People in the pioneer days died of all kinds of crazy things...

No OP. Cities were filthy and disease ridden.

But at least they were civilized and had schools and hospitals, r1 and they wouldn't freeze or starve.

We wouldn't have more wilderness, the loggers destroyed them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

We'd have more wetlands and natural grass areas instead of small towns and farmland, R3.

Maybe they were antisocial

They could basically just go find a huge chunk of land and claim it for themselves for free. If they were white, of course. Blacks, natives, Asians would be kicked off any land that Whitey wanted.

Read "Wisconsin Death Trip". by Michael Lesy. It's an eye-opener.

No EBT cards, SNAP, Section 8, Unemployment etc etc etc it was root, hog or die.

There weren't jobs for them OP

Did you miss history class?

They could own the land by settling it, with a prospect of becoming self-sufficient if not eventually well-off.

It wasn't like they gave up living at the Gables at Beacon Hill: Condoes for Ye Discerning Folke to go live in a log cabin.

Many were recent immigrants and had no other options than hard physical labor for minimal dollars.

Though to your point, there were probably very few femme bottoms among the pioneers. (And the ones that were there were sort of like Doctor Smith in Lost In Space.)

They couldn't find anything to do in the cities, R9?

Did the menfolk sneak out into the wooded areas like today?

The femme bottoms became snooty shop clerks R10/OP

But the Industrial Revolution hadn't really happened in earnest, so for everyone else, no. It was how the US sustained large-scale immigration in those years.

The majority of population of Indians had been wiped out by waves of various diseases brought to them from European explorers. There were cleared trails, cleared fields that seemed to belong to no one. At one time, this country was settled. By Indians. Less than 10% of the original levels of Native American population survived the white men's plagues.

White settlers would not have made much progress if they had to cut down trees every 20 feet to make a trail to get a wagon though.

Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.

OK, but why go out to the middle of nowhere though? Why not settle closer to the bigger centers instead of risking their lives (and the lives of their families too)?

A gal's gotta eat.

R16 replies to R11

Now you're trolling OP

Or you're special needs.

If it's the latter, have someone read through this Wikipedia article on the Homestead Acts with you.

I would have been dead a million times over by the age of 25 because of my eyesight and stupid infection-y things.

The cities were dangerous and dirty. Workers were simply a commodity to employers; they could be worked long hours for astonishingly small pay. If they were injured, they were out of a job—and there were always job shortages because immigrants could come in and were often duped into working for less. Moreover, women and children could do many jobs and they got paid even less. Working conditions were horrendous; in addition to injuries, people died from unsanitary conditions, faulty equipment, fires, etc. TB was a big issue.

Landlords evicted you pretty darn quick after a missed rent payment. Most flats didn’t have running water or gas; coal for heating was expensive and there were no trees to chop down for fuel. Food was expensive and unwholesome. Clothing was expensive and shoddy. Poor people had no access to quality because the social mores of the time meant they would be kicked out of any “luxury” places.

Hospitals were often filthy and without antibiotics, people died there A LOT. Private hospitals were prohibitively expensive and would not accept those who could not pay. Public wards were not always a safe option.

Poor people generally left school by 8th grade (and that was considered a major accomplishment) because children’s wages were needed year-round. On a farm, many settlers took advantage of the time after harvest and before planting (girls usually went to school for more of the year than older boys because boys were needed in the fields). Hospitals were rare but available after trains; the railroads also sent doctors for special cases (Mary Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie blind sister, was attended during the illness that blinded her—meningitis—by at least three railroad doctoiand surgeons and traveled to Chicago and Milwaukee for examination by a specialist—and that family was so dirt-poor that the state paid for her college of the blind and seed wheat).

Also, because teachers were needed in these areas, a lot of churches opened teaching colleges and women had an opportunity for free college (oddly, men didn’t get this chance very often because it was thought they had plentiful opportunities for employment.

Pretty much, city or country, people wanted to be warm and fed. Growing your own crops and having access to firewood at least gave the country settlers a chance of not being indentured to landlords, employers, and shopkeepers.

I’ve recently read a few fascinating books about pioneers who became captives to Indians after watching their families get slaughtered, OP, and I’ve wondered the same thing. Many left safer options for the unknown.

Oh-and read The Jungle by Sinclair Lewis. Thet’ll Scare the 1800s city out of you.

Upton Sinclair, not Sinclair Lewis.

[quote] Hospitals were often filthy and without antibiotics, people died there A LOT. Private hospitals were prohibitively expensive and would not accept those who could not pay. Public wards were not always a safe option.

Hospitals were generally ineffective as modern medicine hadn't happened yet.

If you recall, James Garfield, who, as President of the US, had access to the best doctors available, died after being shot in 1881 because "Several of his doctors inserted their unsterilized fingers into the wound to probe for the bullet, a common practice in the 1880s. Historians agree that massive infection was a significant factor in President Garfield's demise."

And think of how much more sophisticated medicine was in the 1880s than in the 1840s

Yeah. They say Garfield would have lived if the doctors had just left him alone.

OP, people starved in the cities, too.

The large cities seemed pretty foul as well ⸺ humans packed like sardines, living in squalor in the coal-polluted streets. There was a recent thread centered around a photo of kids playing near a dead horse. I don't know- I think it's a toss-up as to which existence was more brutal and harsh.

A big increase in young women dying of heart disease. Their vegan diet?

Farming killed a lot of women in the old days.

Typhoid was a big killer, not to mention those killed by the Spanish Flu in 1918.

People should have forded the river more often

You must remember that many immigrants came to the country from Europe, where land was controlled by a few wealthy elites and that was the source of their power. So when they came to this country, and could get land for free, they jumped at the opportunity. Plus, mankind has always had a pioneering spirit. If space travel ever becomes affordable, we will see the same thing play out in space. If I could, I'd love to be a lunar pioneer.

Is Carol Ann has dysentery, why is health listed as "good," r31?

*If

[quote]OK, but why go out to the middle of nowhere though? Why not settle closer to the bigger centers instead of risking their lives (and the lives of their families too)?

The usual two reasons humans do all sorts of stupid things: money and religion.

I don't know how my ancestors did it: to come here without speaking the language, with just their cardboard suitcases. My great-grandparents came over on the boat as teenagers with nothing. I don't know how they survived, but they did. And they somehow made it to the Midwest, and found work, and had families. Life sucked for lots of people, not just a few. Sometimes, people would be recruited to head West, or enticed with special deals, like cheap land. If all you've known is a farming, life in a city must seem strange. The idea of having several acres of land to farm was very enticing.

R15 Because cities were not safe for large amounts of time. In the south, for instance, the wealthy would stay in the cities, such as Charleston during the winter months, and have their social season, then run to their plantations in the summer months to escape cholera, yellow fever, etc... If you were poor you were stuck. Also, before refrigeration your food in the city might not be fresh. Once you managed to settle the land, it was much safer to be in the country, away from large groups of people and closer to the food supply.

My great Uncle Pierre travelled out West about 1894 to be a Christian missionary to the Indians. He died in Denver about 1901 after eating poison berries and going for a swim. Aged about 23.

[quote]Is Carol Ann has dysentery, why is health listed as "good," [R31]?

If you had to work for Joan Crawford, dysentery would be a walk in the park.

OP, this is an enjoyable novel about the early (1820s, iirc) desire to head west.

Imagine Brooklyn, or Boston, or similar in 1850. Now, subtract any water spigots in your 4th floor walk-up. No air conditioning. No indoor toilet. You share one room with 6 people, at least one of whom is sick at any given time.

TB is everywhere. One in six people die from it. But there is also polio, occasionally small pox, cholera, typhus, rabies, syphilis, etc.

Then you hear about this paradise callled Oregon! OMG! My ancestoral relatives joined the crowd for the Oregon Trail. I think a lot of such people wound up populating the West when they just got tired of traveling part way and just stopped and settled.

They also wound up in Bumfuck, South Dakota because they had been flat-out lied to by the land agents working for the railroads. The agents traveled across Europe enticing the locals to move to America and homestead, and they did it by making wild claims about the quality of the land, the climate, the market for their crops, and anything else they could think of (In short, they were like today's Timeshare Salesmen). By the time they got off the train they were stuck so they made the best of it. Or died trying.

Fun Fact: the Indian Wars did not end for good until the 1920s. Less than a hundred years ago. My parents were both born befor the Indian Wars were concluded.

You can still see the wagon tracks of the Oregon Trail. We should always try to honor our ancestors, without demeaning them with current cheap political crap .Americans, for the most part, came from nothing. I know I did. Tip a hat, say a prayer, whatever you do, for the people who brought you here, for a better life. Isn't that what anyone wants for their children? Most black Americans never even had a say, and that is hard to take in. But we should always remember that.

Well, they warn't in Ireland anymore.

R21 Interesting fact, most pioneer children captured by Native Americans when given the chance to return to “civilization” chose not to and stayed with the Native Americans. Conversely, most Native American children abuducted did return to their people when given the chance.

I refer you to the Ingalls family thread.

Never underestimate the power of indigenous dick!

Without the Pioneers, we'd never have had the Pioneer Woman!

[quote]If you had to work for Joan Crawford, dysentery would be a walk in the park.

I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the squirt.

I wonder what the actual murder rate was in the Old West? You kill your spouse, bury him/her behind the barn and if anyone asks you just say that fever got them, or the mule kicked them in the head, or lightning struck-- who would have bothered to check?

I think a lot of it had to do with employers mistreating their employees so badly. No unions, a typical work week was six days and a half day off on Sunday. People worked twelve hours a day or more. Servants worked from before sunup until late into the night in some cases.

They drank huge amounts of cheap alcohol. I think it was to numb the pain from backbreaking work they had no choice but to do if they were going to survive.

Owning land meant you were your own boss. You could sit down for a minute, rest, have a glass of water or go to the bathroom if you needed to. Factory workers weren’t always allowed to go to the bathroom and they were locked in.

My grandfather worked on a small farm in the 1920’s. He plowed it with a mule. They were poor, they survived by his wife going to her father’s farm and canning fruit for the winter months. My dad said, the neighbors gossiped about how poor they were, but they didn’t know they had a cellar full of canned fruit. That was riches to them.

Right before the crash of ‘29, they moved to California and never looked back. He had a sibling that stayed on a farm and died in his thirties. His heart was worn out. My other grandmother cooked two meals a day for ten farm workers, plus three meals a day for her family of seven. In her “spare time,” she would help out picking fruit on their farm. They used an outhouse and had Saturday night baths in a tub in the kitchen with the water heated on the stove in a big pot.

But there is no doubt they lived better than city workers. They lived on a farm with clean water, grew their own livestock and crops so they knew it was clean and safe. In those days, cities had extreme air pollution from coal burning for heat, the water was full of lead and people dumped their chamber pots out a window or into a communal toilet that served a whole floor of tenement apartments. “Apartments” usually meaning one room for a family. There were rats and fleas and lice in those apartments, severe overcrowding and a lot of times people had to take turns in the beds in shifts. It was bare subsistence survival.

