: Peorth (Womb, Dice Cup) [Day 15 of 15]
Season: Winter (Day 35 of 89)
Zodiac: Capricorn (Day 3 of 28)
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Holidays 1.24
Holidays
BCPB (Black & Can’t Play Basketball) Awareness Day
Bell Let’s Talk Day (Canada)
Bull Day (French Republic)
Change a Pet's Life Day
Colorist Appreciation Day
Economic Liberation Day (Togo)
Fiesta de Ekeko (Bolivia)
Foreign Intelligence Service Day (Ukraine)
Global Belly Laugh Day (at 1:24 pm local time)
Gold Rush Day
Heart to Heart Day
International Day of Education
International Day of the Endangered Lawyer
International Mobile Phone Recycling Day
Juan Pablo Duarte Day (Dominican Republic)
"Just Do It" Day
Macintosh Computer Day
Microwave Oven Day
Minimoog Day
Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day
National ALGS Awareness Day
National Compliment Day
National Girl Child Day (India)
National Heroes Day (Cayman Islands)
National Matthew Day
National Readathon Day
Paul Pitcher Day (UK)
Social Sipping and Nibbling Rehearsal Day
Square Dance Day [also 11.29]
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Tax Ruled Unconstitutional Day
Tricknology Day
TV Game Show Day
Uttar Pradesh Day (India)
World Day for African and Afro-descendant Culture
Zaevion Dobson Day (Tennessee)
Food & Drink Celebrations
Beer Can Day (a.k.a. Beer Can Appreciation Day)
Eskimo Pie Day
National Hot Cereal Day
National Lobster Thermidor Day
National Peanut Butter Day
4th Wednesday in January
Library Shelfie Day [4th Wednesday]
Weedless Wednesday (Canada) [4th Wednesday]
Independence & Related Days
Ziua Unirii (Unification Day of the Romanian Principalities; Romania)
Festivals Beginning January 24, 2024
The Blues of Achilles: Homer Iliad [Annual Raglas Lecture] (San Diego, California)
Iowa Pork Congress (Des Moines, Iowa) [thru 1.25]
Sioux Falls Farm Show (Sioux Falls, Iowa) [thru 1.26]
Sustainable Foods Summit (San Francisco, California) [thru 1.25]
Temple Bar TradFest (Dublin, Ireland) [thru 1.28]
Feast Days
Alacitas (Aymara Indian Pot-Bellied God of Property; Everyday Wicca)
Babylas of Antioch (Christian; Martyr)
Cadoc Day (Wales)
Cat Sacrifice Day (Aix-En Province, France)
Ekeko Festival (God of Abundance; Bolivia) [Lasts 3 Weeks]
Exuperantius of Cingoli (Christian; Saint)
The Fairy-Four Paganalia (Shamanism)
Feast of Our Lady of Peace (Roman Catholic)
Feast of Seed-Time (Feati Sementini; Ancient Rome)
Felician of Foligno (Christian; Martyr)
Francis de Sales (Christian; Saint) [Journalists, Editors, Writers]
Gillis van Coninxloo (Artology)
Invent a God Day (Pastafarian)
John Belushi (Hedonism; Saint)
Jools Holland (Humanism)
Klaatu Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Konstantin Bogaevsky (Artology)
Macedonius of Syria (Christian; Saint)
Paganalia: Gaea’s Day (Celebration of the Country Farmer; Pagan)
Pendulum Dowsing to Find Lost Things (Starza Pagan Book of Days)
The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb (Novel; 1934)
Pratulin Martyrs (Greek Catholic Church)
Robert Motherwell (Artology)
Sailing of Bast (Ancient Egypt)
Sementivae begins (Ancient Roman festival honoring Ceres (Goddess of Agriculture) and Tellus (Mother Earth)
Solomon (Positivist; Saint)
Stanley the Mouse (Muppetism)
Suranus of Umbria (Christian; Saint)
Timothy, disciple of St. Paul (Christian; Martyr)
Twrch Trwyth Day (Boar hunted by King Arthur; Celtic Book of Days)
Vasily Surikov (Artology)
Hebrew Calendar Holidays [Begins at Sundown]
Tu BiShvat [14-15 Shevat]
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]
Premieres
Alice Foils the Pirates (Disney Cartoon; 1927)
Amerika, by Franz Kafka (Novel; 1927)
Chicago (Film; 2003)
Clement Lorimer, by Angus Reach (Novel; 1848)
The Courier (Film; 2020)
Danse Macabre, by Camille Saint-Saëns (Tone Poem; 1874)
Farewell My Ugly or Knots to You (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 18; 1960)
Fierce Creatures (Film; 1997)
Go Ask Alice, by Beatrice Sparks (Novel; 1971)
Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum (Novel; 1929)
The Grapes of Wrath (Film; 1940)
Hairless Hector (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1941)
A Hollywood Detour (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1942)
Ideas on the Aesthetics of Music, by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubert (Essays; 1787)
Jirel of Joiry, by C.L. Moore (Novel; 1934)
Mickey’s Toontown (Disneyland Attraction; 1993)
Mouse-Placed Kitten (WB MM Cartoon; 1959)
My Chauffeur (Film; 1986)
The 19th Hole Club, featuring Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1936)
Noah’s Outing, featuring Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1932)
Pluto’s Playmate (Disney Cartoon; 1941)
Setting Free the Bears, by John Irving (Novel; 1968)
Shift: Third Shift — Pact, by Hugh Howey (Novel; 2013)
Skid Row, by Skid Row (Album; 1989)
Snake in the Gracias (Tijuana Toads Cartoon; 1971)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Film; 1948)
21, by Adele (Album; 2011)
Two for the Ripsaw or Goodbye Mr. Chips (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 17; 1960)
Waco (TV Mini-Series; 2018)
The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl (Philosophy Book; 1969)
Today’s Name Days
Franz, Thurid, Vera (Austria)
Bogoslav, Felicijan, Franjo (Croatia)
Milena (Czech Republic)
Timotheus (Denmark)
Naima, Naimi (Estonia)
Senja (Finland)
François (France)
Bernd, Franz, Thurid, Vera (Germany)
Filon, Polyxene, Polyxeni, Xene, Xeni, Zosimas (Greece)
Timót (Hungary)
Francesco (Italy)
Eglons, Krišs, Ksenija (Latvia)
Artūras, Felicija, Gaivilė, Mažvydas, Šarūnas, Vilgaudas (Lithuania)
Jarl, Joar (Norway)
Chwalibóg, Felicja, Mirogniew, Rafaela, Rafał, Tymoteusz (Poland)
Xenia (Romania)
Timotej (Slovakia)
Francisco, Paz, Xenia (Spain)
Erika (Sweden)
Roxanna, Roxoliana (Ukraine)
Oral, Orel, Tim, Timmy, Timon, Timothy, Vera, Verena (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 24 of 2024; 342 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 3 of week 4 of 2024
Celtic Tree Calendar: Luis (Rowan) [Day 4 of 28]
Chinese: Month 12 (Yi-Chou), Day 14 (Ding-Hai)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 14 Shevat 5784
Islamic: 13 Rajab 1445
J Cal: 24 White; Threesday [24 of 30]
Julian: 11 January 2024
Moon: 99%: Waxing Gibbous
Positivist: 24 Moses (1st Month) [Solomon]
Runic Half Month: Peorth (Womb, Dice Cup) [Day 15 of 15]
Season: Winter (Day 35 of 89)
Zodiac: Capricorn (Day 3 of 28)
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January 24th - Holidays
Global Belly Laugh Day Compliment Day Macintosh Computer Day Beer Can Appreciation Day Library Shelfie Day Peanut Butter Day Vine Day Eskimo Pie Day Day of Education Lobster Thermidor Day Change a Pet’s Life Day Mobile Phone Recycling Day Just Do It Day Belly Laugh Day "Just Do It" Day Edy's Pie Patent Day Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day Unification Day
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🦜 TALK LIKE A GRIZZLED PROSPECTOR DAY - 24 JANUARY 2023 - கசப்பான எதிர்பார்ப்பாளர் போல் பேசுங்கள் தினம் - 24 ஜனவரி 2023.
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January 24th is also Talk Like A Grizzled Prospector Day, which is something I think Dean would have way too much fun with.
my job sent out a 'calendar of national days' this morning and it turns out national pie day is january 23... devastated on dean's behalf that it missed his birthday by ONE day...
Okay but consider this: Discount pies that didn't sell on National Pie Day. TWO pies for the price of one. This is how we can still win.
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Child Labor Day & National Sanctity of Human Life Day & Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Person A works in a mining station in space, but one day finds an alien child seemingly sleeping encased in a crystal, but the crystal shatters when Person A touches it. Turns out the child is presumably the last of their kind, a sole survivor of an ancient race that was assumed to have all died out, leaving their resource rich planet desolate. Person A decides to hide the child, knowing the manager of the mining station doesn’t value alien lives, and has to figure out a way to protect the child. To make matters more complicated, strange newcomers are stopping by the mining station now, asking if there were any lifeforms found in the mines.
#writing prompts#creative writing prompt#writing#creative writing#prompts#prompt#creative writing prompts#writing prompt#fanfiction prompt#fanfiction prompts#fanfic prompts#fanfic prompt#ficinsp#alternate universe#plots and prompts#obscure holiday prompt#Mod Poss#miner au#adopted au#found family au#Children AU#alien au#science fiction au#space au#planet au
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Adventures in Roasting Dead People, ep. 1
I was watching Godless on Netflix with a friend of mine the other night (great miniseries, go watch it, it has lesbians), and without getting spoilery, there’s several characters who work for a mining company back east who I would very much like to be dead (spoilers, they do not, much to my disgust). They’re vile, awful people, and not just in a mustache-twirly “hu hu hu, i’m the antagonist of this program!” way. My friend said at one point, “man you really have a retroactive bone to pick with mining companies,” and after contemplating it for a full day, I do really have a retroactive bone to pick with mining companies. So strap in folks, it’s about to get salty as hell in here.
