Everything had been leading to this... (rough draft and unfinished)

Everything had been leading to this. He didn’t know that, of course. None of us ever know that kind of thing. But everything is leading to something, for each one of us individually and for us all collectively. Reconciliation or Absurdity, Chaos or Harmony, Personal Communion or Impersonal Totality, take your pick and stake out your variety. But motion is. The spatial is consecutive: it starts, it progresses, it terminates (as in ‘terminus’, a goal, a destination, an End to which all is rushing or slouching or shuffling or limping; or hideously scrape-thud-crawling or gloriously leap-thrust-soaring. Or some of both, no doubt. Some of both. Surely. It was certainly some of both for him).

But the corollary of the fact that the spatial is consecutive is of course that the chronological is dimensional: just as space is hurtling through a continuum so time is weighted and extended materially with volume and viscera. The latter was the significant thing for Hadwin Heath. Space. Space and its textures and possibilities, meshed in time… and times. Everything had been leading to his discovery of this (or rather, its terrifying discovery of him). As he stood before the painting for the tenth time in a week. After travelling so far to stand before this particular work. As he pondered its physical texture of paint, the colours brushed and congealed to this emotion, this psychological state. He was discovered.

He involuntarily tried to move his head to glance round the gallery and see if anyone else was looking at the painting or at him, but his head would not move. Or rather, it would move in no direction but impossibly slowly and inexorably toward, into, the painting. He stood thus for hours. No one could have observed him move in ‘real time’ (as we say). But over a period of six hours his head was not in the place it had started. It was moving into the painting.

Those ‘six hours’ were not for him the experience that phrase conjures for us. For him, everything had ‘slowed’ – each thud of his heart was a long, sonorous and deep-growling b-o-o-o-o-o-o-m. Each breath was a completely strange and alien all-sucking inhalation followed by the mighty god-like blowing of the exhalation – his breathing became a mythic cycle of these roaring and warring winds. And each emotion… each emotion of appreciation and wonder and agitation and queer joy and hinted terror, intermingled and interlocked in wrestling and dancing, became like the paint, flowing but frozen, fixed in flux. Each emotion was thereby for him a topographical piece of terrain, a ‘place’ to ‘go to’ and occupy before exploring onward, to be returned to in the meandering.

This state occupied him so long and so utterly from the moment he had tried to turn his head (which had been his last moment of awareness about his surroundings outside the painting) that only after these many engrossing hours did he once again give thought to trying to move his body and this time only in response to his engagement with the painting. He involuntarily reached for it, to touch it, the impulse always suppressed in the public space where this gesture was forever and fiercely forbidden by social cherubim with flaming swords and radios, closed circuit television, badges, respectability and respect, the (understandable) need to preserve precious physical artefacts.

When he reached for it he found he could. He could move. This movement only, in response solely to the painting and in motion toward its surface—this only was ‘allowed’ for him, though all the world around he and the painting may have disallowed it.

The para-temporal experience he was having did not cease with the movement. No, this singular gesture was an epic part of it. The alien god was majestically, miraculously bearing his arm to the creation not his own. The colonised paint received him regally and ritually with statecraft and pomp and pageantry. Its textures and tones were reaching also for him. Its sweeps and layers were longing and plying toward his touch. Its pigments made supplication to him and resigned themselves to wait patiently for his sign from their watchtowers. Were security guards this moment shouting to him, rushing him, even tearing at him, pulling him back? He was not aware of it. He had no experience of it. Were mortified alarms blaring and angry lights flashing redly? They were meaningless to him for they were unknown to him.

He touched the sacred surface of the painting. Skin contact on oils coated in invisible protective chemical shields. His forefinger, then each of the others and the thumb, a geologically gentle and reverential clawing or pawing of the paint.

And the paint discovered him. The oils rose and lapped his fingers, withdrew, receded, then lapped again, then leaped and covered his whole hand.

His nose was now only a centimetre from the painting’s surface. He did not see the painting envelop and welcome his hand into its oils. His eyes were long-locked in a great age of staring upon the painting at a proximity known only to the master who had made it. He was seeing what he could never have seen before, nor would he ever ‘un-see’ it. In a vast pilgrimage of time-movement he barely perceived, his head too was received.

Into the paint. Into the painting. This is what he began to see on the other side, from within the within.