The fresh air on the farms, and the distance from neighbors, meant it was harder to catch diseases. Tenement apartments were festering pits of disease. You had a better chance of keeping your children alive to adulthood if you weren’t surrounded with tubercular neighbors coughing on them.

R32 for the win - most land in Europe was owned by the aristocracy. The thought of being an actual land owner, which also provided voting rights, was something completely out of reach for Europeans.

Plus, what did they know of the land out there? Many of the posters and flyers trying to get settlers to come were bullshit enticements. Once there were out there, they couldn't exactly turn around.

Lots of settlers got suckered - including buying unfertile land and getting raped with pricing on farm equipment and tools. A lot of people made a lot of money off of these poor folks. Not a lot persevered and were successful.

In America, as in Europe, most property was settled on the oldest son. It was common to have 10 or more children in a family, so figuring that half would be daughters, that would leave 5 boys, One or two at the most would inherit the farm. The rest needed to go elsewhere, either hiring themselves out as farmhands to other farms, move to a city to work as a factory worker or salesman, or try to homestead.

My father's family (actually it was a clan of about 40 relatives) left their "holler" in Appalachia (Virginia at the border of Kentucky) to homestead in the Emigrant Valley in Montana. They knew nothing about farming in the west, (no rain for months on end for one thing), but the thought of free land was enticing enough that the whole kit and kaboodle hopped on a train and came out in 1900. Mostly they lost their shirts. But many of the men found out that they were good at cowboy work, and they hired out as cowhands, went rodeoing, etc. Some married well, women who owned ranches and livestock through their families. Not many actually died of the things that would kill most of us off. A couple died of the Spanish flu in 1917-1918.

But my great-grandmother, after she drove off one of her three husbands, lived in a cabin on a mountainside near Yellowstone Park. One winter she didn't appear in the little town there, (Millwood), and people assumed she had died during the winter, but conditions were so bad no one could check on her. In the spring she came down to town, using a cane. She had broken her leg on the way to the well, set it HERSELF with a strong stick and some rope, and somehow kept herself alive with whatever provisions (I suppose a barrel of flour and some bacon), until spring.

We're a bunch of fucking wimps.......

Then you read about someone who is worried about a cat, walking across their car.

“I tell you, if wasn’t one thing, it was another”

^ But, no Kardashians. So, PARADISE???

[quote] Without the Pioneers, we'd never have had the Pioneer Woman!

We'd have to call her The Annoying Bitch.

I would’ve died of strep throat. When I was in my teens in the 1970s my parents would go to FL every February during President week & stay with my grandparents while I stayed home. I came down with a sore throat & called the dr on Thursday, saying I had a sore throat. The receptionist told me to come in on the following Tuesday evening, saying the dr was all booked up until then. So I waited. I called my married sister who agreed to take me to the dr. I stopped eating on Friday and drank sips of orange juice for 4 days because my throat hurt so bad. When I got to the dr my temperature was 104.8 and my throat was nearly closed. The dr wanted to put me in the hospital but couldn’t get in touch with my parents, who’d gone out to dinner with my grandparents. My sister was under 21. The dr gave me 2 injections of penicillin and crushed up a new medicine called Percogesic (it was acetaminophen) and had me drink it in some water through a straw. She kept me in the office for several hours until she was satisfied I could drink fluid & sent me home. She wanted me to come in the next day but I couldn’t because my sister would be working late. She had me call the next day to make sure I was feeling better and able to drink a full glass of water and swallow aspirin.

I look back on it and wonder what would’ve happened if there were no doctors around, no penicillin, no aspirin. I would’ve died. My dr was appalled at how ignorant I was about illness, but with no adult around, I really didn’t know what to do except call the dr and wait for my appointment. I hadn’t had a fever since I was about 5 years old and had measles, so I didn’t even remember taking aspirin.

It’s kind of funny because nowadays people are obsessed with their health when they’re really fine. They have so many resources online and Dr Oz, etc, as well as 2 day delivery of all kinds of OTC medicines. It’s hard to understand what life was like before all of these things.

A lot of people died from tooth infections. That would be a painful way to go.

Most people can and have survived strep throat, but it can leave serious and sometimes permanent body damage. If, for instance, it develops into rheumatic fever, it could lead to permanent damage to the heart valves. Also sometimes to the kidneys. Strep, as with a lot of other diseases, the body can survive, but it will be damaged, and the lifespan will be shortened. Same with parasites. Our ancestors probably routinely lived with giardia and other parasites. They didn't die, but they probably were always vaguely unwell with poor digestion, and died relatively young. Things like appendicitis, however......you'd be a goner. Deep puncture wounds without a tetanus shot and antibiotics - a goner. Rabies. ....a goner. Pneumonia ...probably killed half of the people who got it. Diabetes.....you'd live a short lifespan, go blind, and die. However, by far, most humans in history who died prematurely did so in infancy or early childhood. That's when humans are most vulnerable to infections then and don't have the reserves to survive, say, a week of high fever.

r61, you’re probably right. While Calvin Coolidge was in office, his 16-year-old son died from infection a week after getting a toe blister from playing lawn tennis with his brother. It led to sepsis. No antibiotics then.

r62 here— oops! Meant to reference r59 (above).

Land - it's the only thing that lasts

Life expectancy from birth for humans was 28 for most of human history. It started to creep up a bit in the late 1800s but was still only 42 in 1900. It increased greatly over the 20th century due to modern sanitation and refrigeration and transportation. Our modern civilization that lets us live long healthy lives is very new and very fragile and the way we our treating our environment and infrastructure, it's not going to last.

R46, I’m a direct descendant of one of the Deerfield colony children who chose to come back. Some of their siblings stayed in Canada with the First Nations captors.

Interestingly I do also have some Native American admixture from another side of the family, who were French Canadian.

A big killer was childbirth--in 17th-century England, a quarter of the women died in labor. That and infant mortality are the two big reasons that the average lifespan was so low.

I had ancestors who were early settlers in Ohio--there were land grants given to veterans--the U.S. didn't have much money, but it had a lot of land. My multiple X great grandfather fought in the War of 1812 and ended up with a 200-acre spread in Ohio, something that wouldn't have been possible for him if he'd stayed on the East Coast.

DNA testing tells me I have an abundance of Neanderthal genes. My ancestors were killed by dinosaurs.

[quote]DNA testing tells me I have an abundance of Neanderthal genes. My ancestors were killed by dinosaurs.

Your Neanderthal ancestors were NOT killed by dinosaurs.

I had a book on the history of farming in the local area written by a guy about 10 years older than I am whose father died of tetanus in the late 50s or early 60s. It was an isolated area with few doctors & the man hadn’t had a tetanus booster. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late.

R65 Here is the thing about life expectancy, yes it used to be much lower. But, life expectancy is basically a mathematical average. What made it so much lower in the past, was the large number of infants and children who died. If you made it to age 18, you could basically expect to live much longer than the life expectancy.

Nasty, brutish and short.

When a asked the hypothetical about time travel, I always pick a recent year. I’m very happy here with my luxurious life.

Even with the risks I would have loved to have been a farmer, in a fertile area, like Ohio, Washington, Oregon or Upstate New York in the late 1800s to early 1900s. It was a much better life then degrading in the city. Places like Kansas, SD, ND etc...no thanks.

Upstate New York's winters would have been brutal though, r73. I would pick wine country in Oregon or Washington for a milder climate and gorgeous scenery.

I would think most of them moved out to find more space, you know for entertaining family and friends.

I just finished a book on the Oregon Trail, and the author pointed out that many of the pioneers were going out west to claim land because it was that or homelessness. The 19th century agricultural economy suffered from terrible boom-or-bust cycles, and during the bust cycles lots of people lost their farms and found themselves with nothing but whatever they could load into a cart. A lot of them chose to head out west and claim free land or government grant land, because farming was all the knew and the only way they could farm was to head into the unknown. About 50% of the wagons that started out on the Oregon Trail actually got there, the journey was horrifically dangerous.

But what was the alternative, for a dirt farmer with no farm? Sponge off of relatives who didn't have anything to spare? Go to the city and doom the whole family to working in hellish factories, and end up on the city streets if you and your children couldn't all get jobs? Break up the family by sending everyone out to get spotty seasonal work as farmhands or hired girls, and sacrifice the familial safety net (such as it was)? No, free farms in the middle of nowhere seemed like the best available option to a lot of people, in a time when it absolutely sucked to be poor.

Winters were brutal in the city too but I do hear what your saying. There are a lot of books, movies, and documentaries that like to focus on how hard it was. Though it's not as exciting there is just as much historical documentation on how happy people were to be pioneers too. Don't get me wrong though I'm far from discounting the hardships. Of course times were WAY different but I grew up on a farm in the 70s. It was still tough work but all in all it was a near idyllic childhood. Memory making it a little better than it was. I get it. But it was still a good time. The funniest part was that all the kids that didn't live on a farm, which the farm being in Connecticut, was pretty much everyone surrounding us. Well they were always at our house. They though farm work was the most fun ever.

One of my best memories is how neighbors would help. We had about 70 acres. Near the end of the summer you do the haying. That's cutting and bailing the hay and putting it in the barn. You watch the weather closely cause a rain could ruin all your winter hay. There were more than a few times the hay would be bailed and stacked in the fields. A rain would start in the middle of the night. The neighbors with the 9 to 5 jobs would still run over and get in the trailers pulled by tractors and trucks and help us get the hay in the barn as quickly as possible. Never even had to ask. Alas even the 70s are long gone.

R67 I was going to follow up with women being burned to death when their clothing caught on fire from open hearth cooking as a second leading killer of women in the past, but this historian debunks it as myth. They also say that death in childbirth wasn’t as prevelent as was once believed.

I’ve researched about 5000 ancestors and at least one woman and, separately, one child, died by catching fire. That’s still pretty high odds, though the sampling isn’t broad.

The women catching fire was mostly a southern thing.

Why, R80? We have fires in the North, too. 😈

R80 No, largely it was a wealthy thing, regardless of their region. The wealthier the woman, the bigger their dresses, and in colonial times the bigger their hair. Wealthy women were basically walking fire hazards.

But women didn't wear the same types of clothes in the North

It's rarely presented this way but in reality the flapper style movement was a huge act of feminism. It got women out of all those clothes....but that's a huge thread derailment.

R83 Obviously you are a troll, or uninformed. If you are thinking of hoop skirts, they were worn in the North and South and around the western world. It is why you see them in films and TV shows set in different areas during that time period, GWTW, Little Women, The King & I, Victoria, etc... Clothing was like today inspired by what was worn in Paris and by royalty, and copied the world over.

Among my New England research, just from memory, my family died by...

Lots of Consumption. One case small pox (body buried “inland”, away from even the other dead). A couple died in early train accidents. Death “in childbed”. A few fires, both house fires, and dress fires. Some lung fever, Bright’s Disease, Intemperance, and Dropsy. Some “old age”, a few suicides, lots of drownings or boat accidents as they were fishermen, and a bunch of miscellaneous reasons.

