First Thanksgiving Feast Had Turkey but No Stuffing, No Pie, No Women

This blog entry was originally posted on November 20, 2015.

The Pilgrims started their first colony in Plymouth, MA, in 1620. They endured a year of near starvation but somehow built homes, storage areas and even a church. During the second year, their farms provided a bountiful harvest, mostly due to the help and advice from the local Native Americans.

In November, 1621, the pioneers, in what would become known as the American Colonies, celebrated their bountiful harvest before the cold, fall season set in. Their impromptu celebration set the precedent for our annual celebration of Thanksgiving.

About 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians got together some time that November. The exact date is unknown. A strict religious group, the Pilgrims believed that a thanksgiving was a gathering that included prayers and worship. But even then, the food played a major role in their celebration.

The first Thanksgiving lasted about three days. Their guests, the Wampanoag Indians, slept outside when the Pilgrims went into their homes to rest after each day of eating and celebrating. The women dutifully cooked and served the food to the celebrants, but the female Pilgrims were prohibited from joining the male partygoers who exchanged gifts and played games.

The women boiled vegetables, roasted meats and baked bread in their ovens. A delicious smell probably drifted over the primitive encampment as the women carried the food among the party goers. The women served the men and darted back to their open fires to continue their cooking chores. For many of the women, it was the first time they made close contact with Indians. Some of them were fascinated with being near a group of people foreign to them. Others were afraid to interact with the Indians. We can speculate that the women probably talked among themselves and decided that the hard work they had to do would stop them from inviting Thanksgiving guests the next year.

Nothing was recorded about the food that was consumed during the first Thanksgiving. But historians can surmise what the menu might have been by knowing what food sources were available to the settlers. Researchers often conclude that turkey, our staple on Thanksgiving tables, was not part of the meal the Pilgrims had. However, wild turkey was plentiful in Massachusetts in the 1600s. The Pilgrims and Indians undoubtedly ate turkey as part of the feast. Turkeys, roasted over open fires, weren’t stuffed with spices and bread crumbs back then. With turkey, they also ate duck and other migrating fowl.

Pies, fruit pies as we know them, weren’t part of the staples the Pilgrims ate. The pie they knew in England was typically a meat pie and similar to what we call today a pot pie. It would have been too complicated for the Pilgrims to bake. Pumpkins grew wild, but they weren’t part of the Pilgrims’ food group, thus eliminating pumpkin pie from the menu. Wild duck was plentiful and a popular food. They also ate roots, squash, carrots, peas and corn. The Pilgrims grew all these vegetables with the knowledge they learned from the Wampanoags. Migrating fowl of several types were eaten at the feast. Staples such as walnuts and chestnuts came from the forest. Fresh corn wasn’t available in the cold autumn. Only dried corn was possible to be used on the Thanksgiving menu. The Wampanoags probably provided a favorite of theirs called sobaheg. It’s a stewed mix of dried corn, roots, beans, squash and chunks of meat. Cranberries were available, but only in their natural form. Cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes weren’t invented yet. The friendly Indians probably provided several deer to the original feast. Venison was readily available. It was a favorite food for the locals and the Pilgrims and an important source of protein in their agrarian diets.

President Abraham Lincoln made the first attempt to make Thanksgiving a holiday. He proclaimed it a national day of celebration in 1861. Lincoln hoped that the holiday would help unify the country at the beginning of the Civil War. The 16^th president ordered government offices closed on the fourth Thursday of November to celebrate Thanksgiving. On October 3, 1863, the holiday became an official national observance.

In 1939, politics motivated President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move the holiday to the third Thursday of November to encourage citizens to begin their Christmas shopping one week earlier. The country was ending its worst economic decade. Roosevelt proclaimed the date change to help strengthen the weak economy.

On December 26, 1941, just 19 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that pushed the United States into World War II, the U.S. Congress moved Thanksgiving to its permanent place on the fourth Thursday of November. That change to the original date worked to calm a very nervous population that was facing participation in a world-wide conflict.

Thanksgiving often is considered the favorite national holiday. It doesn’t bring the pressure of buying gifts to exchange with family and friends but focuses on time spent with family. Today, turkey is the main course for most of Thanksgiving meals in the United States. According to a CNN poll, 46 million turkeys will be baked, grilled or fried this month.

Washington’s Monument Design Changed from Grandiose to Simple Style

Congress approved a design and money in 1845 to build a monument to George Washington. The monument would be placed in a prestigious part of the U.S. Capitol to honor the commander of the Continental Army that defeated King James III’s superior British force during the Revolutionary War. In 1783, Washington was elected the country’s first president.

