The Ojibwa Women: 1763

Chapter 2 (Really speeding along here!)

During a baggataway game held just outside the walls of Fort Michilimackinac, near Lake Michigan, Ojibwa women played a crucial role. The fort’s gates were open, as it was also a trading post, and most of the people conducting the trade were Ojibwa women. During the baggataway game, an Ojibwa lobbed a ball inside the fort and went after it in hot pursuit, accompanied by his brethren. Once inside, their women “drew tomahawks, knives, and other weapons from under their blankets and handed them to their brothers and husbands, who set upon the garrison. The warriors’ victory was as complete as the soldiers’ surprise.”

Result: “16 redcoats and one trader” killed on the spot.

The fort’s previous (French) commander, Lt. Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade, had hung around after the fort’s handover to the British. This was a stroke of luck, because Langlade, who had an Ottawa mother and a French father, was able to persuade the Ojibwa to spare the life of the fort’s British commander, who instead was shipped 500 miles down the Great Lakes to a French outpost in Montreal.

A nearby British fort, Fort Detroit, was spared only because the fort’s British commander had been warned of an impending assault by his “Native American lover.”

So, eyebrows really rising here at the notion that mixed race was common in the colonies by the 18th century (Exhibit A: Lt. Langlade) and were moreover holding positions in the French army. Also: the “Native American lover” of the British commander (probably produced progeny?)

So much fun to speculate!

Stay tuned.

Edward Braddock, 1755: Battle of the Monongahela

Whiplash! Self blazed through Ann Cleeves’ Cold Earth (Four stars) this afternoon and is starting a new read. Goodbye Shetlands, hello pre-revolutionary America.

Edward Braddock, Commander of the British Forces in North America — to think self has reached her great age without knowing anything about him, until half an hour ago, when she began Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, by Woody Holton. Braddock is a man of much perspicacity, having agreed to have 23-year-old George Washington — who, despite his youth was an experienced woodsman — as an unpaid member of his “personal staff.” He also used eight Iroquois (one of whom was Scarouady, the Iroquois “Half King” of the Ohio Valley), as guides.

Fascinating stuff!

Braddock’s army of 1,400 collides “unexpectedly” with the French north of the Monongahela River, and “in short order fifteen of the eighteen officers in the British vanguard became casualties.” The British were not at all good at forest fighting (which this encounter was) and there was a very chaotic scene: “native warriors scalped wounded captives, assailants’ screams mingled with those of their victims, terrifying the remaining redcoats.”

p. 10:

• All the while, Braddock rode furiously among them, constantly exposing himself to enemy fire as he tried to gather platoons into companies. Four or five horses were successively shot from under him.

He was only felled three hours later, when a musket ball threw him from his horse. It took him four days to die of his wounds.

The British lost a third of their men (approx. 500), the French lost 28 soldiers and 11 “natives.”

Stay tuned.

Monticello Plantation, Sentence of the Day

“At the time of my visit, of the eighty-nine tour guides, only four of them were Black, and three of the four were a part of the incoming class that had yet to officially begin their jobs.” (How the Word Is Passed, p. 39)

The above is not the Sentence of the Day. This one is:

• “Many African-American interpreters who have worked here . . . it’s been challenging, because people say some pretty insensitive and unbelievable things.”

Sentence of the Day, Fourth Sunday of 2022

• The splitting of families was not peripheral to the practice of slavery; it was central. — Chapter 2 (“Monticello Plantation”), p. 15

Tour, Monticello

The decision to use “human” as the primary descriptor rather than “slave” was a small yet intentional move. He desvribed the games the children played on warm Sunday afternoons (the only day of the week they did not have to work), the songs enslaved workers sang late into the evenings, the celebrations they took part in when someone was married. What reverberated throughout was the humanity of the enslaved people — their unceasing desire to live a full life, one that would not be defined simply by their forced labor.