Yeah, out on the isolated pioneer farms, familial murders must have been the easiest thing in the world! There was no divorce, no law enforcement to speak of, no witnesses, and no help within miles. Any inconvenient spouses or in-laws who are never seen again, must have died of a sudden flux or been attacked by Indians or bears.

Life on the frontier was notoriously hellish for women. Kids could run wild and be happy, men could be their own bosses and be happy, but for the frontier wives it was all isolation and high-risk pregnancies.

Regarding murders - my bet is that alcohol was rare, or quickly consumed and the supply exhausted, so that’s going to cut the murder rate down a lot right there. Then, every hand was needed, as described above about women’s work. I can’t imagine murdering anybody, just based on their value as free labor.

Threads like these is what makes me come back to the DL.... I wonder, looking at the catalog of deaths from r86, cancer isn't there. Or was it called something else?

All the states that were carved out of what were considered pioneer areas were the first to lead the way for women's rights. Some even granting women the right to vote in the 1800s. One of my favorite statues. The Pioneer Woman. It's in OK. Dedicated in 1930. The west is filled with these statues honoring women.

My family comes from Western Virginia, and if the family histories are to be believed, a truly alarming number of my ancestors died from lightning, most while out plowing in the fields, but my great aunt was struck while peacefully smoking her pipe on the front porch.

Madonna of the Trail Early 1900s

R89, I do recall some cancer diagnoses. I was surprised that some were very early, like 1600-1800, somewhere. I’m writing now from memory. I recall thinking it was early for them to know what cancer was, but they did. Or, so they recorded, anyway. There was also heart disease listed for some, but I thought that too dull to mention here, haha.

My home town, Salem, MA, had a huge fire that wiped-out a large part of the town in the early 1900s, including the town hall, so a lot of records were lost. They don’t know who’s buried in their own cemeteries. Not because they didn’t have records. They did, they just all burnt-up or were discarded in the cleanup.

R90 Also, people forget how important whores were to the old west. Not just for the obvious reasons. Madams often became some of the wealthiest people in town, and they engaged in real estate development, and funded schools, hospitals, and even churches.

R94, score one for the whores!

R89 Read the Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which covers the history of the disease from ancient Egypt to present day.

One of my ancestors left his family's homestead farm in Washington state around 1895 and because he knew carpentry, he went to the gold rush town of Virginia City, Montana to seek his fortune. Unfortunately, a year after he fathered my grandmother, he fell off of a roof he was working on and died a day or so later of a brain hemorrhage. My grandmother's maternal side were Pennsylvania Dutch and they came from very prosperous farms, but enormous families generation after generation. Most of the children had to leave the area eventually, which is how my great great grandfather ended up in Montana. On my mother's side, Irish ancestors, who mostly raised horses for the English in Northern Ireland, homesteaded in northwest Iowa in the 1870s and built up a whole region of farms - mostly corn , and eventually soybeans too. Almost all the next generation inherited farms but a lot were women, so they leased their farms to other farmers and to corporations - including jiffy pop popcorn . The entire family were very long-lived people. 80s and 90s, except my grandfather who hated farming and became an engineer. He died young of lung cancer in his late 60s

Speaking of familial murder on the prairie... My partner's Grandmother and Great Aunt were the youngest of 11 children born on a South Dakota homestead founded by their German immigrant parents in 1880. They used to warn us about eating watermelon, as they knew a 5-year-old boy from another very large, very poor family who went to a church picnic ( in 1910 ) ate watermelon and died shortly after. The parents said he must have choked on watermelon seeds. I'm pretty sure he was beaten to death or something like that. No doctor was called.

It wasn't just death. Imagine how easy it would have been to simply walk away. You get on a horse or hop a freight train, and wind up in Denver or San Francisco (or go back East for that matter), and in the days before any standard identification how would anyone ever have found you?

My ancestors came from Norway in the late 1800's. They were farmers in Norway so it was logical that they would farm here. I doing genealogy, I've found lots of infant deaths especially in the 1800's and earlier. Births were at home. Disease was common especially consumption (TB), cancer and occasional heart attack. Most deaths have no indication of the cause.

Comparing living on the plains vs the cities,

Consider the year 1888.

On January 12, 1888 a terrible blizzard, which was to be called "The Schoolhouse Blizzard", swept down over the plains. Because it had been an unseasonably warm day, many people were caught out unawares. Even worse, the timing of the storm was such that it caught out many children whose school day was ending in small local schools over the plains. Stories were told afterward of the dead children and there was one heroic story of a young school teacher who saved her pupils. One particularly sad story was about 3 brothers whose father had warned them that should bad weather come, the boys should stay in the school house. The schoolmaster, however, insisted that everyone leave to get home. In the storm, the group was separated and the teacher and some of the children made it. The boys' father who had expected they would have been safer in the school building eventually found the frozen bodies of his 3 boys.

Part of the aftermath was newspaper stories about the terrible events and the resulting smug comments from eastern newspapers about the mistakes of people who chose to settle out on the plains.

Two months later, starting on March 11, 1888, a tremendous blizzard swept over the eastern part of the US. It came to be known as "The Great Blizzard of 1888" and parallelized that part of the country. It left 58 inches of snow in Saratoga Springs, NY, 48 includes in Albany, 45 inches in New Haven and 22 inches in New York City.

Since food and milk and fuel was delivered to residents daily, residents were out of luck. People who were only paid if they went to work, struggled through the snow, some of them dying in the attempt.

Transportation was gridlocked, the telegraph was disabled, fire stations were immobilized.

More than 400 people died from the storm and cold, 200 of them in New York City.

About the School House Blizzard...

About the Great Blizzard of 1888.

r46, I just finished reading “Captured” by Scott Zesch, “The Blue Tattoo” by Margot Mifflin, “A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” by James E. Seaver and “Nine Years Among the Indians” by Herman Lehmann. All of the books narrate exactly your point. Fascinating.

As a child, I recall hearing of the blizzard of 1888, though no one I knew was born then. It was just famous.

In New England, there was a famous blizzard in February, 1978. And again in February, 2015.

Back in the 70s, my grandmother's friend told me about her brother dying of lockjaw (tetanus). This was around WWI, before the tetanus immunization was developed. I wish she were around to nag parents who don't take their children in for immunizations.

That’s why I insisted on getting a tetanus booster, recently. I work with rusty metal, on occasion.

A friend who grew up in a farm town told me that during the 30s, there was a town picnic. Everyone brought stuff - sort of a potluck. One woman brought her 8 children and her home canned green beans - which no one else touched. She forced her kids to eat them - within a day they were all dead of botulism. She wiped out her entire family.

My 4th Great Uncle died on Consumption in 1827. I found his grave a few years back. I was cleaning some debris from the base of the neglected stone in the neglected cemetery, and realized the edge of his coffin had “floated” up and breached the ground level. It was really just wood slivers. I wondered if I should worry about getting Consumption from his corpse, but DataLounge talked me off the ledge, at that time.

In France, I hear that munitions and shrapnel from WWI that had once been buried, works it’s way to the surface every year.

[quote]In France, I hear that munitions and shrapnel from WWI that had once been buried, works it’s way to the surface every year.

Yes, but take comfort in the fact that anyone killed by the unexploded munitions is awarded a medal and full military pension for the family.

[quote]The Pioneer Woman. It's in OK.

Doesn't look a thing like me.

[quote] They used to warn us about eating watermelon,

I was warned about watermelon when I visited the USSR in 1983. My tour guide said it was unlikely we’d come across it in Moscow but if we went to Georgia , do not eat watermelon, as tourists had recently gotten very sick from it. Azerbaijan had bad watermelon recently.

And in a comical turn, recently Chinese farmers applied a growth accelerator to their watermelon, which caused millions of watermelons to explode in the fields. They fed the watermelon to pigs & fish.

(Unfunnily, the exploding watermelon followed discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms, and the detergent borax in pork, added to make it resemble beef. The People's Daily website has run stories of human birth control chemicals being used on cucumber plants in Xian, China Daily has reported Sichuan peppers releasing red dye in water, and the Sina news portal revealed that barite powder had been injected into chickens in Guizhou to increase their weight. And American cowboy capitalists want to ship meat to China for processing.)

Re: catching fire

The kitchen in my grandparents’ house was old & creaky and we had to step down a few steps to go in there. My mother said the house did not originally have a kitchen and it was added in a slapdash way.

Kitchens were placed in the backyard for 2 reasons: 1) they made houses hotter in summertime when vegetables like potatoes were being boiled, and 2) because cooking was done in wood burning stoves, there were sometimes smoldering ashes that hadn’t all been put out & the kitchen would catch fire. It made sense to keep the kitchen away from the main house, because if the kitchen burned down, it wouldn’t take the house with it and no one would get killed.

I remember seeing houses with second story sleeping porches when I was a kid. They were usually neglected old houses, as older houses that were maintained had removed their sleeping porches years previously. I understand lots of southern houses still have the remnants of the sleeping porches that have been turned into balconies.

This is the type of sleeping porch I remember seeing on old houses. Not pretty, wide, balcony-type porches, but ugly, utilitarian things tacked into house fronts

OP-- have you ever read Charles Dickens?

While his books are set in London, conditions in East Coast cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia were no better.

Not quite Pioneer Days - but 100 years ago. A very elderly relative used to tell the tale of life before antibiotics. She got the Spanish Flu as a teenager during the pandemic of 1918. She became septic. She said they anesthetized her with chloroform and removed her intestines to scrub with carbolic acid (an early antibiotic?) to combat the infection. She awoke to see her intestines spread out on a steel table next to her bed, and a nurse scrubbing them with a brush. Needless to say, she loved modern medicine.

I spent my childhood summers sleeping on a sleeping porch, and that was in the 1960's. Our house was built in 1917, but it was hardly neglected.

Having eldergays on here makes these threads come to life as many of you are old enough to have known relatives who lived in days before antibiotics and modern medicine.

It breaks my heart knowing so many strapping handsome men died of petrified smegma.

R115, carbolic acid was an early disinfectant. It was really the only thing they had to disinfect in the old days. It was incredibly harsh. Using it on internal organs is interesting. She’s lucky her insides didn’t get burned, but it would kill germs all right.

They used to make carbolic soap too. They used it to kill germs on surfaces in a sickroom for example. Or to wash their hands before operations. The old Lifeboy soap was a carbolic soap.

A few manufacturers still make it. It’s very harsh and people used to use it to disinfect their hands, or auto mechanics would use it to get rid of grease ground into their hands. I used it once to wash my dry face out of curiosity, and it burned horribly. My face peeled.

In the 1930s, they would have had “sulfa drugs,” which were the only antibiotics available before penicillin.

Sleeping porches were popular for two reasons - largely because they were cooler than bedrooms in the summer, in the days before air conditioning. But they were also a holdover from the pre-medical era, when people believed that bad air or "miasma" caused disease, and that breathing fresh air both prevented disease and treated it. So people who could afford sleeping porches used them well into cold winter weather, because they thought that sleeping in enclosed rooms put them at risk for disease. And if they had someone in the house with "consumption", that was probably true.