Nine years after Congress approved the building of the Washington Monument, construction stopped when money for the tribute ran out. After an extremely long delay, work resumed on a redesigned, simpler structure 25 years later in 1879.

George Washington and Robert Mills

Architect Robert Mills began the initial construction of a 600-foot obelisk that would be surrounded by a ring of 30 Romanesque columns. The base of the structure would resemble a pantheon or ancient temple-like building.

An obelisk is a tall, four-sided monument that tapers to a pyramid shape on top. Ancient Egyptians used the obelisk or spire to honor kings and military heroes. The idea of using obelisks as tributes spread to ancient Greek and Roman societies.  

Mills planned to carve a huge statue of Washington driving a horse-drawn chariot that would be housed inside the temple-like base. The overall design was very grandiose and extremely ornate.

The decades of delays after initial funding stopped included the country’s four-year Civil War that came and went. The war years dominated the country’s expenses, making the monument a low priority as it languished in its unfinished state. The long delay that showed no progress on the project encouraged criticisms from citizens and from at least one national celebrity.

Samuel Clemmons visited the abandoned construction site in 1868. Clemmons (a.k.a. Mark Twain) called the partly built tower an “ungainly old chimney.” He wrote newspaper articles in which he demanded that the monument should be completed or torn down. Work finally resumed in 1879 after Congress, still recovering from the financial drain of the U.S. Civil War, provided the funds needed to complete the monument.

Congressional members decided to skip the ornate temple and statue of Washington. The nation’s law makers declared that the architect’s plans to carve a large image of Washington driving a horse and chariot could be interpreted as representing a Roman emperor. Instead, people in control of financing the monument concentrated on the obelisk without any statures. That made the monument an understated and elegant tribute to the first president.

Mills argued that the redesigned obelisk looked, in his words, like a large “stalk of asparagus.” Against Mill’s objections, the Washington Monument was completed in a much simpler form. The obelisk was capped in 1884. At 555 feet, five and 1/8th inches, it became the tallest structure in the world.

Cost of the 40-year project that began 1848 to its official opening in October 1888 was slightly more than $1.4 million. That’s $3.5 hundred million in today’s money. The construction used more than 36,000 granite and marble blocks.

Approximately 10,000 marble blocks are visible on the outside of the obelisk. The final marble blocks came from a different stone quarry that yielded darker stones. That’s why the monument shows two shades of blocks; lighter colors are in the lower half and darker marble is visible in the top half of the spire.             

Unfinished Faces on Mt. Rushmore Will Last Many Millennia

Carving the likenesses of four U.S. presidents into the granite mountain of Mt. Rushmore began in 1927. The 60-foot faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were carved into the granite mountain to attract tourists to the scenic Black Hills of South Dakota.

After 14 years of delays and restarts on the massive project, the Mt. Rushmore carving was dedicated in its uncompleted condition on October 31, 1941. Interest in raising money to finish the massive carving stopped when the United States joined World War II five weeks later.  

Original plans showed that each president’s image would be carved from head to waist. The stone carvers stopped working after completing most details of the faces of the four presidents.  A carved outline of the shoulders and chest for the Washington figure is visible on the mountain. The faces of the four presidents are remarkably accurate in their details, but Lincoln’s likeness has extra stone above his head, looking somewhat like a helmet. And Lincoln’s head has no left ear.

The actual productive work time was about eight years. Delays came repeatedly, and work stopped and later restarted when money to pay the hundreds of workers kept running out. Project officials traveled outside South Dakota to raise money to keep the work going. The delays extended the project by approximately six years.

One major setback occurred during the first part of construction. The head of Jefferson was originally set to be on the left side of Washington. After 18 months of work, the architects decided that the granite on that part of the mountain was poor quality and would not support Jefferson’s figure. The work of a year and a half was blasted away, and Jefferson’s likeness was moved to the right of Washington.

Doane Robinson was the brainchild of the project. He was South Dakota’s official historian. Robinson worked to promote tourism for the state, and he wanted to develop South Dakota’s Black Hills mountain range into a vacation spot. He thought that the Black Hills would draw visitors from all over the world to experience camping and hiking in the dense pine forests. He believed that a spectacular, one-of-a-kind attraction was needed to bring visitors to his state.

Robinson visited a Civil War memorial that was being carved into a cliff face on a huge piece of granite in Georgia during the early 1920s. He was inspired by the project in Stone Mountain, GA, and thought carvings of numerous American heroes could be cut into granite spires that appeared throughout forests of the Black Hills.

