Month: August 2009

LIBRARY, VERSION 2.0

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

UPDATE 2015: The item below was written in 2009 and remains here only for posterity. At the time, desktop computers and netbooks (remember the fad for those small, cheap laptops?) were the only practical means of reading digital book facsimiles. It was before the advent of the iPad; the only mobile eReader was the first generation Kindle and that did not even have native PDF ability. The best mobile phone of the day was the iPhone 3GS and its screen was too small and too low-resolution for serious reading.

Today all mobile devices have available apps that can display PDF books, usually offering markup features such as highlighting, note-taking and multiple bookmarks that were not even available on most PDF desktop readers in 2009. There is no longer any need to split up a PDF into separate files or do any other somersaults to read a facsimile book on a mobile device.

The library section of the Comstock House website continues to grow with new titles added monthly. Many of these works remain difficult to find online; where possible, links to sources are provided allowing anyone to download – and often more importantly, search – these materials. Since 2009, however, both Google Books and Archive.Org have modified some of their file directory structures; for example, web addresses at Google used to begin as “images.google.com” but that no longer works; it now must be “books.google.com”. Simply replace “images” with “books” and the URL should work. Archive.Org address changes are more varied. I am correcting these errors as I find them.

Some titles are simply no longer available online because modern publishers have republished these public domain works and claimed a new copyright. Download any books that are important to you; do not expect them to always be available in the future.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:  The library section of the Comstock House website has been completely redesigned, which should make it easier for newcomers to understand and more functional for everyone, including us.

Now the library simply presents a topic index. Under each is a catalog of related e-books. Seen on the right for each entry is the “Comments” field, which contains a link to an Internet location where you can read the book on-line or download it. More topics will be added and refined as the number of e-books in the library (rapidly!) expands.

The previous version failed for multiple reasons, primarily because it tried to reinvent too many wheels. It started as a hierarchical index of e-books referenced by blog articles, but it wasn’t long before books less directly related, even works of fiction, were added to the mix (trust me: if you knew how hard it is to find a readable facsimile of Dickens’ “Little Dorrit,” you’d want to share the link, too). That concept also hinged on using a customized e-book reader that required hand-coding a special file for each and every document. Even if the bugs and quirks in the open-source software could be tolerated, tweaking all those initialization files was a significant detriment to adding new entries.

A far better solution began with switching to LibraryThing for the actual database. Almost all of our real library is already cataloged using this remarkable web site; I can now search electronic and paper book records interchangeably, which is increasingly how I view books — I no longer care if I have a fine-condition early edition of a physical book or an excellent high-resolution scan of same.

The quest for a better e-book reader ended by discovering FFView (Mac only), which is a versatile image viewer that was originally intended for displaying comic books. For the first time, I can now curl up with a mini-laptop and have the same experience reading an electronic book as with the dead-tree kind.* To be clear, for those not familiar with the e-book world: I am reading scanned images from actual old books, displayed about the same size as the original pages. This is NOT the same as using a device such as Amazon’s Kindle, which, in my opinion, is comparable to reading a Word document printed on soggy, grey cardboard.

Also now included in our LibraryThing catalog are high-resolution historic maps and photographs in JPEG 2000 or MrSid formats, which usually require a special viewer to display. I highly recommend ExpressView, available for both Mac and PC.

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THAT CAN’T BE TRUE

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Surprise: Some things you read in the old papers ain’t exactly true. Beyond the frequent typos and misspelled names, beyond the stories with hopelessly garbled details, there’s the occasional item that you read twice, three times, before realizing, “why, this is total bullshit.”

Journalism standards were loose in the 19th century (to say the least), and it wasn’t that unusual for a spoof, a satire, or an outright hoax to appear in a newspaper without any cue to the reader that the story wasn’t true. Tall tales were particularly common in wild west papers; a good book on the topic, Red Blood & Black Ink, has an entertaining chapter on the false news story genre.

The master of the art was probably Mark Twain’s pal, Dan De Quille. One of his “quaints” (as he called them) was about an air-conditioned helmet that would allow a man to walk across Death Valley in the hottest part of summer. The inventor supposedly took his invention out for a test stroll, but alas, it worked too well, and he was later found frozen stiff in the broiling-hot desert. His most infamous hoax was the report about the “Traveling Stones of Pahranagat Valley,” which he claimed were mysterious magnetic rocks that were attracted to others of their own kind — scatter a bunch of them over a tabletop and they would supposedly roll towards a center point and form themselves into a little pile. German scientists wrote to “Herr Dan De Quille, the eminent physicist of Virginiastadt, Nevada” for more details about the phenomena, and De Quille admitted it was a joke — but the Germans were incensed, thinking that he was instead being secretive about a great discovery. The story took on a life of its own, and requests for samples came in for years. De Quille took to replying that he was fresh out of the stones, and they should instead contact Samuel Clemens, “who probably has still on hand fifteen or twenty bushels of assorted sizes.”