But come to think of it, when I win the lottery and build my dream house, I'm going to put a terrace off the master bedroom and sleep outdoors during the summer.

R107, my grandmother used to do a lot of canning in the 1920s and my father helped her. In those days canning jars didn’t seal the way they do now and there was much more spoilage. There was a glass lid with a rubber gasket between the jar and lid, and a wire would slide over the top of the lid, fitting into a groove on top of the lid. The whole thing was reusable except for the rubber gasket.

My dad said Grandma would put a layer of paraffin over the top of the food to seal it further and stop air from entering. Apparently if food was spoiled it would look or smell different, which is probably why the people at the fair didn’t want to eat it. Non-commercial canning jars of this type only preserved food for about six months.

I have some of those antique jars today. They’re good for storing spices, but I wouldn’t can anything in them.

Here's a preview of a book you should read, OP. It's called Bad Land. I wish there was a way for me to copy and paste a few of the paragraphs

My favorite type of thread. Thanks

I don't know why the book Bad Land is under ROMANCE in google books. It's written by an Englidhman who was fascinated by the settlement of Great Plains. He travels the area talking to people, walking through ruins of houses and towns. He tells the story of how the government put out misleading pamphlets in the US and Europe, what the lives of the settlers was like and travels farther west to talk to people whose parents or grandparents left their Plains homes and wound up in places like Idaho and Washingtion. He traces the distrust of government in these areas to the collapse of their ancestors' unsuccessful excursions into farming in the place that used to be called The Great American Desert.

R111, we do ship chicken to China for processing, then it comes back for consumption.

People rarely ate fresh fruit because it could kill you. President Zachary Taylor died from eating cherries that were contaminated by cholera.

I don't think that's true, R126. The classic multi-course formal dinner included a "fruit course", so the upper classes at least weren't afraid to eat fresh fruit.

But then, the upper classes had their own huge safe kitchen gardens, or farms, and if they were in town they could have stuff sent from the country house gardens. They didn't have to rely on the local markets, where anything could be ccontaminated with anything else.

It was dirty hands and bad water that contaminated the fruit.

My grandmother's home had an upstairs sleeping porch. This was Houston in the 1960s. I loved sleeping out there when we visited.

R126 His cause of death was listed as Cholera morbus, also known as Gastroenteritis. It could have come from anything. Basically he died from it, because his doctors gave him many things to purge his system, therefore he dehydrated from both diarrhea and vomiting.

R129 Looking at old Sears mail order home plans, I was struck by how common they were.

Cool thread.

You Rang, talk about tough times I am the Pioneer Woman.

R133 Oh yeah it is SOOO hard being the wife of large wealthy cattle rancher, having your own tv show, and being the CEO of your own multi-million dollar lifestyle brand. I can't stand Ree Drummond's fakery, she is Sue Ellen Ewing trying to act like she is Caroline Ingalls.

Dumbest OP who ever OP'd😅

Lots of pioneers died of cholera, dysentery, and other GI diseases on their covered-wagon journeys out west, even though they were traveling through so much deserted country. Because the major trails led from sources of water and grass for the draft animals in dry country or desert, all the pioneers were clustered around the few water holes... and the few sources of water were easily contaminated because nobody there understood how disease was transmitted through water or by fecal contamination. So people would crap near the water supply or their animals would crap in it... and everyone who drank from the contaminated water source got sick, hundreds of rough miles from medical help.

Sometimes the popular trails got backed up by a flooded river or other hazard, and hundreds or even thousands of people would be stuck in the same place, with no sewage of any kind available. What do you think happens when hundreds or thousands of people get crowded together with no sewage?

Describe this sleeping porch R129. Seems divine. Dreamy.

Thank you, Canada R124!

Here's a nice sleeping porch!

For those that live in a good neighborhood, of course.

There are some old, grand 2-3 storey Craftmens here in the L.A. area that have huge screened porches on the 2nd floor- they take up almost 1/3 of the floor space. Are they sleeping patios?

Free land!

More free land!

In my area, sleeping porches are very common in older homes up through very high-end. I didn't realize this wasn't common around the US.

Free land in Oklahoma

R137, it was an upstairs screened-in porch at the corner of the house. With two sides open, a good breeze came through at night. A ceiling fan kept the air moving when there was no wind. There was a platform on the side with a twin mattress. There were also wicker chairs, so you could sit in the breeze. The only place I've ever slept better was at lake houses or beach houses.

The Montana Raban reveals in Bad Land is one where hunters clean game in their rooms. It is a state where some of the more unbridled fundamentalist churches flourish. In one of the most insightful observations in the book, Raban elucidates the connection between Montana’s violent weather and extreme climate, and the savage and intense Protestant fundamentalism of rural America. Raban, the son of an Anglican priest was raised to believe in a tweedy, mild-mannered father figure – a “temperate, maritime and clement God.”

Raban’s father preached a Christianity with an antiseptic Crucifixion (the epicenter of the religion) and almost bereft of the Book of Revelation. But Montana, “a landscape ideally suited to the staging of the millennium… A land of earthquakes, deluges, hurricanes, lightning strikes, forest fires and grotesque extremes of heat and cold,” does not have a tidy, moderate, or gentle Christianity. Montana’s Christianity is what a friend of mine calls “Old Testament Christianity,” a religion of plagues, locusts, hellfire, and the rapture.

--------

This is something I've believed for decades. The Midwest is crazy because of the crazy weather that can spring up without warning. Now we have people in tv studios intently watching radar maps and gathering data from satellites monitoring cold air coming over the Rockies and hot air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. But still, even now, people are caught in tornados in places like Jolin, MO. Imagine what is was like for 100 years out there where it was warm and sunny one minute and the wind howling and hailing the next. Same thing with blizzards. It could be a fairly warm afternoon and the temperature could drop like a stone and within minutes it would be snowing.

--------

Raban believes the region’s religious climate is the main reason for the reaction of the Rocky Mountain West to the siege and destruction of David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas, in the early months of 1993. “When westerners watched the confrontation at Waco on CNN,” Raban writes, “they could see their own family histories reflected in the Koresh place in the scrubland of Texas… it was as if the family homestead was being violated. People felt tender for the Koreshites – not merely out of some Neanderthal dogma about property rights, but because their sense of themselves was under siege.”

Waco affected Westerners because many recalled their parents and grandparents moving out west to escape from the East and worship their god in unconventional ways; in fact, Koresh’s compound “would look like a lot like grandpa’s farm – where, perhaps Armageddon was just as eagerly awaited as it was in Waco.”

R145, beach house. The oxygen! Looking gorgeous.

[quote] She said they anesthetized her with chloroform and removed her intestines to scrub with carbolic acid (an early antibiotic?) to combat the infection. She awoke to see her intestines spread out on a steel table next to her bed, and a nurse scrubbing them with a brush

That’s a load of horseshit

TY R146. LOVE your posts

I've never seen a screened porch or a sleeping porch here in California, I'd thought they were a Southern or Midwestern thing.

Or maybe it's just a thing in places where land is cheap and homes are large.

My grandparents in Connecticut had one on their old house. Loved sleeping out there in the summer. It was like camping without the hassle.

Carbolic acid causes gastrointestinal distress. There's no way it would have been used as a topical antiseptic on intestines, even IF a topical antiseptic could have helped with the flu. Which it can't.

Strange story. Are you just trolling us or did your grandmother really tell you that happened?

[quote] Or maybe it's just a thing in places where land is cheap and homes are large.

That used to be California.

That was a ZINGER!😅 R150. Knee slapper.

The thing I remember about sleeping porches were the insects. In June you would have the fireflies, but the saddest was the night in early August when you first heard the crickets chirp, because that meant Summer was almost over.

R151 is setting my intention ablaze with a Dollhouse creation!

[quote] Or maybe it's just a thing in places where land is cheap and homes are large.

The town I grew up in was working class. People worked in fishing and in transporting goods down small rivers to the railroad. The houses were fairly small and some were haphazardly built before building codes were enacted. But many of those homely, houses had second floor sleeping porches. They weren’t the glorious , wide porches with mahogany ceilings and breezy looking wicker furniture. They often weren’t wide enough for a mattress. People would put a blanket on the floor and a pillow for bedding. Or hammocks were set up. They were kind of ugly, like the one in the link shown in to the dreary upstate house upthread. Very utilitarian, they were basically screens and floors .

Upper class houses had very nice sleeping porches, but there weren’t many of those in my town.

Raban focuses on the town of Ismay, Mont., and its role in a seldom-discussed chapter of the modern American West. Ismay's settlers were lured by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, by misleading advertising by railroad companies, and by pseudoscientific claims about the benefits of dry-land farming. Before long, however, this inhospitable land had wrecked the hopes of these latter-day homesteaders. Instead of the American Eden they were promised, they encountered something more akin to the Egyptian plagues: subzero winter temperatures, dust, dying cattle, large grasshoppers, and above all, scant rainfall. Raban skillfully evokes the landscape's stark immensity, which defeated the attempts of photographers who tried to transform it into a romantic panorama..

Ultimately, Raban produces a startling revision of traditional Western myth: not the hopeful cowboys and farmers so often found in children's school primers, but solitaries, religious zealots, and even sociopaths. In Randy Weaver, Theodore Kaczynski, and Timothy McVeigh, Raban discovers spiritual descendants of the homesteaders in 'their resentment of government, their notion of property rights, their harping on self-sufficiency, and self-defence, [and] in their sense of enraged Scriptural entitlement.' A powerful, grim new slant on those who took the way west--and of the terrible consequences when their dreams curdled and died.

Declared a MUST HAVE!

meh those sleeping porches are much too complicated.

Powerful R158. Grateful to have hailed from blessed ancestry

Too precious, R159.

Not real.

Not like the real thing at all.

😂R160. Hysterical.

Anytime I think of those days, I only think: Stinky. Everyone was stinky.

Yeah, should have linked to Pinterest?

the whole thing to sleeping porches is to have as much room for people as possible and as much access to the night air as possible. All that wicker, plants, drapes, etc etc etc just defeat the purpose. But yeah it does look like sleeping porches are the new thing.

You know what R158? Thanks for posting that. Wide scale betrayal. Same scheme pulled on the Western colonies in Greenland. Green was a marketing hack. Nothing Green about the place.

I don't know what you would have done in that desolate condition..I know what I would have done. I woulda hauled ass up north and joined an Indian tribe. Once this weather environment started spazzing causing me money & status, nope the fuck outta there. Nomadic native lifestyle hunting for berries in season. Whole 9 yards. Gonna go with proven and true. Be making some green eyed hybrids. Fuck the farms. Too elegant. Fine boned. No security.

😂 Hey, wait a minute...that's exactly what my European ancestors DID do.

I always assumed that the very poor, misfits and criminals were the ones went to new colonies or moved West. Most of my Irish ancestors who came to N America were crazy criminals.

Anyone who has seen Once Upon a Time in the West understands what happened. It was the railroads who pushed Congress to establish the homestead act & it was the railroad companies that printed up those brochures.