Robinson contacted Gutzon Borgham, the sculptor in charge of carving the Civil War memorial. The two men met in 1924, and Borgham immediately agreed to create a sculpture on the scale of the Georgia monument. Borgham had serious disagreements with members of the Georgia commission in charge of that state’s Civil War memorial. And he welcomed the opportunity to leave the Georgia project.

Borgham had already carved the outlines of the Confederate Army figures into the Georgia Mountain. But state officials didn’t like the looks or the positioning of the southern military figures. Two years later, Borgham resigned from the Georgia project and started working on Mt. Rushmore. His initial Civil War design was drilled off Stone Mountain, and a new rendering was carved several feet higher on Georgia’s granite mountain.

The South Dakota delays and disagreements began immediately as Robinson and Borgham argued about which heroes they wanted to depict and the location in the Black Hills. Robinson originally planned to place the carved faces of many American heroes and pioneers onto several granite towers located miles away from Mt. Rushmore.

Borgham insisted on limiting the subjects to four U.S. presidents. In 1927, the chief architect/sculptor began carving on the southeastern, flat face of the mountain called Rushmore. Borgham said the location allowed the rising sun to illuminate the carvings.

Visitors during the first years of the massive Mr. Rushmore project heard explosions and no drilling or carving noises from the granite surface. The workforce used dynamite to clear 90% of the rock before detailed carving of the faces began. After blasting away tons of rock, work crews used pneumatic tools to drill close rows of holes into the granite. Called honeycombing, the holes let the skilled carvers chip away the granite with hand tools.

More than 400 people worked in specialized teams. One group of men on the top of the mountain hand cranked individuals up and down the 500 foot cliff in bosun chairs. The chairs weren’t more than small boards that were suspended by 3/8^th inch steel cables, allowing the workers freedom of movement. Men were lowered and raised hundreds of times throughout the work days, depending on weather conditions. Working several hundred feet off the ground with dynamite and precarious equipment could have resulted in several fatal accidents. Surprising, no one died while working on the monument.

Explosive experts were the first laborers to dominate the cliff face. A basic outline of each head was revealed during the first years of blasting tons of rock off the mountain. Men carrying drills created the honeycomb features of the faces. Skilled rock carvers came next to accomplish the tedious work of chipping away the rock with hand tools and revealing the rough features of each president.

Skilled carvers then polished the facial features, leaving the four faces with smooth surfaces. A preservative containing silicone and granite powder covers the faces and helps slow the natural erosion without affecting the natural color of the rock.

Studies done by geologists indicate the monument could bring in visitors for a very long time. Erosion will fade the presidents’ faces in about 500,000 years. And the inevitable wearing away of the rock will make the faces unrecognizable after the next 2.5 million years.

Funding for the massive project came from government money and public contributions. A grant of $250,000 came from the U.S. Congress. That created the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial Commission that controlled the money used in the project. Many of the delays during the total 14 years taken to build Mt. Rushmore came after work was stopped while Borgham traveled across the country seeking contributions.

The Memorial Commission reported $989,992.32 was used to construct the monument up to its dedication in 1941. How the commission kept such accurate records down to the last thirty-two cents is incredible. Money from visitors and South Dakota taxes keep the monument open today.

Robinson’s vision to create something to attract visitors to South Dakota became a reality. The state visitor’s bureau reports that more than 3 million tourists visit Mt. Rushmore each year.     

International Space Station Provides New Feelings of Détente

The International Space Station (ISS) circles the globe 15.54 times every 24 hours with a crew of six astronauts. It’s a huge satellite that races around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. The international scientists who make up the crew travel in what’s called a low orbit that averages an altitude of 248 miles.

Three American and three Russian astronauts left Earth for the ISS in 2000 to become the first rotating group of scientists to live inside the ISS. The largest structure ever put into space, the ISS covers an area larger than a football field, including the end zones. It’s big enough to be seen at night with the naked eye; it resembles a streaking star as it crosses different parts of the globe. If it were on earth, the massive structure would weigh 400 tons.

The main assembly started in 1998 and went on two years; improvements have continued for the past 19 years. American shuttles and Russian rockets transported pressured modules, external trusses and solar arrays that were assembled in space like a giant erector set. The international mix of scientists who comprise the changing crews of the ISS demonstrate co-operation and trust in working together.

American and Russian governments paid the bulk of the costs to assemble and begin operation of the ISS. The European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency contribute money to help pay the $100 billion plus dollars spent so far to keep the ISS floating above Earth.