Under the cut because it got long:
First, a little background - mining has been A Thing in the Americas for millenia, dating all the way back to the Archaic period. The oldest known mining site in the Americas dates back at least 10,000 years, and we’ve (by which I mean archaeologists and not actually myself directly) been finding copper bells all over Central America and the American Southwest dating back to somewhere in the range of 900 AD. But it’s not really until the Spanish show up that we begin to see the “furious scramble to rip everything possible out of the bosom of the earth” type of mining that I think most of us are familiar with. Spanish mines were run largely on slave labor - first the indigenous peoples, who died in massive numbers between the forced labor and the Columbian Exchange diseases, and then imported Africans (although by this point most of the slave labor force had been diverted to cash crops rather than mining). Jamestown was founded for the purpose of mining for English interests, which is part of the reason almost everyone starved on multiple occasions.
In 1829, we get our first truly American gold rush, in which white people flagrantly disregard the fact that the Cherokee were definitely here (meaning North Carolina and Georgia) first, followed by the 1849 California Gold Rush that everyone knows, the 1859 Rocky Mountain Gold Rush, the Black Hills Gold Rush in 1874, and the Klondike Gold Rush in 1899. These are where we get that Stinky Pete caricature of the prospector - grizzled, gray bearded, rocking the suspenders and the beat-to-shit felt hat - although that’s also wrong, if we’re talking about the average characteristics of prospectors. People of all ages, including women and other minorities, came in droves for a chance at placer or surface gold.
And then the mining companies show up.
(Stinky Pete, for anyone who hasn’t seen Toy Story 2)
Now, to be fair, mining companies do have a pretty fair reason for existing. Most gold (and silver, and copper, and coal and uranium and and and) needs lots of startup cash to get at - with surface gold (and maybe silver?? idk I’m not a fucking geologist don’t @ me), all you really need is a big ass pie tin and the patience to stand in a cold creek all day swirling dirt around. Maybe a pickaxe and/or shovel, if you’re real ambitious about it. Once the surface stuff is played out, however, you need lots of labor and equipment to dig down far enough to start mining veins. And with things that aren’t as sexy as gold and silver, like coal for example, no one wants to be mining that shit alone in their backyard unless they’re some kind of like, goddamn sociopath or whatever.
However. Mining companies are still the fucking scum of the earth, if for no other reasons than those that make all groups of more than four people (men) motivated by Having Shit just absolutely fucking awful. Oh, Mining Industry, how do I loathe thee, let me count the ways:
#1 - They exploit the shit out of previous inhabitants.
Now, do not get the wrong idea, the humble, individualistic prospectors of the gold rush days do not come out of this unroasted - the Georgia Gold Rush was a direct motivation for the Trail of Tears, the reason why we only have one tiny corner of a reservation in Colorado is because the territory was the epicenter of a major mineral boom, the Black Hills Indian wars were a direct result of prospectors breaking multiple treaties to mine an area sacred to multiple tribes, and I’m sure we did something fucking horrible to the indigenous peoples of Alaska during that gold rush, too. But in general, mining companies spelled disaster for Native Americans more than individual miners did, because mining companies have lobbyists who can “encourage” Congressmen to “protect” “business” “interests” by “reigning in” the US Army’s approach to land treaties in the west. (Which is itself a very fascinating story that I will definitely have to tell later because woof did we fuck that up real bad.)
But if that’s not enough for you to find deeply upsetting (congratulations you’ve got some racist ideology happening and you should get that checked out), mining companies were also awful to white people too!! (And also black people like whoa, but like, there’s a solid 40 years in there where slavery’s still legal, I think everyone pretty much called that.) Mining companies were notorious for illegal land grab tactics (usually aided and abetted by government agents in charge of land distribution and incorporation), and also for obtaining already claimed land by any means necessary. If that meant paying you to leave, cool. If that meant burning down your house, also fine. If that meant shooting an assortment of people living on said property, that’s just business. We call this shit the Wild West for a reason, and it’s not just because of cattle rustlers. This shit lasts more or less up to the 1890s, specifically 1893 when the US Census Bureau and a guy named Frederick Jackson Turner declare that the frontier is closed. (I don’t know why, like 50% of Nebraska still doesn’t qualify as “populated”.) However, what does not end in the 1890s is how absolutely shitty mining companies are to the people who work for them.
#2 - They exploit the shit out of their workers.
I know, I know, capitalism is deeply broken, #staywoke, etc. etc., this isn’t news. But almost literally nowhere else is that more evident than extractive industries, and mining in particular. Even if you jump the pond back to England where the concept of industrial coal mining really got its start, mistreatment of workers (particularly children, see image below) was shockingly bad.
In the US, mining companies primarily targeted immigrants fresh off the boat from places like Ireland, Greece, Italy, and eastern Europe, and then once slavery had been (nominally) dealt with, they started going after newly freed slaves. What do these groups have in common? Extremely limited resources, lack of concrete physical ties (often their possessions could fit in a few suitcases, and very rarely did they have extended families present to share the burdens of living expenses, childcare, etc.), and very low levels of social respect. Listen, guys, WASPs have been shitty to immigrants since we were immigrants - if I had to write an essay that started “What I learned in History School is,” that’s probably the one constant I’d put down. And in the wake of the Civil War, sure slavery wasn’t legally a thing anymore, but people still really really wanted it to be a thing. (And don’t even get me started on the whole pre-war “We’re not racist, we want to enslave poor white people too” argument, like jesus.)
So mining companies in particular figured out a way to do this that was completely legal. Recruiters would sell you what seemed like a great gig - paying work, no experience required, a house provided for your family, a well-stocked general store for all your physical needs. We’ll even pay for your travel expenses! What they don’t tell you up front is that they’re going to pay you in what are essentially Chuck E. Cheese tokens called scrip, redeemable only from that well-stocked general store, which is selling goods for up to 5x what the rest of the country is paying for them. Some companies would allow you to exchange their gross Monopoly money shit for actual US dollars, but they’d tack on a nice little “exchange fee” which, like, they’re already paying you next to nothing, so it’s not like you can actually save anything to leave.
Another trick that mining companies (and also railroads, which kind of go hand-in-hand for most of the 19th century) used to cut labor costs was to rent convicts from jails. So like, basically slavery? But legal slavery. Because of course no one actually wanted the 13th Amendment or anything. Jesus.
This is all awful, you’re thinking, why would people just let this happen? As far as I know, the earliest mining strike in the US is in 1865, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as a result of the mining company cutting wages after the Civil War (literally the earliest they could get away with it, since the Union Army needed iron for the war). The US Army sent the USS Michigan up from Chicago twice to put down the strike at the request of the company. For the most part, mining strikes arise from pay disputes and/or crazy hours, with union recognition coming in a close second. As we get into the last half of the 20th century, strikes about health and safety concerns start to come up, but honestly the Industrial Age is a hellspace of work-related terrors, so I guess that didn’t really ping anyone’s radar before then? Who knows.
#3 - They exploit the shit out of the environment.
Though there are some small-scale environmental consequences of non-mechanized mining, the advent of the mining companies in the west was the beginning of a number of very serious environmental disasters throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century. In particular, mining for precious metals is a goddamn nightmare, for a couple reasons:
There’s a reason they’re called precious metals -- there’s not huge quantities hanging out in one spot very often. Therefore, it takes significantly more invasive procedures to get the same volume as other mining products.
Separating ore requires a lot of work: pulverizing ore, smelting (which requires a large and steady feed of fuel to keep temperatures high enough to reliably melt out metals from ore), and in the late 19th century, industrial chemists discovered that mercury and cyanide did a much better job getting gold out of ore than fire did. (Side note: if you have a 19th century/Victorian au for any piece of media involving hackers, they’re hereby required to be industrial chemists. Those people were borderline supervillains.) In addition, arsenic and sulfuric acid are really common products of the ore smelting process, so all of those highly toxic substances just get, like, dumped into the environment.
So right away, you have some cool deforestation, massive erosion, and pollution of the local water system, which is 100% guaranteed to fuck up the ecosystem. Fish die, vegetation dies, catastrophic erosion causes huge damage to the landscape, which is great. The practices that cause those things also have a tendency to cause more explosive disasters like:
Fires - Coal mines in particular have a habit of exploding with very little warning, but any mine can hit a coal vein or a natural gas pocket and become a fire hazard. Even after “safety” lamps (which still contain open flames, so like), faulty lighting and sparks from tools and machines could send a mine up in flames within the space of a minute. In precious metal mines, the use of high explosives like nitroglycerin and dynamite was much more common, making fires a much greater danger.
Collapses - Collapses are another danger of mining that uses high explosives, but they’re certainly not limited to fire-based catastrophes. Mines are highly prone to filling with water (they’re basically just very large wells if you don’t pump them out frequently), and water has a tendency to cause erosion and make wooden support beams rot very quickly, making the danger of thousands of pounds of rock and dirt falling down on top of you highly likely in mines that didn’t observe strict safety standards.
Gas leaks - As I mentioned above, pockets of natural gas were a common danger in mines, and not just for their potentially explosive properties. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “canary in the coal mine,” this is where it comes from - miners would carry canaries (or occasionally other warm-blooded animals) down into the mines to signal potentially deadly levels of toxic gases, particularly carbon monoxide from burning lanterns and other equipment in confined spaces. If the canary stopped singing (because of illness or, more frequently, death), that was time to get the fuck up to the surface.