New Voice of the Mysterons and Blaster the Rocket Man - available to the world!

ARTIST'S STATEMENT (stab, reconnaissance)

We are the weird and deformed things thought to be spied grubbing among the rubble. We haunt you, we invite you in to our carnival-festival, we menace your monsters, we harass your poltergeists. We eagerly want to shuck the shell from off your real skin and bones, we zestily come at you with sharp but rusty knives to cut that fester-scab off your exo-heart (inner but shown, known through body talk). Ah, the ripping PAIN! It's unavoidable. Receive it now not latterly. So we urge in urgent whispers unheard. Clickety, clickety, scuffle, shuffle, snuffle, slaver, cackle at the corners and edges of your mind, we creep on you from before and behind and under and over and inside-out and outside-in, beneath and upon your skin, knocking to get out of your skull and rap-rap-rapping to get in.

Revenge of the Sacred, 1973!

An entire life('s work) may well be a well-timed joke or wisecrack of theo-comedic Revenge on a world that rejects—an offhanded, sharp little retort with some biting but reconciliatory import. Who can say?

(Monsters of) The Middle Ages

The Huge Father Beast Thrashed Amuck,

Raised an Enormous Rumbling Ruckus,

Roared and Writhed and Rent Asunder,

Tore and Tunnelled and Trampled Under,

Winged Up to the Rarest Skies,

Clawed Deep Into the Darkest Earth,

Threw About his Dirt-Girt Girth

For All its Wild Worth.

And Lo, his Feral Wee Ones Wondered on,

Strove to Imitate his Massive Machinations

In their Frolicking, their Captured Imaginations

Raptured by his Rollicking.

But Alas, Alack, the Daddy Beast Grew Slack and Slowly

Slowed and Lacked Alacrity.

Yet was He Fairly Hale with Lingering Heft,

But of the Young Thrasher he Had Been

Little was Left.

As his Monstrous Prime Began to Fade Behind

There Welled Up from Deep in His Beast Belly

A Long, Long Groan that Became a Hoarse Howling,

But Only Alone, Down Deep

In His Caverns or High Up

On his Crags, in the Waste Places

Where no one Brags.

Finally, he Rested, for he knew he was

Bested. All that he Boasted was Busted.

And he Turned Unto his Own

Son, Lately Grown so Monstrous and Mighty,

And Spake Thusly: ‘It is Your Turn.

I Hope you Learn from All I Was and

All I’m Not.’ And the Precocious

Son-Beast Leapt Up with a Ferocious

Cry and Showed the World the Vast Measure

Of all his Strength and Ardour.

And the Daddy Beast, Sweetly Pierced,

Heaved his Lately Great Gait without Regret

To Gather How Monsters Grow Hoary

And what Lesser Havocs he might Wreak Yet.

Untitled

I am, to the blue depths of me, I am

Rationalist? Idealist? Supernaturalist?

Whatever. But not, clearly,

an empiricist.

Yet, contra the bell-toll of an aching soul

I concede to my senses that I am not,

in fact, a poet, but merely

a lyricist.

INDIANA BONES - Digging Up My Midwestern Roots

I was born in a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, even though my parents lived across the river in New Albany, Indiana at the time. So it's 'Louisville' on the birth certificate. There was a year or so we lived in Louisville proper when my dad pastored a congregation there. I was in kindergarten I believe. I can still picture the average working class neighbourhood of small-to medium-sized wood-panelled and brick houses (ours was red brick I think). Three or so concrete steps and metal rails composed what we had of a back porch. (I ripped my lips off when I tore my open mouth away from those frozen rails one winter. True story.) In the house we had a ‘den’ that was off the kitchen by a step down, in which I loved to run madly round in circles, arms held out to my sides, lips vibrating in a buzzing noise, whenever my parents would play the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ record on the couch-sized wood-cased record player.

