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April 23, 2001 - Bill Cooper
01:00:53
Retreat to Boston
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Time Text
Thank you.
the world.
I'm going to be doing something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. I'm going to be doing something that I've
been wanting to do for a long time.
I'm going to be doing something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. I'm going to be doing something that I've
been wanting to do for a long time.
I'm going to be doing something that I've been wanting to do for a long time.
You're listening once again to the Hour of the Time.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, you're listening once again to the Hour of the Time.
I'm William Cooper.
Well tonight we're going to finish up with the British retreat from Lexington Concord
to Boston and that was quite a route.
Thank you.
For a portion, as you learned last Thursday, for the portion of the route, the British troops were in disarray, without discipline, actually running out of formation, scared, terrified, as a matter of fact, as they were Cut down literally from every rock wall and every tree line by American Patriots who lay in wait for them along their route.
Finally, the British officers managed to get in front of the fleeing troops and pull their, affix their bayonets to their rifle and, I should say their muskets, their brown best muskets, as they were called.
The finest muskets in the world at that time, or at least as far as military weapons were concerned, they were said to have been.
Some people knowledgeable in firearms of the era would have questioned that, claiming that some of the arms that the civilian American Patriots carried We're far superior to the British Brown Bess, but be that as it may, that's a subject for debate and not for this broadcast.
The officers faced the fleeing men down in the middle of the road, forced them to get back into formation, and they began an orderly retreat in British fashion, still being ambushed and cut down all along the way.
And so we will resume the story, the narrative, the history, after this little scene setter,
I guess you might call it.
So let's get started.
So, this is the story.
So, this is the story.
I'm going to overlap just one paragraph so that you'll remember where it was that we
It was at the end of the narrative of the time period of 4.30pm.
General Percy, riding his white horse, offered a conspicuous target.
He escaped death or injury, but a button was shot from his uniform.
The increasing number of minute men brought such pressure on his rear and flanks that Percy finally halted his column not far from the rocks and turned his two field pieces upon them.
The cannon shot hit no one, but temporarily at least scattered his pursuers.
The destructive aspect of real war was now fully present as cannonballs blasted the road smashed into stone walls and trees, and tore jagged holes through houses.
5 P.M.
Jason Russell, 58, and lame, was one citizen of monotony who believed that an Englishman's house is his castle.
So after taking his wife and children to a place of greater safety, he had returned to his dwelling and prepared for any forays the British might make.
A group of Minutemen who ran into a British flanking party got to Russell's doorway just as Earl Percy's column coming up the road saw them and fired, forcing them to take shelter in the house.
The unfortunate Russell, with his disabled foot, was the last to reach the door and was struck by two bullets.
As he lay in the doorway, the red coat stabbed him with no less than eleven bayonet thrusts.
In the house, the Minutemen, who had no bayonets, We're at a great disadvantage, and the Redcoats readily slew all they could reach.
Some men from Beverly and others, eight in number, fled into the cellar, and pointing their muskets up the stairway, threatened instant death to any soldiers who should follow.
One venturesome Redcoat took a chance and was shot on the stairs.
Another was killed in the fight on the floor above.
After the British had gone, the dead in and about the house were gathered in a single room.
When Mrs. Russell came home, she found her husband and eleven minute men lying side by side on the floor in a common pool of blood.
They were the largest number of combatants, either American or British, to give up their lives in any one place and at any one time during the course of the day's conflict.
The Jason Russell House, commendably saved by the Arlington Historical Society, 530 P.M.
The section of the highway leading to the Cooper Tavern from the Jason Russell House was, indeed, the scene of some of the most frenzied and desperate action during the running fight over an almost continuous battlefield.
No less than twenty Americans And as many or more British were finally slain in this stretch, which deservedly has been called the bloodiest half-mile of all the Battle Road.
The buildings along the village street of Monotony had harbored so many Minutemen and made the route of the British retreat so hot and tantalizing That it was inevitable the harried troops would sooner or later, in their reckless fury, make victims of some of the innocent as well as the guilty.
This very thing occurred at the Cooper Tavern.
Jason Winship, forty-five, and Jabez Wyman, thirty-nine, had already tarried too long over their mugs of ale, and the landlord, Benjamin Cooper, and his wife, Rachel, were mixing flip at the bar.
When the redcoats began shooting at the doors and windows and crowded into the taproom.
The drinking companions never had a chance.