When a mine was played out, most of the time it was cheaper to just buy new equipment for the next mine than to bother with dismantling and hauling the equipment out of whatever (usually mountainous) place it was in. In many places (particularly in the Rockies), this concept filtered down to the individual miners - you can still find ghost towns full of furniture, dishes, etc. that people just left rather than go to the expense of packing everything up and trying to get it down out of there again. So mines would just be left as-is - they’d fill up with water, equipment would be left to rust, tailings piles (the waste products from ore processing, which are these super unattractive piles of sludge) continued leech arsenic, sulfuric acid, cyanide, and mercury into the water table every time it rained.
(Tailings piles from a mine in Silver City NM)
Abandoned mines continue to be an environmental hazard - PSA: Be extremely careful around abandoned mines, and if they haven’t been blocked off/otherwise flagged by the Forest Service, Parks Service (national or state), BLM, or assorted law enforcement agencies, please report them to the relevant authorities.
So that’s just an overview of the many reasons that mining companies fucking suck - individual mines had their own varied levels of grossness, but as a whole, mining companies are vile and everyone associated with them in fiction should have horrible things befall them. If you’re interested in more information about the history of mining and mining companies, I might post my bibliography for this in a separate post.
If you found this informative, entertaining, or weird enough that you want to see more, drop me a line at dead-dialogs.tumblr.com or at [email protected] with your history questions, and consider kicking a few bucks into my KoFi.
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Auckland, New Zealand, Under Lockdown After 3 Covid-19 Coronavirus Cases Emerge
https://sciencespies.com/news/auckland-new-zealand-under-lockdown-after-3-covid-19-coronavirus-cases-emerge/
Auckland, New Zealand, Under Lockdown After 3 Covid-19 Coronavirus Cases Emerge
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on February 14, 2021 that Auckland is moving to Level 3 … [+] Alert with the rest of the country on Level 2. Three new locally acquired COVID-19 cases have been recorded in Auckland on Sunday with genomic testing underway to confirm if the cases are linked to any of the more infectious coronavirus strains. (Photo by Mark Tantrum/Getty Images)
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Three is a little less than 84,717.
The latter is the number of new reported Covid-19 coronavirus cases in the U.S. in just one day, February 13. The former is the number of cases that have emerged in New Zealand over the past three weeks since late January. Three weeks is longer than one day. Nevertheless, three reported Covid-19 cases in New Zealand has been enough for its government to impose a temporary lockdown.
In this case, temporary means only three days. And the lockdown will involve no more than Auckland, not the rest of the country. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on February 14 that as of 11:59pm that day, the largest city in New Zealand will move into a Level 3 alert. This Reuters video showed the announcement:
The government is trying to make the city dubbed “A Place Desired By Many” into “A Place Not Desired By The Covid-19 Coronavirus.” The lockdown is not going to be the primary response to the virus but more so a time out so that public health officials can figure out where the virus came from and how to re-configure its defenses against the virus.
Level 3 restrictions mean no public venues can remain open. You also gotta stay at home, unless you have to do something essential like shop for toilet paper or shop for food or perhaps shop for toilet paper and food. Essential workers can continue to go to and from work. There can be no gatherings outside homes with the exception of weddings and funerals. Oh, and if you were planning on getting married in front of your closest 10,000 friends in Auckland, yeah-nah. Assuming that you and your future spouse will show up to the wedding and that you are marrying only one other person, you would only be able to invite eight more people to meet the 10-person limit on gatherings. If you are an essential worker, your kids can go to school. But all other kids should stay home.
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At the same time, the rest of New Zealand has gone to a Level 2 Alert. That means if you are outside Auckland, you will still be allowed to leave your home and go to work and school. But you would have to maintain a distance of at least two meters in public and in retail stores and one meter in most other places like workplaces, cafes, restaurants and gyms. Two meters is about six feet five inches or Denzel Washington (who is around six feet tall) wearing a top hat. It would also be Denzel with a European hedgehog on his head, assuming that the hedgehog were not fully standing and maybe partially on his face.
Speaking of European hedgehog on the face. A hedgehog would not fulfill the face covering requirement for Level 2. Face coverings are required on public transport and when enough physical distancing is not possible. Social gatherings can’t include more than 100 people either. Both the Level 3 Alert in Auckland and the Level 2 Alert elsewhere will remain in place until 12 midnight on Wednesday February 17.
All of these changes were in response to a couple and their daughter in Auckland testing positive for the virus. As Ardern indicated in this 1 News segment, they did test positive for the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant of the the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) that first emerged in the U.K.:
These were the first local infections in the country since January 24, which happened to also be Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day, if you celebrate it. Before late January, New Zealand had gone over two months without any local infections. New Zealand along with countries such as Taiwan and South Korea has shown that you can actually prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV2 with an organized and effective national response. New Zealand will be commencing vaccinations with the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on February 20 but unlike many in the U.S. hasn’t been pinning all its hopes of controlling the virus on vaccination.
Yep, New Zealand actually has a clear national warning system and a pro-active approach to containing the spread of the SARS-CoV2 before it actually spreads. The U.S. never really established a national warning system for the pandemic, unless you count a President saying something like “we’re rounding the corner on the pandemic” over and over again as a “warning system.” In responding to a pandemic, it is really important to get ahead of the virus, to anticipate where it may go before it actually goes there. After all, no coach should say during a football game, “let’s allow the opponents to get a big lead first and then come up with a plan.”
And, of course, it helps to actually take some action against the virus rather than downplaying it or hoping it will just go away. The virus is not like the TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. It won’t go away if you simply ignore it. Arden has maintained the need to “go hard, and go early” when it comes to responding to the pandemic, not “go hardly at all.”
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Sunday funny
There are many things about Jan. 24 to laugh about. For one thing, it’s Belly Laugh Day. It’s also Talk Like A Grizzled Prospector Day. Weirdly, it’s also the first day of Kiss a Shark Week 2021. Though if you kiss a shark, you probably won’t be laughing because of all the death. Still, you should laugh today. Just don’t kiss a shark. Especially don’t kiss this one. LEGO pain might mean he’ll…
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Massacre In Deadlock Gorge
A special report by Olivia Colomar of Paranormal New Mexico.
Deadlock Gorge.
It’s a name that catches the imagination almost immediately, harkening back as it does to the days of the Wild West, of handsome cowboys and grizzled old prospectors, wagon trains full of tenderfoot settlers, Pony Express riders and stagecoaches and the black-hatted outlaws who robbed them all. That is, of course, not its only name -- only the most recent, and likely the most famous, for a variety of reasons.
The Ancestral Puebloans left ruins there, as they did in so many other high-walled canyons in the Four Corners, but even now their descendants do not give it a name. In fact, my regular Puebloan cultural experts flatly refused to speak with me about the place at all. The Spanish settlers who made their homes around Albuquerque called it El Cañon del Viento Cortante, the Canyon of the Biting Wind, though its position tends to be rather nomadic on antique maps of the region housed in the University of New Mexico Anthropology Department’s library. The Navajo bands who were its closest neighbors simply called it the Hungry Place and shunned it with astonishing enthusiasm given the presence of readily available water, arable land at its widest point, and the shelter to be found within its network of water-carved sandstone caves. Today it lies entirely inside the boundaries of the expanded Navajo Reservation Annex and is only desultorily patrolled by Navajo Nation police. It came by its present name, of course, thanks to the infamous Deadlock Gang, who used it as their base of operations as they marauded across Native communities and Anglo settlements, prospecting outfits and isolated ranches, before the final bloody confrontation within the canyon’s walls brought an end to their reign of terror.
In fact, Deadlock Gorge appears to have had a rather significant history of violence, stretching back as far into history as I’ve been able to research and very much extending to the present day. It was, as of this writing, only ten years ago that the art colony established there by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters came to a grisly and, to date, unexplained end.
*
It was just after midnight on October 29th when the call came in to McKinley County 911. Veteran operator Melissa Rosales received that first frantic call for help.
Melissa Rosales is a petite woman who wears her graying brown hair in an asymetrical style that flatters her pixieish face. Her eyes are framed in crow’s feet and the years have gifted her with a generous portion of laugh lines. She is smiling as we sit down together at Cafe Pasqual to talk once she’s done her shift. She still works at the county 911 office, as a supervisor, and she says that, over the years, she has received many calls that have stayed with her: the young family caught in their vehicle in the midst of rising flood waters during a freakishly powerful storm, the two year old bitten by a rattlesnake in her family’s garden, more than one car accident involving drunken college students and long haul transport rigs on the interstate. None of them haunt her like the frantic cries that came from Deadlock Gorge that night in October ten years ago.
“It was almost Halloween, and it was a full moon -- that whole week was crazy, weird calls every day. The night before, someone called to report a chupacabra raiding their compost bin. Can you believe it?” Melissa laughs, shaking her head, but the humor doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It isn’t always like that on the full moon but that month, it surely was. When the first calls came in, Ms. Colomar, I freely confess that we didn’t know what to believe.”
[Begin Transcript:
911 Call #1 12:07 AM
911 Operator:
911, where is the emergency?
Unidentified Woman:
Help...please help…
911 Operator:
We will certainly do so, ma’am, but I need you to tell me where you are.
Unidentified Woman:
Deadlock...We’re...We’re in Deadlock Gorge, just off 66, the Starry Desert Center For the Arts -- [static] -- ter’s residency at the edge of town. Something --
911 Operator:
Ma’am, could you please tell me the nature of the emergency? Do you need fire and rescue services? Emergency medical services? Police?