But the rest of my upbringing was an Indiana one and I’m very much a product of Middle America, the Midwest more specifically, Indiana in particular: I grew up on the East Side of Indianapolis, the capitol city (in Marion County). I’m a product of wide-open flat cornfields and cow pastures punctuating working and middle class neighbourhoods, mostly a dozen or more miles out of downtown but still part of the greater metropolis of ‘Indy’. I’m a product of big blue skies, of cold white winters, warm wet springs, long hot summers, and crisp bittersweet autumns. I’m a product of tight electric air before a fierce downpour of rain and of the never-seen-with-my-own-eyes terrifying rumour of a nearby tornado, the aftermath of which could be seen plainly on the evening news or on a drive through a nearby town. Grassy Creek Elementary School regularly had 'tornado drills', rows of children with their heads between their knees lined along the corridor walls like folded up bugs.

My most formative years were the decade of age seven to seventeen—the 1980s. So I’m Ronald Reagan, John Cougar (Mellancamp), Michael Jackson, Run DMC, Bryan Adams, Max Headroom, Mad Max, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Jim Henson, John Carpenter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael J. Fox, MTV, The A-Team, Manimal, Automan, PacMan, Space Invaders, Atari, Commodore 64, Donkey Kong, Q-bert, Alf, The Cosby Show, Facts of Life, Eight Is Enough, Different Strokes, Family Ties, Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Ocean Pacific, Panama Jack, Bahama shorts, parachute pants, muscle shirts, bandannas, Vans, Air Jordans—whatever came down the pike, I guess.

I was a pastor’s kid, a churchgoing boy in a devout, fairly 'low church' Southern Baptist-cum-Jesus-Movement family. My Dad was a working class post-hippie rock’n’roller who, still rooted in this half of his identity, became also a seminary-trained pastor-evangelist. That pretty much defined us culturally as a family. Stacks of rock'n'roll records and shelves of theology books. Loud music and Bible reading. Rock concerts and churchgoing.

I grew up on all the stories from the Bible (mostly learned in ‘Sunday School’ every Sunday at church). I knew them all forward and back by the time I was ten probably. I mean I really did – there wasn’t really any bit of the Bible I hadn’t heard of, wasn’t familiar with. I thrilled to many parts of it, but regardless, it was just the air I breathed. The God of Moses and David and Jesus and Paul felt very near and real, across the Eastern ages right down to me and my Western adolescence. I also discovered Greek and Norse mythology at the elementary school library and soaked myself especially in the Trojan War with those mighty heroes Ajax and Achilles and Hercules. Oden and Thor and Loki were only dipped into but I had deep respect for Thor as my Norse Hercules. Books on Trolls and Goblins and Ogres were also much appreciated with awe and some fear. ‘Factual’ books about, on the one hand, dinosaurs in the incomprehensibly remote past, and, on the other hand, flying cars, wrist-watch video phones, rocket ships, and colonised moons and planets in the surely oh-so-attainable, not-too-distant future also supplied part of the standard imaginative fare of those years.

And comic books: I preferred (and still do) Marvel over DC any day of the week. Reasonable respect to Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and their ilk. But, for me, it was really all about X-Men, Spiderman, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Avengers, Micronauts, Moon Knight, ROM, Ghost Rider, and the rest of that inexhaustibly inventive throng.

And a fairly random assortment of novels and stories. Some childhood standards like Where the Wild Things Are, Where The Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and even the lesser known Charlie and the Glass Elevator), Ralph S. Mouse, White Fang, Call of the Wild and that sort. But also some standards and some bypaths of fantastic literature: Chronicles of Narnia, Chronicles of Prydain (Lloyd Alexander), The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, Screwtape Letters, Edgar Allan Poe to mention some of the more memorable tomes.

And, of course, the popular movies: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T., Goonies, Uncle Buck, Fletch, The Jerk, Blade Runner, Princess Bride, Back to the Future, Ghost Busters, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Road Warrior, The Thing, Dark Crystal. (Some of these were sneaked.) It seemed like a magical decade for a boy.

Baseball and basketball and football were in the air and on the television. Super Bowl, Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, World Series, NCAA, NBA, NFL: they’re part of who I am as an American, but I never truly cared for them, even when I sincerely tried to (I was pretending, playing a role, which was fun for a short while). I played soccer for eleven seasons, enjoyed it, played well on defense, and I wrestled for a few years in junior high, enjoyed it too, but dropped out after a few seasons, unwilling to hack the intense and frequent practices. I tried skateboarding latterly but only liked the music, the ‘look’, and the general counterculture associated with it. I was pretty terrible at it. But even without much sports or athletics, I spent many long hours outdoors exploring woods, climbing trees, wading in creeks, chasing and play-fighting with friends at all hours of day and night in all seasons.