Press Democrat editor Ernest L. Finley had presented Santa Rosa with (at least) three obviously fake items in 1905, starting with a pair of parody ads for the rival Santa Rosa Republican, which were intended to ridicule the new owners as clueless outsiders who didn’t fit in an agricultural community, “people from the big town, who never saw a pumpkin in their lives.” The other example was over-the-top silliness that had our own James W. Oates and his neighbor launching a skyship, complete with “wireless telegraph apparatus.”

But the story below was more in the league with De Quille’s fantastic quaints. A reprint from an uncredited East Coast paper, it claimed that some dairy farmers were bypassing cows to create milk and butter directly from hay. Without a single hint that it was a joke, the story burrowed down into tedious cost analysis benefits of using such artificial dairy products.

Question #1 is whether Finley himself was bamboozled. That’s doubtful, but possible; the story was actually a parody of the 1905 discovery of hydrogenation, where oil from vegetables could be chemically transformed into a substitute for margarine or lard. With that background, is it really so outlandish that someone in that era might also believe a process using “certain chemicals” could create a passable fake milk from plant matter?

At least one newspaper was outraged by the hoax and sought to debunk it. The weekly Florida Agriculturist called it “a sample of the outrageous stories that some writers will palm off upon an unexpecting and credulous public,” reprinting the exact same story that appeared in the PD, but tracing it back to an article in the Oswego Times.

The Dec. 31, 1905 edition of the Florida paper quoted a reader who supposedly lived near the Massachussetts location of the hay-to-butter plant: “We do not know of the slightest foundation for this yarn. We believe it to be a canard pure and simple. We do not have a daily paper regularly, but we have one occasionally and lately I have been almost shocked to see the way the reporter lies to make a sensation…It is strange that a reputable paper should print such awful nonsense without labeling it ‘A Joke.'”

CREAMERY BUTTER FROM HAY
New Process That Promises to Put Cows Out of Business

In the town of New Braintree Massachussetts, there is a factory in which butter is made direct from hay. The following description of the factory and the process followed will doubtless prove of interest:

The plant covers about five acres of ground; the building alone covers about two acres and is two stories height. It is constructed on the latest improved plans, being build of concrete and then smoothed up with cement. This plant is for the making of butter from hay without the use of cows. It uses some 10,000 tons of hay per year and arrangements are being made to more than double the capacity within the next year or so.

These people buy the hay as soon as it is thoroughly cured paying as high as $15 per ton for good clover, and from that down to $8 for the poorer grades. The hay is then cut up fine, about one-half inch in length and put in very large, strong vats or tanks, which are so made that they are capable of standing great pressure. About five tons of hay are put in each vat and certain chemicals are sprayed on the hay. Then steam is forced into the vats until all the hay is thoroughly softened. The vats is then hermetically sealed and left for twenty-seven hours, after which time immense pressure is put on and every particle of juice is pressed from the hay.

This juice is run through a separator and the butter fat comes out just the same as the cream from milk. This is kept at a temperature of 60 degrees for twenty hours and then churned. Butter produced in this manner is now selling in New York and Boston markets for 40 and 50 cents per pound, and the average amount of butter taken from a ton of hay is 100 pounds, a good clover hay making as high as 150 pounds per ton, while hay of a poorer quality will seldom run below 75 pounds per ton.

The juice after the butter fat is extracted is mixed with buckwheat middlings and baked into cakes, and is being used by dealers in fancy poultry for feeding young chickens, it having been demonstrated that 20 per cent more chickens can be raised from this food than any other food known.

Then again, the hay, after having been pressed, is put to a dry kiln and dried and then ground as fine as cornmeal and sold for horsefeed, it being claimed that this, mixed with oats half and half, givers better results than clear oats, and is worth about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cents per pound. This feed is sold for about $20 per ton, so that altogether it is a very profitable business. Experiments are now going on by which the manufacturers are expecting to bring out new products making it still better.