While the two superpowers distrust each other on a political platform, goodwill feelings are strong between Russia and the U.S. concerning the ISS. Trust and co-operation between the U.S. and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) was at a high water mark in the late 1960’s into most of the 1970’s. That time of mutual trust and co-operation became known as Détente (dey-tahnt). That’s French and means a relaxing of tension, especially between nations, by negotiations and agreement.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States co-existed in a tumultuous time called the Cold War. Both countries competed in manufacturing military buildup including nuclear weapons. Tensions came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. It was a dangerous time when the U.S. came close to war with the Soviets.

Détente became a popular idea as leaders and citizens of the two countries realized that the stockpiling of weapons that could destroy Earth several times over was useless and extremely expensive. Efforts to put Americans and Soviets into space helped to overshadow the arms race.

The word Détente slowly left the lexicon of the two countries by the time the Berlin Wall was knocked down in November 1989. That’s when the Soviet Union and communism itself started coming apart.

Scientists who make up the crew of the ISS spend about six months in the satellite before a new crew of astronauts replaces them. The ISS provides a microgravity laboratory where crew members conduct experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and other fields. The ISS and future space stations provide excellent opportunities to monitor weather patterns on Earth. Manned exploration to other planets such as Mars would also by greatly helped by such platforms as the ISS.

The ISS is the ninth successful, inhabited space station. Extended funding for the ISS project was approved in March 2017 by both the U.S. and Russia to keep it working through 2024. The replacement for the ISS will be developed and built during the next eight years in Russia by the Roscosmos agency. Roscosmos is the Russian equivalent to America’s NASA.

The commitment to keep funding the ISS for the next seven years gives the two superpowers a chance to keep Détente working in space and maybe, by example, make it spread among all nations.

Great American Eclipse Coming August 21st

Millions of Americans will look overhead this month as a total solar eclipse crosses the United States from coast to coast. People in all the contiguous states will see at least a partial eclipse while a narrow band of 14 states will get a full view of the Moon moving between the Earth and Sun.

The eclipse will begin on the Oregon coast as a partial eclipse at 9:06 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, August 21st. It will end later as a partial eclipse along the South Carolina coast at 4:06 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time.

The Moon’s shadow will block the sunlight for two minutes and 40 seconds, turning day into darkness as the Moon aligns between the Earth and Sun. The air will feel cooler, as much as 10 degrees. Tagged the Great American Eclipse, the entire journey of the Moon’s shadow from the west coast to the east coast will take just 90 minutes.

Scientists will study the eclipse from numerous locations along the narrow band of cities. The next total eclipse that will pass across the U.S. will be in 2024. The last one occurred 99 years ago.

NASA scientists will get the closest look at the eclipse. Several of them will board a specially built Golfstream V jet from Tennessee to record the Moon’s shadow. The astrophysicists will get a very close but a very brief view of the corona. That’s the fuzzy halo that appears around the edges of the Sun when it’s completely covered by the Moon’s shadow.

The corona is what the scientists most want to study. When the Moon shades the brightness of the Sun and the corona is visible, scientists can study the escaping gases that shoot out into space for millions of miles. The corona is visible and safe to watch even to the unaided eye during the brief, total eclipse.

Thousands of photographs will be taken from the ground and from various airplanes in addition to the NASA group flight. The full eclipse takes less than five minutes each time it occurs over and over as the Moon crosses the U.S., so recording the eclipse from several cities will help with the research. 

The Moon will be moving at one and one half times the speed of sound as it crosses the U.S. That’s too fast for the special Golfstream jet to provide more than that one, quick view.

Throughout history, solar eclipses caused fear that resulted in myths and superstitions. Ancient cultures came up with various reasons to understand why the Sun temporarily vanished from the sky. People of ancient China believed that the Sun disappeared because it was eaten by a giant dragon. In fact, the Chinese word for eclipse is shi, which means “to eat.” In Vietnam, people believed a giant frog devoured the Sun. And Norse cultures blamed hungry wolves. Ancient Greeks believed a solar eclipse was a sign from angry gods who were signaling the beginning of pending disasters and destruction on the world.

Irrational fears of solar eclipses exist today. Many cultures around the world see eclipses as evil omens that bring death and destruction. Any such superstitions have no evidence of actually affecting human behavior. Scientists do, however, emphasize that anyone watching a solar eclipse must protect their eyes.

