Occupation of Independence

 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 ...