EPHRAIM GEORGE SQUIER, AKA SAMUEL A. BARD

Transcription

1 , AKA There were all sorts of life possibilities available to Henry Thoreau, that he did not pursue. One of these possibilities was to become like this present author the perpetrator of a series of stupid books full of ridiculous prejudices while currying favor with federal politicians and then standing around with hand out looking for a government sinecure (or, as in the case of Hawthorne, become the author of a series of halfway interesting fabulations while currying favor with federal politicians and then standing around with hand out looking for a government sinecure). Aren t we glad Henry wasn t like this? NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

2 1821 June 17, Sunday: Ephraim George Squier was born in Bethlehem, New York, a son of a Methodist minister. He would study civil engineering while working on a farm until the Panic of 1837 would cause him to consider in turn becoming a teacher, a lawyer, and a journalist. Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 17th of 6th M 1821 / Our frd Micajah Collins attended both Meetings with us - in the Morning he was engaged in a lively & useful testimony, also in the Afternoon tho the gospel key did not rise as in the forenoon yet I believe many hearts were Sensibly baptized & particularly among the Youth. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

3 1840 Ephraim George Squier edited the Literary Pearl of Charlton, New York while preparing a literary history of Portugal (a project that would not be completed). LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? NO, THAT S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN S STORIES. LIFE ISN T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

4 1841 Ephraim George Squier went to Albany and got work at a unionist magazine, the New York State Mechanic. While employed there he would attempt to start a Poet s Magazine, and would attempt to secure a diplomatic posting to China. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

5 1842 Ephraim George Squier put out two issues of a Poet s Magazine containing many of his own poems which was unfortunate. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

6 1843 US sailors and marines from the USS St. Louis were landed in Canton after a clash between Americans and Chinese at the trading post there. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS In Canton, Hung Hsiu Ch üan for the 4th and final time attempted, and flunked, his all-important government Mandarin examinations. When a friend pulled a forgotten book on Christianity off his bookshelf and was looking at it, the book QUANSHI LIANGYAN or GOOD WORDS TO EXHORT THE AGES describing the basic elements of Christianity, by Liang Afa, which had been given him by some Christian missionary or other, the distraught Hung decided that the book explained the experience which he had had under delirium in 1837, when he had failed his examinations for the 3d time. An old man with a golden beard had spoken to him in his dream, telling him that this world was overrun by demons. That old man must have been the Christian God. Then in the dream he had met a middle-aged man. That must have been Jesus Christ. Instead of being a failure in life, a reject, a retard, Hung actually had been selected for a most unique greatness! Most impressed by the self-servingness of this sort of thinking, Hung proceeded to baptize himself (although, just between you and me and that lamppost over there, I would have preferred that he had proceeded to hang himself). The New York State Mechanic failed, putting Ephraim George Squier out of a paycheck. He got a job as the editor of the Whig Daily Journal of Hartford, Connecticut. He prepared for publication George Tradescent

7 Lay s THE CHINESE AS THEY ARE; THEIR MORAL AND SOCIAL CHARACTER, MANNERS, CUSTOMS, LANGUAGE: WITH REMARKS ON THEIR ARTS AND SCIENCES, MEDICAL SKILL, THE EXTENT OF MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE, ETC. BY G. TRADESCENT LAY, ESQ., NATURALIST IN BEECHY S EXPEDITION, LATE RESIDENT AT CANTON, AUTHOR OF THE VOYAGE OF THE HIMMALEH, ETC. CONTAINING ALSO, ILLUSTRATIVE AND CORROBORATIVE NOTES, ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS ON THE ANCIENT AND MODERN HISTORY, ANCIENT AND MODERN INTERCOURSE, POPULATION GOVERNMENT CIVILIZATION EDUCATION LITERATURE ETC. OF THE CHINESE. COMPILED FROM AUTHENTIC SOURCES. BY E.G. SQUIER. ALBANY: PUBLISHED BY GEORGE JONES, MUSEUM BUILDING. BURGESS AND STRINGER, AND M.Y. BEACH, NEW YORK: REDDING AND CO. BOSTON: G.B. ZEIBER, PHILADELPHIA: WM. TAYLOR, BALTIMORE. THE CHINESE AS THEY ARE The volume contained many illuminations, such as the following: The head of a Chinese is broad behind and narrow in front, when compared with the general standard of Europeans. If, according to a very general opinion, the forepart of the head represents intellectual capability, the advantage is in our favor; a conclusion which is warranted by everything that research brings to light. WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

8 1844 The Whig Daily Journal of Hartford, Connecticut, and its editor Ephraim George Squier, supported Henry Clay in the 1844 presidential election. When Clay was defeated the journal was sold to the leading opposition journal and Squier was again out of a job. Since he was going to receive no political reward for services rendered to a candidate who did not get elected, he removed to Chillicothe, Ohio. CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

9 1845 Ephraim George Squier became the editor of the Scioto Gazette of Chillicothe, Ohio.

