Historical Chicago History Post

Getting back to my summer vacation before it hits the month-ago mark... I spent the July 4 weekend in the city doing a few things I'd done before and seeing a whole lot more I'd managed to miss during the nine years I lived there.

First stop: the site of the Haymarket Riot of 1886. From the plaques at the base of the memorial, which depicts labor activists speaking from a wagon before the meeting turned ugly:

On the evening of May 4th, 1886, a tragedy of international significance unfolded on this site in Chicago's Haymarket produce district. An outdoor meeting had been hastily organized by anarchist activists to protest the violent death of workers during a labor lockout the previous day in another area of the city. Spectators gathered in the street as speakers addressed political, social, and labor issues from atop a wagon that stood at the location of this monument. When approximately 175 policemen approached with an order to disperse the meeting, a dynamite bomb was thrown into their ranks.

The Haymarket Memorial, 151 N. Desplaines St.

The short version of the aftermath is that 7 cops and 4 civilians were killed by the bomb, thrown from Crane's Alley, here:

Crane's Alley, east side of Desplaines.

The slightly longer version is that, despite the failure to identify the bomber by either name or affiliation, the organizers of the meeting and several other people with unpopular pro-labor political beliefs were arrested and imprisoned after sham trials. Two organizers and two speakers were executed; another was murdered in prison while awaiting trial. The Haymarket Affair ultimately became a rallying point for the modern labor movement.

From the memorial at Desplaines and Randolph, it was a decent walk down to the ultimate Chicago historical site: the origin point of the Great Fire. The O'Learys built their barn on DeKoven Street just east of Jefferson. October 8, 1871: cow, lantern, wind, history.

Poof.

The red brick building behind the monument? The one that says "Chicago Fire..."? Yeah, the full sign reads "Chicago Fire Academy." Too fittingly, the original fire site was taken over by the fire department to build their training academy; the back of the brick building is lit up at regular intervals to teach cadet firefighters how to ameliorate the effects of modern day O'Learys.

Boltgirl demonstrates callous disregard. It wasn't me, honest!

From there, a stroll up to the south Loop, where Dearborn Station overlooks the south end of Printer's Row.

Dearborn Station's tower, somewhat shortened after a fire--what else?--destroyed its original high peaked roof.

Next time: fun architectural details from historic Loop buildings. For now, the Cubs won in Milwaukee and are sitting in first by four.

Weekend Snowblogging

The Doppler radar on the Weather Channel Friday night showed a slowly rotating giant pink pinwheel perched on the northern edge of the Tucson Basin. By Saturday morning our normally bite-sized mountain range had draped itself in snow to rear up from behind tattered clouds in terrible majesty and splendor. As usual when the snow flies, the highway up was closed at the base, so we contented ourselves with the view from Sabino Canyon.
















Boltgirl in peril!

No sign of mountain lions (other than this, well, sign). I did see some javelina and raccoon tracks in the sand on the edge of Sabino Creek, which was churning at a fairly good volume.

Snow-and cloud-crested mountains above the desert.

Snowy slopes from beneath a confused saguaro.

This might be the last good winter storm we get. Stay tuned for a killer wildflower season in the spring... which is due in about a month, I think.

Overdue Natureblogging

Tomorrow, Super Duper Tuesday insanity. Tonight, 5500' of Catalina Mountains serenity from last weekend.

















Peak peeking through the oaks.

The sun was just climbing high enough to paint parts of the creekbed with light, but the soaked sand was frozen, making for easy walking. It was cold enough for the spray from innumerable small waterfalls to freeze into icy shoulderpads on the nearby rocks.

Tiny fall, defiant ice.

Still puddles stranded by lowering water levels were skimmed over with delicate crystals.

Thin ice.

I moseyed up the Green Mountain Trail for about an hour and a half, stopping to take pictures and chase the sound of falling water up side drainages. My favorite is a series of half a dozen small pools stair-stepped up the slope near the trailhead; in the sand by the second pool I saw a lion track. The sun hadn't warmed the sand enough for it to have been thawed for long, so I decided against climbing to the top and returned to the main trail, continuing until wondering what was around the next bend was outweighed by sore knees and the need to get down the mountain to tend to real life.

View from Green Mountain Trail down to Thimble Peak.

