Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: History
There is an art to letting go.
Freedom,
Home, as in being at home,
Trust, as in the predominate feeling,
I AM OK.
Health, good diet and exercise,
Safe – I feel safe,
Love, I am surrounded by love,
Peace, yet another predominate feeling,
Calm, and yet another predominate feeling.
Think about these qualities
There’s an art to letting go.
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I wrote this for Jean on March 22nd, 2026.
I ended it by writing that I loved Jean. Very much!
The following is an excellent message.
The Conversation yet again have published an excellent post. It is about becoming a more informed person.
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Tommy Blanchard, Tufts University
Do you know what the Apple logo looks like?
Chances are, you think you do. It’s ubiquitous and iconic. How could you not know it?
But when tested, it turns out very few people can remember all the features of the logo. One study of 85 people found that only about half could pick the correct logo out of a lineup of similar ones. And only one person could correctly draw it.
This isn’t an isolated example. A classic study from 1979 found that people similarly couldn’t draw a penny accurately or pick out a correctly drawn penny from incorrect ones.
People aren’t just bad at remembering things they see all the time, but also in actually knowing how they work. In a 2006 study, many people made significant errors when drawing a bicycle, like putting the chain around the front wheel as well as the back wheel. More than just a forgotten detail, putting the chain around both wheels shows a deeper misunderstanding of how a bicycle works. A bicycle with a chain around both wheels wouldn’t be able to turn.
It turns out people’s knowledge of how the world works is often fragmented and sketchy at best. They systematically overestimate their understanding of everyday devices and natural phenomena. People will tend to give themselves high ratings on how well they understand something, such as how bicycles or zippers work. But when they’re asked to actually explain the mechanics of these objects, their ratings of their understanding typically drop.
Just like how your knowledge of the world around you is imperfect, your knowledge about your own knowledge – also called metaknowledge – is often flawed. My field of cognitive science has been uncovering various gaps in human metaknowledge for decades.
If people are systematically overconfident about how well they understand things, why don’t they notice when they don’t understand something? And what can people do to better recognize the limits of their own knowledge?
Researchers have identified several factors behind people’s overconfidence in their knowledge.
One is that people confuse environmental support with understanding: The information is out in the world but not actually in your head. With a bicycle or a zipper, all of the parts are visible to you, and you may confuse this transparency for an internal understanding of how they work. But until you go to use that knowledge by attempting to explain how they work, you may not recognize that you don’t understand how those parts interact.
A second factor is confusing different levels of analysis. People can often describe how something works at a very high level. You know that the engine of a car makes the car go, and the brakes slow and stop the vehicle. But confidence in your high-level understanding of the car may bias you to think you also have a good grasp of the finer details, like how the engine pistons and brake pads work.
Additionally, people can be blind to the ways their knowledge shapes their own perception. In one study, researchers had participants tap out the tune to a popular song. On average, the tappers thought listeners would be able to identify the song about 50% of the time. But when listeners had to identify the tapped song, they actually could identify it only 2.5% of the time. The tappers didn’t realize how much their knowledge was making identifying the song seem easy to them.
This disconnect has consequences beyond whether someone else can understand your Morse code version of a song. When teaching people, whether in formal classroom settings or through casual mentorship, you can sometimes have an expert blind spot: the inability to recognize the difficulties beginners face when learning something you have expertise in.
Building expertise often involves internalizing knowledge to the point where it becomes invisible to you. You draw on knowledge you don’t realize you have, making it hard to relate to learners who lack this knowledge – and, of course, hard for learners to relate to your teaching. You might have experienced this when you’ve gotten partway through explaining something, only to realize you’ve been using jargon you forgot isn’t common knowledge and lost your listener.
Your metaknowledge can fail in two directions: You can think you know more than you do, and you can be blind to how much you’re relying on knowledge you do have. Each calls for a different response to correct it.