The landlord and his spouse, who escaped for their lives into the cellar, made the incident appear even more merciless and shocking than it probably was.
In a later disposition for the Provincial Congress, they described Winship and his brother-in-law as two aged gentlemen Most barbarously and inhumanely murdered, being stabbed through in many places, their heads mauled, skulls broke, and their brains beat out on the floor and walls of the house.
The battle had reached the height of its ferocity at Menetimi.
More were killed there on both sides than in any other town.
At least forty of the British succumbed.
More than half of their fatalities of seventy-three for the day, while twenty-five out of the forty-nine Americans who lost their lives, fell in the town that was later to be called West Cambridge, and finally Arlington.
Homes were put to the torch, as at Lexington, but the regulars were more closely pursued by a greater number of Minutemen and others, who deprived them of sufficient time to destroy the village by a wholesale conflagration.
Many fires were started, but soon extinguished by the militia and townsmen.
6 P.M.
Only an hour remained before complete darkness, and the British force still had several miles to go before it could reach the comfort and protection of the warships in the Charles and reinforcements at Boston.
The troops, therefore, rapidly and without incident beyond the Cooper Tavern, and in a little more than a mile and a quarter arrived at the Monotony River, the present Alewife Brook, where they crossed into the north end of Cambridge.
A mile beyond the Monotony River, a small but resolute band of Americans waited for the British, under the dubious shelter provided by a pile of empty casks in the yard of Jacob Watson, a blacksmith.
Once again the flankers caught their victims by surprise as they got in their rear unobserved and charged with bayonets.
Major Isaac Gardner of the Brookline Militia and the highest-ranking officer to be slain on either side during the day fell in the encounter, and two volunteers of Cambridge, John Hicks and Moses Richardson, both fifty.
630 P.M.
When General Percy led his troops out of Boston in the morning, It is claimed by one source that he intended to camp that night on Cambridge Common and, with reinforcements to be sent out later by General Gage, lay waste the buildings of Harvard College and others in the town as an example of the swift and terrible punishment King George was ready to mete out to subjects who were rebellious and took up arms to defy his authority.
Any thought of stopping in Cambridge now, however, was far from Percy's mind. In the course of the afternoon's
fighting, he had seen what an aroused and hostile countryside could
do to an invader.
As a result, he was determined to get back to the main army in Boston as soon as possible by taking the shortest and safest route through Charlestown.
He had regarded the Americans before as cowards and timid creatures, but was now in a position where he had to reverse his opinion.
In a report the next day, he wrote, Many of them concealed themselves in houses, and advanced within ten yards to fire at me and other officers, though they were mortally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.
Nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it perhaps imagined at home.
For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the King's troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday.
Percy's column wheeled to the left onto Beach Street from Massachusetts Avenue, a quarter of a mile beyond the spot where three Americans had been killed in the fight at the empty casks, and came into the modern Somerville at the corner of Beach and Elm Streets.
The militia were too inexperienced and too few in number to oppose Percy with anything like a frontal attack.
But they exposed him to a hot fire from a grove not too far away and killed several of his men.
As he had already done more than once on the retreat, Percy was compelled to unlimber his two field pieces and with cannon shot frighten and drive off his adversaries.
This sharp encounter took place at the corner of Elm Street and Willow Avenue in Somerville.
Almost a mile farther on, the Redcoats, now moving swiftly in the last moments of daylight, came to a small pond at the foot of the present Laurel Street and Somerville Avenue.
Overheated by their exertions and frantic with thirst, many of the soldiers threw themselves into the water to refresh their perspiring bodies and parched throats.
The pond, like almost all features of what was unspoiled countryside, or a small village comprising the west end of Charlestown in 1775, disappeared many years ago.
Under the impact of urban growth, this part of Charlestown was set off as Somersville in 1842.
The last few musket shots flashed in the darkness as General Percy's exhausted troops filed over Charlestown Neck and reached the protection of Bunker Hill.
There they flung themselves to the ground and waited, some of them for hours, until arrangements could be completed and boats provided to carry them across the river to Boston, thus ending the opening day of battle in the American Revolution.
The British losses were seventy-three killed, one hundred and seventy-four wounded, twenty-six missing, a total of two hundred and seventy-three casualties, while the Americans had forty-nine fatalities, 41 wounded and 5 missing, a total casualty list of 95.
There are no injuries reported.