Unidentified Woman:
I -- I -- I don’t know I don’t know. I’m at the window, the front window of the writer’s residency parlor and and I see...someone’s lying in the street. They’re not moving, they’re not moving, I think they might be dead, the street lights are out I can’t -- [static]
911 Operator:
Ma’am can you hear me? [pause] Ma’am?
Unidentified Woman:
[whispering] I hear something right outside. I can hear it breathing. I think it can hear me, too. Oh God I think it can hear me too.
Recording Ends
[End Transcript]
“There are all sorts of weird stories about the Gorge -- I sure you’ve heard more than a few of them.” Melissa fiddles with her necklace as she speaks, a delicate silver chain hung with turquoise beads, a strangely nervous gesture for a woman who otherwise comes across as bedrock settled, coolly calm and collected. “That it’s haunted, that it’s cursed, you know how it is. I was half convinced, given how close it was to Halloween, that it could be some kind of stupid prank, college kids with nothing better to do. Then the second call came in.”
[Begin Transcript:
911 Call #2 12:12 AM
911 Operator:
911, where is the emergency?
Anita Colomar (Writer’s Residency Director at Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences):
Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences, 66 Canyon Drive, in Deadlock Gorge. Please send police and emergency medical services.
911 Operator:
Ma’am, can you tell me the nature of the emergency?
Anita Colomar:
I’m...not entirely certain myself. Power is out in the gorge -- I heard an...I don’t want to say an explosion but...it could have been. It was loud -- loud enough to wake me and several of the residents out of a sound sleep and --
[A high-pitched sound cuts across the recording, followed by several seconds of intense static]
911 Operator:
Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?
Anita Colomar:
Yes -- yes, I can hear you. Did you hear that?
911 Operator:
Yes, I did. That was at your end?
Anita Colomar:
It was. I think -- was that coming from outside? Candace, can you see?
[Inaudibly muffled voices from off the line, a sequence of loud bangs, a short scream that terminates abruptly]
Jeff, Candy, push my dresser in front of the door. Hurry. Officer, I think someone may be inside the residency building --
Recording Ends
[End Transcript]
I suppose I should confess, at this point, that my interest in the incident that took place at the Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences -- the so-called Massacre In Deadlock Gorge -- is not entirely one of a neutral observer. My aunt, my father’s younger sister, Anita Colomar, was the director of the writer’s residency at the time and one of the few people to have verifiable contact with emergency services on the night of the incident itself. In fact, the woman sitting across from me was, in all likelihood, one of the last people to ever speak to her.
“I dispatched police as soon as the first call came in.” Melissa says, her tone quiet and apologetic, as though she has something to apologize for. “When the second came in, I also dispatched emergency services. And after that, well…”
My FOIA request to the McKinley County 911 dispatch office for calls related to the incident in Deadlock Gorge yielded eighty-seven individual call records and associated transcripts concentrated in a single twenty-five minute period between 12:07 am and 12:32 am. Most of the calls are no more than a few seconds long and consist almost entirely of static, snatches of loud noises, and incoherent voices. Cellular contact with the Gorge failed entirely by no later than 12:33 am. The first law enforcement responders arrived at the edge of the canyon three minutes later. The motivators and antigrav units in their vehicles failed as they crossed beneath the sandstone arch that marks the entrance to the town proper, forcing them to approach the cluster of darkened structures clinging to the mid-canyon escarpment on foot. What they found once they arrived exceeded the expectations of even the most experienced officers but not those of the dispatchers, whose lines had by then fallen eerily silent.
“I’m sorry that we couldn’t do more that night, though to this day I’m not sure if there was more to do.” Melissa tells me as we step outside into the warm summer evening, ten years removed from the cold and dark of that night. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”
*
Deadlock Gorge first enters the “modern” historical record in documents dating from the early 1700s, copies of reports written to and by the assorted Spanish colonial governors of Villa de Alburquerque, as the city was known at that time, a strategic military outpost along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. It was this military significance, and resultant presence of a fairly hefty armed garrison, that led the rancheros living west of the city -- in what is today McKinley County -- to repeatedly beg the assistance of their governor when it came to keeping marauders out of their flocks. The ranchers mostly raised sheep (for their wool -- early Albuquerque was a major center for the New World textiles trade) and goats (for their meat and milk) and in the autumn of 1711, something was taking a sizeable chunk out of that trade, whole flocks, and whole shepherds, going missing. Evidence suggested that the missing livestock and farmers were disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, into El Cañon del Viento Cortante, a deep, twisting canyon of red sandstone walls, one end of which formed a natural border between several different ranching concerns.
The wealthy Spanish landowners were losing money hand over fist, they were having trouble retaining trustworthy workers, and they insisted, in a flurry of letters growing gradually shriller as the year wore on, that the governor had to send troops to help rout out the source of their trouble. Frankly, they suspected marauding natives clever enough to cover up the evidence of the depredations. Finally aggravated beyond endurance by all the whining, from sheep ranchers and wool merchants alike, a detachment of soldiers under an experienced native-fighting commander was sent to investigate the situation in El Cañon del Viento Cortante, kill whatever needed to be killed, soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, and return with proof that the matter was handled.
The detachment never returned.
In fact, nothing of them was ever seen or heard from again. No remains were ever found. No indications of battle -- pitched or otherwise -- were found. No evidence of ambush, either. The local Native bands who came to trade in Albuquerque disclaimed any knowledge of the thefts or the fate of the Spanish soldiers but issued an unusually blunt warning: El Cañon del Viento Cortante was not a good place, was not a safe place, and that was why no member of any band not insane, desperate, or outcast chose to make a home there. It would be best if the Spaniards left it alone, as well.
The governor of Albuquerque quietly arranged for the ranchers to be compensated for their losses and urged them to abandon the territory immediately surrounding El Cañon del Viento Cortante. Fragmentary records exist to suggest this may have happened -- or that the ranchers, like their unfortunate herds, employees, and soldiers, also vanished into the hungry maw of the canyon.
*
Sergeant Andrew Flores of the New Mexico State Police was the first police responder to reach Deadlock Gorge on the night of the incident, followed closely by three black-and-white cruisers rerouted from patrols in nearby communities. He organized the group and led them into town on foot after all their vehicles failed, more or less simultaneously. He recounts the way the night unfolded to me as we sit together in the living room of his trim little cabin outside Chimayó, drinking iced tea and eating a meal he has prepared using the vegetables grown in his own garden. He retired from the State Police three years ago and settled down in this vibrant little town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to write his memoirs and to raise heirloom produce for sale in the local farmer’s market. He does, in fact, have plenty to write about but, even so, the incident in Deadlock Gorge stands out in his memory as the strangest of many strange experiences.
“It’s a cliche but I guess that’s for a reason,” Former Officer Flores laughs, shaking his head slightly. “‘Twas a dark and stormy night,’ you know? The moon was full -- I recall that vividly -- but it hardly mattered because heavy weather was rolling in from the north and the moon was playing hide and seek with the clouds. One minute it was almost as bright as noon, shining off the canyon walls and the streets and the buildings, and the next it was as dark as the bottom of a well, no lights anywhere except ours, not even battery powered emergency lights.”
The town of Deadlock Gorge is built atop a midlevel escarpment a couple hundred feet down from the rim of the canyon at its extreme northern and narrowest end, straddling a relatively short and dangerously curvy stretch of Historic Route 66 that exits the canyon headed west, into Arizona. That particular stretch of HR 66 was, at one point, a shepherd’s trail, used to usher flocks of sheep and goats between one pasturage and another, and then a wagon trail, used by settlers traveling west, hopefully to California. The original town sprung up to tend to the needs of weary travelers and consisted of a boarding house, a saloon, a dry goods store, a livery stable, and a blacksmith. Of those original buildings, only the boarding house survived the raid that put an end to the Deadlock Gang -- survived it in good enough condition that efforts were made to preserve it by the New Mexico State Historical Society and, when the land was later purchased by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters, it was rehabbed into a part of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. Specifically, it was the building used to house the members of the residential writer’s program and its presence, at the edge of town, made it the first structure the investigating officers encountered on their way in.
[Begin Sidebar:
Crime Scene Photo #1:
The structure is longer than it is wide, owing to the relatively narrow slice of land on which the town is built, two stories of clapboard siding painted a slaty blue-gray under a steeply pitched shingled roof, studded with windows flanked in functional shutters, an unenclosed patio/porch extending nearly to the street in front. A sign bolted to the facade over the front door identifies it as the Starry Desert Center Writer’s Residence; a plaque next to the door identifies it as a building on the State Register of Historic Places. The door itself hangs open on one twisted hinge barely clinging to the splintered wood of the frame.
Crime Scene Photos #2, 3, 4, 5 - 13:
The interior of the Writer’s Residence, ground floor. A steep staircase stands just inside the front door, leading to the second floor. To the left of the staircase lies the parlor: a collection of mismatched furniture (a sectional couch, a smaller semi-matching loveseat, a selection of chairs, a coffee table) sits in a rough circle. No holotank or sound system but a high capacity ceramic space heater designed to resemble a 19th century cast iron wood stove occupies the far corner. The signs of a struggle are obvious: an area rug covering the hardwood floor is rucked up; the coffee table lies on its side, glass top smashed, fragments scattered around it; something dark stains both the rug and the floor and more than a few pieces of glass.
To the right lies the dining room, a single long table surrounded by a dozen chairs, one of which, at the far end near the entrance to the kitchen, sits askew from its place. A glass-fronted hutch sits at the far end of the room, containing the residency’s good China, one door marked by a smeared, dark handprint.
In the kitchen, the back door stands open into the breezeway linking it to the fenced-off herb/vegetable garden occupying the next plot over. Pots hang over the prep island, undisturbed, and all of the cabinets are closed. A single piece of cutlery is missing from the knife block sitting on the prep island.