The Catalinas kick ass.

Fogblogging

Now it feels like winter, finally, so feeling like Christmas must be just around the corner. The last couple of days brought rain and glimpses of snow during the scattered minute-long breaks in the clouds that let us look at the mountains.

Rainbow (snowbow?) across the Catalina Mountains.

I particularly like the broken clouds and fog because they reveal the intricacies of the mountains, turning them from the usual sunny day's monolithic horizon to a much more interesting landscape with relief and depth.

Clouds, rainbow, mountain: mystery and majesty! Angel choirs!

Winter's second act opened this morning. Namely, thick thick fog. My office sits down in the cold-air drainage of Rillito Creek; driving in I could see the fog thicken with each declining temperature gradient.

Same view as rainbow/snowbow shot above, only slightly obscured by fog.

The sun may be making an appearance this morning. Hopefully there's still a nice snowcap up there somewhere.

Required Reading

On a slow day occasioned by the need to really, really get some archaeology report writing closer to finished than it was yesterday, I offer up (via Pharyngula) these two instant classics from John Scalzi, an intrepid blogger who dared venture into Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky. The photo stream and accompanying essay should keep you occupied and spewing coffee for the next hour or so. Seriously, the funniest shit I have read in a while, even if it knocked back my productivity quotient by a factor of about a thousand this morning.

But their days were numbered!

Hunting the Wild Chert in Central Arizona

I spent this past Thursday and Friday tramping along creeks and down the sides of highway road cuts outside Payson, in search of the sources of the many lovely varieties of chert people at one specific site used to make bucketloads of arrowheads way back in the 11th century. It was a mostly successful venture.
















The Home Depot of A.D. 1000 Payson, located roughly between the two large alligator junipers (red arrows) near the top of the right side of this ridge. Click to supersize.

Four or five different cherts outcrop here and roll down the hill in the form of fist-sized nodules. Some of the people living in the small settlement below scooped them up, knocked thin flakes from them with round stone hammers, and turned those flakes into arrowheads by pressure-flaking tiny chips from their edges. The analytical problem I'm exploring is how the staggering number of artifacts--mostly waste flakes that are the byproduct of the manufacturing technique and broken arrowheads that got thrown away--can be used to infer the scale and organization of the little industry centered here at the base of an otherwise unremarkable hill, one among dozens in the immediate area, but one that just happened to be loaded with the kind of stone favored for arrowheads back in the day.

One of the larger nodules on the hill (above handle), with prehistoric flakes (below handle). Click to supersize!

I came home with a backpack full of samples and a roll of maps I have yet to mark up. The scenery was lovely, even if fall has been a bit late in coming this year.

Oak leaves against a brilliant blue sky.



















Butterfly on thistle, with inquisitive bee making an appearance at lower left.

I leave you with this image from Star Valley. I do not know why the adult cabaret chose a giant steer as its mascot, except that there are a lot of ranches in the area. We tried not to think about that one too hard when we drove by.

Weekend Snakeblogging

A couple of hours after the world cup games Saturday morning were plenty for a leisurely jaunt up the Green Mountain trail in the Catalinas. I hadn't been on this one before; it's going to turn into one of my favorites, given my inordinate fondness for damp creekbeds, ferns, and big big rocks. The trailhead is at the back of the General Hitchcock campground, roughly 5,000 ft up, but you can pick it up by following the streambed that runs uphill behind the Bear Canyon and Chihuahua Pine picnic areas.






















Water strider (middle left) skimming along next to a ponderosa
pine reflected in a late-season pool.

The added bonus came on the way back to the truck, when I doubled my career snake sightings in the span of about fifty yards. First up was a two-foot Arizona Black Rattlesnake that was heading across a large rock in the streambed just ahead of me. Note to non-Arizona readers contemplating a hike here: don't mess with rattlesnakes. Give 'em a nice wide berth, take advantage of the zoom function on your camera, and move along.


















Mildly annoyed rattlesnake.

I immediately started paying much closer attention to where I was stepping, and a few minutes later did a better job of spotting the Sonoran Desert Kingsnake slithering across a remnant sandbar.


















Kingsnake.

Kingsnakes slurp up rattlesnakes like spaghetti, but this one was probably too small yet to pose much of a threat to the guy upstream. Isn't he handsome?


