How the Word Is Passed, p. 13

How the Word Is Passed: Prologue

There are six words in the title of this post: She can link to the Six-Word Saturday Challenge, hosted by Travel with Intent. YAY!

After years of Black people being killed by police and having their deaths broadcast in videos streamed across the world, after a white supremacist went into a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine people as they prayed, after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protect a Confederate statue and reclaim a history born of a lie, after George Floyd was killed by a police officer’s knee on his neck, cities across the country have begun to more fully reckon with the history that made such moments possible — a history that many had previously been unwilling to acknowledge.

How the Word Is Passed, pp. 4 -5

The Diary of Brig. Arthur Varley

Arthur Varley, a commander of the 22nd Australian Infantry Brigade, was one of those unfortunates who, almost at the tail end of the war, was loaded on a prison transport ship to be taken who-knows-where, a ship that was, tragically, sunk by a US submarine (The Japanese refused to mark their prisoner transport ships)

Fortunately, he had kept a meticulous diary during his internment and his forced labor on the Burma-Siam railroad and buried it near his camp in Thanbyuzayat, its whereaouts known only to a trusted few. After the war, during the War Crimes trials of the officers who ran the POW camps in Burma, the diary was located and the words of the “welcome speeches” given by certain officers, and in particular the words and actions of a sadistic officer who headed 80-kilo, 100-kilo, 105-kilo and 114-kilo camps, Lt. Colonel Yoshitada Nagatomo, came back to haunt them. Nagatomo, was hung in the jail in Chiangi, the same jail where so many POWS had been kept in isolation and tortured, on Sept. 16, 1947.

Jane Harris, Wife of Lanson

For three years, friends and family of Jane Harris had urged her to accept the inevitable: that her husband had gone down with his ship. She tuned them all out. Hospitalized for a burst appendix, she insisted that the doctors continue to sedate her because the hospital was the first real sleep she had had for years. Then, she insisted they keep her sedated, for three more weeks.

A U.S. newspaper had printed an article “describing how two unnamed USS Houston men had escaped from a Thai prison camp.” Then she received “a Navy Department telegram saying that her husband was safe in American hands.”

She told an interviewer, “I put two and two together with the telegram I got, and I said, well one of those has got to be Lans.”

Sentence of the Day: Christmas Eve, 2021

Gus Forman, imprisoned in Changi, Singapore, where he had served in isolation for three months of what he was told was a six-year sentence (for plotting to escape), suddenly saw the door to his cell open. Sunlight flooded in, blinding him. He was ushered out and reunited with two other survivors of the USS Houston: Capt. Ike Parker and Major Windy Rogers.

They cringed at each other’s stench.

Ship of Ghosts, p. 405

July 25, 1945

In July 1945, two USS Houston survivors, James Huffman and Lanson Harris, managed to escape from their prison camp. Aided by Thai villagers, they were led to a secret camp, hidden deep in the Thai jungle, run by a Major Eben Bartlett. Bartlett, it turned out, was part of OSS, a covert US operation that had established camps all over Southeast Asia. He was amazed when Huffman and Harris told him they were survivors of the USS Houston, and that approximately 300 survivors had been taken prisoner. They also had the names of all the men they knew who had died in captivity, about sixty-odd names.

On July 25, 1945, the world heard for the first time about the fate of the survivors from the sinking, over three years before. By then, Harold Rooks, the eldest son of the USS Houston’s captain, who had been a junior at Harvard when his father’s ship was sunk, had enlisted and was headed for the Pacific War as the plotting officer for the USS San Jacinto.

On July 29, Bartlett used a portable transmitter to begin transmitting the roster of names to his U.S. superiors. The roster of “lost names” filled his “outgoing Morse bandwidth for nearly a week. It was not until August 5 that Major Bartlett’s radioman hand-keyed the last of the dots and dashes representing the 301 names on the list. Two days later, he started sending a shorter list: the name of sixty three of the sixty-seven Houston men who had met their end as prisoners of war.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.