My Attempt to Map a Historic Itinerary

Historic newspapers can be illuminating but also frustrating.  A case in point is the series of articles in the 1864 Arizona Miner detailing "Woolsey's Expedition" in March and April of that year.  

I hoped to deduce some of the actual places visited by the expedition, but the details given were confusing, contradictory, and ultimately insufficient to definitively map where the events took place.  I wonder how many modern newspaper stories, when subject to the same analysis, would fall short?

I analyzed Henry Clifton's account from the May 11, 1864 issue.  The first step was to break the narrative into a numbered itinerary.  I underlined what I thought would be helpful clues, and bolded descriptions I thought would be interesting to compare against present day conditions:

My next step was to try to map the itinerary points on a modern day map.  I added two additionally pieces of information to the text.  First, I looked up that sunrise and sunset were at 6:20am and 6:50pm, respectively. This helps fill in the times for each stop.  Then I filled in the mileage between each stop.  In the table that follows, question marks indicate uncertainty.  The start and stop points correspond to the itinerary above.

In some cases Clifton gives the mileage, and in some cases the stops can be determined so the mileage can be measured, but in many cases he does not give the mileage.  However, based on the travel and rest times I tried to estimate the mileage.  This can also be constrained by the possible stop locations.  For example, when they stop at a creek or a canyon, there are only so many choices for where that could be.  

This map shows their possible itinerary from Woolsey's ranch to the Apache Rancheria on "Squaw Creek".  Tent icons are campsites and hiking figures are other stops.  

Overview map showing likely itinerary points.

Waypoint #4 makes sense if they followed the drainage downstream from "Cottonwood Spring" SE to the next main drainage that could be described as "east fork of the Aqua Fria".  This fork is now known as Ash Creek.  The "Ash Creek" they named at stop #5 is most likely the next major creek to the SE, which is now known as Little Ash Creek.

My best guesses for stop #4 and stop #5.

Many mysteries remain.  First, they claim to do a lot of hiking at night, but this is extremely rough terrain that would be difficult to navigate by night.  According to the US Naval Observatory historical moon phase calculator, this expedition occurred during the waning last quarter of the moon, so they would not have had much light from the moon.  I don't know what kind of lanterns they had, but they don't describe much difficulty traveling at night, other than a description that they had to "descend carefully" to a creek for stop #7.

At stop #6, which occurred sometime after 10 PM on the night of March 31st, Clifton reports finding species of the garlic family on a ridge.  These small plants seem like they would have been difficult to notice by lantern light.  Interestingly, there are only two species of garlic/onions that grow in this area in the spring now.  One, is Crowpoison, which as the name suggests is toxic.  The other is Largeflower onion, which is not common.  

Second, was the Apache Rancheria at modern Squaw Creek or some other location?  It would make sense that their place name stuck, but Squaw Creek is not exactly a unique name so it is possible that other locations have the same name.  Interestingly these creeks that form the southeast boundary of Perry Mesa have been recently renamed Ledni Lii Creek, Gosga Creek, Liya Draw, Che Yagoodiguhn Creek, etc.  I can't find any information about when they were renamed or what the new names mean.

Based on their travel that night from 10 PM until 9 AM and their progress on other legs of the journey, I estimated that they traveled about 10 miles to get there.  However, (for reasons discussed below) I think the site of the Rancheria must have been just upstream of the confluence of Gosga creek and Ilya Draw (AKA North Squaw Creek and Squaw Creek), and this would put them less than 7 miles from camp.  After attacking the Rancheria they managed to get back to camp in less time, so it is possible that they were less than 10 miles from camp.   

Possible site of the Ranchera, upstream of the confluence of Gosga creek and Ilya Draw (AKA North Squaw Creek and Squaw Creek)

In the description of the battle, Clifton states that Company C was west of Company B.  Company B "was in the canon below the rancheria" and chased the Indians up the canyon to where company C was.  Since almost all of the canyons in this part of Arizona run from NE to SW, I had a lot of trouble finding a location where "up canyon" was some westerly.  

Conclusion

Through this exercise of interpreting and attempting to map a historical itinerary, I've come to realize the difficulty of matching newspaper accounts to specific locations.  Without an extremely explicit travelogue, creating a location-based itinerary is either impossible or unreliable.  There were several times when I was ready to give up, but through persevering, rereading the account, and staring at the map I've at least been able to convince myself that some of these locations are approximately correct.  I hope to visit some of these areas in the coming months to retrace the route and add additional information.  