When you’re overconfident in your knowledge, the remedy is using that knowledge. You’ll quickly realize how much you actually understand and dial down your confidence. Challenging yourself to actually try to walk through how something works is a great exercise in intellectual humility – that is, recognizing that you may be wrong – and can keep you from getting out over your skis.
Building a greater appreciation for what you know is more difficult. You can’t simply unlearn what you’ve internalized. But what this challenge shows is that, to some extent, knowing a subject and knowing how to teach it are two separate skills. Some experts are great teachers, but not simply by virtue of being experts. Recognizing that you have to approach teaching with humility, and that your expertise doesn’t automatically make you a skilled teacher, can go a long way toward making you a better teacher and mentor.
These aren’t easy and quick fixes to failures of metaknowledge. Both require ongoing intellectual humility and a willingness to distrust your own confidence. But acknowledging the fallibility of your own metaknowledge is a good place to start.
Tommy Blanchard, Research Associate in Cognitive Science, Tufts University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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This article is of particular interest for me. Because a few years ago, I had a biking accident at the local Merlin (OR) rail crossing. I banged my head badly and was unconscious for about eight minutes. Later on the surgeon who operated on my head said that I was lucky to be alive but that from here on my memory would be poor.
I work very hard to try and remember the items that I want to. And without my pocket book to write things down, I would be so much more forgetful.
Action regarding the climate crisis.
The following essay from George Monbiot is a difficult read but it is also a necessary read.
With the news that the polar ice caps are retreating, just read yesterday: “Polar ice caps and sheets are shrinking at alarming rates due to global warming, with Arctic sea ice decreasing by over 12% per decade and polar ice sheets losing 7,560 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2020. Greenland and Antarctica are losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice annually, significantly contributing to rising sea levels. [1, 2, 3, 4]”
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Alternating Current
Posted on 29th April, 2026
If this crucial circulation system shuts down, the civilisational impacts will be irreversible. So why isn’t it a top priority?
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd April 2026
The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.
They reshape the world to suit their demands. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.
The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.
Amoc’s shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating climate catastrophe.
Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.
This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happenedbefore. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.
The first paper proposing that Amoc might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, Amoc collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur.
Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century”.
So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings. This model underpins official responses to the climate crisis.
It began with the work of the economist William Nordhaus, who sought to assess the economic effects of global heating. His modelling suggests that a “socially optimal” level of heating is between 3.5C and 4C. Most climate scientists see a temperature rise of this kind as catastrophic. Even 6C of heating, Nordhaus suggests, would cause a loss of just 8.5% of GDP. Climate science suggests it would look more like curtains for civilisation.
As the eminent economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the mild effects Nordhaus forecasts are merely artefacts of the model he has used. For example, his modelling assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that climate impacts rise linearly with temperature. There is no climate model that proposes such a trend. Instead, climate science forecasts nonlinear impacts and greatly escalating risk.
The likely impacts of high levels of heating include the inundation of major cities, the closure of the human climate niche (the conditions that sustain human life) across large parts of the globe, the collapse of the global food system and cascading regime shifts – that is, abrupt transitions in ecosystems – releasing natural carbon stores, potentially leading to a “hothouse Earth” in which very few survive. Never mind a few points off GDP: there would be no means of measurement and scarcely an economy to measure.
Bizarrely, the modelling also applies discount rates to future people: their lives, it assumes, are worth less than ours. In other words, it has taken a method used to calculate returns to capital and applied it to human beings. As the three economists point out, “it is very difficult to find a justification for this in moral philosophy.” Moreover, climate impacts disproportionately affect the poor – but under the models, their lives are also priced down.
Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.
A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.
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Until I came to live in the the USA permanently, in 2010, I used to live in South Devon, near Totnes. Thus the AMOC was very familiar to me and the local population. AMOC stands for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Much more information on AMOC may be read on the WikiPedia site.
Although the future of the AMOC is uncertain, many scientists are concerned that the AMOC will weaken.
The above article by George Monbiot is potentially frightening. As Monbiot says at the end; “… a few thousand people can destroy civilisations.“
What we need is a few thousand people to make this the number one priority! Not tomorrow but today!