Use eye protection whenever you look at the Sun. The only safe time to watch a total eclipse is during the brief time the Moon’s shadow completely covers the Sun. Otherwise, use specially designed safety glasses that are available from several websites. But the only completely safe way to protect your eyes from sun damage is not to look directly at the sun.

Go outside if you are lucky enough to be in an area where the total or close to total eclipse occurs. The temperature will drop as daylight gives way to partial darkness. And you can watch it in detail on television broadcasts that can show the many photographs and recordings astrophysicists will produce with telescopes and from airplanes.

Oldest Known Animal Lived More Than Five Centuries

Two scientists from Bangor University in North Wales found the world’s oldest known living animal, a 507-year-old clam, when they harvested it from the bottom of the Icelandic Ocean in 2006. The remarkable clam was among 200 specimens the scientists scooped from the icy bottom of the ocean to use in researching climate changes over the past 1,000 years.

They named the bivalve Ming the Clam after they determined it was born in 1499 A.D. That was near the middle of the Ming Dynasty that ruled China until 1644. 

After studying the ancient clam, marine geologists Paul Butler and James Scourse announced to the scientific world that they found the world’s oldest known animal. The marine scientists and administrative members for the university in the United Kingdom were criticized for killing the oldest known animal. The marine geologists routinely froze clams they harvested and took them to their lab in the university so they could examine the clams as part of a study about climate changes during the last 1,000 years.

At first inspection, the two researchers found the specimen they named Ming had growth rings indicating that clam was 405 years old. After studying the old clam for a year, they found more growth rings and changed the estimated age to 507 years old. Much like the growth rings found in a tree, a clam grows one ring a year as it matures.   

Butler wrote an article for “Science Nordic” magazine in which he suggested that other clams older than Ming might be found. “Thousands of ocean quahogs are caught commercially every year,” Butler wrote. “So it is entirely likely that some fishermen may have caught quahogs that are as old or even older than the one we caught.”

The Pando Forest

The quahog is the most popular clam used in making chowder. Fishermen bring up thousands of clams from the cold Icelandic Ocean bottom every time their specialized trawlers harvest the bivalves.  Therefore, a clam even older than Ming could make its way into the chowder of an unsuspecting seafood eater.

While Ming holds the record for the oldest animal known, other living earth organisms continue to exist for more than thousands of years. A 106-acre colony of aspen trees in Utah is at least 80,000 years old; some estimates put that age well past 100,000 years. Scientists call the forest Pando. Each tree is a clone (identical duplicate) of the other hundreds of trees in the spectacular forest. All the trees grow from a single, huge, underground root system, making that forest the oldest known living organism on the planet.

The shells for Ming the Clam stay in the research lab inside the North Wales university. No clams even close to the age of Ming have been found yet. Since clam chowder is a popular dish the odds another ancient living animal clam will equal to the 507 years of Ming is anybody’s guess.

Star Sirius Inspired Naming Dog Days of Summer

A spring holiday that nudges the start of summer, the recent Memorial Day celebration reminds people that the hottest part of the year is coming soon. The months of July and August bring the uncomfortable, humid weather that many people call the “dog days of summer.”

The phrase “dog days” conjures images of yard mongrels seeking relief in shade and water from summer’s steamy heat. However, it’s the star constellation Canis Major that inspired the name.

Canis Major is a group of stars Greek astronomers named in 700 BC. The constellation represents the dog owned by Orion who appears in the nighttime sky in his own group of stars. Orion is the mighty hunter of Greek and Roman mythology.

The bright star Sirius, the nose of the dog constellation, rises and falls with the sun during July and August in the Western Hemisphere. During summer, Sirius is the brightest object in the sky next to the sun. Ancients believed Sirius, called the Dog Star, added to the summertime heat. That’s how the dog days description began.

A third constellation called Lepus, the rabbit, shares the nighttime sky with Orion and Canis Major. The Dog Star chases Lepus, according to Greek and Roman mythologies. Orion is in the sky with his dog that’s chasing a rabbit, composing a nighttime story in the stars.

Recognizing star constellations requires a stretch in our imaginations. Typically, one major part of a star cluster inspires an imaginary figure. Orion, for example, is recognized by three stars that make up the figure’s belt. The rest of the image of Orion can be described as vague at best. The same is true of Canis Major that has Sirius at the tip of the dog’s nose. The rest of the dog’s figure is difficult to accept.

Sirius Satellite Radio company hosts a play on words for this constellation using a dog as part of their logo! 

Astrology is an old belief that our futures’ can be predicted from star formations. Recognizing the figures in constellations can be interesting and fun. Entertainment is the best reason to view the nighttime skies.