Red next to black, friend of Jack.

Metamorphoses

Thanks to Typhoon Wipha, there is no WWC news to report, other than a gripe about the tardiness of the announcement that this morning's games would be postponed until tomorrow. FIFA didn't take action on Canada's protest against only two of the games being postponed, rather than all four, until well after Arizona bedtime, meaning I hauled my ass out of bed at two this morning for the Australia-Canada match only to be greeted by a replay of Austria-Norway. That is not a nice thing to do to a groggy girl. After no more than five minutes of staring uncomprehendingly at the TV, I trudged back to bed and some really weird dreams.

And I don't have the energy for Iraq or conservative Christian brothers--although I did send mine a nice assortment of Benny Hinn YouTube videos (this one first, then this one) for his birthday yesterday--so here's some nature writing instead, both of the back yard and big mountain varieties.

As summer transitions to fall, small non-mammals get about the business of genetic propogation. Two large sphinx moth caterpillars (often called hornworms) laid waste to my pepper plants about a month ago, pissing me off to no end but simultaneously impressing me with their voraciousness and staying power.






















Hornworm (look for the stripes and suckers) striking an innocent pose
amidst denuded stalks.

Their mandibles whir as they shear leaves off the plants, zip zip zip, plowing through them like a PhotoShop eraser tool through a mass of pixels. Then you poke them and they curl their front ends up in an attempt to impersonate an innocent leaf much like the one they were just now mowing down before you so rudely interrupted them. Pulling them off the stalk isn't going to happen. Their abdominal prolegs (the suckery feet on the back segment of the caterpillar) grab on and do not let go. And they also have the nasty habit of whipping their thoraxes and heads back and forth in an attempt to sink those garden shears of mouthparts into you. Fortunately for my fingers, I was attempting to dislodge them with a stick; I could hear the clacking of mandible hitting wood with enough force to leave little divots. The simple solution was to grab the little bastards with tongs and snip off the section of stalk they refused to let go, and then toss the whole package into the weeds at the back of the lot.

Fast forward a month and the big green guys have grown up into very handsome moths, about three inches long with wings patterned to mimic tree bark and exposed wood.

Sphinx moth trying to blend in to the chicken wire-covered fence post.

The adults make up for their rapacious juvenile habits by being prolific pollinators, which is a very good thing in these dark days for honeybees. I'm hoping this moth has enough of a nagging conscience to fly a little closer to the house and pollinate the few straggling flowers on the pepper plants.

The amphibians have been putting on their own life cycle show as the last of the monsoon runoff trickles away. A stream was still running through Molino Basin over the weekend, and its little pools were teeming with late-season tadpoles. They ranged in development from newly-hatched tads the size of small peas with tails (who are probably doomed by impending evaporation) to fully-formed toads. Most of the tads were fat grapes with leg buds, but the best was the little mostly-toad guy who still had a snippet of a tail.

Tadpole, not thrilled to be in my hand.

Tiny almost-toad, basking on the boy's finger.

With the last of the young critters trundling toward maturity, fall is in the air. My own tad accompanied me on this trip, to my delight, nearly full-sized himself at 15 but still happy to build temporary dams across the stream and examine the toads-in-progress before gently slipping them back into the water.

Birthday Chaos

Oh, the day started promisingly enough, Coffee Times coffee in hand, annual pass to the Catalinas stuck to the windshield, all ready for a drive up the mountain with stops at various vista points to play in the water that's still bravely holding out against the sun and evaporation.

Stream bubbling past a tree growing between granite boulders in Molino Canyon.

A few remnant puddles stranded high up on the tops of the boulders on either side of the stream were indicators of the awesome torrent that rushed through here last week. Today it was a lovely cool gurgle perfect for wading and splashing.

The next stop was a couple thousand feet higher, up in the ponderosa forest near Bear Canyon. The slope of the streambed here is gentle, creating a wide channel with interesting sandbars, meandering among the pines. Although it was reasonably early in the morning, I didn't see much in the way of wildlife; a large orange dragonfly buzzing the surface of the pool on the left side of the sandbar and a lone waterbug doing the backstroke were about it.

Cool, shimmery water pooling near Bear Canyon.