The cause of death is unknown.
give credit where credit is due.
A couple of our listeners visited Lexington and Concord and sent me that narrative, which anyone can obtain at the Visitor's Center, I'm told.
And if you're there, you should get anything and everything that you possibly can that will teach you the real history of the beginning of the Revolutionary War that occurred right there in Lexington and Concord.
And on the road between Concord and Boston during the British retreat.
So I want to thank them.
They also sent me some photographs of themselves and the historical landmarks and some of the things that we take for granted and form pictures of in our mind.
And when we see the photographs, we'll have to excuse me, folks.
That's why there was a pause during the narrative.
I still got a little cough, or another cough, or something.
And that has plagued me since Thursday night.
Or Wednesday night, actually, when I started this.
And the reading of this was very small print, and some of the English is archaic.
In other words, spelled in the manner that it was spelled back then.
And so, if you take the broadcast on Wednesday or Thursday night and go back and listen to it, you might scratch your head at some of my mispronunciations, so I apologize for that.
I didn't have time to scan it into the computer and make the type larger so that I wouldn't have that problem, which is normally what I do when I read something over the air.
But I thank them.
Thank you for sending all that material.
It's very interesting.
I was at Lexington and Concord many years ago, and one of the things that I found most interesting was the bridge where the encounter occurred.
And I think that you will, too, because our concept of what bridges look like in this modern day and age isn't anything like what you're going to see there.
It's a beautiful bridge, but it's a bridge that was built back in the 1700s before 1775 and was actually there for quite some time before the battle occurred.
And when you see it, you're going to be surprised and amazed and very pleased and it's a beautiful bridge.
It's an old wooden bridge, is what it is, and they've, at least when I was there, they kept it in the, as close to the original exact condition that it was when the battle occurred.
And from the pictures that they've sent me, it looks the same as it did when I was there to see it.
But a lot of the area has changed.
It's not like it was back then.
Which brings me to what I want to talk about next.
I've heard so many people say that they wish they had lived during that time, and I'm one of those people, and I sincerely mean it, but I don't think most people who have been reared in our modern times with all the conveniences and things that we have today would really find it all that attractive, to tell you the truth.
I would because I believe in a simple life.
I think a simple life makes us better people.
I think when we are involved in providing for ourselves, it makes us responsible, ethical, and moral people.
I believe that idle hands or mischievous minds create all kinds of problems that we have today that they didn't have back then.
Communities were small.
Everybody knew everybody.
It's pretty hard to go off and do something somewhere where everybody didn't know who you were.
Children and young people and even old people can do that now and disappear into the night and nobody knows who the hell they are and get away with some pretty obnoxious and outrageous things.
Back then you just couldn't do it.
You couldn't even go to the next county and do it because they knew you there too.
Communities were small.
Everybody knew everybody.
They knew who you were from the time you were born until the time you died.
And they had pretty strict rules in those communities.
And manners.
People had manners then.
And there was such a thing called honor.
Common sense was what People used to determine what was right and what was wrong and how to solve a problem.
And I've got to tell you folks, in my dealings with most people today, there isn't much common sense in any of them.
And I don't know why that's so.
Plus, back then, no meant no, and yes meant yes, and maybe meant maybe.
Now, today, no doesn't mean anything.
Yes is a license to do whatever somebody pleases way beyond what the yes really meant.
And most times maybe mean yes.
Which is all screwed up.
And people have learned to become manipulative.
They don't listen to what other people say.
And that's caused me some problems with a whole bunch of phone calls lately.
People trying to manipulate me into doing something for them that I'm not going to do.
And they don't listen to me when I say no.
No, we don't do that anymore.
And they go into this, it's like I never said it.
They go into this little spiel about, well, you used to do it, and I really need that, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you can say no eight or ten times.
And it's like, it's like they have cotton in their ears.
They're not even listening.
And so the only alternative is to, is to, Get a little bit rude, or just plain old hang up on them.
Which, as you know, it doesn't bother me a bit to do that.
But back in that day, if somebody said no, you better listen to them, because they meant it, and you weren't likely to talk them out of it, especially in New England, where people are pretty stubborn.
And, uh, maybe meant maybe.
It didn't mean yes or no, it meant maybe.
Yes meant yes with reservations.
Yes meant yes what we agreed upon and nothing more.
Life was simple, but at the same time it was hard work.
For instance, there were no modern cleaners.