The early railways were steam locomotives. They needed water and had to replenish water about every dozen or so miles. So there needed to be tank ponds, water tanks, windmills, water mills and hand pumps and those things needed to be maintained by people. And the people had to live there, so they needed to have towns nearby. Towns with a post office, a general store, a blacksmith, farrier, saloon/hotel, bank, gunsmith, sheriff, barber, undertaker, church, etc. So the railroads needed all of those people out there working in towns and growing food for the workers. A lot of farmers would also mean railroads could transport grain, vegetables & fruit to the east & west coasts (and charge the farmers and the produce buyers a fee).

So the railroad barons drew up maps and stuck towns along the line wherever they could find a water supply - creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes. They named the towns after their children. Some towns kept their names (Mildred) and some changed 5heir names after settlement.

So that’s why many towns in Montana and other areas were built. For water.

Again R158 this comparison could be compared to the Inuit of eastern Kanada. It comes down to adaptability. Like these farmers who got roped into eking out a dismal prospect in Big Sky Country one would imagine a life at the Pole would be switched up by traveling south. As the Euro in SKC i'd opt northbound with Indians. As an Inuit, we all over the southern trade route. The fiber to never settle, me. Fuck harsh living conditions when opportunity calls.

😂 Hey wait a minute. That's exactly what my Inuit ancestors DID do!

Sleeping porches are a practical adaptation to summer. Houses used to be built to take advantage of prevailing winds. You could open windows on the front and back of the house; the breeze would keep the house from getting stuffy, as would an attic fan. Now houses are built with air conditioning, and thank god, but I've lived in older Houston houses in which you could delay running air conditioning by keeping the air circulating with fans and open, screened windows. .

Again R169, know what I'd do? Merchant trade deals between my new adoptive tribe with those townspeople. Opportunities. It's in the blood.

re: the sleeping porch subthread: it needs to be stressed that, at least as far as east of the Mississippi is concerned, it was absolutely essential that the porch be fully screened - otherwise, unusable. The mosquitoes would be over the sleepers like white on rice all night long, otherwise. When I lived in north Florida, I learned that you never EVER left an unscreened window open - summer or winter. In addition to the mosquitoes, you could get the flying cockroaches, the tree frogs, bats, you name it..... On a sleeping porch, you'd be damp (no escaping the humidity), but at least there was the hope of a breeze and being a few degrees cooler than inside. I knew someone who grew up poor in the Mississippi Delta region, and he said during the summer, the kids would lie down on the kitchen floor to nap and sleep, not even a sheet, because the linoleum felt cooler to the skin than anywhere else in the house. (Let's face it, the deep South before AC became universal was a hell hole in summer - a six month long season, too!)

I lived in Northern Illinois, the mosquitoes were horrible.

Giving birth was a normal way to die.

R171, you know how the indians did it? No AC or fans needed when the summer camps were on the beach. Winter inland to the 2nd homestead.

Options, common sense. Going with the Indians.

[quote]So the railroad barons drew up maps and stuck towns along the line wherever they could find a water supply - creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes.

Yes, but the 12 miles between towns was also the approx. distance a farmer with a horse and wagon could travel in a day and be back home by sundown with a couple of hours to trade at the general store, visit the blacksmith, sell to the grain elevator, and fuck the whores at Miss Kitty's saloon.

R87, there was an interesting episode in “The Ballad of Lester Scruggs” that examines how absolutely shitty life was, for women. Horrible.

I’d recommend it to anyone here, who has an interest in the westward expansion. Not sure how perfectly historically accurate it was, but I find myself still thinking about some of the vignettes. It’s on Netflix, still.

It was a rough, tough goddamn life, what do you want me to say?

I live in a house built in the 1880s in upstate NY -- the present kitchen used to be an open dining porch, and above it, now enclosed as a bedroom, was the sleeping porch for the three other second-floor bedrooms. There were even stairs from the second floor porch to the ground so you could go to the outhouse (now gone) without having to go back into the house itself -- these steps were taken down years ago, I would guess due to fears of burglary as the stairs led right from the porch into the master bedroom.

The kitchen, btw, was in the basement, connected to the dining room via a dumbwaiter, which is now a shower in a first floor bathroom. The cook wasn't allowed on the first floor. There was a small room next to the kitchen where she could sleep (it's now a storage closet -- that's how small and dismal it is).

All in all the house was built for the tastes of the late 19th century and now modernized, more or less, for the 21st. I would actually prefer the second floor porch to the bedroom but... too late.

Sleeping porches were very popular n Charleston SC. Back in the day. The humidity and heat at night were unbearable inside. At least you had the chance of a breeze at night or early morning to relieve the misery.

I love the historical threads on DL.

In the north, they had a back porch that had a floor about 4 feet below grade. The upper half was screened. Mainly used to store root vegetables or canned goods. In 1914 my grandfather and his brother contracted some crazy illness going around at that time.. They moved my grandfather to the "vegetable" cellar as they did not think he would survive and out there would not infect anyone else. His brother died even though he had medical attention. My grandfather survived because the cold temps in that cellar slowed the progression of the illness to the point he regained strength enough to recover. I have always wanted to ask him what he thought of his parents decision to basically leave him for dead. Funny, he died before I could.

My grandparents had something like that in front of their house and it was about two feet lower than the rest of the house. It helped keep the house warmer in winter because when people entered the house they entered through the windowed porch first, then walked across it up the steps to the front door. By the time I came aking my grandparents used it to store their push mower, shovels, step ladder, etc. By the late 60s/early 70s many families had converted this to an extra room.

My other grandparents lived in a house with a small pantry, which was an area behind the kitchen door that was uninsulated and unheated. The bathroom was nearby (like lots of old houses, the kitchen and bathroom were added to the house later) and I hated using it in winter because the nearby pantry kept it so cold back there

Sleeping Porch: The Movie! Sounds hilarious.

Two of Robert Frost’s children died in childhood, one of cholera & one shortly after she was born. One of his daughters died of puerperal fever (“childbed” fever) at age 31 shortly after giving birth. One of his daughters was committed to a mental hospital and a son committed suicide at 38. Things were rough in New England as well as out on the prairies.

My mother has been in charge of our family “bible” and photographs. We have some fascinating memoirs from one of my “great” grandmothers who came out west as a new bride in a covered wagon and settled on some land in what’s now Missouri. She regularly wrote of daily happenings. One morning while her husband was plowing the back forty some Indians walked in the house. She was terrified but fed them biscuits and apple butter. I guess that made them happy so they left. She also scribbled about riding out on a horse and taking lunch to her new husband and “blissfully resting” under a tree.

I keep telling her to publish some. Some of the pics great too.

You just know a lot of people died of untreated VDs

Back in those days people didn't know that you had to boil water to kill everything in it, so lots of deaths from cholera, dysentery and various other things from contaminated water.

Amazing to think that something as elementary as boiling water to make it safe for consumption took so long for people to understand.

That’s why people who drank ale lived while people who drank water died. The water for ale was boiled so hops could be added.

[quote]Here's a nice sleeping porch!

[quote]For those that live in a good neighborhood, of course.

Yes, we know what you're implying.

In the 10th grade I had to do a book report on some book on life of pioneers out in South Dakota. (Or msybe North Dakota? It was a long time ago) Basically there's a family living out in a sod hut. The wife is 7 months pregnant and there's a 4 year old kid. Supplies are running low, so the husband says, "I'm going hunting, taking the horse, a mule and one of the dogs. I'll be back in a few weks." OF COURSE the wife goes into labor 2 months early. By hersel, she starts giving the 4 yr old i structions to chop wood to boil the water or whatever, and gets in position on the. floor, all the while she's in excruciating pain ( I seem to remember she was the narrator) and trying to calm the kid down.

Good times.

R168 You forget about second, etc... sons.

r150, I was the one talking about the Craftsmen- I work in the film industry, and the 3 Craftsmen I encountered were in Victoria Park, KTown, and South Pasadena. All had large screened porches on the 2nd floor, where some of the cast and the crew hung out during breaks. It was quite lovely.

I have such enormous admiration for the people who settled this country. The hardships they endured are like nothing any of us have ever seen. If we could go back in time to those days, we would all probably die from the conditions.

R190 Hard apple cider was more common than ale and found readily on most frontiersmen’s tables. Johnny Appleseed wasn’t planting orchards to have fresh apples to munch on, but to make cider since it was safer to drink than water. Also, planting an orchard was conditional in places to claiming land, proving you were going to stay awhile. Johnny would “ go west” plant apple trees in preparation for the settlers coming along and sell them the trees. He could always get a fresh supply of seeds from the cider making process, since his religious beliefs frowned upon grafting. Much of the history of this was erased during prohibition when the FBI cut down apple orchards to thwart making hard cider.

Considering the average age on DL, I'll ask: Which one of you has taken Johnny's appleseed...?

I fucking LOVE this thread. The stories are fascinating.

Honestly, I try to remember my ancestors when I’m peeved about some first-world problem like someone broke the cup holder in the SUV or the building is shutting off the hot water between the hours of 10:00 am - 5:00 pm. My quality of life is better than 99% of humans throughout history — present day included.

People who hail from pioneer stock are a completely different breed than the late comers.

Same here R198. Whenever I'm in a quandry I stop and remind myself who I come from. Full of confidence, I soldier on. Genealogical research and DNA tests, I can't feel sorry for myself. These people pulled it off in the early 1600s, in a freezer, no less. Early gallavanters they were.

It's funny about Johnny and his apples. Well not just his. The apple is what kept many alive over the long winter. There was so much you could do with it and just one tree produced so many apples. Apple sauce, apple butter, dried apples by the bucket full, jams, jellies, juice, pies, bread, not to mention that coming in the cool fall the apple itself would last a long time. Plus with the volume of apples just a few trees could produce they fed the livestock too. Especially the pigs. Without the simple apple a lot more would have just simply starved. That's why apples are EVERYWHERE in the United States.

Humans have been around for thousands of years. How is it that by the 1800s no one knew about boiling water? How did BC folks survive?

No very long, R202.

One thing they certainly had knowledge of was agriculture. By the time the importance of the apple began to decrease, in the early 1900s, , colonists through pioneers, had developed over 14,000 varieties of apples in the United States. Some with very thick skins that grew well into the winter.

Doing genealogy research for Chicago relatives, I was looking at records from a Catholic Church parish whose records had survived the 1871 Chicago Fire (October 8 -10, 1871).

This parish kept records of funerals as well as baptisms and weddings.

I began to notice while researching funerals that there was a period during 1873 where the number of pages showing funerals was much greater than usual - pages and pages of funerals, including a funeral for one of the family I was researching who died in August 1873. A bit of research led to information that beginning in the summer of 1873, there was a cholera epidemic which resulted in the deaths of 116 people.

According to the "Encyclopedia of Chicago" section on Epidemics...

[quote] The Board of Health measured the duration of the disease, from first symptoms to death, at about eleven hours.

There were lots of epidemics during those early years

Germ theory had been around since the 16th century but even late into the Victorian era scientists and doctors believed that disease was caused by miasmas.