Notes

Note: #PrescottAZHistory blog has an account of Woolsey's expedition that is more of a summary and less of a GIS analysis.  

Note 2: Woolsey organized several expeditions, including a second one in June of 1864 that traversed a much larger area.

OTEC: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

OTEC has the potential to harness the power of the ocean, while pumping water from the depths to the surface has challenges and opportunities. It can fuel plankton growth and may help sequester carbon.

1982 National Energy Laboratory Report on OTEC

The xerox scan of the old scientific report is dark and stained, with primitive printing and poor font and layout.  But the columns and official investor report style belie the real science presented, without preamble or typical science summary.

The 1-mile long cold water pipe was deployed successfully in 1981, thanks to "Calm weather and much hard work."  The pipe extends from the surface to 2,000 feet deep. It can pump 500 GPM of deep cold 9-10 C) water. The warm water pipe pumps 2,000 GPM of surface seawater (24-28C).  When allowed to foul freely, it showed immediate increase in resistance to heat transfer, which biofouling countermeasures ameliorated.

The article presents a glowing portrait of research advancing at a fast pace, but is offset with somber photos of cloud-mottled skies and the inclusion of disturbing headings like "biofouling countermeasures". (Biofouling is when nimals get sucked in, and the system can become clogged by marine animals and plants.  This could also be used positively to grow algae) Funding is flowing in from multiple sources like the cold and warm water siphoned from the rich offshore resources...

The project is strategically located with nearby availability of cold, deep ocean water and a warm ocean surface layer that is not subject to strong seasonal cooling. The warm water intake only 15 feet offshore may explain the much more rapid initiation of biofouling than previous experiments.  A 300 foot extension has been designed and was to be installed in 1983.  They plan to add 2 new 500 GPM pumps to replace the original coldwater pump that only pumped from Feb to June at 340 GPM before failing.  They propose reconfiguring the OTEC-1 coldwater pipe to provide a capacity of 22,000 GPM, which would "satisfy their coldwater needs for the foreseeable future."







What ever became of all of this? The Makai Engineering website presents research from the 2010s that seems directly related to work done in the early 1980's, as if a 30 year gap is missing from the story, a lull in research perhaps while people's careers stagnated, limited by something mundane like the size or strength of piping availability or funding.  Maybe the ocean was still there but the money stopped coming from Washington.  Reagon took the solar panels off the white house, and the country went back to sleep for 30 years while a couple of billion people were born and the climate inched toward the 2 degree warming threshold. 

This dark paper seems to hold secrets of the past, arcane mad science experimentation. All that is not said, like the sea creatures sucked up.  So that today when ocean researchers wonder about the effects of cold water outfalls they have to design and bring their own small pipes and pumps.

2008 Reserach: Artifically Induced Upwelling
Used to understand how marine microbial ecosystems respond to large-scale perturbations. Diatoms will consume nitrogen, leaving some amount of phosphorus in the water, which will stimulate a second-stage bloom of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. These blooms are often observed during summer months in open ocean waters when there are almost no nutrients at the surface and the winds generally are calm. What triggers the blooms and where are the nutrients coming from? We need to know.

Vast, seemingly barren regions comprise more than two-thirds of our oceans and nearly 40 percent of the entire Earth.  Need to replace about 10 percent of the surface waters with upwelled water to fuel a bloom.  Some scientists have looked at iron fertilization as a way to trigger biological growth in nutrient-poor areas of the ocean, but “everything responds to iron,” Letelier said. “You can’t control what grows.”

The researchers believe they can control plankton growth by determining which species respond to specific nutrients, and then adjusting the rate of nutrient feeding by the frequency and duration of water pumping.

Where the ocean is about 4,500 meters deep, the bottom layers of water have too much CO2 because of the decaying organisms that have sunk to the floor.  Their studies have shown, however, that water at a depth of 300 to 700 meters has the proper ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus to trigger a two-stage phytoplankton bloom.

Currently, they are able to pump about 50 cubic meters of water per hour (=4 GPM) using wave energy. "If we want to generate a bloom in an area of one-square kilometer, we would need to replace about 10 percent of the surface waters with upwelled water, which would take about a month at the rate we pumped.”