There was no modern laundry soap.
There wasn't any bleach.
Everything that you had, you had to make, unless you lived in a large population center and could get some ready-made things that were shipped in from England or that were made by local craftsmen, such as soap.
Families made their own soap.
Unless you lived in a large city, there were no butcher shops.
You raised your pork and your beef and your chickens And you slaughtered them, and you plucked them, and you skinned them, and you butchered them, and you smoked them, or salted them, or did whatever you had to do to preserve them.
To preserve the meat until it was time to eat.
And, uh, you stored it.
In many instances, that means you had to make your own barrels.
If you didn't have a barrel maker or a cooper.
Which, by the way, is the origin of the name Cooper.
Somewhere way back in my distant history there was a barrel maker.
It was called a cooper.
Somebody was Mike, son of the cooper, and eventually in time it became Mike Cooper.
That's how people were named back in ancient times, in olden times.
I should say olden times, not ancient times.
But, yes, even in ancient times, it was quite alive.
You had to be involved in everything.
And you had to be healthy because you had to take care of where you lived and your family and your home.
And sometimes you had to defend it.
You had to take care of your animals.
Which means you couldn't sleep in late or take a day off because the animals had to be fed.
They had to be taken care of.
Horses had to be shooed.
Watered.
Some animals had to be groomed.
Sometimes you had to continually, and I mean continually, especially if you had a large property, be repairing fences and rounding up animals that had broken through your fence and bring them back before somebody else's property was damaged.
Because if your cow escaped onto somebody else's property back then and caused any damage or ate any grass, you had to pay for it.
You had to pay for it.
It was interesting times.
You made your own gunpowder in many instances and gunpowder is very easy to make, folks.
All you need is saltpeter and sugar.
75 parts saltpeter and 12 parts fine sugar.
That's all you need for gunpowder.
If you don't believe me, you know, I'm not telling you to try it unless you're somebody who has a musket and normally, you know, makes your own black powder or purchases black powder to fire your musket.
But when you're messing around with stuff like this, you have to be very, very careful.
But gunpowder can be made in 75 parts saltpeter and 12 parts of fine, which means refined, pure sugar.
Pure sugar.
Bet you didn't know that, did you?
They made their own paint.
They made their own varnish.
They made their own toothpaste.
They made everything themselves.
Only people who lived in the large cities had the luxury of being able to go to a shop and purchase something, and most people couldn't do that because they didn't have any money.
They had goods to barter or trade.
And so, you might find somebody who would make enough soap for his own family, or her own family, because a lot of the time it was the women who made the soap.
And they would make enough extra soap to sell.
And they would save that to take to things like fairs, large gatherings where they would set up a little table, or a plank across two stumps, or just the dropped in board of their wagon and sell their extra soap.
Sometimes they would create some scent from lavender flowers or some flowers that they raised in their garden or maybe mint and mix with the soap so that it would have a pleasant smell and might have a better chance of selling it.
Because soap back then was pretty crude, folks.
It's mainly fat, lye, ashes, or the drippings from ashes, which is how you made lye, and poured into molds when it was hot.
Now, that's not the whole recipe.
Other things went into that soap, and the better quality of fat, or whatever you used in place of fat, such as tallow, might make a better, finer soap, which they might have called a beauty bar back then.
Something that most of you ladies today would pinch your nose and turn away from in a split second.
In many instances, they made their own cloth, made their own dresses and breeches and shirts.
The men made their own leather goods from the hides of their own animals that they skinned and saved and tanned when When they butchered an animal for meat.
So, all of that, folks, you know, is what those people were doing back then.
And things that we, for the most part, have forgotten all about.
Couldn't do it if we had to, man!
But, you know, I don't believe that.
I think we could.
If we needed to, and if we wanted to, and if we had the recipes to do it, and I think there may be some day coming where we may have to do that again.
And so, we'll see about that.
We'll see about getting those recipes and making them available on the website for a
lot of things that we may need to know how to do someday in the future.
So, let's get started.
You're listening to the Hour of the Time with your truly William Cooper, the most dangerous radio host in America, according to William Jefferson.
By the way, folks, have you noticed?
There doesn't seem to be much difference between the Clinton presidency and the Bush presidency, except for the fact that the bimbos are gone.
No bimbos, or at least none have surfaced.
No interns in the Oval Office after hours with the President by himself.
Or at any other time that I'm aware of.