[quote] R177: Having eldergays on here makes these threads come to life as many of you are old enough to have known relatives who lived in days before antibiotics and modern medicine.

That’s me!

My great grandmother’s son “Little Howard”, as engraved on his grave marker, died at age 4 in 1878. Cause unknown. Grandmother “was never the same again”, and she wasn’t so good to start with!

Only one of Mark Twain’s children survived him. His sone was born prematurely and died before age 2 of diphtheria. His daughter Suzy died of spinal meningitis at age 24. Twain’s daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 15. She died on Christmas Eve at the age of 29 while taking a bath. She apparently had a seizure & either drowned or died of a heart attack. His daughter Clara, however lived to be 88 and died in 1962. Her only child Nina died at 55 in 1966 without children, so there are no direct descendants of Mark Twain.

And look at the Bronte family. Charlotte Bronte’s mother died of cancer when Charlotte was 5 years old. Her two sisters Elizabeth and Marie died of TB at ages 12 and 11. Charlotte’a aunt had taken the place of Charlotte’s mother raising the children but died of an intestinal obstruction. Charlotte’s brother died at 31 of TB & substance abuse. Sister Emily died three months later at age 30 of TB and sister Anne followed a few months later at age 29. Charlotte died at 38 while pregnant.

Life wasn’t just hazardous prairies

R152 - she told me that story more than a few times. Maybe she was making it up? I believed her, and other family members backed up her story. She never did have kids, despite outliving four husbands, so I just assumed they ruined or removed or scarred up her during that operation/procedure. First husband, died from tainted illegal alcohol during Prohibition. 1920's. Second husband, car accident. 1930s. Third husband, much older, heart attack. 1940s. Fourth husband, also older, heart attack. 1950s. She lived until she was 98!

R177 I'm a millennial and my grandfather was born the same year that Penicillin was discovered, 1928. It didn't become used for treatment until 1942 and wasn't available for use in the general civilian population until 1945.

[quote]First husband, died from tainted illegal alcohol during Prohibition.

My Grandmother used to talk about the guys getting together to buy bootleg whiskey, and the first thing they would do was pour a little of the whiskey into the lid of the jar (it came in fruit jars) and light it on fire. If the flame burned blue they would drink it. If the flame was green they would throw the jar against the brick wall and smash it, because the whiskey was contaminated and would kill you or make you go blind.

Measels are a great way to get a pop of color.

Good one R211! What element turned it green?

Methyl?

[quote]Good one [R211]! What element turned it green?

I think copper, but I don't know, I was a little kid when I heard the stories.She dwelled on the smashing of the bottle against the brick wall more than the science involved.

Here's a YouTube video about testing moonshine. No mention of yellow, just blue, red, and yellow. Maybe I remember the color wrong.

God, Prohibition was such a stupid and pointless exercise. So much time and money wasted. Not to mention the people who died from drinking tainted alcohol.

Stupid, pointless, wasteful and destructive, r216 (let's not forget that it essentially created the Mafia as it came to be known in the US).

But Prohibition resulted from the confluence if WASP nativism ("It's those dirty filthy Catholic foreigners who get drunk and rowdy every night! Why, good god-fearing real Americans frown on that and drink -- when they do -- at home or at a civilized party.") and the beginnings of the women's movement, since those same poor men who drank away their weekly wages also beat their wives and left their kids in rags. So instead of investing on education or (God forbid!) Socialist economic policies to make lives less miserable, the Temperance movement worked to ban the Demon Alcohol and hoped that would make everything fine.

Great summary, R217. I can understand many women’s stake in the temperance movement (WASP nativist prejudices aside), but the religious aspect took control (surprise) and the opportunity for a positive impact on the country backfired.

Love this thread! Family was from New Orleans so I don’t have much connection of pioneer stories, but wow what a challlenge,

I find it interesting about the lreligious extremism and anti government sentiment that was created in pioneer days pollutes our politics today. I recall that book What’s Wong w Kansas also noted that issue.

Re: Prohibition. The Ken Burns Prohibition documentary is on Netflix, and it's very good.

It hasn't been 20 years since a little old lady used to come to our office every year asking for a donation to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. We gave her $25 dollars (corporate policy said we could give that much to anyone who asked), and I'm not so sure we weren't financing the whole operation, or what was left of it. Anyway, she would leave us some really neat literature and pledge cards that said we had promised to swear off alcohol and hard cider (see attached) that everyone in the office carried in their wallets for weeks after her visit.

[quote]Stupid, pointless, wasteful and destructive, [R216] (let's not forget that it essentially created the Mafia as it came to be known in the US).

It also created the Kennedy dynasty.

R222 and NASCAR

R211, from the Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition, I remember them talking about the poisoned alcohol.

Snopes.com answers this suggestion...

[quote] When the manufacture and sale of alcohol was illegal between 1920 and 1933, regulatory agencies encouraged measures making industrial alcohol undrinkable, including the addition of lethal chemicals.

but according to snopes.com

[quote] The government did not poison supplies of alcohol meant for human consumption, nor did it intentionally aim to kill those who drank the tainted products.

See the snopes response about the poisoned alcohol story.

Are you teasing R221?

[quote] Maybe she was making it up?

Yup. For one thing, Spanish flu was a respiratory illness. It would make no sense to operate on the intestines for Spanish flu. For another thing, no one would survive their intestines being taken out and scrubbed with a wire brush & carbolic acid. A wire brush would rip away the intestinal covering . The carbolic acid would kill intestinal tissue.

She was either lying or she dreamed it. I’m inclined to believe the latter.

[quote]Are you teasing [R221]?

No, this was in Nebraska, and she came by for her donation every year. She was ancient, and she lived in a little town 45 miles away so our donation barely paid for her gas money. I tried kidding her once by saying there seems to be a bit of a lull in the fight at the moment, and she had zero sense of humor about it. Maybe she was like those Japanese soldiers on the desert island who never heard the war was over?

We all liked getting the cards just so we could show them to bartenders. A free drink was almost automatic as soon as they saw you had taken the pledge.

Awesome R227. In Southern Louisiana, I cannot even imagine someone collecting donations for the temperance movement, even in the 70s. Great story.

I remember my grandmother saying that a girl “puked her guts up” on the street on her way to church. “Puked up her guts. Her guts were puked up right into the street!” I was fascinated & scared that someone could puke their guts up — and it wasn’t just a saying; my grandmother insisted “her guts were hanging out.” Of course, when I grew up and went to college I learned this was not possible.

I remember my other grandmother saying that people caught colds in parts of their bodies & it killed them. “Yeah, her husband Joe caught a cold in his kidneys and died.” And “Poor thing, she caught a cold in her spine and it killed her.”

I pictured a kidney sneezing and a spine coughing. “Of course if those things happened, you’d die,” I thought.

Once I studied anatomy & physiology & pathology I realized how ignorant most people are about their bodies and health. I think anatomy should be taught throughout kindergarten -12th grade. For example, they should learn that a flu is not the same thing as a cold and it doesn’t entail vomiting & diarrhea. A flu is influenza and it’s a respiratory illness. And it’s a lot more serious than a cold. You can’t get “a stomach flu.” Apparently doctors felt they couldn’t inform people about bacteria and viruses without using the commonly used the terms “flu” and “a cold.” They’d say, “Well it’s like when you catch a cold, Mrs Joe. A virus causes you to get sick when you have a cold. So it’s like catching a cold, only in your kidneys.”

We can do better than that.

Is it at all possible that the scrubbed intestine memory is based in truth, but the poor girl had insufficient knowledge or vocabulary to describe it accurately? Imagine already being in pain and feverish from a burst appendix or intestinal blockage/rupture, and you halfway wake up during the emergency surgery. Something agonizing was happening in her abdomen, so her delirious brain gave it a name that accurately described the sensation but not the procedure.

R229 You are not going to stop people from calling Viral gastroenteritis, stomach flu. Even doctors use the term stomach flu.

I have never heard anyone, and I am kin to some poor backward people, say getting a cold in the kidney, etc...

Think of the things that used to kill people. Measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough, strep throat causing heart failure due to rheumatic fever. Cholera, dysentery, appendicitis, intestinal blockage, influenza, polio, TB. Some of these diseases were caused by poor sanitation. Some caused people to die due to dehydration from vomiting/diarrhea or high fever or all 3.

Then think of things people had to deal with that didn’t cause death, but were horrible, like scabies, head and body lice, bedbugs, mouse/rat infestations. My mother told me her uncle in Ireland died because he’d taken his sandwich into the fields where he worked and left it in a sack on a wall. While eating the sandwich he thought it tasted strange and saw there was yellow wetness on the bread. He got sick and died. The dr said it was from rodent urine. Nowadays we call that leptospirosis and we prevent it by keeping food away from rodents. My dad carried a metal lunchbox with hinges on it to work. No rodents would be able to get at his food. Something as simple as a hinged metal box to keep food in can save your life. Or something as simple as a lemon or lime could cure scurvy.

Scrofula could cause someone to suffer festering lesions for years. Congenital syphilis was disfiguring and sufferers were shunned and shuttered away. Mary Ingalls was blinded for life by meningioencephalitis.

Back in the 80s I started to notice I didn’t see people who looked like what I’d seen in the 60s - people with very pronounced overbites (Bucky Beaver), pronounced underbites (prognathia), crossed eyes, severe cystic acne. There was a guy who owned a stationery store whose eye was nearly closed from what we now call Xanthelasma ..... and we now know they’re caused by cholesterol. But back then we just thought he was just a horrible looking person. I saw people who had a club foot, which couldn’t be treated when they were younger. When I visited the USSR in the 80s I realized I hadn’t seen older men or women with twisted spines or hip problems walking with canes since I was very young. But there were a lot of them in the USSR, since medicine was crappy and many older people had been injured in WWII.

I used to get chilblains as a kid. My mother spent her money on the church and sent me to catholic school, wear I had to wear a uniform with a nylon shirt and my mother bought me thin nylon knee socks because they were cheaper. The school forced us to go outdoors for recess in very cold weather. My thin shoes and thin socks left my feet so cold I felt like I had ice in between my toes. I’d get chilblains, which were quite painful. Now we have better clothing and we don’t force children outdoors onto a concrete “playground” (with no play equipment) for 45 minutes a day. Sometimes, just not being a dick can save a child from suffering.

R217 couldn't be more off base!

R217, answer honestly, do you have any african ancestry going on ? Reason why we're asking because trying to figure how far back your pedigree goes on the continent.

Then we'll reveal the correct reason.

R218, it's off.

R219, give it a few hours, you're gonna adore this thread when we all post before bed.

The mention of New Orleans reminds me of some old photos I saw recently of men, mostly black but not all, down at the riverfront unloading bails of cotton and huge bunches of bananas for 10 hours a day in the Summer heat and humidity of New Orleans. I can't imagine Hell being any worse. Other than a blizzard or Indian attack, they would have been as susceptible to Measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough, cholera, or dysentery as anyone on the prairie, probably more so given the population density and climate of New Orleans.

