Weekend Steam

SpencerMcGrew posted this video of a Porter locomotive at Rollag, Minnesota on it's first run, pulling Locomotive Number 353. Mr. McGrew's notes:

IT RUNS!!! full throttle + minimum cutoff= a powerful noisy little engine

Builder: H.K. Porter
Build Date: 03/1924
Construction No.: 6854
Empty Weight: 72,000
Weight on Drivers: 72,000
Driver Diameter: 40
Tractive Effort: 16,500
Boiler Pressure: 180
Cylinders: 14x22
Fuel: Coal
Gauge: Standard

Crankin' It Up

With the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War this week, 'My Old Kentucky Home' was an easy choice for the crank-up. Next week we will play the A side of this record, which also came out of the years just prior to the Civil War.

Elsie Baker recorded this song for Victor on April 27, 1916.

What A Difference A Couple Of Decades Make

I use Google Earth on a regular basis nowadays to check out places from the air before making a real visit, and I am surprised daily by the tree plantings I stumble across that I haven't visited in many years.  This project is from 1992, and it is doing pretty well.   It has mostly white oak, swamp chestnut oak, cherrybark oak, northern red oak, and Shumard oak.  The swamp chestnut and cherrybark oaks are growing faster than anything else.

This cherrybark oak is over eight inches diameter in less than twenty years, from a seedling.  The owner sprayed glyphosate and simazine herbicides along the rows when he planted to control the grass and weeds during the first year.

Adventures In TSI

 Most TSI (Timber Stand Improvement) work is fairly straightforward and safe to perform, the most difficult part being the decisions you have to make on which trees to grow, and which ones need to be killed.  In large pole and immature sawtimber you work on wide spacings and look up at crowns constantly, checking for space around the trees you choose to help. 

You have to take out a cull occasionally, and these things bear watching.  This white oak toppled after being girdled, and I suspect that it fell while the cutter still had his saw in it.

Don't work on trees like this one if any spectators are hanging around.  The results are just too unpredictable.  If you are going to girdle a tree with just a thin shell, be sure to start on the compressed side, and finish on the tensioned side of the tree.  Don't kill a tree like this one in a high traffic area; it will go from being a hazard, to an extreme hazard.

 This tree had multiple fire scars, was hollow all the way up the trunk, and it also had fence wire imbedded in it, so even without the fire scars it would have been worthless.

Here is a look inside the hollow stump.  Old wire never goes away in a tree.  I get calls once in a while about putting nails in shade trees to keep them from fruiting, (It does not work!) and the caller always gets a lesson from me about not putting metal into trees.  It will be a problem for someone years in the future.

Ghosts In Daylight

The header at the top of this page is made up of family photos; the first three are Civil War veterans.  We have done lots of research over the years about these men, and have managed to find quite a bit of interesting information, and have visited many of the places they fought during the 1860's.  On the left is William Tweed.  He was born near Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and moved to Oquawka, Illinois with his family when he was just a kid.  His father Abraham died when he was just ten years old, and William didn't like the treatment he and his siblings received from Abraham's brother who took them in, so William got on a horse and rode back to Fort Wayne to live with an aunt.  He rode back to Illinois two years later and took over the affairs of raising his siblings.  He signed up to go fight in the war after going to a rally, and you have to wonder what his pregnant wife had to say about being left to manage a farm all by herself.  He and his wife are buried at Bassett, Nebraska.

Second on the header is Jesse Morgan, who was born near Makanda, Illinois. He served in the Sixty-Second Illinois Infantry, and he was very bitter about his time in the military. He is buried in Ventura, California with his second wife. His first wife (my ancestor) is buried at Makanda.


The third fellow is George Hunt, who was born in Blount County, Tennessee, and moved to Crawfordsville, Iowa with his wife, Sarah Alexandar just before the war. He enlisted in the Twenty-Fifth Iowa Infantry, and fought through most of the Civil War, missing out on the Grand Review because of an infection in one leg. That infection killed him in 1870, and he is buried at an unknown location in Montgomery County, Kansas.


Matthew H. Jamison (Not an ancestor) was the lieutenant over Company E, Tenth Regiment, Illinois Infantry; William Tweed's regiment.  Mr. Jamison's book, Recollections of Pioneer and Army Life was a major source of personal information for us, and this book is one that I will be quoting from over the next few years as we follow the timeline of the war.

 The Introducton from Mr. Jamison's book:

     "Gone are they all!  The tints of youth; the tumult of battle; the old and worn and tattered banners; the neighing horses; the broken caissons; the prisoners of war; the Mississippi flotilla; the defiant rebel yell on the midnight departure from Corinth; Bragg's broken columns on the shifting field of Mission Ridge; the bloody repulse of Kenesaw and Marietta; the discomfiture of Hood before Atlanta; the exultant March to the Sea; the advance in storm and flood through the Carolinas; the bloody hour before Bentonville; the Surrender of Johnson at Raleigh; and the pageant on Pennsylvania Avenue following the funeral car of President Lincoln.  Gone are they all; and I too am soon gone!  In the fleeting moment the aging veteran, hat in hand, waves a  salute to the oncoming youth, bearing full high advanced the colors of his country to undreamed-of triumphs: for this is our warfare; no battle, no crown of Victory!

M. H. J.

October1, 1911.

Battle Mountain Sanitarium,

Hot Springs, South Dakota" 

Ruger Shows Us How To Do Cowboy Fast Draw!

Some days the blogging is easy! I had the previous post in the hopper, and Ruger put up a new video about Cowboy Fast Draw, so TBS readers get two fast draw posts in a row. The good folks at Ruger must have been reading my mind. Ruger is one of the sponsors of the Gun Blogger Rendezvous.

Cowboy Fast Draw At The Gun Blogger Rendezvous

I saw over on Mr. Completely's blog that he had a Cowboy Fast Draw match at his local club, the Holmes Harbor Rod and Gun Club. Mr. C has included Cowboy Fast Draw in the last two Gun Blogger Rendezvous, and I expect it will be part of the fun again this year. While he is best known for shooting steel with his home built .22 High Standard, Mr. Completely is a well rounded shooter, and he showed us how to shoot the Drag Race stage with Bea's .45 Ruger Blackhawk.(Above) He's pretty good on fast draw, too, as you will see in the second video below.

The first video is one I have run before, with Quick Cal giving the Gun Bloggers a lesson in the mechanics of performing a quick draw with a single action revolver.



The second video is a new one, and it shows some of the action during our little contest. The ammo for these fast draw contests consists of brass cases machined to accept a shotgun primer, and a wax bullet pressed into the case mouth. Ear and eye protection must be worn by all present; shotgun primers are loud, and the wax bullets can bounce occasionally.



Gun Blogger Rendezvous VI is coming up in September, and it's important to remember that you do not have to be a blogger to attend. If you follow the blogs, like to shoot, want to learn a little bit about shooting, or maybe just meet some of the bloggers you read, you should sign up and go to Reno! Click here to go to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous site, and register with Mr. Completely.

The Pay Doesn't Look Too Good, but,

Back To The Old Grind!

Not My Victrola

Atticus70 shares a great record by the Casa Loma Orchestra, recorded in December of 1930.

Weekend Steam

The engine room of the Steamboat Natchez on the Mississippi River. New Orleans, Louisiana. Wednesday, January 2, 2008. By Kevinsyoza.

And another look at the Natchez by Steamboatsorg.