10 1847 Ephraim George Squier got himself elected Clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives and was able to quit his job as editor of the Scioto Gazette. While occupying this government post, he and Chillicothe physician E.H. Davies would research the Indian mounds of the area.

11 1848 Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury s ABSTRACT LOG FOR THE USE OF AMERICAN NAVIGATORS. Richard Owen described homologies similarities of design in bird wings, fish fins and human hands. The AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was founded after the model of a British Association for the Advancement of Science which had been in existence for some 17 years. Lt. Maury of the US Naval Observatory was present for its initial meeting. Joseph Henry ( ), who had been appointed the 1st secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, became its 1st Secretary. In this year was issued the 1st publication of the new Smithsonian Institution, Ephraim George Squier s and Edwin H. Davis s ANCIENT MONUMENTS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. Thoreau would in 1849 copy the following materials into his Indian Notebook #3: 1 Arrowheads, differing from each other only in variety of stone of which they are composed, are discovered in all quarters of the globe. They have been found in... Liberia, in the tombs of Egypt... upon the plains of Greece... and in the rude monuments of ancient Scandinavia. A simple heap of earth or stones seems to have been the first monument which suggested itself to man; the Pyramid, the arch, and the obelisk are evidences of a more advanced state. But rude as are these primitive memorials, they have been but little impaired by time, while other more imposing structures have sunk into shapeless ruins. We do not, unfortunately, have electronic copy of the 1848 printing that Thoreau saw, but we do have Google Books electronic copy for the 1847 edition from the same publisher (New York: Bartlett & Welford) and have reason to expect this to be equivalent. James Ellsworth De Kay became a member of this new entity, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. THE SCIENCE OF 1848 This association established Science Magazine, which was to become one of the world s foremost science journals. 1. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials.

12 1849 Upon the successful election of the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, Ephraim George Squier had sought as his reward for his support of this party a diplomatic assignment that would enable him to study the native ruins of Central America. In this year, consequently, he was rewarded with an appointment as United States Chargé d'affaires to Central America (things were so different then than now). DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

13 January 3, Wednesday: Ephraim George Squier s The Antiquities of Western New-York appeared on page 1 of the New-York Tribune. When Henry Thoreau would receive this issue in Concord, he would copy from this into his Indian Notebook # The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials.

14 1850 Publication of Ephraim George Squier s ABORIGINAL MONUMENTS OF THE STATE OF NEW-YORK. COMPRISING THE RESULTS OF ORIGINAL SURVEYS AND EXPLORATIONS... (Smithsonian Institution: Smithsonian contributions to knowledge, volume 2). In 1852 Henry Thoreau would make extracts from this in his Indian Notebook # The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials.

15 1851 Publication of Ephraim George Squier s THE SERPENT SYMBOL, AND THE WORSHIP OF THE RECIPROCAL PRINCIPLES OF NATURE IN AMERICA (New-York: G.P. Putnam). Henry Thoreau borrowed this from Bronson Alcott as soon as it was published and made extracts in his Indian Notebook # The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials.

16 1852 Ephraim George Squier s NICARAGUA: ITS PEOPLE, SCENERY, MONUMENTS.

17 1853 Ephraim George Squier was Secretary for the Honduras Interoceanic Railway Company (until this project collapsed). Here is Lawrence Buell on Thoreau s tweaking of the great bourgeois (sub)urbanite anxiety on page 149 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE: WALDEN s ideological ambience can be pinned down... by comparing it to the Anglophone Protestant classic about homesteading that it most resembles: Defoe s ROBINSON CRUSOE. CRUSOE was already a classic in Thoreau s day. Thoreau knew the Crusoe story well, both the original and several recent imitations, such as Mayne Reid s juvenile novel THE DESERT HOME (1853) and Ephraim Squier s faintly Typee-like WAIKNA; OR, ADVENTURES ON THE MOSQUITO SHORE (1855), about a beach- and junglecombing American artist-adventurer in Central America... Thoreau was not wholly immune to the Crusoe syndrome... Still, of the two, Thoreau is the sponsor of technological devolution and the attenuation of authority structures. Like their nightmarish complement, the gothic romance, CRUSOE and WALDEN both cater to the great bourgeois (sub)urbanite anxiety. Can I survive when cast back on my own resources, without the usual

18 social and material supports?