Bedrooms line the second floor hallway, most of them in states of profound disarray, as though the occupants were woken abruptly. At least one was partially barricaded from the inside. The attic lofts, containing quiet study space, appear untouched.
[End Sidebar]
“The initial 911 contact indicated that the caller saw a body lying in the street.” Copies of the crime scene photos taken in the days after that night are spread out on the patio table between us -- we have adjourned outside to enjoy the fine weather as the day fades into evening and the view of the aspen-clad mountains, already beginning their autumnward turn. “We didn’t find a body -- a splotch of blood where a body might have been, and drag marks that led right to the edge of the escarpment, but no body. In fact, we didn’t find any bodies of any kind until we got into the basement of the Center’s admin building, down in the storage rooms.”
[Begin Sidebar:
Crime Scene Photo #14, 15:
A dark pool in the middle of the road, stretched into several smaller, splotchier pools amid obvious drag marks that terminate at the south rim of the escarpment.
The photographer must have leaned uncomfortably far out over the side to get a shot of the canyon floor at the base of the escarpment, a mass of loose scree and brush, also containing no body or bodies.
[End Sidebar]
Most of the Center’s larger buildings -- the writers’ and artists’ residences, the main administrative building, the gallery display space, the shell of what was intended to be a small performance theater, still under construction at the time of the incident, were built hard against the canyon wall. The building that housed studio space for artists and sculptors, the kiln house, the materials storage outbuildings, were constructed closer to the escarpment rim, inside a waist-high guard rail fence further reinforced with decorative iron rods strung with hurricane webbing. Nobody wanted anyone to accidentally stroll off the side.
“By the time we reached the first of the production buildings, another couple black-and-whites and a few more Staties had arrived, so I felt a little more comfortable splitting the group into search parties.” Mr. Flores chuckles and shakes his head. “I...really can’t explain in words how eerie the whole scenario was -- that night was surreal in a way I’ve never experienced, before or since. The wind was howling down the canyon like a living thing -- and not any living thing, a living thing with fangs and claws that hated us all and wanted us to die. Some of the guys swore up and down that night and for days after that they heard voices in it.”
“Did you?” I feel compelled to ask, as I leaf through his personal casefile on the incident -- he’s got more pictures than are available even through FOIA requests, and he will later graciously copy them for me.
“Not...really.” He pauses, takes a sip of his tea, refuses to meet my eyes. “I heard something...but I wouldn’t call it a voice. Not words, at any rate. I split the group into two teams, one under my command, the other under Major Hathaway, and we proceeded deeper into town.”
[Begin Sidebar:
Crime Scene Photos #16 - 20:
The building containing the art studio space is a two-story structure built in a roughly crescent shape along the widest part of the escarpment rim -- a blocky central building containing a foyer scattered with a mismatched assortment of chairs and a lumpy ancient futon, a unisex bathroom setup, and two projecting wings containing studios for traditional media art, digital art, photography, textile art, and sculpture. Most of the studio spaces have enormous windows overlooking the canyon itself.
The glass-fronted door of the studio space is smashed and the door itself hanging open. Traces of blood adhere to the door and create a path up the stairs to one of the sculpture studios on the second floor. The window of that studio is broken from the inside -- glass fell into the narrow strip of land behind the studio and between the safety fence. The break itself is small, as though something were flung through the window with great force.
The blood trail ends completely in the upstairs sculpture studio.
[End Sidebar]
“Major Hathaway’s group took the escarpment side of the town and then circled around the far end toward the spot where they were building the theater. Most of what they found was concentrated in the arts studio -- none of the storage outbuildings were touched, they were all padlocked shut, until they came to the new construction.” He slides a photograph across to me, one I had heard referenced by my contacts among the State and local police forces, but which I have never seen until now. “And that was some weird shit, let me tell you.”
[Begin Sidebar:
Crime Scene Photos #21 - 28:
Multiple views of the semi-complete outdoor theater/amphitheater. What would have been the stage is no more than a skeletal hint of a structure but the seating is more or less complete: low-backed wooden benches sitting on top of elaborately carved sandstone supports in two concentric semi-circles, four rows each, with an aisle between them.
At the end of the aisle, in front of what would have been the stage, is the remains of a large firepit dug several inches into the underlying stone, ringed in more stones, containing the remains of a large bonfire. The stones ringing the firepit are likewise elaborately carved in a style distinctly different from the bench supports: they are jagged, appear to be broken from several larger stones, and are covered in petroglyphs: perfectly executed circles lined inside with triangular forms, inward-turning spirals, concentric bullseye figures surrounded in a dozen smaller circles around the outer edge. Some of them are splashed with a dark semi-liquid substance.
The two rows of benches closest to the fire are covered in upholstered throw cushions and a few throw blankets here and there. Discarded clothing is scattered between them. Half-hidden beneath someone’s sports bra and semi-buried in the sand is a knife, its hilt carved from horn of some sort partially wrapped in leather, its blade roughly leaf-shaped and made of carefully shaped obsidian.
[End Sidebar]
“There were rumors, of course -- had been for years. You can’t put a bunch of artsy-fartsy types out in the middle of nowhere, have minimal interaction with the outside world, and not have rumors. And where there’s rumors, there’s complaints.” Mr. Flores hands over a sheaf of papers: noise complaints, public disturbance complaints, the basic legal nuisances used to make nontraditional communities miserable when there’s no other way to do it. “We investigated, of course, but the Center was, for a pack of allegedly immoral bohemian libertines, pretty hard on the straight and narrow. Minors were not allowed to apply for residency even if they would be legal adults before the residency started. Minimum age of participation in any program was twenty-one. Zero tolerance policy for drug or alcohol abuse or for sexual harassment. Which isn’t to say that they were perfectly squeaky clean. We got called a couple times from inside for domestic disturbances, because they allowed couples to apply together, and residents to bring plus ones if they could pony up for it, and even the best couples sometimes don’t stay that way. But nothing like this.” He shakes his head. “Nothing even close. Certainly nothing to indicate that they directors were actually running a cult.”
[Begin Sidebar:
Crime Scene Photos #29 - 40:
The interior of the artists’ residency in a now-familiar state of disarray: evidence of attempts by the residents to secure themselves in their rooms, apparently to no avail, indicators of a struggle in some instances, including blood spatter on the walls, on the floor, in one case across the ceiling.
Inside the central administration building, the destruction is even more significant. The shelves in the community lending library are reduced to kindling, the books themselves to little more than empty covers lost amid snowdrifts of shredded pages. The main office has been completely destroyed: metal desks twisted apart, their fragments embedded in the walls and the floor. Not a single computer or other piece of technology escapes destruction.
The downstairs storage rooms, where the community stored years of hardcopy records in filing boxes and cabinets, are strangely untouched, though all the doors have been torn off their hinges.
At the far end of the corridor stands one intact door: solid wood, carved with a sequence of glyphs similar to those on the stones outside around the firepit. A second and thematically distinct set of carvings adorns the frame. Inside the room stands a single object: a cage consisting of heavy forged iron bars sunk into eight inch thick wooden railroad ties, slightly more than six feet long and three feet wide, containing a thin pallet, a pillow, and a blanket. All three items are bloody and a pool of the same spreads out from beneath the cage.
The bars of the cage are meticulously carved with glyphs identical to those on the door and the doorframe, as are the railroad ties. Two sets of iron manacles, one attached to the head of the cage by a heavy length of chain, the other to the foot, are similarly marked though in the case of both it seems as though the manacles and the chain were cast in that design. The door of the cage is secured with a heavy padlock of similar manufacture.
The walls, the floor, and even the ceiling are covered in concentric lines of the same visual script, some images repeating from the door to the cage to the rocks around the firepit, some completely different.
In the far corner of the room, the only example of actual human remains recovered in Deadlock Gorge that night: a human hand, roughly severed just above the wrist, ragged ends of bone clearly visible. Nearby lies a second obsidian knife, its blade and handle bloodstained.
[End Sidebar]
“We found the kid downstairs -- we might not have found him at all, but one of the officers in my search group thought she saw something moving at the head of the stairs that led down to the storage area.” Mr. Flores pours himself another glass of iced, drinks, stares out into the deepening twilight for several minutes. “He...was not in a good way -- it was lucky Hathaway had her lockpicking tool on her, because otherwise we’d never have gotten those manacles open. I don’t think Forensics ever actually found the key to the damn things. We had to jimmy all the locks just to get him out and there wasn’t much he could do to help, hurt as he was. The EMTs told me he was lucky to be alive -- one of the stab wounds nicked the abdominal aorta and he was in the process of bleeding to death internally when we found him. The blood on the knife we found was his. The hand belonged to Val Kalloway, the Center’s director of operations, according to the fingerprints.” A humorless smile. “We never did find anyone else.”
In fact, none of the experts brought in to examine Deadlock Gorge after that night found anything else. In the days and weeks that followed, law enforcement officials from Federal, State, and local agencies combed every inch of the town and the canyon beyond for any trace of the missing inhabitants of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. There were four writers plus the program director on site for the September through December residency term; there were six artists plus the art residency director. The Director of Operations and six members of the permanent instruction staff plus two administrative personnel lived in a smaller residence behind the main administration building.
Twenty-one people disappeared without a trace that night. Cadaver-sniffing dogs found no evidence of hidden human remains, either in the town or in the canyon. The forensic scientists who processed the scene found copious evidence of habitation by the the people who were supposed to be there but no evidence whatsoever of any invaders, intruders, or involvement by outside individuals. The lone survivor -- a juvenile male listed as John Doe in the official documentation of the incident -- was transported via ambulance to the University Hospital. It is my understanding that he survived, despite the severity of his injuries and his overall condition, which was something other than ideal, and that he gave an official statement to the authorities. Both that statement, and the documents confirming his identity, are sealed by Federal district court order and have never been released to the public. A FOIA request I made in regard to this issue was summarily rejected.
