New Mexico Nicho

 

There's a small nicho in the entryway of my house. It's filled with things that remind me of the great state of New Mexico, its people and its history and distant past. I made the quilt that hangs on the nicho's back wall. The fabrics have pictures of chili peppers and cacti, and the colors remind me of a New Mexico sunset. My youngest son made the ladder when he was learning how to lash sticks together with the Boy Scouts. It is similar to the ladders used in Pueblos and cliff houses. If you want to climb one, a great place to visit is Bandalier.

Nestled at the feet of the ladder is a decorated gourd bowl and two small pots that my husband and I received as wedding presents. I think they are from the Jemez Pueblo. There is also a rug that my husband's secretary gave him long ago. Many people assume that a rug made in New Mexico would be made by an Indian, and they'd be wrong. The Spanish brought sheep and weaving to the Southwest. Some Hispanic shops, such as Ortegas, have been weaving for hundreds of years. 

My greatest treasures are older than the pots and gourds. My oldest son made the display case that holds an operculum that I found a few miles away from the site of the Robledo trackway, in the southern part of the state near Las Cruces. The operculum came from an ammonite  that swam in the ocean that covered New Mexico during the Cretaceous era. Look back at the small pots in the picture above and you'll see a fossilized ammonite from that same sea. I didn't find that fossil, but know if was found in Texas.

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I also have a large chunk of petrified wood in my nicho to remind me that this desert was once forested. This chunk is from Arizona's Petrified Forest, but I have picked up smaller pieces in many arroyos in New Mexico and in the dry bed of the Rio Puerco west of Rio Rancho. Probably the most spectacular place to see petrified forest is in the Bisti Badlands near Farmington.

New Mexico hasn't always been the desert that it is today, but it's always been an interesting place. I've got the mementos to prove it.

Do you have any New Mexico mementos?

Celebrating an American inventor

 

 

There are many ways to leaven bread. One way is to incorporate whipped egg whites, such as is done in angel food and sponge cakes. However, this was difficult and time consuming before Willis Johnson patented the eggbeater on February 5, 1884.

Bread wasn’t always as easy to bake as it is now. Bread gets its airy structure by leavening: capturing gas bubbles in the elastic gluten of wheat.

Jennifer Bohnhoff writes historical and other novels for middle grade and older readers and is fascinated by quirky inventions.

Grape and Canister

 

 

One of the things that makes historical fiction difficult for middle grade readers is the vocabulary. Tweens and young teens are often perplexed by words that don't make any sense to them.

Take, for instance, grape. Once, while teaching about the Civil War, I had a 7th grader ask me what was so scary about having grapes shot at you. She honestly believed that cannoneers loaded their guns with the same kind of grapes that make their way into jelly and jam. While this would lead to a sticky situation, and perhaps some stained uniforms, it likely wouldn't lead to many fatalities.

By Geni - Photo by user:geni, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11925339

Grape, when referring to 18th and 19th Century war, is just a shortened form of the word grapeshot. Neither grape or grapeshot refer to shooting people with grapes. Rather, it refers to how small metal balls, or shot, were bundled together before being loaded into the gun. When the gun fired, the bag disintegrated and the shot spread out from the muzzle, much like shot from a shotgun. My students understand this concept better when I ask if any of their parents are hunters. Usually they know the purpose of buck shot (for shooting deer) and birdshot (smaller pellets, for shooting pigeons.)

Students who are involved in track and field suddenly realized that the shot they put in shot put is related to grapeshot, especially when I haul out the one piece of grapeshot I own and we compare them with the team's shot.

Grapeshot was especially effective against amassed infantry movements, such as Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. But by the Civil War, grapeshot was already becoming a thing of the past, replaced by canister.

By Minnesota Historical Society [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Canister, which is sometimes known as case shot, involved small metal balls similar to the ones used in grapeshot. Instead of being encased in muslin, they were packed into a tin or brass container, the front of which blew out, scattering the balls into the oncoming enemy.

Canister is a word that is unfamiliar to many middle grade readers, because they are too young to know what a film canister is. They do, however, know what a can is, and can readily accept that can is short for canister.

Jennifer Bohnhoff teaches New Mexico History to 7th grade students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her middle grade novel, The Bent Reed, is set at the Battle of Gettysburg. Her next novel, Valverde, is set in New Mexico during the Civil War and is due out this spring.