19 THE MAINE WOODS: Setting out on our return to the river, still at an early hour in the day, we decided to follow the course of the torrent, which we supposed to be Murch Brook, as long as it would not lead us too far out of our way. We thus travelled about four miles in the very torrent itself, continually crossing and recrossing it, leaping from rock to rock, and jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water. This ravine had been the scene of an extraordinary freshet in the spring, apparently accompanied by a slide from the mountain. It must have been filled with a stream of stones and water, at least twenty feet above the present level of the torrent. For a rod or two, on either side of its channel, the trees were barked and splintered up to their tops, the birches bent over, twisted, and sometimes finely split, like a stable-broom; some, a foot in diameter, snapped off, and whole clumps of trees bent over with the weight of rocks piled on them. In one place we noticed a rock, two or three feet in diameter, lodged nearly twenty feet high in the crotch of a tree. For the whole four miles, we saw but one rill emptying in, and the volume of water did not seem to be increased from the first. We travelled thus very rapidly with a downward impetus, and grew remarkably expert at leaping from rock to rock, for leap we must, and leap we did, whether there was any rock at the right distance or not. It was a pleasant picture when the foremost turned about and looked up the winding ravine, walled in with rocks and the green forest, to see, at intervals of a rod or two, a red-shirted or green-jacketed mountaineer against the white torrent, leaping down the channel with his pack on his back, or pausing upon a convenient rock in the midst of the torrent to mend a rent in his clothes, or unstrap the dipper at his belt to take a draught of the water. At one place we were startled by seeing, on a little sandy shelf by the side of the stream, the fresh print of a man s foot, and for a moment realized how Robinson Crusoe felt in a similar case; but at last we remembered that we had struck this stream on our way up, though we could not have told where, and one had descended into the ravine for a drink. The cool air above, and the continual bathing of our bodies in mountain water, alternate foot, sitz, douche, and plunge baths, made this walk exceedingly refreshing, and we had travelled only a mile or two, after leaving the torrent, before every thread of our clothes was as dry as usual, owing perhaps to a peculiar quality in the atmosphere. ROBINSON CRUSOE

20 1855 Ephraim George Squier s NOTES ON CENTRAL AMERICA: PARTICULARLY THE STATES OF HONDURAS AND SAN SALVADOR. Under the pen name Samuel A. Bard he issued WAIKNA; OR, ADVENTURES ON THE MOSQUITO SHORE. Thoreau would copy from this into his Indian Notebook #10 5 and into his Fact Book for So, where did this word Waikna come from? For quite a while I have been dealing with the received notion, probably taught to you in civics class in your public high school, that each American tribe s name for itself had been something like The Real Human Beings in their local language. This condescending idea, although entirely presumptuous, has seemed undefeatable. It, like the conceit that the Eskimos have a thousand words for snow, and like the conceit that Native Americans worshiped a Nature goddess, pops up in popular discourse to be batted again and again on the head as if trying to have conversations with white American was like a game of Gopher Bashing. 5. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials.

21 However, in this trade-press book that Thoreau would peruse in 1857, I find there to have been innocently foregrounded a complete demonstration that such a naming tradition, whereby each tribe s name was the word in its local language for The Real Human Beings, amounts to a mere naming convention imposed by the White Man upon each successive tribe as encountered: PREFACE. Scene. A lonely shore. Enter YANKEE and MOSQUITO MAN. Well, my dark friend, who are you? Waikna! A man! And what is your nation? Waikna! A nation of men! Pretty good for you, my dark friend! There was once a great nation a few old bricks are about all that remains of it now whose people were proud to call themselves but then what do you know about the Romans? Him good for drink him grog? Bah! No! Den no good! bah, too! Exunt ambo. Now such a dialogue took place, or might have taken place, on the Mosquito Shore. For all artistic purposes it did take place; and, as my book is chiefly devoted to the Mosquito man and his country, it shall be called WAIKNA a word that, in the Mosquito tongue, means simply MAN, but which is proudly claimed as the generic designation of the people of the entire coast. Here we see the white intrusive in the generic act of making up tribal names out of whole white cloth!

22 1858 Ephraim George Squier s THE STATES OF CENTRAL AMERICA. He got married with Miriam Florence Folline of New Orleans and obtained the position of Chief Editor of Frank Leslie s Weekly.

23 1860 Ephraim George Squier s TRAVELS IN CENTRAL AMERICA, PARTICULARLY IN NICARAGUA.

24 1862 Ephraim George Squier had been politically helpful, and as his reward President Abraham Lincoln sent him to Peru as United States Commissioner (things were so different then than now).

25 1868 Ephraim George Squier became the Consul General of Honduras in New-York.

26 1870 Ephraim George Squier s HONDURAS: DESCRIPTIVE, HISTORICAL, AND STATISTICAL.

27 1873 Ephraim George Squier and Miriam Florence Folline Squier went through a divorce proceeding.

28 1874 At long last somebody figured out that Ephraim George Squier was crazier than a squirrel, and they put him away. Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, Isaac Elwood, and other American inventors introduce machine-made barbed wire. In an unrelated piece of news from this year, Chester Greenwood invented the modern earmuff.

29 When the Blackwell Company erected a tobacco plant in Durham, North Carolina, it placed atop its new building an instrument after the style of the Calliope, which imitates the bellowing of the bull If you ve never heard an uncastrated bull roar, you ve missed something. It s awesome.

30 1877 Publication of Ephraim George Squier s INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION IN THE LAND OF THE INCAS (something written in the 1860s).

31 1888 April 17, Tuesday: Ephraim George Squier died in Brooklyn. MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Ephraim George Squier

32 COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: July 25, 2014

33 ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

34 Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.