Mr. Flores gifted me a copy of his entire casefile on the incident -- the so-called “Massacre In Deadlock Gorge” -- before I left that night and wished me luck.
“Of all the unsolved cases I’ve had in my time -- and there have been a couple -- that’s the one that’s caused me the most sleepless nights over the years.” He admitted as he walked me to my car. “Because if it could happen there, who’s to say it couldn’t happen somewhere else? Lots of small places where small numbers of people live now, after the Crisis, and we don’t even have official eyes on them all. Someday, it’s going to happen again.”
*
Daniel Locke was not the sort of person one would reasonably expect to find running a gang of ruthless outlaws out of a bloodsoaked canyon in the desert but, well, he did.
He was the scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family, a step below the true northeastern aristocratic clans of the day but rich enough from their own endeavors that their “lesser” social cachet hardly impeded them. His elder brother, Alexander, graduated from Harvard and served terms in both the Massachusetts State Senate and in the US House of Representatives. His younger sister, Margaret, graduated from Mount Holyoke and married well, repeatedly, further enhancing the family’s fortunes.
Daniel himself attended Dartmouth and evidently graduated with sufficient academic success that his doting parents sent him on a Grand Tour of Europe, a rite of passage beloved by the economic elite of the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. We know, as a result of his own extensive journals on the topic -- Locke loved to write, particularly about himself -- that his Tour departed from the well-beaten path of posing for portraiture among majestic Roman ruins in Italy rather early in the proceedings. His writings on the topic are erudite and scathing, lambasting the insipidity of it all, scrabbling for meaning amid the pretty wreckage instead of seeking the true legacy of lost knowledge, sparing not even his family, “who seemed to content to profit from the scholarly endeavors of earlier, better generations,” and I quote. At the point in the standard Grand Tour itinerary where the average wealthy American would winter in Geneva, writing odes to the lake and/or the Rhone, sipping chocolate and flirting with beautiful young women (apple-cheeked Swiss milkmaid variety), Daniel Locke abandoned his traveling companions and his guide and continued on. In the last of the journals he wrote in Switzerland, entrusted to a college friend for delivery to his parents, he indicated his intent to seek a hidden school in the mountains of the uttermost (European) East.
And then he vanished.
For more than ten years.
When next he appears in the historical record, it’s on a Wanted poster in the New Mexico Territory. A relatively modest reward is offered for his capture on charges related to a stagecoach robbery on the road between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. That would, over the next handful of years, change rather rapidly: at the time of his putative death, the bounty on his head was over $15000, one of the highest in the history of the Old West, and the charges had grown to include murder and rape as well as a spectacular and brazen series of robberies. His own initial successes as an outlaw attracted to him a band of likeminded confederates and together they terrorized communities on both sides of the New Mexico-Arizona territorial border.
They were called the Deadlock Gang: Daniel “Deadeye” Locke, who claimed that his uncanny skill with a gun was a gift from the hands of the Devil himself, for which he had given his mortal soul; Black Frank O’Rourke, an Irishman who fled New York just ahead of the hangman, having murdered both his wife and her lover; Jefferson “Skinner” Delacour, an infamous former Confederate officer and fugitive slave-hunter; Sarah “Red” Reed, a young woman from a long line of cattle rustlers, horse thieves, bootleggers, and fences. Others came went but they formed the core of the group and, for four bloody years in the late 1870s to the early 1880s, they held sway over a constantly shifting court of rogues and killers from the little town in the canyon that came to be known as Deadlock Gorge. In many ways, they owed their success to the possession of that stronghold: the entrances and exits of the Gorge were natural chokepoints, easy for a relatively small group of defenders to hold, and the twisting, switchback routes along the canyon floor and through the town itself lent a significant advantage to anyone familiar with their tricks. It couldn’t last, of course: each of the gang’s members were wanted individually for crimes ranging from murder to bank robbery to forgery and, together, they represented a significant threat to law and order as well as an almost impossibly huge payday for bounty hunters.
In the end, it was a joint operation of the US Marshals, a detachment of the regular Army, and a posse of personally interested individuals, many of them the friends and kin of the Deadlock Gang’s victims, to finally take them down. Light artillery pieces were involved. So were at least two gatling guns. There are still places along the rim of the canyon where the scars of the battle are visible to this day. By the time the shooting was over, more than half the Marshals, no small number of the soldiers, a goodly portion of the vengeful posse, and the entire Deadlock Gang lay dead. Or, at least, it was presumed that the entire Deadlock Gang was dead. Their bodies were recovered from the bullet-riddled ruins of the saloon/inn that they used as the site of their last stand, as were their personal possessions: an astonishing quantity of ill-gotten lucre, firearms, explosives, and Daniel Locke’s many, many, many journals, which he had never ceased to write and excerpts from which ultimately served to confirm his identity to his horrified family back East. All but one was buried in Fairview Cemetery in Albuquerque -- that one being Daniel Locke himself, whose body disappeared before it could be interred. The Locke family denied any involvement in the matter and, in fact, his name was formally stricken from the family lineage. They refused to take possession of any of his mortal effects, leaving his journals and his allegedly hell-forged six-gun to the authorities to dispose of as they wished. Packed away in an ironbound steamer trunk, they passed through numerous hands over the course of a century before finally landing in the possession of the University of New Mexico Sante Fe Historical Documents Archive where they were promptly deposited in the storage annex and forgotten again for nearly a second century.
They were rediscovered in the early 2050s when the Historical Document Archive began an aggressive program of content digitization for the preservation of at-risk documents. The revelation that the so-called “Deadlock Journals” still existed sent a shockwave through the loose community of historians focused on the Old West -- it was generally assumed that they had been destroyed at some point, surviving only in the occasional excerpt published by the more salacious tabloid newspapers of the day. It’s easy to understand why the discovery was such a sensation: college educated outlaws who can’t stop writing about everything they see, hear, do, and think are rare as hen’s teeth, and Daniel Locke continued to be a particularly witty, insightful, and erudite example of the breed right up to the end of his life. His authorial voice is distinct and precise, with a natural storyteller’s gift for phrase-turning and an artist’s eye for detail. In fact, several of the journals are enlivened with his pen-and-ink drawings and the occasional watercolor rendering of landscapes and his cohorts, as well as duplications of the petroglyph-bearing standing stones that once ringed Deadlock Gorge. A genuine polymath, he spoke and wrote in several languages, including his native English, Spanish, French, modern Italian, Latin, two southern Athabaskan dialects, and Romanian.
The “Romanian Memoirs” are by far the most interesting to me because it is in them, and them alone, that he discusses at any length the ten years he spent in Europe, if only obliquely in many cases. What one can surmise is that he did, indeed, find the school he sought and, after many trials, won entry to it, that he drank deep of the wells of secret knowledge and, contrary to his boasts to the contrary, he was one of the fortunates who left its walls with his soul no more in hock to unholy powers than the cost of his tuition. More importantly, they detail his motives for abandoning a life of wealth and ease among the Yankee upper crust for brutal outlawry on the frontier: something there reached out and called to him almost as soon as he landed at the port of New Orleans and he could no more deny its summons than he could refuse to drink water or breathe air. Something that lay waiting beneath the sands, chained deep within the blood-red stone, something that could not free itself but required willing hands to act as its protector and, eventually, its redeemer. Locke traveled west, across Texas, into the territory of New Mexico, where in the bloody, water-carved canyon that eventually bore a bastardized version of his name, he apparently found what he sought and willingly chose to become its servant, feeding it a bounty of fear and pain and blood. He knew, eventually, that it would have to end -- they were far too bold in their depredations, far too cruel in their savagery to be left to their tasks for very long -- and he evidently prepared for that eventuality. He left his “grimoire” and his tools encased somewhere in the webwork of sandstone caverns woven through the walls of the canyon for his “heirs” to find, a bequest that has, theoretically at least, remained unrecovered.
Daniel Locke, during his time in the west, fathered at least three natural children: his daughters Charity Needless (with Silver City prostitute Katherine Needless) and Amelia Reed (with Ruth Reed, the younger sister of his partner in crime, Sarah Reed) and an unnamed son who was only a few weeks old at the time of Locke’s death. A cursory examination of birth and death records show the descendants of his daughters are scattered all over the southwestern United States. The Reeds relocated to California in the bloody aftermath of the legitimate massacre in Deadlock Gorge. Katherine Needless died of tuberculosis in an asylum in the Arizona Territories -- her daughter became a Ward of the Court, eventually a schoolteacher, and married in due course. If any of them sought the inheritance their father left for them, it has not entered into any historical record that I can access.
*
The Ancient Ancestors -- at one time called the Anasazi and now known more widely as the Ancestral Puebloans -- left their marks all over the Four Corners region, quite literally, including in what would become known as Deadlock Gorge. At the extreme southern end of the canyon, high off the floor, lies the remains of a small cliff-dwelling, less complete and subsequently less studied than the far more extensive, and famous, examples to be found in Mesa Verde National Park and Chaco Canyon. At one point, I’m told, the entire canyon was ringed in petroglyph-bearing stones, enormous chunks of basalt carved from the El Malpais lava fields, carried overland by unknown means, and set in place around the rim of Deadlock Gorge in antiquity. Today, only a few examples remain -- but those that do are strikingly similar to those found on Urraca Mesa, famous in legend as the site of a world-shaking battle between the Lords of the Outer and Underworlds, a gateway into the realm of evil spirits hostile to humanity, and the place in New Mexico where lightning strikes more than any other. Compasses don’t like to work there and most technology decides you don’t really need to live in the 21st Century anyway.