Or anybody else is aware of, to my knowledge.
Believe me, if it happened, it would be all over the front pages of the Communist news press and all of that kind of stuff.
Which reminds me, back in the days of the Revolutionary War, Just to print, we take so many things for granted, folks.
Just to print a little newsletter or a paper was incredibly difficult if it was actually printed.
Now, you could sit down and write one out in longhand, you know, but then you'd only be able to give it to one person.
Printing is what made pamphlets and newsletters and newspapers available to large numbers of people.
Before the printing press, these things just simply did not exist.
Just didn't exist.
When the printing press was invented and became available, they were expensive.
And you had to apprentice yourself for several years, which means either buy an apprenticeship Or indenture yourself to someone, to a master, who would then teach you the craft.
Bear in mind, they weren't always so obliging because if they taught you the craft and you started doing the same thing in the town where they were doing the craft, you then became their competition.
So it was difficult to learn these skills.
And it was difficult to find someone to become indentured to or apprenticed to who would really and honestly teach you everything that they knew.
And I doubt that they all taught anybody everything that they knew.
They held some things back so that they would be recognized as the acknowledged master of the trade in that particular area.
To have a printing press You had to know what a printing press was and build it yourself, or you had to order it from Europe.
It had to come from England, or Holland, or Germany, or Portugal, or Spain, or France, maybe.
And when it arrived, it would be usually in pieces, and you would have to assemble it.
Then you would have to know where to find lead, purchase lead, how to melt lead, You would have to have the moles for all the letters of the alphabet and the punctuation and all of that kind of thing because you had to cast your own type.
Had to cast your own type.
And the type could only be used for one or two or maybe three runs of print before it had to be melted and recast all over again because lead is soft and the print would become unreadable.
And then each piece wasn't like modern presses where you put this huge roll of paper on one end and pushed a button and within just, you know, fifteen minutes a hundred thousand copies of a newspaper came rolling off.
Nope.
Not at all.
Each sheet had to be printed and pressed by hand, taken out and laid up to dry.
And then the paper had to be assembled.
And then you'd have some boys to take the paper out and either deliver it or sell it on the streets.
One of the reasons for the American Revolution was, on top of all of this, what they accepted as a normal way to publish a newspaper, or a flyer, or a newsletter, whatever, The British came along and imposed a document tax.
Well, most people didn't have a whole lot of money.
And purchasing a newspaper was a luxury.
That was a luxury.
That didn't help feed you.
It didn't house you.
It didn't give you security for the future.
It was a luxury.
Today, you take newspapers for granted.
Back then, it was a luxury.
And people were not willing to give up the few cents that the newspaper might cost,
because those few cents would buy an awful lot of things that were really needed by
families back then.
So on top of that few cents you had to pay, after all the work and the hardship and the
trouble it took to produce the newspaper, the British came along and levied a document
tax on all the documents in the colonies.
People in England didn't have to pay that tax, but the people in the colonies did.
Which meant you couldn't sell a paper that didn't have the stamp on it.
The stamp had to be paid for.
You had to get the quantity of stamps for the number of papers you intended to sell, and you had to put a stamp on each paper on top of all of the other handwork that you had to do.
And if the British authorities caught you selling papers without documents, He went to prison.
Papers without stamps, I should say, or any document.
Newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, invitations, court documents, court orders, birth certificates.
Just to get a paper that certified that the doctor delivered a live child from your wife, you had to purchase a stamp to put on that document.
They didn't have birth certificates, but they had certificates of live birth.
And they didn't have that to prove that you were born or anything else.
It was to prove who your parents were and what your citizenship was.
Because back then, folks, You didn't want to get caught somewhere as a spy.
And, you know, if you study the history of Europe, you'll find that all of those countries were at war with each other off and on, always.
And it became necessary, sometimes, to prove who your parents were.
And if your parents both died, and you hadn't been living at home, and people didn't know Or your looks had changed, or you'd grown up so much that they didn't recognize or know you.
You came back to claim what was rightfully yours as the heir to whatever little they had.
If you couldn't prove they were your parents, you didn't get it.
It was very important in those days for fathers to know who their children were.
Their real children.
Because in those days, it wasn't like today.
In those days, the children got whatever was left when the parents passed away.
And usually it was the oldest son.
Not always, but usually.
People valued things then.
Nobody seems to value anything today.
