Occupation of Independence

 Leaving the Southwest makes you first think of being cold, but that really isn't true along the Snake or Columbia rivers .  I've even managed to enter Oregon without suffering the indignity of being in the Pacific Time Zone .  Perhaps this results from southeastern Oregon having a mindset that got established back in the Oregon Trail days. It has been warm enough to get my first insect bite and to see the first snake of summer: Photo doesn't show him sticking out his forked tongue at me.  He was one little pissed-off snake. The Oregon Trail passed along these sandstone bluffs .  My little girl has played here a couple years ago.  She likes sand. Ahh, what a smooth road went along the foot of those bluffs!  A cross-country-style mountain biker like me can really love smooth, flat, and fast, as the pioneers no doubt did. A couple geese were pocketed in those bluffs.  They were easy to hear, but hard to see.  They got a rhythm going that remi...

 I found the experience of finding the spring (in the last post) so satisfying that I should try to explain it.  Long-suffering readers know that I like to bring in a historical perspective when camping and traveling.  But is that completely correct? A proper historian uses documents and occasional inscriptions in stone as their inputs.  They can also team up with an archeologist .  These are severe limitations obviously.  Even if there are lots of documents about a certain topic, most documents are official and therefore biased, legal, or commercial, so they are full of people's names, dates, facts, and figures.  That is fine, as far as it goes. But what was it like to experience the historical event for people directly involved?  What were they thinking and feeling?  For some reason, I made a real effort to imagine what it was like to find a spring or find water when digging a well for early settlers in the 1800s . What visual clues were ...