How tall was he really?
Dec. 21st, 2003 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ambitious_wench"No matter how tall your grandaddy was, you have to do your own growing, Edie"
--Jean T. McKinney
5-year old Priscilla Sterns: "Uncle Gerald, is it true that we are Mayflower people?"
Gerald Howe Totten: "Yes, it is, but don't tell anyone. It's the dirty family secret"
Jean T. McKinney was my mother's mother. Gerald Totten, who later added the middle name Howe, was her father.
And this is why my great-grandfather said what he did:
From The Writer's Almanac for Dec 20, 2003
It seems we have a history of beheading our enemies and displaying them. I say that is barbaric, but I am sure at least one of my readers will disagree.
Yes, I am descended from both Miles Standish and William Bradford, through several lines.
--Jean T. McKinney
5-year old Priscilla Sterns: "Uncle Gerald, is it true that we are Mayflower people?"
Gerald Howe Totten: "Yes, it is, but don't tell anyone. It's the dirty family secret"
Jean T. McKinney was my mother's mother. Gerald Totten, who later added the middle name Howe, was her father.
And this is why my great-grandfather said what he did:
On this day in 1620, the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on the shores of Massachusetts. The Mayflower carried enough furniture for 19 cottages, as well as pigs, goats, guns, journals and bibles. Native American tribes had already skirmished with the Pilgrims as they explored the banks of Cape Cod. William Bradford, who became the governor of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that they reached the new continent and found nothing but "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men."
For the first year, the Pilgrims and Indians lived peacefully together. They signed a peace treaty in the spring and had a plentiful harvest. But there was trouble the following January. The chief of a tribe called the Narragansett wanted no part in the peace treaty, and he sent Bradford a sheaf of arrows wrapped inside a snakeskin. Bradford sent the snakeskin back to him, stuffing it with bullets. Then the pilgrims built a wall around their village, eleven feet high and a mile all around.
A year later, in March 1623, Bradford sent a group of heavily armed men to a neighboring camp of English settlers. They had been told that the Indians there were planning a massacre. Led by Miles Standish, they arrived at the village and cornered four Indians. Standish took them into a hut and killed them with a knife. Then he ordered his men to kill all the Indians in the village, but some escaped into a swamp. He cut off one of the Indians' heads and brought it back to Plymouth, placing it on a spike for all to see. Later, a former minister to the Pilgrims sent a letter saying, "Oh! How happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any."
From The Writer's Almanac for Dec 20, 2003
It seems we have a history of beheading our enemies and displaying them. I say that is barbaric, but I am sure at least one of my readers will disagree.
Yes, I am descended from both Miles Standish and William Bradford, through several lines.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 10:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 10:17 am (UTC)It wasn't effective. It was an added insult to a people who had been brutilized and lied to repeatedly.
Edie
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 10:29 am (UTC)More to the 'head on display' thing. Displaying the heads/bodies of one's enemies not only instilled a kind of obedience in your own subjects, but let anyone that would screw with you know that you meant business.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 10:50 am (UTC)Take a look at the history of head hunting among the Celts--to take the head of your enemy was to take his spirit, and to display it in special niches in the walls was to put his spirit to work gaurding *your* dun, or fortress. It was also a taunt to your (living) enemies, designed to enrage them to attacking without thinking.
Read the story of Bran the Blessed for insight into heads as war trophies.
As long as the ravens attend the Tower of London, Britain will not fall to invasion. During the air-raid attacks by the Germans during WWII, they caged the ravens and kept them in the tower, "just in case".
The Tower of London is also the mythological resting place of the head of Bran the Blessed, and his totem is the raven.
The raven is also the animal of The Morrigan, the goddess of death and war, who, like Kali, wears the limbs and heads of her enemies as jewelry.
But to the Native Americans, it was mutliation that they had never seen before, barbaric and horrific.
I really need to find that post I made a long time ago about the picture of a GI in a photograph, holding the head of a Vietnamese soldier by the hair and smiling.
Edie
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 10:53 am (UTC)Food for thought. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 01:13 pm (UTC)Heh. Whereas nowadays the poor fat ravens just have their wings clipped so they can't go anywhere.
People and their symbolic tokens...
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 03:23 pm (UTC)decidedly so.
And as an aside, I remember hearing a long time ago that the practice of 'scalping' was never a Native practice until they observed the various settlers doing it. They adopted the effective barbaric practice for the same reasons : to instill fear.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 11:01 am (UTC)my dad's dad's line were early new englanders too. they lived riverside near hartford, ct. such a contrast to my mom's mom's scottish homesteaders and railway workers!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 12:14 pm (UTC)I wonder if he is still alive...
A small curtsey will suffice
She disgraced herself by marrying a commoner who was not only common, but *gasp* a Scott!
The embarassment to the family was so great that they were forced to immigrate to America.
*beam*
And we've been embarassing our relatives ever since.
Re: A small curtsey will suffice
Date: 2003-12-21 12:43 pm (UTC)Re: A small curtsey will suffice
Yes indeed.
(And I'm sure they liked America much better. So much more scope for the imagination!)
Re: A small curtsey will suffice
Date: 2003-12-21 01:19 pm (UTC)Heh. Have you ever seen 'Her Majesty Mrs. Brown'?
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 01:17 pm (UTC)I guess if we're all in glass houses, it should at least make people think twice about casting stones, right?
Right?
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 02:50 pm (UTC)Seems like every book has its dark chapter, as
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 07:35 am (UTC)And I'm sure if they knew about you we could attach generators to their corpses and power half of New England with their spinning.
Heh.
;-)
-m
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 08:53 am (UTC)-E.