I had a sort of ‘puppy-love’ girlfriend or two, danced at a few dances, longed and pined secretly, tried my hand at a love poem or two, held hands whenever I could, and eventually got way over-committed in a few late teen relationships.

Somewhere around sixteen, two life-shaping things happened. One was that I became self-aware of a huge disenchantment with mainstream culture and what it cared about and was struck with the desire to strike out and figure out a way to ‘be different’, which I did as best I could as a Midwestern kid. (I’d been unconsciously seeking this for some years.) After some misspent early teen years courting heavy metal, I now finally and fully discovered punk rock and realised this was the main musical medium for me. I began scheming to sing in a band.

The other was that my latent, childhood, familial faith woke up with a vengeance and I experienced God in a profound way like I never had before. It swept me right off my feet and switched on an insatiable spiritual thirst and hunger that sent me questing after Jesus (because his was the only divine voice that called to me and he was the one who jumped inside my soul when I said ‘ok, Sir’). Reading the Bible, praying, going to church, ‘evangelising’ others became exquisite peaks of experience, not chores at all. Make of it what you will, I whole-heartedly and besottedlyloved Jesus in blissful naivety and blessed simplicity. My time of running from that and furtively returning would come a little later.

Growing up I was generally an incurable underachiever. From first grade onward I ended each year with an overflowing folder of backed-up schoolwork that, if I and my parents promised I would finish, then the school would pass me on to the next grade. I was a lazy daydreamer. Schoolwork was hard work (because it required focus and sustained attention, not necessarily because I couldn’t understand or perform the work) and imagining fantastic tales in my head constantly and easily overtook my mind and pleasurably passed hours on end, at school and at home. I had an inexhaustible wide-screen, full-immersion cinema in my own head and the temptation to look inward and enjoy the epic entertainment there was just too great for my young undisciplined soul, especially when the alternative prospect was schoolwork.

A few teachers did manage to get me writing some small amounts of poetry and fiction in the early years, which they (along with my parents) encouraged me I had a gift for. I loved it. But I was too lazy to do much of the hard work of getting all that wonderful stuff out of my head and onto paper. At some point I discovered this little alternative called ‘song lyrics’. Those came thick and fast and easy. I was a writer from the depths of my soul and I simply had to write and I was profoundly relieved to finally discover that lyric writing was the path of least resistance for me. (Choosing to follow this path, though successful to a certain degree, would also keep me undisciplined for any other form of creative writing for decades to come.) The songs I wrote were total crap for the entirety of my teenage years and I’m completely torn about having lost all my notebooks full of that trash. I’m so glad the world will never have the slightest chance of seeing them. Yet wouldn’t I love the morbid, macabre thrill of looking over them and ruefully relish the resultant cringing and self-loathing?

But I had found what I liked and, more importantly, what I could actually do. It wasn’t until I’d graduated high school that band members finally came along and it wasn’t until I was married a few years later that the opportunity for putting some of those songs out permanently arrived. I liked what I did. Lots of other people did too. (That surprised me, but, without meaning too, I just took the approbation in stride and kept at the craft with pleasure and not a little pain too.) I was never entirely happy with anything at all that I created, but I kept seeing potential in it that I hoped I could ‘get right’ the next time (which always became the next time after that).

Mid-Western Pioneer Dialect: "Them Pea Ridge folks is all hatefuls, an' if they'r a-lookin' fer trouble they'll shore get a lavish of it"

'In speech, as in blood, the Middle Westerner of the pioneer period was essentially "American" - that is, his language was a blend, with the Southern Appalachian element generally predominating. The speech of the southern highlands was a survival of Anglo-Saxon of the Elizabethan Age, with some "Scotch-Irish", "Pennsylvania Dutch", and Indian influences. Description is difficult... Strong verbs were made weak and weak verbs strong. The mountaineer "blowed", "ketched", "drawed", "knowed", "seed", and was "borned"; but he also "clum", "div", "retch", "drug", "et", "snuck", and "skun". Old forms were common. He "taken" things to town, and he "heered" or "hearn say." "Affeared" for "afraid", and "et" for "ate" were good English ancestry. Cases, moods, auxiliaries, relatives, agreement of subject and verb, as well as tense, were treated with true Elizabethan indifference: "Me and her was a-sparkin," "Hit shore is me," "She seed he and I a-comin' down the road."