Everyone takes everything so much for granted that I shudder to think what would happen to most Americans if all of a sudden they lost everything.
I couldn't figure out, when I was a boy and I was reading about the stock market crash of the late 1800s and then again in 1929, why people were jumping out of buildings and committing suicide.
Didn't make any sense to me because I was a young boy.
I didn't have anything.
I didn't have anything.
I had a roof over my head.
I had, you know, food to eat.
I had a bed to sleep in and I had my clothes.
And for a major portion of my young life I got a 25 cent a week allowance.
Which became a dollar a week at some point and then later five dollars a week.
But that was nothing.
By today's standards.
I had nothing.
And I just couldn't understand why people would jump out of windows and kill themselves.
Commit suicide.
Because the stock market had crashed and they'd lost a bunch of money.
You see, when you don't have any money, that money doesn't mean anything to you.
When you have so much money that that's all that you can see in your life, then it becomes your life.
And if you lose it, For all intents and purposes, you might as well be dead.
And, you know, years later I began to understand that because I went through my period, like everybody does, where you get to a point where you want to make tons of money and get filthy rich and retire.
There was a couple of times in my life when I made lots of money.
But it didn't make me any happier.
It didn't.
In fact, it caused me lots of problems.
Lots of problems.
And I really don't care for it anymore.
I really don't care.
I have reached the stage where if I could go back and live in 1775, I would do it so quick!
There's a few things that I would do instantly if I could do it.
I would.
One is if somebody said that there really is a way to get to Mars, and we want to send a group of people to try to start a colony on Mars, And you're not going to have much to take with you.
You're going to have to learn, you know, like people learned back in our history, how to do these things from the raw materials of Mars.
You'll have a few things, a few tools, a few necessities.
I'd go in a heartbeat.
I'd be first in line.
Let me go.
You don't have to worry about me causing any problems on the radio anymore, or tattling on the IRS, Digging up the truth about the tyranny of government.
Let me go to Mars and I'll be there with these good people and we'll start all over again and maybe we can build something lasting and that won't be ending up in some kind of tyranny.
I would go so quick.
Another thing, if somebody said, well, I've invented a time machine that really works and they could really prove it to me and prove that if you get somebody through time and then bring them back, although I wouldn't want to come back, I just want that demonstrated to know that I was going to get there.
They could send me back to 1775 and I would just be so happy.
I would be so happy.
And I would be happy to fight in the Revolutionary War.
I would like to have my memory of this time so that I could warn them about what's coming if they don't, you know, make things a little more ironclad.
Fix the padlock on that cage, Ben Franklin, because that monster you call the federal government that you're making right now that you have so much faith in, in the future, is going to rip those bars apart and enslave the population once again.
I would warn them about that.
I'd tell them exactly how it was going to happen, too.
I don't know if they would listen to me.
They'd probably label me as some crazy kook.
And put me in the stocks in the middle of the square.
That's okay.
I'd be happy in the stocks.
They could even throw tomatoes at me if they wanted to.
I'd just be happy to be there.
I really would.
I would love it.
I would love making my own soap.
I would love building a cabin in the wilderness.
I would love seeing this country the way it was Before it became what it is.
Can you imagine those mountain men who went out in front of everybody else where no people from Europe had ever been before?
Who became friends with the Native Americans and hunted and trapped way out in the wilderness.
They saw this country in a manner that we can never see it.
What an amazing thing.
What a wonderful thing!
Sometimes, when I've gone to bed at night, I've turned out the lights, and I've imagined what it might have been like.
I say might have been because I can never know what it was really like to set out from the East Coast when the East Coast was the frontier, but spend months with a horse, and a saddle, and whatever I could forage
from the countryside to eat, and end up on the West Coast to see the Pacific Ocean for
the first time, and nothing in between but wilderness and Indian tribes.
And believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, the Indians were not hostile upon first encounters
with European travelers.
Thank you.
They didn't become hostile until they found out what the Europeans were doing.
And how it was going to affect them.
And then they became murderous.
And I don't blame them a bit.
But neither do I blame the white man for all the travails of the Indians.
Because you can't judge people by the social mores of their time.
They were doing what they knew to do.
And they were not doing it out of animosity.
They were doing it because it was accepted in those times to do it.
Nor am I condoning what they did.
I'm just saying it is history.
It is what it is.
We have to understand it.
Accept it.
Don't try to pretend like it didn't happen as so many people want to do.