More NASA images.
And what images.
There is more information on the NASA website.
Now a YouTube video.
What terrific images from Hubble.
There’s more to this topic than meets the eye.
George Bernard Shaw once remarked that America and Britain are “two countries separated by the same language.”
A long time ago that became a quotable quote. Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and died in England in 1950. He was 94.
Although I have visited the USA many times before, I came to live here in Merlin, Oregon, with Jeannie, my gorgeous wife, in 2012. And we love living here.
However, I still think like an Englishman and spell my words in English English.
Read the following. I am sure you will enjoy it.
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Valerie M. Fridland, University of Nevada, Reno
As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.
While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.
Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”
The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.
In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.
The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.
Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”
While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.
If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.
And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.
Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.
Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.
In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.
Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.
Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.
Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”
In fact, evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”
Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.
But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.
So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.
Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Thank you, Valerie Fridland, for your interest article.
To quote another famous idiom, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
In honour of July 4th and America’s 250th birthday.
(And they were to be shown on the 22nd February but the snowy scenes took priority.)
These are photographs of Mount Rushmore Natioanl Memorial.
They have not be taken by me and hopefully the photographers who did take them will allow me to republish them,
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Impressive!
Gutzon Borglum did an incredible work of sculpture. Just amazing!
I am republishing a NextDoor News Feed created by Sammie Nolan that I read yesterday. Here is the photo that accompanied the note.
And here is that news item:
Happy Birthday, Oregon! 🥳
Today, February 14, 2026, the Beaver State officially turns 167 years old.
Oregon joined the Union as the 33rd state on Valentine’s Day in 1859, making it the only state to share its birthday with the holiday of love. 🥰
That is Sammie sitting on the bench and the photograph was taken at the Painted Hills. Some more information on Painted Hills courtesy of WikiPedia.
The Painted Hills is a geologic site in Wheeler County, Oregon that is one of the three units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument along with Sheep Rock and Clarno. It totals 3,132 acres and is located 9 miles northwest of Mitchell, Oregon. The Painted Hills are listed as one of the Seven Wonders of Oregon. Wikipedia
We have never thought of this before but the question is a valid one.
The article, which was presented by The Conversation, raised the question. As you will see the article starts with the sentence “Americans love dogs.” To my mind, it is many more people than Americans who love dogs. Let’s read the article.
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Margret Grebowicz, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Americans love dogs.
Nearly half of U.S. households have one, and practically all owners see pets as part of the family – 51% say pets belong “as much as a human member.” The pet industry keeps generating more and more jobs, from vets to trainers, to influencers. Schools cannot keep up with the demand for veterinarians.
It all seems part of what Mark Cushing, a lawyer and lobbyist for veterinary issues, calls “the pet revolution”: the more and more privileged place that pets occupy in American society. In his 2020 book “Pet Nation,” he argues that the internet has caused people to become more lonely, and this has made them focus more intensely on their pets – filling in for human relationships.
I would argue that something different is happening, however, particularly since the COVID-19 lockdown: Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people.
In my own book, “Rescue Me,” I explore how today’s dog culture is more a symptom of our suffering as a society than a cure for it. Dogs aren’t just being used as a substitute for people. As a philosopher who studies the relationships between animals, humans and the environment, I believe Americans are turning to dogs to alleviate the erosion of social life itself. For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do.
And I am no different. I live with three dogs, and my love for them has driven me to research the culture of dog ownership in an effort to understand myself and other humans better. By nature, dogs are masters of social life who can communicate beyond the boundaries of their species. But I believe many Americans are expecting their pets to address problems that they cannot fix.
During the pandemic, people often struggled with the monotony of spending too much time cooped up with other humans – children, romantic partners, roommates. Meanwhile, relationships with their dogs seemed to flourish.
Rescuing shelter animals grew in popularity, and on social media people celebrated being at home with their pets. Dog content on Instagram and Pinterest now commonly includes hashtags like #DogsAreBetterThanPeople and #IPreferDogsToPeople.
