First Battlefield Of A Black American Regiment Preserved

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has recently aquired the site of the Battle of Island Mound and plans to preserve it as a state park. About fifty miles south of Kansas City, it was here on 29 October 1862 that the First Kansas Colored Volunteers defeated a large Confederate guerrilla force in what was the first engagement of an American black regiment.

The First Kansas had been organized by Jim Lane, a radical abolitionist senator from Kansas. The regiment was, in fact, illegal, as Abraham Lincoln had expressly forbidden him from arming blacks. Senator Lane was convinced that the only way the North would win the fight on the frontier was if it armed the black population. The First Kansas was made up of runaway slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, free blacks from Kansas, and mixed black/Indian volunteers from the Indian Territory.

The Department of Natural Resoucres plans to have the site fully open to the public in time for the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011.

I wrote about this battle for an issue of Missouri Life magazine several years ago and am currently pitching a book proposal on the regiment, so this comes as great news to me. Another researcher, Chris Tabor, has made an excellent website on the battle. He has also written a short monograph on the topic titled The Skirmish at Island Mound, now sadly out of print.

Reading A Book Twice By Accident

Over the holidays I started reading Gorillas Were My Neighbors by Fred C. Merfield, a big game hunter in the French Cameroons during the first half of the twentieth century. It's a fun little book from a different era, when hunters led huge safaris through the little-known jungle blasting away at animals with gleeful abandon.

As I started reading it I recognized a couple of the stories he told, but I figured they were common tales from Africa and I had read them somewhere before. It took until I was a third of the way through the book before I realized that I had read them before, in this very book. It had been sitting on my shelf since I bought it at a library sale twelve years ago, and for some reason I'd forgotten I'd read it. I guess this means my library is getting out of control. I've met people who have bought the same book twice because they forgot they already had a copy, or they simply couldn't find it on the shelves!

Remarkably, Merfield was a bit of a preservationist, calling for limits on hunting seventy years ago. He also had a lot of respect for the local cultures, although he also pointed out any flaws he saw. This is a refreshing change from modern political correctness, which sees only the good, and traditional (and modern) racism, which only sees the bad. Merfield spent most of his life in Africa, and unlike a lot of colonial officials he worked and lived with Africans. This book is well worth a read for its engaging style, exciting anecdotes, and insights into traditional cultures. Affordable used copies can easily be found at all the usual online outlets.

Canadian Arctic Not What It Used To Be

In more depressing news about the state of the Arctic, a 4,500 year-old shelf of ice has broken off from Ellesmere Island. The BBC reported that a nineteen-square-mile section, about three times the size of Manhattan, is now floating around the ocean. It's getting bad on the other islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago too. What people often forget is that not only is this a scary symptom of global warming, but these ice shelves are actually very fragile ecozones that are now in serious danger of disappearing.

I've always been fascinated with Arctic exploration. When I was a kid I loved the stories of explorers such as Hudson and Barents navigating between ice floes and having run-ins with polar bears. I loved looking at maps of the Arctic and wondering about all those islands with the strange names--Ellesmere, Baffin, Devon. I wondered what it would be like to be trekking across their huge expanses of ice. Looks like I'll never know.

Kayaking to the North Pole

What's wrong with this title? Well, you shouldn't be able to kayak to the North Pole, because there's supposed to be a bunch of ice up there! Unfortunately, the polar cap has been shrinking so quickly that star swimmer Lewis Pugh has decided to attempt to kayak to the top of the world to bring awareness to the problem of global warming.

He's got a fascinating blog about his preparations and start of his expedition. I don't know how much he'll be posting from now on, because he just left Svalbard, headed north. Best of luck, Lewis!

Oh, and if you don't "believe" in global warming, get with the program. Its existence is the closest thing to consensus I've seen in the scientific community, expect for maybe evolution. While the rate of global warming and the extent of human culpability are both debatable, it should be common sense that pumping huge amounts of toxins into our air and water supply is a bad idea.

A Pagan Grove and Norman Church in Iffley

We have a new favorite walk from Oxford. Just a couple of miles up the Isis (the local name for the Thames), and past a nice riverside pub, is the little village of Iffley. Its main claim to fame is a fine Norman church built in the late 11th century that's is almost perfectly preserved. Early on, it changed hands from the local lord to an estate further away, and while the absentee owners paid for its upkeep, they didn't do much to change it, making it one of the most pristine Norman churches in the country.

The front is very Romanesque, and the door is decorated with an unusual partial zodiac, which I'll post on later with more pictures. There's also an atmospheric old cemetery and a 1,500 year-old yew tree. The local priest thinks it was part of a sacred pagan grove and that under the church there's probably an old Saxon church from the 5th or 6th century. Since early church builders liked to build in sacred groves, I'm thinking the Saxons cut down the center tree of the grove, which was probably as old then as this one is now, and built the church on top of it. You see this sort of behavior with mosques, churches, and synagogues in the Middle East depending on who won the latest war.

The surviving tree was probably little more than a sapling then, young when its religion was old, and escaped the notice of the Christians. Perhaps cutting down the central, most sacred tree in the grove was all that needed to be done to destroy it as a place of religious significance. I remember reading in some early Christian accounts where they destroyed sacred groves, and they usually only destroyed the main tree. The sole surviving sacred yew can be seen on the righthand side of both the photos of the church here.

The Rollright Stones

Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but a lot of people don't know that the British Isles are home to nearly 1000 other stone circles. Even more have been lost to time. Archaeologists argue about what they were for. Many seem to have astronomical alignments, and they certainly played a big part in prehistoric religion. They were created during the Neolithic and Early/Middle Bronze Age (from about 4000 to 1500 B.C.).

One of my favorites is the Rollright Stones, in Oxfordshire. Last year I took a ten mile hike through beautiful (but muddy!) countryside to see them. It's hard to get a complete view of the site, since it's actually three clusters of stones. There's a circle of 77 stones called The King's Men, and nearby stands a curved single monolith called the King's Stone. Not far away are a group of five stones leaning on one another called the Whispering Knights.

The stones got these names according to legend a king and his knights were turned to stone by a witch. The Whispering Knights were leaning towards one another because apparently they were conspiring against their sovereign when they got petrified.

One of the King's Men, in the main circle, has a hole
through which you can get a clear view of the Whispering Knights. This has led to all sorts of speculation, but nobody's really sure what it all means.

The site was built over a long period of time. The Whispering Knights are actually the partially collapsed remains of a Neolithic burial chamber. The King's Men might have been built a bit later. The King's Stone seems to mark a Bronze Age cemetery, and came last.

The whole association with a king may be a very old memory of a true story. Burial chambers were hard to build, requiring a lot of manpower to haul the big stones and then cover them with earth, so the person buried there was probably a chief or king. The fact that the spot was still being used for burials two thousand years later show how important the place was.


Sadly, the Rollright Stones have been subject to a lot of vandalism in recent years. Some idiot spray painted a few of the stones yellow, and another idiot put a burning tire on the King's Stone. It seems a lot of modern people are determined to wreck the countryside and anything that hints of any association with the past.

If you go, please respect the stones. You can get information on how to get there from the Oxford Tourist Information Centre. The best way is to get a local bus to Chipping Norton and walk the rest of the way. If the weather's good, you'll pass nice views, including a country church.