I'll take my chances on the Oregon Trail over life in a 19th Century textile mill or a coal mine any day.

Life really sucked whether you were in a city or a pioneer. Even the wealthy people back then lived in conditions we would consider unacceptable.

Chilblains! Never heard of this. I'm definitely physiologically immune to this reaction. Built for the cold. Thin arms and legs.

Sorry to hear about Mom being all "lace curtain"😅 (know these types). Just dumped an elderly friend over this cheapness. It's not frugal. It's CHEAP! Frugal is buying quality, well made items that don't need replacement.

The nylon socks is from not knowing any better. Nylon not cotton shirts was for easy laundering. No ironing involved. Sure Dupont invented products changed the landscape decades ago but people from the lower classes just didn't get the ramifications concerning practicality.

A legal Mexican employee of mine went to Macy*s to purchase a crew neck sweater as an Xmas gift. I marched this person back to the store and exchanged the sweater for something we both could use. Along with the lesson of why you never purchase an acrylic sweater. It is actually downright dangerous to sport an acrylic anything but especially a garment worn for warmth, like a sweater. You'll freeze because dampness cannot be whisked away from your skin. Doesn't breathe. Doesn't absorb. Some people just are unaware.

R236, they certainly did not! Some of my ancestors in the late 1600s on into the late 1800s lived plush lives by todays standards. In the city or in the country they knew how to adapt. Finest of everything. Their manors, estates and townhouses are historical sites today. Even those of modest means built digs impervious to harsh temps.

R235 If you think unloading the cotton 10 hours a day was bad, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s uncle got drunk and passed out on bales of cotton that were being loaded on to a ship. They didn’t notice him and buried him alive under more bales. It muffled his shouting for nine days as the boat made its way to New York City. Miraculously he was still alive when they arrived and he was rushed to St. Vincent Hospital. They managed to revive him, and Edna’s mother was so thankful, that she incorporated the hospital into her new born baby daughter’s name in homage for what they did to help him.

R235, again, like we're gonna get around to explaining the fault in R217's logic who suspect is the view of someone with African ancestry. Guessing you may share the same heritage as well (adding in our shared heritage of N'Orleans later).

Explained in depth on another thread concerning races and why Jussie's noose was a big ole red flag. White people just wouldn't fathom lynching into any aggression. That historic sin traveled out of the south with a massive black migration to cities around 1910. Well again, completely oblivious, the US turned that lemon into lemonade.

Can't imagine hell being any worse than black guys doing such work in NO? Switch out the black guy with a nordic white, NA or Eskimo.

r238 with no running water no plumbing no refrigerators and no AC most people today wouldn't be able to tolerate even the mansions of those times.

Sorry, the point was in the DNA study to find cures for inheritable diseases and certain sectors having a built in immunity. To trace the origin of these favorable traits they wrangled up a bunch of black people in the chicago area. Minnesota. That whole diaspora who migrated out of the south around 1910. Average sample tested to be the mean of about 83% black rest euro and NA.

The midwest crew had lost their immunity to most strains of Malaria. The blacks (even mixed race) of the south and those in Africa retained their natural immunity. The northern gang of today has an influx of DNA from northern Germany & SW Sweden on top of euro ancestry from the southern US. These people could eat cheese & high cholesterol foods like it is going out of style and never suffer clogging up their arteries. High cholesterol counts are unheard of in those parts. Scientists are trying to figure a way to alter all DNA to present this super human trait and cure disease.

R241, ever hear of a root cellar? Servants?

A root cellar and servants aren't the same thing as plumbing, ac, and a fridge lol!

Can some of the gang transfer the findings in this thread over to LSA when they regain posting privileges there? Hate having to repeat myself.

Go tell that to the Mohawks R244. Besides no AC needed in a 32 room stone Norman style castle located ON THE WATER.

Beats section 8 fridge and working toilet 😂

Notice nobody is claiming R217? Been waiting for we have an answer for you. You're not gonna like it. Just as much as you don't like the Jussie debacle.

R217, we hope to have you live for this class coming up.

Come in R217. Mayday

R217 has it right. Prior to prohibition, in some places, there were alcohol sellers on every street. Maybe multiple ones. There was no zoning or controls of any kind.

A Norman replica castle. How gauche.

Prohibition was definitely rooted in anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrants. That's common knowledge. Again, the Ken Burns PBS documentary is very good.

When I was in college in Connecticut, I drove to the clubs in Boston one Sunday. We stopped for the bathroom, and I thought I’d get a drink while waiting. The waitress drawaled “Natick is a dryyyyyy town”. Even worse was that I was on I-90, and that restaurant only served people driving on the turnpike.

Those dry towns in MA are a fucking pain in the ass!

Anyone up for that disastrous scheme outta NO? Works into R235's narrative seamlessly. 'Twas Plan B.

Apparently some authentic root cellars survived well into the 90s. I'm talking about the kind that were cut into small hills. I had a coworker whose Grandparents' place had a charming little root cellar bored into a small rise on an old acreage. It was beautiful, old wooden arched door, two small windows, one on each side of the door, stone frontage. Very charming and quaint.

The buyer wanted to turn that into a house! Instead he built an ugly McMansion with a tower. At least he kept the root cellar he fell in love with.

If homemade alcohol isn’t made correctly, instead of ethyl alcohol, you get methyl alcohol. The former is for drinking. The latter is AKA rubbing alcohol. That’s what is in aftershave and perfume. Drinking enough of it leads to blindness and can kill you.

R229, my Grandma told us my Grandpa, who played the French Horn, died from blowing his lungs out. 30+ years later, I learned he actually died from syphilis. Add that one to the list of earlier causes of death.

Here was my great aunt and myself before opening the results of my first DNA kit she bought me.

Rightly braced for the bombs that were gonna drop 😂

Spin it how you choose as:

Prohibition was definitely rooted in anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrants. That's common knowledge.

So you're R217, we're to believe? Thank you for swift response to our call.

Who would be the non Catholic non-immigrants then?

[quote] R247: Notice nobody is claiming [R217]? Been waiting for we have an answer for you. You're not gonna like it. Just as much as you don't like the Jussie debacle.

I’m not R217, but R247, I found your original complaint to be hard to understand. Just like the above, as I have no idea who or what “Jussie” is. Then you seemed to veer off to a racist offramp and I didn’t finish whatever you wrote.

My family were non-Catholic, non-immigrants at the time of Prohibition and for decades before. They probably did not drink, too.

You never know who you're really messing with online R249. Drive a few miles west and you're in my stomping ground. Discussing with appraiser the possibility of auctioning a gift given to me by the late C.Z. Guest. Your comment is platinum! Serendipity almost.

Tanks R255. I would think you could tell the difference by taste, no? Guess not when you hear about alchies downing it in a pinch.

Yes, prohibition had anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant roots, I thought that was common knowledge. However, it was equally a result of the Woman's Suffrage movement. It isn't surprising that prohibition became law around the same time that women gained the right to vote. Women's groups used Prohibition to enter into the political arena, and strongly supported it. It was considered the "progressive" thing to do. Much like how it is "progressive" today to police people's choices, concerning smoking, eating, etc...

[quote]If homemade alcohol isn’t made correctly, instead of ethyl alcohol, you get methyl alcohol. The former is for drinking. The latter is AKA rubbing alcohol. That’s what is in aftershave and perfume. Drinking enough of it leads to blindness and can kill you.

The US Navy was Dry during WWII. My father used to talk about the old pre-war sailors who were all raging alcoholics staying blind drunk the whole time they were ashore, and then, since they were searched and couldn't smuggle booze on board the ship, they would bring huge bottles of Lucky Tiger Aftershave on board. Apparently Lucky Tiger could be purified by taking a loaf of bread, tearing a hole at both ends, and then pouring the Lucky Tiger through the loaf to let the bread filter out the impurities. Whatever came out the bottom was still pretty foul, but at least it wouldn't kill you or make you go blind.

The worst was after a couple weeks at sea when even the lucky Tiger was gone and all the Old Salts went through about a week of drying out.

Thank you for your concern R259 "not R217" but we'll wait for R217.

But feel free to add your input identifying the nonCatholic nonImmigrant crew who started the movement. So, who were they?

R264 The US Navy is still dry, at least on board ships. They have been 1914.

Who were the people shaming the nonCatholic nonImmigrants. Blaming alcoholism on catholics/immigrants. Who blamed them?

Anti-immigrant bias in Prohibition...

r261 nobody could give a shit. Oh, CZ Guest! Good for you.

[quote]But feel free to add your input identifying the nonCatholic nonImmigrant crew who started the movement. So, who were they?

Protestant churches, the Women's Christian Temperance movement, among others. This is all common knowledge.

[quote] Yes, prohibition had anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant roots, I thought that was common knowledge. However, it was equally a result of the Woman's Suffrage movement. It isn't surprising that prohibition became law around the same time that women gained the right to vote. Women's groups used Prohibition to enter into the political arena, and strongly supported it. It was considered the "progressive" thing to do. Much like how it is "progressive" today to police people's choices, concerning smoking, eating, etc...

Or, prohibition had anti-drunk roots, and it happened that the drunks you stepped over on the way to Sunday Lutheran services tended to be Catholics? People who recently immigrated, so tended to have the worst jobs, and most miserable lives. It was the men who tended to drink their paychecks up, before their wives ever saw the check. The wives joined the temperance movement as a reaction, spurring demands for Womans suffrage.

So, I question if it might just be too simplistic to say prohibition had anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant roots, without looking at the entire context.

More about Prohbition, immigrants, Protestants and Catholics.

[quote]So, I question if it might just be too simplistic to say prohibition had anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant roots

Of course that wasn't the sole reason, but it was a big factor.

So..no one's admitting to authoring this agenda? @R217:

Stupid, pointless, wasteful and destructive, [R216] (let's not forget that it essentially created the Mafia as it came to be known in the US).

But Prohibition resulted from the confluence if WASP nativism ("It's those dirty filthy Catholic foreigners who get drunk and rowdy every night! Why, good god-fearing real Americans frown on that and drink -- when they do -- at home or at a civilized party.") and the beginnings of the women's movement, since those same poor men who drank away their weekly wages also beat their wives and left their kids in rags. So instead of investing on education or (God forbid!) Socialist economic policies to make lives less miserable, the Temperance movement worked to ban the Demon Alcohol and hoped that would make everything fine.

Alright, tried your best to answer. Onto the next. Why does one surmise this movement took hold in the US but not in Ireland, Germany or France? Why the US? All nations hold protestant/catholic populations, just to cut you off at the pass.

Anyone seen R217?

ok r274/75 you've been shitting all over this thread. You're insane. Put down the bottle and go to bed in your Norman replica castle.

Um..GoogleU @ R272 isn't gonna cut it if you can't deduct facts that are hidden from you to make the connection. That's what they teach us in real universities.

Just gonna sit back. Knock yourselves out. Amongst yourselves.

New England had Puritan origins, R275. My ancestor was charged three times with working on a Sunday when it was against the law.