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog” appears on merchandise all over e-commerce sites such as Etsy, Amazon and Redbubble.
One 2025 study found that dog owners tend to rate their pets more highly than their human loved ones in several areas, such as companionship and support. They also experienced fewer negative interactions with their dogs than with the closest people in their lives, including children, romantic partners and relatives.
The late primatologist Jane Goodall celebrated her 90th birthday with 90 dogs. She stated in an interview with Stephen Colbert that she preferred dogs to chimps, because chimps were too much like people. https://www.youtube.com/embed/3xGvLApNrFQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jane Goodall said she appreciates dogs for their “unconditional love.”
This passion for dogs seems to be growing as America’s social fabric unravels – which began long before the pandemic.
In 1972, 46% of Americans said “most people can be trusted.” By 2018, that percentage dropped to 34%. Americans report seeing their friends less than they used to, a phenomenon called the “friendship recession,” and avoid having conversations with strangers because they expect the conversation to go badly. People are spending more time at home.
Today, millennials make up the largest percentage of pet owners. Some cultural commentators argue dogs are especially important for this generation because other traditional markers of stability and adulthood – a mortgage, a child – feel out of reach or simply undesirable. According to the Harris Poll, a marketing research firm, 43% of Americans would prefer a pet to a child.
Amid those pressures, many people turn to the comfort of a pet – but the expectations for what dogs can bring to our lives are becoming increasingly unreasonable.
For some people, dogs are a way to feel loved, to relieve pressures to have kids, to fight the drudgery of their job, to reduce the stress of the rat race and to connect with the outdoors. Some expect pet ownership to improve their physical and mental health.
And it works, to a degree. Studies have found dog people to be “warmer” and happier than cat people. Interacting with pets can improve your health and may even offer some protection against cognitive decline. Dog-training programs in prisons appear to reduce recidivism rates.
But expecting that dogs will fill the social and emotional gaps in our lives is actually an obstacle to dogs’ flourishing, and human flourishing as well.
In philosophical terms, we could call this an extractive relationship: Humans are using dogs for their emotional labor, extracting things from them that they cannot get elsewhere or simply no longer wish to. Just like natural resource extraction, extractive relationships eventually become unsustainable.
The late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant argued that the present stage of capitalism creates a dynamic called “slow death,” a cycle in which “life building and the attrition of life are indistinguishable.” Keeping up is so exhausting that, in order to maintain that life, we need to do things that result in our slow degradation: Work becomes drudgery under unsustainable workloads, and the experience of dating suffers under the unhealthy pressure to have a partner.
Similarly, today’s dog culture is leading to unhealthy and unsustainable dynamics. Veterinarians are concerned that the rise of the “fur baby” lifestyle, in which people treat pets like human children, can harm animals, as owners seek unnecessary veterinary care, tests and medications. Pets staying at home alone while owners work suffer from boredom, which can cause chronic psychological distress and health problems. And as the number of pets goes up, many people wind up giving up their animal, overcrowding shelters.
So what should be done? Some philosophers and activists advocate for pet abolition, arguing that treating any animals as property is ethically indefensible.
This is a hard case to make – especially with dog lovers. Dogs were the first animal that humans domesticated. They have evolved beside us for as long as 40,000 years, and are a central piece of the human story. Some scientists argue that dogs made us human, not the other way around.
Perhaps we can reconfigure aspects of home, family and society to be better for dogs and humans alike – more accessible health care and higher-quality food, for example. A world more focused on human thriving would be more focused on pets’ thriving, too. But that would make for a very different America than this one.
Margret Grebowicz, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Missouri University of Science and Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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I do not recognise the unhealthy culture as mentioned four paragraphs above. But Jeannie and me do understand and believe the alternative: “Some scientists argue that dogs made us human, not the other way around.”
