Saturday 25 July 2009

Thursday 23rd July 2009 – Seeing the Sights

There used to be a feeling that Japanese tourists weren't really on vacation, they were busy taking photos of the vacation they were planning, so they could go home and use the photos to imagine they'd been there.

Pretty early on, I gave up the idea of videoing my entire trip.  It would have been a full time job, and even then would have been done badly.

I now seem to be starting to take the same view about the stills camera.  If I'm out somewhere on my own and I see something worth recording, it's about an even chance I've forgotten to put the camera in the car.

If someone offers to show me round somewhere, it seems positively rude to drape a camera round my neck.  So I generally don't have pictures of the things I see.  This must make me more attentive, and improve my memory.

Of course, this may partly be because I have a camera which looks like an old-fashioned 'proper' camera.  Perhaps I should get one of these new pocket cameras, and carry it with me all the time.  That would produce more useful images than the cellphone.

 

Today, I was taken on a tour to see the grand 'antebellum' houses of the city's founders, and their grand cemetery plots.  (As I'm sure you know, the 'bellum' referred to is the Civil one).

 The town has a significant Civil War history.  The Confederates won the Battle of Glasgow.  Glasgow was a well-organised port on the Missouri, so there were stocks of supplies worth fighting for. 

There seem to have been about four sides in the Civil War in Missouri.  As well as the regulars from each side, there were the irregulars (essentially pro-slave and abolitionist Missourians).  Missouri stayed in the Union, and was occupied by Union troops, but the insurgent pro-slave Missourians wrought a fair amount of havoc.

Quantrill, allegedly was here.  The local bankers, direct ancestors of my guides, had to sneak off at night, down the river, with the gold.  But raiders still got off with a fair amount of money.

Since Quantrill, and "Bloody Bill" Anderson were here, I'm entitled to speculate, romantically, that Jesse James was actually here.  I don't suppose it was very romantic at the time.

 

We stopped for a soda, at the Soda fountain in the drug store.  Glasgow's drug store, where the pharmacists have been father and son for five generations, maintains a genuine soda fountain.  I had a lemonade, made with freshly-squeezed lemons.  The young lady serving reminded me that I had been fishing with her husband on Sunday.

 

In the afternoon, we went to see what had once been the family farm, but is now a wetland nature reserve.  The river had broken down a levee, and formed a new, subsidiary channel across the middle of the farm.  'The Corps' (the Army Corps of Engineers) simply had no intention of rebuilding the levee, so the farm effectively ceased to be.  The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) bought it and turned it into a nature reserve.

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