A lovely morning. Until I walked back to the BoltMobile, at which point I noticed a large puddle that definitely was not there when I pulled off the road. A glance at the radiator and finger-poke into the puddle confirmed that my truck had decided to celebrate my birthday by spewing coolant like an excited and, let's admit it, probably non-Cub outfielder with a bottle of champagne after Game 7.

This meant making the 45-minute drive back down the mountain and into town with the heat on full blast to keep the engine temperature needle just below the red. What's open on Saturday? Why, Pep Boys (shudder), of course. Jesus.

Boltgirl's day takes a turn for the worse.

Four hours and $416 later, I had a shiny new radiator and a big-ass hole in my credit card. And just after finally paying off the summer train tickets last week. Happy birthday to me! Luckily, I have good friends who are happy to drive across town to rescue me and take me shopping to make me feel better.

New Merrell Chameleon Webs make everything sunnier.

So all in all, not a bad day. Not the cheapest day I have ever had, but hey. Forty is better than dead.

Urban Nature Blogging

A couple of monsoon babies made their appearance last week. I noticed this little guy in the back yard, hanging out on the bench under the mesquite tree. It was about 3/4 of an inch long and kept its pinchers at the ready, although it never took any swipes at my fingertip.
















Blurry mantis nymph.

The pictures of the baby desert cottontail turned out better. This is one of the gaggle of rabbits that lives under the fence behind the office, sunning themselves in the parking lot, dashing off under the shed when people get too close. This baby could fit inside a large grapefruit if he tucked his ears in a bit.

Tiny desert cottontail.

The eastern cottontails I grew up with look strange now when I go back to Chicago, their stubby little ears seemingly out of proportion to their bodies. The desert bunnies' ears evolved long in response to the hot climate, their increased surface area of thin skin over a network of capillaries providing an efficient heat-dispersal system. The eastern cottontails' ears stayed small for the opposite reason, of course, that being heat retention in wintertime.

We used to see a family of Harris hawks prowling the neighborhood near the office, hanging out in the upper branches of dying trees and the tops of power poles. They moved on a little more than a year ago, and since then the rabbit and ground squirrel populations have exploded. Coyotes will figure it out soon enough, I suppose, and maybe the Harris hawks will come back to displace the Cooper's hawks that prey on the doves. Until then, we will burble over the baby bunnies.

Monsoon Madness

The frequent rains and lingering humidity of the past couple days finally ushered in the expected mold-induced headache, and since my stash of old-school Sudafed with the demon meth-spawning pseudoephedrine is gone, I went with the new, non-methable Sudafed with pseudoephedrine HCl. Whoulda thunk a little hydrochloric acid would mess with a body so badly? Or, specifically, with a body's brain? By the time I got to work I was starting to feel odd, and within an hour was certifiably baked. Since I really needed my brain that day to sort out discrepancies between artifacts and the database, I sat back and stared at my wall and thought deep thoughts about arrowhead manufacture along the Mogollon Rim, A.D. 600-1150, until my eyes uncrossed enough at lunchtime to let me drive home.

Good thing. A couple hours later a dandy monsoon ripped into Tucson, turning the street I take home from work into a car-swallowing river. The Daily Star put a slideshow up here.


Benjie Sanders / arizona daily star

Arizona has a "stupid motorist law," meaning that if you drive around barricades or warning signs into a flooded wash or dip in the road and have to be rescued, you foot the bill for the fire department. Maybe people are lulled into a false sense of security when they don't see the signs on streets that don't look like they should be flood hazards, like Country Club in the photo above. The problem is that Country Club was bult with an inverted crown, meaning the turn lane in the center becomes a running wash when the rainfall is more than moderate, and the water flowing east to west down the cross streets dumps into that inverted crown to create thirty foot wide, two foot deep traps with standing waves at every block. Go out an hour after the storm once the water's receded, and there are the piles of debris and stranded cars like ticks on a giant ruler measuring off the tenths of a mile.

Kayak Tucson Boulevard!

In Which We Do Not Want To Come Home

Upside to visiting Chicago: love it. Downside: never want to leave.

Wednesday was exactly the sort of perfect June day that blots out memories of the CTA breakdowns, interminable expressway construction, and perpetual March slush that tend to make people decide to move someplace else. Today the cool breezes under a warm sun drew us downtown for unapologetic tourism.