The scientists used undersea gliders in their Hawaii study to monitor the water from the pump so they have an idea how widely and quickly it disperses, and how much of an impact it can have on surface waters.





Resources
List of OTEC plants around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion

1982 report about OTEC work at NEL Hawaii: https://nelha.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NELH_AnnRpt_1982.pdf

Upwelling Press Release: https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2008/sep/scientists-test-%E2%80%9Cartificial-upwelling%E2%80%9D-learn-more-about-complex-ocean-ecosystem-be

More NEL reports: https://nelha.hawaii.gov/resources/library/

Makai Engineering: https://www.makai.com/ocean-thermal-energy-conversion/

A Disturbing History of Nutrition Science

What is the biggest mistake scientists have ever made?  Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise, a wonderful history of the awful state of nutrition science, suggests that science's worst mistake may well be the idea that saturated fat is unhealthy.  She makes a convincing case that nutritional guidelines over the last half century, by focusing on fats rather than sugars, have resulted in the premature deaths of millions of Americans and others around the world.

Even more interesting than turning conventional wisdom on its head, this book is an eye-opening journey into how an entire field of science can be hijacked by special interests and strong personalities. Moreover, this book holds important lessons about how the process of science is still susceptible to the same biases and group-think as the rest of society.

Nina Teicholz sums up the story of how nutrition science went wrong:

"Well-intentioned experts, hastening to address growing epidemics of chronic disease, simply overinterpreted the data. Scientists hypothesized that dietary fat was to blame...  This hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested.  Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma.  The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health.  And the normally self-corrected mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging one's own beliefs, was disabled.  While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. ...Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them."  

"What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats...has never been based in solid science.  A bias against these foods developed early on and became entrenched, but the evidence mustered in its support never amounted to a convincing case and has since crumbled away."

Let the sorry story of nutrition science be a lesson for the scientists and promoters of scientists in other fields.  We like to think that science is independently and objectively building a tower of knowledge for the ages, one rock at a time, but the reality is that our science is a product of our society, our beliefs, our biases, and our assumptions.

Inequality and Wealth

The unlinking of Top 1% income from all those below them is simultaneous of another trend which is hard to measure, and often overlooked: increasingly, health and human hapiness have stopped tracking GDP and wealth. Correlation, or causation? Would greater equality lead to higher standard of living? Why? In the 1960's President Kennedy stated that a "rising tide would lift all boats," which was generally true, but something changed in the early 1980's.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/14/income-inequality-is-at-a_n_259516.html

Displaying 2 of 2 reviews

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores. I disagree with the assertion that, just because aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies didn't practice (efficient) resource management or population control, aboriginal peoples share our modern day ecological failings. For, despite the causes of the Pleistocene extinctions, it does appear that Native Americans lived in North America for 12,000 years without bumping off many, or even any, of their animal neighbors (an achievement we moderns seem unlikely to match). Flores argues that the disparity in environmental damage between Moderns and aboriginals is merely one of degree, and that somehow this ecological disharmony is hardwired into the 'carnivorous, clan and kin-centered primate brain'. I would like to point out that all animals create or accumulate additional or enhanced habitat for their neighbors. Modern humans, not hunter-gatherers, are the only exception to this rule, with out urban deserts and suburban shopping centers. Aboriginal peoples, as long as they utilized local resources, invariably created more habitat and enhanced ecologies. Of course, the proof of this assertion is (hundreds of?) years of back-breaking ecological fieldwork measuring productivity and species richness.

