A Reader Comments On The Hartman Wells In Chimney Butte, Dunn County -- July 26, 2016

See first comment at this post. A reader reminds us of the activity at the Hartman wells in Chimney Butte, Dunn County. I will add his comments at that post.

I haven't updated the production numbers at that site yet, but if I get time, I will.

*************************************

Lake Metigoshe

Last night while driving our older granddaughter to water polo practice, I reminisced out loud about my days as a Boy Scout and camping out at Lake Metigoshe along the Canadian border. I forget exactly how we got on that subject.

I told her how we would canoe to the Canadian side of the border and then find a small "mom and pop" convenience store to visit. The favorite "find" at that convenience store: Mackintosh toffee in its trademark plaid wrapping. As far as I know, it's not (readily) available (even today) in the US. I have never understood why.

Out of curiosity I looked for Mackintosh toffee on Amazon, found it, and ordered some. It will be here tomorrow.

I was not into "philology" when I was a Boy Scout, and was never curious to look up the meaning of "Metigoshe." Of course, without the internet, it would have been a major ordeal: a trek -- a three-mile bicycle ride down to Williston's James Memorial Library -- and then to search out Metigoshe. And I doubt I would have found anything. Hard to say. Maybe. [I do remember spending countless hours there.]

Anyway, it's easy on the internet. From wiki:

The name Lake Metigoshe is derived from the Ojibwe phrase mitigoshi-waashegami-zaaga'igan meaning "clearwater lake of scrub-oaks."

Breaking that down, "zaaga'igan" means "body of water" or lake, loch, or mere. I was unable to find the rest, whether "waashegami" meant "clear" and "mitigoshi" meant "scrub-oaks" or vice versa. One would think, based on word order, "waashegami" describes "zaaga'igan."

More from wiki:

The area was also once home to the Blackfoot, Hidatsa, and Assiniboine peoples. The park was constructed in the 1930s as a part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs during the Great Depression. It was formally established and approved on February 17, 1937.

And a last bit of little trivia, only because I have such fond memories of Yorkshire, England, from the link above:

Mackintosh's Toffee is over 100 years old. John Mackintosh first opened shop in Halifax, Yorkshire England in 1890. He decided he needed a line of sweets that would be unique to his shop. At that time there was very little in the way of toffee as we know it today.

English toffee was mostly hard and brittle. American toffee was very soft, and thus came the idea to blend the two to form a unique toffee. Mackintosh's Toffee was born.

************************************ 

Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

Kate Clifford Larson

c. 2015 

It's funny how things work out. The last book I thought I would ever read would be a book on the Kennedys. And here I am, thoroughly enjoying Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, Kate Clifford Larson, c. 2015.

The first chapter opens with the birth of "Rosemary" on Friday the Thirteenth, 1918, but is predominantly about the coming-of-age years of her mother Rose Fitzgerald and to some extent, the same coming-of-age years of her father, Joseph "Joe" P. Kennedy Sr.

The 1914 marriage of Rose, the beautiful and intelligent eldest daughter of Boston's mayor, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, and his wife, Mary Josephine "Josie" Hannon, to Joe [Kennedy], the scion of a politically powerful East Boston family, had signified a strong political and economic union. It was a foundation from which the couple rapidly ascended to the pinnacle of Boston's newly established Irish social, political, and economic elite.

Side-by-side with this book I am reading portions of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History. In Part One, he has a chapter on eugenics. His chapter begins in the spring of 1920 when Emmett "Emma" Adaline  Buck was brought to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Mukherjee notes that:

"Feeblemindedness," in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify: the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a "mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months" - but imbecile and moron were more porous categories ...

Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding ... 

The word colony gave its purpose away: the place was never meant to be a hospital or an asylum. Rather, from its inception, it was designed to be a containment zone.