– Press Democrat, February 4, 1906

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ROUND VALLEY LAND RUSH

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

You had to be really gullible to believe in 1906 you could still get nearly-free homestead land in California — yet crowds jammed the tiny Mendocino County town of Covelo, waiting for the land rush to begin.

“Round Valley Reservation Will be Open to Settlement” read the headline in the Press Democrat (the article was actually from AP), but had the would-be homesteaders done some research, they would have known that yes, this technically was part of an Indian reservation, but ranchers had grabbed all the good grazing land in Round Valley decades before, and any leftover parcels had to be absolutely worthless.

My first thought was that the 1906 land rush story might be a hoax; it wasn’t mentioned in any books on Round Valley I knew, including the classic history “Genocide and Vendetta” (although that book is skimpy on developments after the 1890s) and only a few old newspapers picked up this wire service story. But sure enough, here was an almost-forgotten chapter in the disgraceful history of Round Valley.

For those not familiar, Round Valley was the main Northern California Indian reservation in the 19th century, and there is no deeper stain on the history of Sonoma County than its connections to that place. As I wrote in a 1995 history essay, The Dark Legacy of Nome Cult, local militia or vigilantes forced residents of entire Pomo villages to walk to the Mendocino reservation, a torturous passage remembered as “The Death March.” After three Indians were lynched near Fort Ross in 1857, about twenty Natives from somewhere in West County passed through town on their way north, the Sonoma Democrat (predecessor to the PD) noting approvingly that “it is much better for them, inasmuch as they are totally incapable of sustaining themselves when left to combat with the more sagacious white men…the hardship [of leaving their homeland] exists only in the imagination.” Many thousands of Indians died in these early years; without hyperbole, it was genocide.

The Round Valley reservation was nothing less than an American gulag. Although the U.S. government had designated the entire valley as reservation land in 1870, Native people were confined to an undesirable corner of the valley because the White ranchers refused to leave, even though they held no legal rights to be there. Entirely dependent upon the government, the Indians once went two years without being given any clothing; a congressman who visited Round Valley in the mid-1870s found they were treated no better than slaves. Indians were forced to work for the ranchers, who in turn sold cattle to government agents to feed the Indians. The Methodist missionary in charge of the place did little to protect them from raiders who stole their children to sell them into servitude, or cowboys who raped their women.

Adding to the injury and insult, an 1890 act of Congress declared that more than half of the reservation land should be sold off, thus legitimizing the rancher’s land grab. But only about a thousand of the 66,000+ acres that were “relinquished” from the reservation were sold at the time. It wasn’t until 1905 that another Congressional act sweetened the deal enough for the ranchers to actually buy the stolen land.

Author of the 1905 bill was the Press Democrat’s favorite perennial political candidate in that era, one-term Rep. Theodore Bell, who did little else in Congress other than add his name to bills authored by others. Bell positioned his resolution as “An act to open to homestead settlement” any unused lands in Round Valley — although he was more honest in his House speech, admitting that this really was for the benefit of the existing ranchers: “A few men have gone in and settled upon the lands…This bill is for the purpose of giving these men the right to perfect title by paying whatever the land shall be appraised for.” (Good background on both the 1890 and 1905 laws, by the way, can be found in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals discussions of a case in 1980.)

Once that was passed, the only question that remained was assessing the price for the land that was to be sold to these “homesteaders,” and articles appeared in other California papers quoting the Surveyor General as saying a new survey would take at least two years. But miracles of miracles, the U.S. Indian Inspector declared in August, 1905, that he had appraised every inch of the 66,111 acres and declared that it all should be sold at “a substantial reduction” from prices estimated way back in 1893. It is a mystery why the “Indian Inspector” was considered an expert in appraising land value, or allowed to have any say whatsoever about land that was “relinquished” from the reservation fifteen years earlier.

RUSH FOR LANDS
Round Valley Reservation Will be Open to Settlement

Special Dispatch to Press Democrat Covelo, Jan. 10 — The lands of the relinquished Round Valley Indian Reservation will be thrown open to settlement Monday, January 15. Already the rush of prospective settlers has assumed the proportions of a stampede and the town is full to overflow. The regular stage facilities do not begin to accomodate those who are rushing in here and many are coming in their own conveyances while others are coming afoot. Many of the would-be settlers are city bred and unaccustomed to roughing it, and it would be ludicrous if it as not so serious a matter. The land is all mountainous and only fit for grazing stock.

– Press Democrat, January 11, 1906

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