I had an ancestor, not an immigrant and not Catholic, he died by getting drunk at his local tavern and falling off of a bridge while walking home.

Not going for this demographic but while you're all here

"During the mid 1800s African Americans, predominantly free people of color and runaway slaves, settled in the area"

Oh boy

Why don't you start a prohibition thread you thread killing cunt.

Towards the middle of the 19th century, Oberlin became a major focus of the abolitionist movement in the United States. The town was conceived as an integrated community and blacks attended Oberlin College from 1835, when brothers Gideon Quarles and Charles Henry Langston were admitted. Their younger brother John Mercer Langston, who became the first black elected to the United States Congress from Virginia in 1888, also graduated from Oberlin. Many Oberlin College graduates were dedicated abolitionists, who traveled throughout the South working to help slaves escape to the north.-

You see? NOW THIS is how you hustle

^Guess who couldn't pull off this abstinence hustle?

R219, New Orleans had its own problems to overcome, e.g., insect-borne diseases.

Around the turn of the last century, Jewish leaders in northeast cities, NYC, Boston, etc., were concerned about the continuing immigration of Jews from eastern Europe, particularly Russia, which was still undergoing pogroms. Eastern cities had received so many waves of immigration that there wasn't enough decent housing or good jobs. They looked for other ports to absorb some of the immigrants, considering Charleston (which had a long-standing Jewish community), New Orleans, and Galveston. New Orleans was ruled out because of yellow fever outbreaks. So, under the Galveston Plan, several thousand Jewish immigrants came to Texas through Galveston.

Let's see. Who else besides the Irish infamous for being drunks?

R284, good find. So we read upthread that Africans had awesome immunity. They also shuffled bales of cotton 10 hours a day in NO.

Then your - New Orleans was ruled out because of yellow fever outbreaks.-

got its heads up from the NO Plan B solution

R281, is it because we went all LSA up in here? Black History month. So many positives if you just look for them. Let us have it. We need this right now. Also calling out race baiter R217. Not gonna fly here. Bring joy not misery. Inefficient use of a forum. Bring negativity and you make yourself a disposable like R217. Flap your cunt lips elsewhere R217.

You've probably heard of Walter Reed Hospital. Reed's great contribution was working with the Army Medical Corps to run the experiments proving yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. That lead to mosquito eradication projects which prevented the spread of yellow fever. And limiting yellow fever outbreaks enabled the U.S. to build the Panama Canal.

Yeah okay R288.

Try to imagine what it must have been like in the 1600s. Imagine being a young indian, black slave, euro pioneer. You know how humans are. Get greedy when offered varieties. Like a kid in the candy store! Predictably, that's exactly what we did. We could and we did. We started right away. 😅

I have, r289. My ancestors settled in what is now Nova Scotia in the early 1600s. What really impressed me is they crossed the north Atlantic in wooden ships.

At any rate, my father's side of the family is Cajun. And my father grew up in Galveston County. And I grew up in Houston. Mosquito-borne diseases are still an issue down here.

R290 THANK YOU...mean MERCI for PLAN B.

Cajuns, right? You know their rep. Gorgeous but dumb, I've heard from locals. This is really important. Down to brass tacks. Close your eyes and remember.....

FRENCH CANADIANS IN THE HEAT

Not dumb, r291. Crazy as bedbugs. But good food and music.

Oh hon R290, got ya beat. As you can tell by my spunky light nature there's no way the Brits were having any say in my ancestor's lives. No siree. Your ancestors, yes. Bey's ancestors, yes. Not my Euro and/or Indigenous ancestors were having that. I'm further NW of your clan. Still some Acadian but not admitting it.

Can't fucking believe someone thought Haiti should be Plan A. They dropped like flies! Survivors still ended up in a swamp.

Wow! These Halifax Cajuns had stamina. Bey should feel proud.

Now this is some black history month shit right here.

Please Lord, let us reflect on this history. Fuckin' beautiful!

terminus on the Underground Railroad, and thousands had already passed through it on their way to freedom. This effort was assisted by an Ohio law that allowed fugitive slaves to apply for a writ of habeas corpus, which protected them from extradition back to the southern states from which they had escaped. In 1858, a newly elected Democratic state legislature repealed this law, making fugitives around Oberlin vulnerable to enforcement of the Federal Fugitive Slave Law, which allowed southern slave-catchers to target and extradite them back to the South.

This situation came to a head with the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a pivotal event described in Nat Brandt's book The Town That Started the Civil War. On September 13, 1858, a fugitive named John Price was captured by federal officials and held in neighboring Wellington, Ohio. A large group of Oberlin residents, consisting of both white and black townspeople, students, and faculty, set out for Wellington to release Price from captivity-

The gang went by Obliner Rescuers. Adorable. Priceless. There's a photo and everything 😢

Why do the Canadians always have to get in on the act?

The ole shuffle off to Oh Canada seems to be a common thread in history. Like a refuge there for us all

Cont'd}

The men took Price back from the arresting US Marshal, and eventually smuggled him to Canada, but the authorities were not content to let the matter rest. United States President James Buchanan personally requested prosecution of the group (now referred to by sympathetic parties as "the Rescuers"), and 37 of them were indicted. Twelve of those were free blacks, including Charles H. Langston..

On a tangent and digging this guy! ^the one with hat over chest in Rescue photo..

He instigated a national war for Chrissakes!

Product of that kid in the candy store. Told ya. Badass Bourgeois bitches 😎

Born free in Louisa County, Virginia, he was the son of a wealthy white planter and his common-law African American-Native American Pamunkey wife. His father provided for his education and ensured Langston and his brothers inherited his estate. In 1835 he and his brother Gideon were the first African Americans to attend Oberlin College in Ohio.-

One thing to keep in mind about who was drinking and prohibition was the fact that the Germans were the primary brewers of beer and lager. The anti German hysteria resulting in WWI fed into the prohibition movement’s overnight dismantling of an industry that had been going strong for over a hundred years.

Let us not forget to factor in this running through our veins

Re: Galveston Plan. Lots of Italians and Greeks came through there too. To this day, names like Fertitta and Maceo are still running things down here. During Prohibition they were mobsters, now gone legit. The history of the mob in Galveston is pretty interesting.

I remember the episode of LHOTP when Caroline cut her leg on a barbed wire fence and almost died from the infection that set in. She was literally going to cut off her own leg with a saw before Charles came home and was able to get Doc Baker to save her. Terrifying.

R301. Oh, Charles! Tee-hee

Didn’t take long to devolve into a thread full of racism & ethnic stereotypes. Good job, thread derailers.

People died just falling off of their covered wagons. You're sitting in the front seat, holding the reins or sitting next to the driver, watching the dull flat plains inch by and the rear end of the oxen. You didn't sleep much last night because there wasn't a dry spot to be had, and life is dull and you nod off... and when you fall off the driver's bench you land under the wagon wheels and are dead in an instant.

Lots of deaths in stagecoach accidents too. Those things were rickety deathtraps.

They used to die of common diseases - flu, measles, whooping cough, tetanus. If only there was a vaccine to keep people from contracting these deadly diseases.

Which is why these anti-vaccine people are fucking nuts, r306. And also ignorant of history. Vaccines have saved us from many diseases that used to be extremely common and often deadly. Modern people are exactly the same as people who lived over a hundred years ago, without vaccines and modern medicine we would go right back to the multitude of diseases of the 1800s and before, which thanks to vaccination we no longer have to worry about.

You beat me to it, R298. My family is Irish, but Germans were also the targets of the Prohibition team. And while lots of Germans were Catholic, there were a lot of Lutherans as well.

They were big beer drinkers, with beer gardens, etc a large part of their social life.

Prohibition is a great example of the unexpected consequences of people who probably had good intentions. Leading to the bright idea that poisoning industrial alcohol would sure enough stop those awful people who drink.

My mother told us that her Irish born father had a still in the basement of their house in Chicago. She was the one of his children he sent down to buy the fixins. She told of walking down to the store, pulling the wagon and decades later she would imitate the voice of the woman behind the counter as she called back for "Ten Pounds Barley". We enjoyed teasing my mother that she was an accomplice to the activities and she admitted to being very embarrassed at her shopping trip.

But, with a twinkle she would always clarify with "... But he never sold it.". And then added with a grin, "But we had LOTS of company."

Vaccines and antibiotics, r307, and -- what is usually underestimated -- sanitation and public hygiene measures. I remember reading somewhere that the installation of plumbing (both water pipes to clean sources and sewage systems) made a bigger difference in mortality between 1800 and 1950 than medical advances did.

(And yeah, there is at least one meth-addled loon spamming this thread with about 50 posts of disjointed race-obsessed ramblings -- block r167 and coherence returns.)

I hope I go in the first bright flash when WWIII starts, because this thread has reminded me of how completely unfit I am to live in a world without air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and a well stocked grocery store down the street.

How many here can clean a fish? How many could take a dead rabbit or deer and actually turn it into something you could eat? Can and preserve vegetables? Forget the catching, hunting, killing, growing part, let's say an animal falls dead at your feet, is it dinner or not?

Me too r310! I don't think I could survive pioneer life if we ever had to return to that. I said upthread that I have tremendous respect for the pioneers and the people who founded the US when this country was nothing but wilderness. They were pretty amazing.

Yes, Excel spreadsheet skills aren't going to keep you alive during the end times.

Back then, people were focused on surviving. There was little time for anything else other than staying alive.

Good point, r310. This is why they predict that the grid going down in the U.S. would be catastrophic— no fresh water, no food supply, no medication, no gas, no sanitation, etc. It would push all of us back 150 years overnight and could remain down for months. Ted Koeppel interviewed experts and wrote a book to sound the alarm several years ago.

I have a survivalist nutcase co-worker, and I've told him that no, I don't want to survive the end times. I'm getting too old to just scrabble for survival at any cost, and it's doubtful that I could scrabble successfully anyway. Other issues aside, my vision is so poor that once the optomotrists of the world ceased to exist, I'd be disabled!

So no, I wouldn't have gone Out West in the old days either, out of necessity I'd have stayed some place I could buy eyeglasses. No lonesome cowboys on the prairie for this gay!

R314, According to my elderly neighbor who still has diaries from her ancestors, it cost $7,000 for a covered wagon set-up. Her Danish relatives came to America as indentured servants and had a very tough life. Then 1st sons inherited everything so the promise of land of your own to farm was very enticing.

I never would've made it. It all sounds horrific and miserable. I barely make it through the winter in these modern times. Lord, I can't begin to imagine. We really do forget how new this modern world is.

R319, they’ll call it “The great dying.”

Add to the list of causes of death: military conflict.

One of my great grand daddies died on a gunboat defending NYC during the War of 1812. And I had a cousin killed in the Civil War. He was 21 and the war was over a few months later.

My BF was in the war of 1812.

I would have had secret (& not so secret) liasons with everybody available. I mean, every attractive body.

I know...typical American. So busy exploring. Not the land, the people!

Come on. Admit it.

Most of the country didn't even exist.

CHILE

This is everything