Ranger Maritza Whitehawk reminds me of this as we sit together at her kitchen table, sipping coffee and reviewing the documents I’ve already compiled as part of my research, including the copy of Sergeant Flores’ casefile. Her family owns a trim little ranch outside Gallup: a two-story cabin, a barn for horses, an enclosure for goats, pasturage. A fire burns in the wood stove in the next room, perfuming the air with piñon and cedar, and the coffee she pours for me is considerably better than the boiled dirt I’ve been drinking for the last few days.
“I wasn’t involved in the initial investigation the night of the incident -- but in the days after? Oh, yes. As many hours as I could reasonably assign myself.” She admits, paging through the casefile thoughtfully. “Wild stuff going on all around the region that night and in the days leading up.”
“The 911 dispatcher I spoke to about the incident said as much.”
“Now there’s a job I’d never want to do.” She chuckles, but it’s the last laugh for a while. Seven months before the disappearance of the Center’s population, her own eldest son, Marcus Whitehawk, vanished in the hills southwest of Deadlock Gorge. Neither he nor any indication of his whereabouts were ever discovered, despite an intensive search. The loss has been one of the driving forces of her life since: she has compiled an amazingly complete and comprehensive dossier of missing persons (solved and unsolved), unexplained disappearances, and horrible, tragic deaths associated with Deadlock Gorge and environs within the last century.
It’s...a lot. The hardcopy for the last century alone is three solid feet thick. Fortunately, the digital version fits neatly on a microdrive, which she shares with me for mutual research purposes. It’s while combing through it while writing the outline of this article that I discovered it, tucked in among the details related to the October 29th incident at the Center.
[Begin Sidebar:
A grainy still photo lifted from the camera roll of a media drone with moderately competent imaging equipment: a hover-gurney ringed in EMTs and mobile life support equipment, carrying a single patient who seems to be unconscious and severely wounded, no more than teenaged despite his height.
[End Sidebar]
Jesse McCree. That was the name appended to the image file. There are several other pieces of documentation. A missing persons report, anonymously filed. An official Have You Seen This Child/at risk notification from the authorities in Gallup. A copy of his admission and treatment records from the University of New Mexico Hospital at Santa Fe, which is an impressive and dubiously legal bit of records request chicanery that I’m going to have to find out how she managed. Several more information requests, including her own request for a copy of his sealed testimony before a Federal circuit court judge, also denied.
Jesse Nathaniel McCree is an oddity. Publicly accessible records for him exist but not the sort of records you might expect. Adoption records, and there’s a birth certificate on file with the State of New Mexico, the information related to his biological parents either blank or redacted. He was apparently home schooled, except for one brief stint at public school in Gallup, via the Schools For Isolated and Distance Education, a special needs online education outfit that operates in several countries around the world, including the United States. They issued him diploma-equivalent educational certs on a nonstandard completion curve -- he missed a whole year and a half of school following whatever he experienced that night in Deadlock Gorge but still graduated at the highest levels of academic proficiency. He sat collegiate admission exams slightly later than average but came away with scores sufficient to earn a slot at the school of his choice: he chose the University of New Mexico, where he dual-majored in History and Anthropology with a concentration in Ethnology. Upon graduation, he pursued employment with the National Park Service and further education in the UNM Anthropology Masters program, specializing in folklore and cultural anthropology. (His Master’s thesis is available through the UNM bookstore in dead tree and ebook formats and makes for fascinating reading. I heartily recommend it.) He is pursuing his doctorate in those fields, occasionally guest lectures at UNM, and serves as the Ranger In Residence at the Los Cerrillos National Monument.
He has no social media presence to speak of and the primary means of contacting him seems to be through the NPS website’s links. I’ve used them. He turns up occasionally in tourist photos and on undergrad social media threads from UNM students that attend his lectures. I’m not entirely surprised: he is a strikingly good-looking man, tall and lean and, well, rangy, all dark hair and eyes and, listening to his drawl on recordings, I can see why he ties Freshman knickers in knots. At the same time, there’s something just a little bit off about him, something not quite right that might come across more clearly in recordings than it does in person. I can’t entirely put my finger on what it is.
He has, thus far, declined to grant an interview. If this changes, you will be the first to know. Until then, both he and Deadlock Gorge continue to guard their secrets.
-- Olivia Colomar, Paranormal New Mexico, reporting.
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Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day commemorates the start of the California Gold Rush, which began on January 24, 1848, when James Marshall discovered gold while building a saw mill for John Sutter, near what is now Coloma, California. The day has its roots in International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and was inspired by Prospectors Day, which was once held at Knott's Berry Farm each year on January 24. It also was inspired by an episode of the Simpsons with the following exchange:
Bart: That ain't been popular since aught-six, dagnabbit. Homer: Bart, what did I tell you? Bart: No talking like a grizzled 1890's prospector, consarn it.
Common examples of characters talking like grizzled prospectors in popular culture include Dallas McKennon narrating Disneyland's Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland and Big Thunder Mountain, Gabby Hayes—both drunk and sober—in many Western films, Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles, Will Ferrell as Gus Chiggins on Saturday Night Live, and Walter Huston in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Prospectors first came to the Sacramento Valley after Marshall found flakes of gold in the American River near Sutter's Mill, at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. At the time there were less than 1,000 non-native inhabitants in California. Newspapers began reporting the discovery of gold, and by August, 4,000 miners had descended on the area. The first people that came from outside of the territory came by boat, and arrived from Oregon, the Sandwich Islands—soon to be called the Hawaiian Islands, Mexico, Peru, China, and Chili.
In December 1848, President James K. Polk announced a report by Colonel Richard Mason which spoke of the abundance of gold in California; this prompted more prospectors to travel to the territory. Throughout 1849, thousands arrived, either traveling by sea or over land, and became known as '49ers. Mining towns popped up in the area, and with them came shops, saloons, and brothels. Many mining towns became lawless, and San Francisco became an important city in the territory. By the end of 1849, the non-native population had swelled to 100,000. The Gold Rush helped California gain statehood in 1850, and gold discovery peaked in the state in 1852. In all, more than 750,000 pounds of gold were extracted during the Gold Rush.
The implication of a grizzled prospector is of one who has stayed so long searching for gold that their hair has turned gray. Some prospectors refused to quit the profession and continued to live in the Western territories. So, when Bart Simpson mentioned a grizzled prospector from the 1890s, he was referring to a prospector that had stayed more than forty years after the Gold Rush happened, still trying to find gold, or other commodities such as silver, oil, radium, and uranium. Besides a gray beard, the stereotypical grizzled prospector had faded clothes, missing teeth, a pickaxe, and a mule. They had bouts of gold fever, and were suspicious of whoever came close to their claim.
How to Observe Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Celebrate the day talking like a grizzled prospector. Here are a few words prospectors commonly used, that you could use today:
Dadburn: to curse; e.g.: "Dadburned boll weevil done 'et my crop!"
Hornswoggle: to embarrass, disconcert, or confuse; e.g.: "I'll be hornswaggled!"
Consarn: the entirety of something, also a curse word.
Dumbfungled: all used up; e.g.: "This claim is dumbfungled! There's no gold left!"
Bonanza: a mine with lots of gold.
Borrasca: a mine with no gold.
Baby buggy: wheel barrow.
Muck: to dig with a shovel.
Powder monkey: a miner who used dynamite to make holes.
Johnny Newcome: a miner new to camp.
Blackjack and saw bosom: coffee and bacon.
Paydirt: land rich in gold.
Panned out: if they had found gold while sifting through dirt with a mining pan, then things had "panned out."
Flash in the pan: something shiny in pan that turned out to be nothing, or just a small piece of gold.
Stake a claim: claim a piece of land as your own as a place to search for gold, must stake the land with wooden stakes when you arrive.
The day could also be spent watching films such as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, or old Western films starring Gabby Hayes. A visit to the Sutter's Mill replica and the Gold Discovery and Visitor Center in Marshall Gold Discovery State Park could also be planned. The days' Facebook page could also be explored.