The Bean!

The formal name of this wonderful hunk of steel is "Cloud Gate," but everyone calls it the Bean. We love the Bean. Essentially a giant parabolic mirror, it squats in the middle of Millennium Park, happily reflecting both the skyline and its adoring fans in all sorts of interesting ways. People can't keep their hands off it. Everyone pats it. Small children hug it. It inspires big goofy grins.

Boltgirl and family wave parabolically from the awesome curvy surface of the Bean.

Walk underneath and look up to see yourself there and there and there and there...

More stunning architecture is on display in the Pritzker Pavilion, an amazing outdoor music venue with a lawn the size of a few football fields covered by an open lattice of curving poles. The Grant Park orchestra was rehearsing when we walked through, and the acoustics were thoroughly good.

Full orchestra nestled in the cavernous maw of Pritzker Pavilion.

View of Michigan Avenue through the latticework of the Pritzker lawn.

From Millennium Park, it's a quick hop, skip, and bus to Navy Pier. We walked the thousand yards out to the end to watch the boats go by and listen to the seagulls shriek. Then it was back to the train that pulled out of downtown faster than I would have liked, into the last few days of being in Illinois for a while.

Grand Ballroom at the end of Navy Pier, at the end of a perfect day.

Archaeology Photoblog

Not Boltgirl's usual day at the office

On those days when I'm not busy punching out Nazis or mackin' on Karen Allen--it's exhausting, but I do what I can--my work as an archaeologist looks a lot like this:




















Pile of 1,000-year-old stone flakes

The prehistoric stone technology I study is pretty well summed up by the lame-o joke about how to sculpt a statue of an elephant (take a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant). When long-ago people made a tool out of stone, say something cool like a spearhead, they started with a fairly hefty piece of rock and knocked small chips, or "flakes," in the parlance, off of its edges in order to shape it into the final product. Needless to say, the waste flakes generally outnumber cool final products by a score of several hundred to one, so most of my time is spent looking at and thinking about these piles of little broken rock fragments.

The process looks like this (the demonstration artifact is a gunflint from the Tucson Presidio, the fort built by the Spaniards in the mid 1700s for protection against Native Americans):














Identify the artifact: hmmm, it's a gunflint.














Measure the artifact: 30.89 mm long.














Weigh the artifact: 8.98 g.














Enter measurements and other info in the database. Note the lightning quick fingers.

Repeat a few hundred times per day and voila, it's the glamorous life of the lab archaeologist. Honestly, I have to chase Nazis and rob Egyptian tombs just to relax.

Look back at the gunflint for a moment; it actually is more interesting than it might seem. The honey-colored chalcedony this flint is made from indicates it came from France. The fact that it was tossed into a trash pit in the Tucson Presidio dating to the later 1700s shows that Tucson was on the tail end of the Spanish supply line; by this time on the Continent, the Dutch had wrested control of the gunflint market from the French and had been supplying all the armies of Europe with flints that looked very different from this one for a couple of decades already.

It's sort of like the French discovering Jerry Lewis movies in the 1980s and thinking they were cutting edge. Or maybe like American soldiers in Iraq getting crappy Interceptor body armor instead of the newer, much more effective Dragon Skin.

Yes, that's why archaeology is interesting and, perhaps, comforting. No matter how old the artifact in your hands is, it usually ends up showing you that human society hasn't changed appreciably between then and now. Only the details are different; the underlying motivations and behaviors are pretty much the same.

Photo Escapism

W's performance leave a bad taste in your mouth? Get away from it all for a moment with some lovely images of Tucson in the springtime.






















An American Shoveler (duck) admiring his fine reflection
at Sweetwater Wetlands
























Morning Primrose at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
























Desert Marigold at the Desert Museum


















Ocotillo juuuuuust thinking about blooming

The equinox was last week, or the week before (to be honest, I lost track), and daylight savings happened about the same time (I don't have to pay attention since I live in Arizona, where we never change our clocks except on the Navajo Nation), so I'm not sure when spring officially began for the rest of the country. It officially began for me yesterday, when the formerly bare branches of the mesquite trees along the fence where I park at work suddenly sported feathery, lime green leaves. This morning they had already transformed into the deep green leaves of summer.