'Yourn", "hisn", "hern", "ourn", and "theirn" were commonly used possessives. Adjectives served as adverbs: "I could ketch him easy"; as verbs: "I shore didn't aim t'contrary that ol heifer fr'm Hell Holler," "Hit darknin' out doors," "He'll sly outen the law"; and as nouns: "Them Pea Ridge folks is all hatefuls, an' if they'r a-lookin' fer trouble they'll shore get a lavish of it"; verbs as adjectives: "He warn't thoughted [intelligent] enough"; and as nouns: "Did you all get the invite (or give-out)?" Nouns were used as adjectives: "Them dang fool houn' dogs," and as verbs: "Don't fault th' young-un jes' fer bein' puny," "That 'ar shoat'll meat th' hull fambly a month, easy," "Waitin' so purty and patientable to bride her man."

'Beyond the knowledge of Elizabethan forms, or grammar and idiom, is required an understanding of the spirit of the folk who created this speech. The frontiersman refused to be restricted in style by law of grammar no less than law of Parliament or Congress. Clearness in expression was preferred to grammatical correctness, and brevity to clearness... Pronunciation and emphasis played an important part, but grammatical shift of parts of speech, word compounding, word coining, use of obsolete comparatives and superlatives, together with imaginative and picturesque speech figures, added appreciably to the expressiveness. Double identifying nouns such as "kitchen-room", "shootin'-iron", "rifle-gun", "ham-meat", "ridin'-critter", "man-person", and "cow-brute" were common, as well as such obvious compounds as "carrytale", "lackbrain", "wantwit", "breakvow", and "clutchfist."

'There were compounds, such as "tale-bearing" and "lie-swearing." Adjective compounds came easily: "sweet-meaty," "hind-leggy," "dumb-brutely," "sheepsy," "stuff and non-setty"; and compounded superlatives were effective: "mud-piedest," "dry-uppedest," "shut-pocket'dest," "sought-afterest," "up-and-comin'-dest," "nothin'-doin'dest," and "flea-huntin'dest." Hybrids with borrowed prefixes and suffixes were created: "disremember," "ingrateful," "onsartin'," "unproper," "unthoughtedly," "disturbment," "revilement," "sadful," "argyfy," "teachified," and so on, as well as words with diminutives or redundant suffixes such as: "tittery," "tumbly," "withery," "frecklsy," "quicksy," "slickery," "tickle-sweety," "stillsome," "patientable," and "virginous."

'Vocabularies were rich, flexible, and sometimes strong. Such words as "brash" (hasty, brittle), "bound" (determined), "beatenest" (hard to beat), "bresket" (energy), "bee-gum" (beehive), "clever" (kind, accommodating), "cazan" (cause), "crick" (creek), "dunk" (dip), "dauncy" (half-sick), "enjoy" (entertain), "fitten" (decent), "lavish" (a large quantity), "guess" (think), "heap" (a great deal), "middlin'" (fair, tolerable), "passel" (parcel, of people, etc.), "poke" (bag), "powerful" (exceedingly, extraordinary), "racket" (fight), "ruction" (quarrel), "reckon" (guess, wonder), "red up" (tidy up), "whang" (thong), "swan" (swear - "I swan," etc.), might necessitate a glossary for one unfamiliar with the speech. But "contrarious," "cumfluttered" (confused), "caterwampus," "flopdoodle," "fractious," "mozy," "ornery," "peart," "piddlin'" (trifling or puttering around), "sashay," "triflin'," and "tetchous" (touchy) are practically self-explanatory. More expressive still are descriptive words and phrases such as "fritter-minded," "gone franzy," "plumb moonshined," "buck-eyed," and "hippoed" (applied to mental states), "lickety splittin'," "lickety brindle," "gimlet-eyed," "chisted out" (swelled up), "sow-belly" (pork), "granny woman" (midwife), "woodscolt" (illegitimate child), and "lollygagin'" and "tomcattin'" (applied respectively to slushy and promiscuous sexual behavior).

'This was the foundation speech of the majority of the folk who populated southern Illinois and Indiana, predominated in parts of Ohio, and figured prominently in the settlement of the northern parts of these states as well as in Wisconsin and to a certain extent in Michigan...