I’ve said it many times before but perhaps some of our newer readers haven’t heard the fact that when I met Jean in 2007 she was looking after twenty-three dogs, and numerous cats, and it was pure magic. In 2008 I went to Mexico, where Jean lived, with Pharaoh. Then in 2010 we came north to Arizona to be married. We had sixteen dogs and seven cats with us.
The photographs from Historical Merlin.
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A continuation of yesterday’s Part One.
Again, a fascinationg account.
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Merlin Oregon,
Gateway To The Wild & Scenic Rogue River
The little hamlet of Merlin is located northwest of Grants Pass and is the home base for many outfitters and fishing guides. This and the fact that Merlin is close to the 84-mile segment of the Rogue River set aside by Congress under the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, is why Merlin is known as the “Gateway To The Wild & Scenic Rogue River.”
Located nearby is the famous Hellgate Canyon (on Galice Hwy.) where Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne and many other Westerns were filmed. Above Merlin is Grave Creek, the starting point for the 32 mile “wild” section of the Rogue River.
Great Fishing and rafting on the white waters are but some of the activities available in the Merlin area. One of the best hiking trails around is the famous Rogue River Wild and Scenic Trail which starts at Grave Creek above Merlin and runs downstream 40 miles through the Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue River to Foster Bar.
Located in Merlin Oregon, (PH: picture of tree on Sunday) this tree is Oregon’s 2nd oldest apple tree. It was planted by the Haines family in the either 1852 or 1854 (accounts vary), the tree stood throughout the Indian wars. The fighting began in 1855 when white vigilantes attacked a group of peaceful Indians-mostly women, children and elderly men-(at present day Eagle Point). Under the direction of a man who titled himself Major James A. Lupton, a group of ” hair brained enthusiast and professed ruffians” butchered the Indians, according to A.G. Walling’s story “A History Of Southern Oregon,” published in 1884.
The Indians in the area struck back, working their way down the Rogue River and attacking white homesteads. Their thirst for vengeance had not been quenched by the time they reached Merlin, according to the recently published “An Arrow In The Earth”: General Joe Palmer and the Indians of Oregon.”
Although Haines tried to fight off the Indians, they were one family against a band of angry warriors. When volunteers arrived to help, according to contemporary accounts, they found Mr. Haines and his young son murdered at the home site. The Indians took Mrs. Haines and her daughter captive, presumed to have been thrown into Hellgate Canyon on the Rogue River. Taking in account that white accounts of Indian atrocities were nearly always exaggerated.
The tree was reported to have died in August, 1973, a few months after Josephine County Commissioners held a ceremony celebrating its antiquity. But three years later, branches of the old three were still alive, and the State Forestry Department declared it a historic site.
A special thanks to Marilyn Luttrell, who over the years has looked after and help raise money to protect this historical tree and site.” We thank you Marilyn”
Life
Peters’s father, known as Umpqua Joe, was a member of the Grave Creek band of the Umpqua people who was known for warning settlers and miners in the Grants Pass area of an impending attack from local Indians in 1855.
Peters’s father was reportedly allowed to stay on his land after the end of the Rogue River Wars rather than be removed to a reservation. Mary Peters, popularly known as “Indian Mary” – not to be confused with a different Native American woman also living in Oregon during the same period (Kalliah Tumulth, a WatlalaChinook) and also known as “Indian Mary”– lived on the land where her father had operated a ferry to transport miners and supplies in Southern Oregon until his death on November 13, 1886. After his death, Peters applied for a claim for the land under the Dawes Act, also known as the “Indian Homestead Act.” Eight years later, she received a little more than 72 acres.
Her 25-year land deed has often been described as the smallest Indian reservation in the United States. In 1958, the land was converted by Josephine County to Indian Mary Park, named after Peters.
She continued to operate her father’s ferry business after his death. In 1894 she leased the ferry to William Massie and moved with her two surviving daughters to Grants Pass. She moved to Salem in 1920 to be near her daughters. Peters died in 1921 and is buried in Salem‘s City View Cemetery.
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I hope you will view the photographs this Sunday.
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