A Tenderfoot’s thoughts on insect repellent

During the summer, Grand Trunk Pacific surveyors rubbed bacon rind on their faces, necks, and hands to keep the bugs off. But that wasn’t their only culinary defense:

They [insects] also have a great aversion to acids thus giving the humble pickle a very high position in our scheme of things. A string of ordinary pickles hung across the bed makes sleep possible & as for the 57 varieties no self respecting skeeter will go within a mile of one…Not being quite satisfied however with the effect of an unbroken line of cucumber I hung my bed with a “sweetly pretty chain” having a small onion after every third cucumber. The result was charming. I heartily commend this scheme of decoration to society hostesses in search of some relief from the sameness of roses & ferns.

A Tenderfoot’s thoughts on coyotes

Writing 27 May 1906, Norman Jacobs chronicled his acclimation to Canadian wildlife:

The wolves are an awful nuisance at night & even in the daytime we see them though they keep their distance. Strange to say the coyote the coward & most harmless of the wolf family makes the most unearthly noise. The sensation of waking at 2 in the morning to hear a score or more howling round you must be felt to be appreciated. I think the first week I put my head under the blanket & promised to be good the second week I turned out with a rifle & the third week disdaining to waste ammunition I drove them off with a tin pail & a hair brush.

A Tenderfoot’s thoughts on darning

Norman Jacobs, in the field surveying for the Grand Trunk Pacific circa 1906:

Personally, I hate darning. First you loose the needle & then you sit on it & find it & by that time the dog has the sock. You sew the sock onto your finger & prick yourself & swear & wish you were a girl but even darning must come to an end…

Published, not product

At least, that was what the little voice in my head said when I found, via Boing Boing (which excerpted the paragraph that made me twinge), a GeekDad account of the discovery and auction of materials belonging to Dave Arneson (the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons).

The use of “product” and “non-product” to describe the materials made me twinge. It’s not an unreasonable way to distinguish between published materials and unpublished manuscripts, but the word choice drives home the profit-driven nature of the enterprise. The non-archivy terminology sparks questions about appraisal decisions. Just because somebody buys the contents of a storage unit, does that mean they’re doing it right?

And yes, even if you’re talking about non-profit repositories, “doing it right” means different things, real world constraints come into play, etc., etc. We can’t save everything, we don’t want to save everything, etc., etc. But there’s something anxiety-inducing about the treasure-hunter mentality. I worry about a Storage Wars Effect* influencing people’s expectations about the monetary value of materials that come into their possession—and influencing the care and ultimate disposition of those materials.

Admittedly, when the “they” in question seems to consist of experts in the field—geeky people who evaluate the possessions of geeks and sell them to other geeks—it’s less likely that interesting stuff will simply be trashed. I appreciate the fact that the article mentioned some meatier issues, like IP, and ended on the “wouldn’t it be nice if we had archives?” note.† Yes, it would; I’d like archives to get first crack at, well, just about everything, and I’d very much like them to have the resources to take advantage of it. But I will simply take a deep breath, and remind myself of the long antiquarian tradition that, despite its hobbyist nature, resulted in the preservation of some pretty cool stuff.

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* Like the CSI Effect, which is largely anecdotal; empirical evidence has its impact hovering somewhere around negligible. In a similar vein, I have some anecdotal evidence for the existence of a “Storage Wars Effect,” but no real sense of how it affects potential donors’ decisions.

† More than a little irritated, too, because there are places that collect geeky stuff. The wistful sentiment had a bit of the “nobody understands/cares about us” stench clinging to it.

A Tenderfoot’s thoughts on Winnipeg

The 1905 impressions of Norman Jacobs, most recently of Pittsburgh:

This city is a revelation to me!…Every thing seems to breathe of that largness & Breadth which is the spirit of the West. Everything takes up as much room as it can….Men on shaggy horses or behind half broken teams electric cars automobiles mounted men & vehicles of all kinds careen wildly up & down & some times they warn you & most often they don’t but everything is drunk with the joy of life.

I don’t know what we did before Wikipedia

We all just stumbled around in ignorance, I suppose.

An essay I read included a reference to Laurence Oliphant, which pinged some neurons though I couldn’t remember why. Rather than wrack my brain or forget about it, I googled him and there, at the bottom of the page, was the reminder that Oliphant is a character in The Difference Engine. Of course.

(Side note, which I intend to expand/expound upon, but may not because I am lazy: re-reading The Difference Engine after having my hands on material from that period, was weird and fun. I knew those addresses! And I wondered where some of the personalities were hiding.)

A Tenderfoot’s thoughts on exploration

En route to Winnipeg—and the hope of a position with the railroad—in 1905, Norman Jacobs ruminated on the drive to explore:

Methinks the East India Company, The Hudsons Bay Co & the South African Co were some thing more than mere gigantic mercantile enterprises. A nation’s mission. Greater by far [the?] the mere preaching to the world of dreamy religious theories send out your sons Mother England. Send them out willingly & with rejoicings to death by sea & plains jungles & swamps! Go forth & colonize. Assuredly Allah is Allah & it is good to be an Englishman.

“Blessed with a special taste for blundering into unknown parts and coming out the other side with a more or less reliable map”

Norman Jacobs’s assessment of his skills and an explanation for his desire to specialize in exploration work, in a 14 November 1908 letter. At that point he had already been doing survey work for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway for a couple of years; his proposal to the letter’s recipient was still a couple years in the future.

Starting last fall, a few of us worked on processing the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway collection. More will be available digitally in the near future, but in the meantime I wanted to share some quotes. Norman Jacobs is an entertaining writer; it’s fun to be on a first name basis with him.

Toddler 1, bar code 0

The Daughter just peeled the bar code out of Jewish Identity. Very neat and efficient; the top layer of the label came off in one smooth piece. My apologies in advance to the Canaday staff.

Foucault

It has been a very, very long time since I read any Foucault. Since I was an undergraduate, I think, though it seems like it can’t have been that long. Foucault is in the aether. I bump into him in other articles; he is the substance of occasional meaty conversation with friends; he is second only to Gibson in retroactively coloring my impressions of Gallifrey. It feels rather odd citing him, as though it should be sufficient to mention him in a handwavy fashion or, alternatively, that I should ritually invoke him like some primal deity.