'The western man ripped out remorseless oaths, swearing a blue streak with a remarkable breadth of expression. Whereas a Hoosier described himself as "catawampously chawed up," the Yankee was merely a "gone sucker." Inquire about his health, and he tells you he is "so as to be crawlin'!" As one contemporary observed: He talks of "spunkin' up to an all-fired, tarnation, slick gall, clean grit, I tell yeou neow"; and naturally he has a "kinder sneakin' notion arter her." If she were to tell him to "hold his yawp" he would admit that he felt "kinder streaked, by golly!" He describes a man as being "handsome as a picter, but so darnation ugly"; or as "a thunderin' fool, but a clever critter as ever lived" - ugly being Yankee for wicked, and clever for good-natured...

'Naturally current events affected speech. For example, anyone knew in the 1830's that "to swarthout" (after Samuel Swarthout of New York) meant to default and flee. To "go the whole hog" meant to have refreshment or to vote a straight ticket; "to have steam up," ready to go. When political ferment or reform movements got to humming, people were warned "not to mistake the whizzing of the safety valves for the bursting of the boilers." "Have you seen the elephant?" must have originated as a result of the tour of the great pachyderm. The question (and answer) usually had connotations but remotely related to menageries. When a man had "seen the elephant" he had been everywhere, seen everything, perhaps was, in the language of a later period, "fed up"...

'Of folklore, proverbs, and superstitions, the West had no distinctive variety, and made few original contributions. The most-used gems of wisdom were those which had stood the test of time - those used in colonial times, in England, Germany, even in ancient lands. "Buying a pig in a poke," "A chip off the old block," "He cut a real swath," "A hard row to hoe," "He's been through the mill," "He'll never amount to a hill of beans," "He's come to the end of his rope," "Short horse soon curried," "It comes and goes like the old woman's soap," and hundreds of others, saws and sayings as well as proverbs, which comprised a considerable part of ordinary speech, antedate the new West.

'Nor can the habit of the smart answer or "wisecrack" be said to be indigenous to the West, although it certainly was characteristic. To his tall tales, practical jokes, and witty replies the Westerner gave his peculiar twist - and how he loved them. To the greeting "How do you do?" a keen citizen would reply, "About as I please, stranger, how do you do?" If he were asked, "Where does this road go?" he might aptly observe, "Don't go nowheres, mister, stays right there." If asked how his potatoes turned out, he would say, "Didn't turn out at all, had to dig 'em out." And so on. Such pat answers were used over and over on friends as well as strangers, and never seemed to die out as do slang and current expressions. The river boatmen, professional teamsters, later the lumberjacks and other workers with a vocational pride or esprit de corps, had their special collections; the reputations of such heroes as Mike Fink and Paul Bunyan rested as much upon their ready wit as upon prodigious feats of valor and skill. The embarrassing question, the successful baiting of a rival, above all the riposte verbale were often more decisive than a fight, and longer remembered.

'Though the common speech was less used by the educated and those of wider contacts, still there was always a tendency for even these classes to speak with somewhat less grammatical correctness and propriety of diction than they had knowledge of. Correct pronunciation and too much attention to diction was put in the same category as fastidiousness in dress, and was regarded as "stuck up." Lawyers who aspired to office, newspaper editors, even preachers, had to be careful about such matters. To many, however, such precaution was unnecessary. Not too exceptional was the legislator from Columbiana County, Ohio, who spoke of the "hebias kawus law" and referred to "Jefferson's immanuel" address. "Zelious," "magnanimious," "scurlious," "philanthripic," "embazzle," "inoquivocably," "reitriate," and "oughter" were favorites with him. He was reported as using "rise up enmassey" and saying "his garden are cut, his house are kept by the state."

'Lack of acquaintance with books and a knowledge of the classics, history, and philosophy was ordinarily no handicap to the active-minded Westerner. He relied heavily upon personal contacts, conversations, and firsthand knowledge. "Fluency of language, with an ease and power of expression which sometimes swells to the dignity of eloquence, and often displays itself in terms of originality, at once humorous and forcible, constitute the conversational resources of the western man."'

-R. Carlyle Buley (1951), The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period 1815-1840, Indiana University Press, Bloomington