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples What's the difference between centripetal and centrifugal evolution? Despite needing better editing and a careful cross-checking of important numbers (pre-1492 population of the Americas anyone?), this is an inspiring book with lots of grist for the mental mill. In the interest of Big Ideas this book (written at Harvard don't you know) plays loose and easy with facts and rhetoric, often glossing important points and proclaiming rather than analyzing. But the Big Ideas are worth it! The parallel between the 300 year heyday and collapse of Clovis culture (11,000BC-12,700BC) and the 300-year opening of the American frontier (1580AD -1880 AD), the influence that growing weeds (succesional colonizers) as crops had on creating r-selected (weedy) society, the placing in context of our own extinction event with the last 100 million years of extinction and colonization events...the analysis and structure are a bit thin but the gist is pure gold...plus hearing an Aussie psychoanalyze America is priceless. I can't wait to read his parallel account of Australia's last 300 million years, "The Future Eaters." Flanery asks whether a "nation so conceived in liberty can long endure" and compares the mindset of "liberty" with that of a weed (which most of our crops are) that experiences "release" in a new environment before adaptation sets in. When will Americans adapt to America and become truly native? Maybe once we've all read this book... It is only at the end of the book that we discover how all this history answers Aldo Leopold's assertion that we must "know what the world was like" in order to save the environment. Flanery comes out strongly in favor of restoring parts of America to pre-Clovis (pre-human, approximately 13,000 years ago) conditions. By reintroducing extirpated animals as well as analogs or homologs of extinct animals, he hopes to restore America to "rival Africa" in terms of large mammal diversity, as well as creating balanced and sustainable ecosystems. Its amazing to think that where we live used to look like the Serengeti, or the Costa Rican rainforest. But, according to Flanery, we still have the choice to put things back how they were. Wolf reintroduction anyone?

Foreshadowing the Puerco River

I feel like we're going off to war. Moving equipment, each day more preparation that builds on the gear and supplies and tools we've already shuffled and hauled and schlepped all over the landscape. Each step requires previous and prepares further. This is my third tour: a whole new river flowing through a new watershed held in the lap of new mountains, mesas, and wild country: big water, thickets, and quicksand. A vast brown landscape that requires new color words: burnt umber, ochre, chocolate, burgundy. New growth shows green around the edges.

To get to our encampment you take the exit for Placitas, but go west up the long slow slope of Rio Grande alluvium, while the hills of the Jemez slowly embrace you, and you wind between redrock mesas with deep canyons and cliffs. Onto the Rez, past White Mesa's warm pastels, past the arroyos full of cold salt, unnaturally blighted. Past Zia pueblo, past the dirt parking lot full of cars and people, lit by the neon LOVE RANCH sign, past San Ysidro. Into dark silence, past Cabezon Peak, solitary, unmistakable, dominating the first view (looking South) into the Puerco valley.

Puerco; an ugly name that changed the place to fit it. This used to be the "breadbasket of New Mexico", before the 1800's chewed it to dust, until it had nothing left to give, and it was abandoned... it had served as the hearth and heart of the Anasazi pueblo people, whose empire encompassed the thousand-roomed ruins at Chaco, still abandonded and brooding in a valley to the Northwest above the Puerco river.

You will find me standing there, breathing into the spaces, planting trees.

Restoration History: Hoedads

"In the middle of a clearcut, planting a tree is a spiritual act; doing it over and over is healing." Eugene Weekly.

Photo courtesy of www.dechene.com

The Hoedads were an organized cooperative of tree planters, named after their tool of choice, a sort of pickax used to plant trees. Mostly college graduates, these young men and women went "back to the land" in the 1970s to care for the earth and try to live out the ideals of the the 1960's, although by the time my father was a forester in Oregon in the 1980's only "drunks and guys who couldn't make it doing anything else" were left. It was brutal labor, a job the Oregon State Employment Service lists as “the hardest physical work known to this office.., one person in fifty succeeds the three week training period.” But the scenery was fantastic, and the art, music, and poetry of the movement continues to speak to us...

...especially to those of us who follow in their revolutionary footsteps, planting trees and caring for the earth. Today, reading about the idealism of the Hoedads, it is tempting to romanticize their work in comparison with our own. For example, both men and women Hoedads commonly worked shirtless, while today we rarely work shirtless and there aren't really many women on the crew anyway.

But, reading further history reveals trade-offs even in paradise. The Hoedads were exposed to sprayed herbicides and pesticides, while today we avoid using most poisonous chemicals (except petroleum products). Our work today, like the Hoedad's, is a product of our times. We drive trucks and eat processed food and doubt whether we can make a real difference, while the Hoedads confronted prejudice, exploitation, and chemical toxins with the fresh idealism of the 1960's. 40 years later it can be hard to see if much progress has been made (there are still so many forests and riparian areas to re-plant!), but perhaps the important fact is what has stayed the same: the dedication, hard work, and, yes, idealism to try to make a positive difference on the earth.

"God almighty! Why am I here, saying this, and not there, and not doing, and making the forest?"
Please read this great verse poem by Richard Bear eulogizing the Hoedads.

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How to use a hoedad.