Source
#Miners Memorial by T.W. Seatle#Grande Cache#Prospector and his dog by Chuck Buchanan#Whitehorse#Yukon#Alberta#summer 2023#Canada#World’s Largest Gold Pan by Linden Welding#Quesnel#British Columbia#Skagway Centennial Statue by Chuck Buchanan#Alaska#Stampeder Statue by Peter Lucchetti#Gold Rush Mural by Lance Burton#Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day#travel#USA#NationalTalkLikeAGrizzledProspectorDay#24 January#vacation#original photography#tourist attraction#landmark#Sweden#Falun Mine#Gruvabetaren by Helge Zandén#Nevada#Carson City#Tribute to Nevada Miners by Greg Melton
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Holidays 1.24
Holidays
Belly Laugh Day
Change a Pet's Life Day
Economic Liberation Day (Togo)
Global Belly Laugh Day (at 1:24 pm local time)
Gold Rush Day
Heart to Heart Day
International Day of Education
International Mobile Phone Recycling Day
Juan Pablo Duarte Day (Dominican Republic)
"Just Do It" Day
Macintosh Computer Day
Microwave Oven Day
Minimoog Day
Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day
National Compliment Day
National Girl Child Day (India)
National Heroes Day (Cayman Islands)
National Readathon Day
Paul Pitcher Day (UK)
Sailing of Bast (Ancient Egypt)
Social Sipping and Nibbling Rehearsal Day
Square Dance Day [also 11.29]
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Tricknology Day
TV Game Show Day
Uttar Pradesh Day (India)
World Day for African and Afro-descendant Culture
Food & Drink Celebrations
Beer Can Day (a.k.a. Beer Can Appreciation Day)
Eskimo Pie Day
National Hot Cereal Day
National Lobster Thermidor Day
National Peanut Butter Day
4th Tuesday in January
National Speak Up and Succeed Day [4th Tuesday]
Independence Days
Ziua Unirii (Unification Day of the Romanian Principalities; Romania)
Feast Days
Babylas of Antioch (Christian; Saint)
Cadoc (Wales)
Ekeko Festival (God of Abundance; Bolivia) [Lasts 3 Weeks]
Exuperantius of Cingoli (Christian; Saint)
Feast of Our Lady of Peace (Roman Catholic)
Feast of Seed-Time (Feati Sementini; Ancient Rome)
Felician of Foligno (Christian; Saint)
Francis de Sales (Christian; Saint) [Journalists, Editors, Writers]
Invent a God Day (Pastafarian)
John Belushi (Hedonism; Saint)
Jools Holland (Humanism)
Klaatu Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Macedonius of Syria (Christian; Saint)
Pratulin Martyrs (Greek Catholic Church)
Sementivae begins (Ancient Roman festival honoring Ceres (Goddess of Agriculture) and Tellus (Mother Earth)
Solomon (Positivist; Saint)
Stanley the Mouse (Muppetism)
Suranus of Umbria (Christian; Saint)
Timothy, disciple of St. Paul (Christian; Saint)
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]
Premieres
Alice Foils the Pirates (Disney Cartoon; 1927)
The Courier (Film; 2020)
Danse Macabre, by Camille Saint-Saëns (Tone Poem; 1874)
The Grapes of Wrath (Film; 1940)
My Chauffeur (Film; 1986)
Pluto’s Playmate (Disney Cartoon; 1941)
Skid Row, by Skid Row (Album; 1989)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Film; 1948)
21, by Adele (Album; 2011)
Waco (TV Mini-Series; 2018)
Today’s Name Days
Franz, Thurid, Vera (Austria)
Bogoslav, Felicijan, Franjo (Croatia)
Milena (Czech Republic)
Timotheus (Denmark)
Naima, Naimi (Estonia)
Senja (Finland)
François (France)
Bernd, Franz, Thurid, Vera (Germany)
Filon, Polyxene, Polyxeni, Xene, Xeni, Zosimas (Greece)
Timót (Hungary)
Francesco (Italy)
Eglons, Krišs, Ksenija (Latvia)
Artūras, Felicija, Gaivilė, Mažvydas, Šarūnas, Vilgaudas (Lithuania)
Jarl, Joar (Norway)
Chwalibóg, Felicja, Mirogniew, Rafaela, Rafał, Tymoteusz (Poland)
Xenia (Romania)
Timotej (Slovakia)
Francisco, Paz, Xenia (Spain)
Erika (Sweden)
Roxanna, Roxoliana (Ukraine)
Oral, Orel, Tim, Timmy, Timon, Timothy, Vera, Verena (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 24 of 2023; 341 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 2 of week 4 of 2023
Celtic Tree Calendar: Luis (Rowan) [Day 3 of 28]
Chinese: Month 1 (Jia-Yin), Day 3 (Ren-Wu)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 2 Shevat 5783
Islamic: 2 Rajab II 1444
J Cal: 24 Aer; Threesday [24 of 30]
Julian: 11 January 2023
Moon: 12%: Waxing Crescent
Positivist: 24 Moses (1st Month) [Solomon]
Runic Half Month: Peorth (Womb, Dice Cup) [Day 15 of 15]
Season: Winter (Day 35 of 90)
Zodiac: Aquarius (Day 4 of 30)
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Holidays 1.24
Holidays
Belly Laugh Day
Change a Pet's Life Day
Economic Liberation Day (Togo)
Global Belly Laugh Day (at 1:24 pm local time)
Gold Rush Day
Heart to Heart Day
International Day of Education
International Mobile Phone Recycling Day
Juan Pablo Duarte Day (Dominican Republic)
"Just Do It" Day
Macintosh Computer Day
Microwave Oven Day
Minimoog Day
Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day
National Compliment Day
National Girl Child Day (India)
National Heroes Day (Cayman Islands)
National Readathon Day
Paul Pitcher Day (UK)
Sailing of Bast (Ancient Egypt)
Social Sipping and Nibbling Rehearsal Day
Square Dance Day [also 11.29]
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
Tricknology Day
TV Game Show Day
Uttar Pradesh Day (India)
World Day for African and Afro-descendant Culture
Food & Drink Celebrations
Beer Can Day (a.k.a. Beer Can Appreciation Day)
Eskimo Pie Day
National Hot Cereal Day
National Lobster Thermidor Day
National Peanut Butter Day
4th Tuesday in January
National Speak Up and Succeed Day [4th Tuesday]
Independence Days
Ziua Unirii (Unification Day of the Romanian Principalities; Romania)
Feast Days
Babylas of Antioch (Christian; Saint)
Cadoc (Wales)
Ekeko Festival (God of Abundance; Bolivia) [Lasts 3 Weeks]
Exuperantius of Cingoli (Christian; Saint)
Feast of Our Lady of Peace (Roman Catholic)
Feast of Seed-Time (Feati Sementini; Ancient Rome)
Felician of Foligno (Christian; Saint)
Francis de Sales (Christian; Saint) [Journalists, Editors, Writers]
Invent a God Day (Pastafarian)
John Belushi (Hedonism; Saint)
Jools Holland (Humanism)
Klaatu Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Macedonius of Syria (Christian; Saint)
Pratulin Martyrs (Greek Catholic Church)
Sementivae begins (Ancient Roman festival honoring Ceres (Goddess of Agriculture) and Tellus (Mother Earth)
Solomon (Positivist; Saint)
Stanley the Mouse (Muppetism)
Suranus of Umbria (Christian; Saint)
Timothy, disciple of St. Paul (Christian; Saint)
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]
Premieres
Alice Foils the Pirates (Disney Cartoon; 1927)
The Courier (Film; 2020)
Danse Macabre, by Camille Saint-Saëns (Tone Poem; 1874)
The Grapes of Wrath (Film; 1940)
My Chauffeur (Film; 1986)
Pluto’s Playmate (Disney Cartoon; 1941)
Skid Row, by Skid Row (Album; 1989)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Film; 1948)
21, by Adele (Album; 2011)
Waco (TV Mini-Series; 2018)
Today’s Name Days
Franz, Thurid, Vera (Austria)
Bogoslav, Felicijan, Franjo (Croatia)
Milena (Czech Republic)
Timotheus (Denmark)
Naima, Naimi (Estonia)
Senja (Finland)
François (France)
Bernd, Franz, Thurid, Vera (Germany)
Filon, Polyxene, Polyxeni, Xene, Xeni, Zosimas (Greece)
Timót (Hungary)
Francesco (Italy)
Eglons, Krišs, Ksenija (Latvia)
Artūras, Felicija, Gaivilė, Mažvydas, Šarūnas, Vilgaudas (Lithuania)
Jarl, Joar (Norway)
Chwalibóg, Felicja, Mirogniew, Rafaela, Rafał, Tymoteusz (Poland)
Xenia (Romania)
Timotej (Slovakia)
Francisco, Paz, Xenia (Spain)
Erika (Sweden)
Roxanna, Roxoliana (Ukraine)
Oral, Orel, Tim, Timmy, Timon, Timothy, Vera, Verena (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 24 of 2023; 341 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 2 of week 4 of 2023
Celtic Tree Calendar: Luis (Rowan) [Day 3 of 28]
Chinese: Month 1 (Jia-Yin), Day 3 (Ren-Wu)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 2 Shevat 5783
Islamic: 2 Rajab II 1444
J Cal: 24 Aer; Threesday [24 of 30]
Julian: 11 January 2023
Moon: 12%: Waxing Crescent
Positivist: 24 Moses (1st Month) [Solomon]
Runic Half Month: Peorth (Womb, Dice Cup) [Day 15 of 15]
Season: Winter (Day 35 of 90)
Zodiac: Aquarius (Day 4 of 30)
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January 24th was...
Beer Can Appreciation Day
Belly Laugh Day
Library Shelfie Day
National "Just Do It" Day
National Compliment Day
National Eskimo Pie Patent Day
National Lobster Thermidor Day
National Peanut Butter Day
Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day
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Today is Thursday, January 25th, 2018
The holidays for the day are Talk Like A Grizzled Prospector Day, National Opposite Day, and Thank Your Mentor Day
Born on this day:
Robert Burns (Writer, widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide, also the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland, he also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest) in 1759
Virginia Woolf (Writer, considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device) in 1882
Alicia Keys (Musician, has been referred to as the “Queen of R&B” by various media outlets) in 1981
Died on this day:
Al Capone (Historical figure, known by the nickname "Scarface", he was an American mobster, crime boss, and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit) in 1947 at age 48
Jonathan Larson (Playwright, noted for exploring the social issues of multiculturalism, addiction, and homophobia in his work, examples of his use of these themes are found in his works, Rent and tick, tick... BOOM!) in 1996 at age 35
Mary Tyler Moore (Actress, known for her roles in the television sitcoms The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which she starred as Mary Richards, a single woman working as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and The Dick Van Dyke Show, in which she played Laura Petrie, a former dancer turned Westchester homemaker, wife and mother) in 2017 at age 80
Please, remember to be kind to animals & check my Cat Adoption tag, reblog some kitties and help them find a home!
Have a person you want included at a future date? Send me an ask/ message and give me the info and I’ll consider it!
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