But, learn our lessons from the past.
so that we can make the future better.
There are so many things that people want to lie about that happened in history.
Thank you.
.
For instance, in the movie Patriot, a wonderful movie that everyone who loves this country should see because it teaches you the price of freedom.
And the price of freedom is steep.
And there are so many people who live today who are not willing to pay that price.
But there's one scene in there that never happened.
I have thoroughly researched it.
The British never filled a church full of American colonists and burned it.
That's Hollywood.
However, the American colonists did fill a church full of Christian Native Americans who had converted to Christianity a little village, a Christian village, and built a church,
the American colonists, at the height of some of the Indian trouble, made the mistake,
as so many people do, by as labeling all Indians as bad, rounded up these peaceful
Christian Indians, put them in their church, locked the doors, and burned them and it
to the ground.
The American colonists did that, not the British.
They did it to Indians, Native American Indians, who were Christians, living peacefully, who
had built a church, never harmed anybody.
Thank you.
Bye.
But back in those days, folks, I got to tell you, to come home from a hunting trip and find your wife and children had been murdered and scalped and cut to pieces or roasted over a fire.
I can understand how some people could hate every Indian.
And I can also understand how every Indian could hate every white man that he ever saw.
Because some of them would come home from their hunting parties and find their village burned to the ground and every old man, woman, and child who had remained in the village murdered and scalped.
And by the way, scalping was not an Indian thing.
Nope.
No.
During the early years of the settlement of the North American continent, both the British and the French offered rewards for the scalp of any Native American Indian that was brought in and you were paid cash on the barrel head for that scalp.
The Indians never scalped anybody until the white man began scalping the Indians and then they began scalping the white man because they figured there must be something to it.
Maybe that's the way you kill your enemy's soul or something.
I don't know.
But that's where that came from.
It was like a coyote pelt.
Bring you the pelt of a coyote and we'll give you $60.
I remember when I was a boy, $65 is what you got for a coyote pelt.
$65.
So, a lot of us young men went hunting for coyotes.
You'd skin it out, bring in the pelt, And they didn't keep the whole pelt.
I think they took the years.
You got 65 bucks.
That's a lot of money.
Considering that when I first went into the service of my country, into the Air Force, my salary as a recruit, I think, was 55 bucks a month and when I got out of boot camp it was $65 a month and when I got my first stripe I think it was $75 a month.
That's a lot of money.
Air Force gave me a bed to sleep in, a roof over my head, food to eat, $75 a month and all my uniforms.
All I had to do to make more than that was go kill two coyotes.
Well that's all for tonight folks.
Don't miss tomorrow night's episode of the hour Of the time.
I think you'll be sorry if you do.
Good night.
God bless each and every single one of you.
Hope you've liked this little excursion into history, and if I've been in error about any of the things that I've talked about tonight, write me a letter, and I'll be sure and correct it.
But I think I'm pretty right on.
I'm a pretty good historian, by cracky.
Good night, Annie Pooh and Allison.
I love you.
It's taking it wide.
It's extra-wide.
It's taking it wide.
It's taking it wide!
Like this building not.
It's taking it wide.
It's taking it wide!
It's taking it wide!
Like this building not.
It's taking it wide.
It's extra-wide.
It's taking it wide.
It's taking it wide!
Like this building not.
It's taking it wide!
All you militia members out there, I hope you heard what I was trying to teach you tonight.
Gunpowder.
75 parts.
Saltpeter.
12 parts.
Pure sugar.
Pure, fine sugar.
If you don't believe me, check it out.
But make sure you know what you're doing first.
Oh, and by the way, folks, I'm not giving away any secrets.
You can go in any library and find twelve different recipes for gunpowder in the first five minutes that you're in there.
Unless you're a complete fool or a blithering idiot.
Don't write me letters.
Oh, you're telling all the cooks how to make gunpowder.
I learned how to make gunpowder closer to when I was, I think, six years old.
the next video.
Thank you, Evan Sweetwater, for this wonderful music that you've given us to use on this
broadcast.
It was made special for this broadcast by professional musicians in Hollywood, Tel
Aviv and in New York City.
Thank you.
Speaking now for all oldies most of the time, Sam Cooke, one of the greatest, one of the best.
Do you think the sun must go when someone you love's gone?
And I swear it's that, yeah.
Yeah, don't go out, turn the lights out, you're making it hard.
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