oct 27 2022
Today's in-depth study will be one facet of fewer people smoking---- which you may not have considered before.
Turns out that if you stand around wanting to light your fireplace and you say "has anyone got a match" you will find no one does.. and furthermore no one even thought of being minus a fire...... and that you don't have a match to light your fire..actually or figuratively currently....
However---the Native American Indians knew that one facet of moving around chasing Buffalo.. meant that they wanted to start of fire every time they got to a new campground.. and rather than have someone start the laborious practice of rubbing two sticks together, there was always a fire carrier.. a person generally on foot who ran ahead of the rest of the tribe to locate where they were going to have a campground and he carried a fire carrier..
it was not only the practical way to start a fire in the new campground was to have coals out of the old campground but it also had some religious significance is that the fire they were starting came from some original fire long ago Apparently started by lightning so the story goes
Many Native American peoples developed technology and traditions so they could carry fire from one place to another. The Pikunii people of the western Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Front used fire carriers made of buffalo horns to carry burning coals from one camp to the next and to start a fire in the new camp. This was very helpful for the people as they arrived in the new camp, but the fire also served another important purpose: The fire provided spiritual and cultural continuity for the people because the same fire was used in one camp after another, even while the people traveled hundreds of miles in their yearly migrations.
I obviously googled that paragraph.. but somewhere in my upbringing.. I had a very intellectual discussion with somebody about trying to carry a fire from place to place so you didn't have to rub two sticks together.
So how does that leap forward to modern life? Bud Got the iron Glen wood stove hooked up to the chimney whe're it's been many times before and yesterday I tested the the draft to make sure the smoke was going to go up and not into the kitchen and I had a zip lighter.. little did I know that starting that fire yesterday was the last gasp of that bic llighter.. Matches are something that just aren't lying around anymore.. but I did go to the next most obvious fireplace and found one of those handy little boxes where you have to scratch the match on their particular piece of sandpaper the cause of flame... rushing back to the Glenwood.. I struck and struck and struck... somewhat similar to me trying to make a telephone call on my cell phone.. those matches have to have been at least six months old and it took nearly a dozen to have one light..
so my first chore today---well maybe my second one after I go get the two trailers back from Meredith which are now loaded with fencing... is the go purchase several sources of fire like matches.. it just to be sure that I have some method of carrying my fire forward I'm going to put some of them in a waterproof jar or something.
what was once so simple to do reverted back to thousands of years ago in keeping a fire going...
p.s. they. used a buffalo horn to carry fire...
