Little Egypt Heritage Articles Stories of Southern Illinois © Bill Oliver 26 March 2006 Vol 5 Issue: #12 ISBN: pending Osiyo, Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen of Little Egypt, In my snail-mail box yesterday was my newsletter from the Nebraska State Genealogical Society. Included in the “news” about the May 2006 Annual Conference at Beatrice, Nebraska. The feature speaker for the conference will be John Philip Colletta who will present, among other items, “Hacks and Hookers and Putting up Pickles: Snares of yesterday’s English.” Now that is a title I’d like to hear about. I must see if that talk will be taped and available for sale. Also, in my e-mail box yesterday appeared a note from an e-mail list owner friend recommending an article* from “The Southern Illinoisan” online newspaper entitled, “Early Southern Illinoisans had colorful speech”. How coincidental! My interest in the way we express things might have already been peaked by my visit last week to the roots of my Dad in Southern Illinois, where I learned many things about my pioneer ancestors who migrated there in the very early 1830s. Dad and Grandma Oliver often used expressions and/or words that are not used in this day and age. The colorful language of yesteryear known as “Appalachian Speechways” allows phrases as plain and as functional as an ax ... “drug” for “dragged” or “clum” for “climbed” or “The smoke o’ dawn hit were jist ‘scarletin’ red.” And, one of my all time favorites – “the sun ‘undered’ behind the ridges.” Have you ever been “yankeed”? And, Grandma Oliver was “a-sparkin” with Grandpa Oliver ‘cause he asked if he “might see her safe home” in the middle of the week. I can understand “down the hollar” but for the life of me I can’t find “under the ridge”. Grandma Oliver spoke of a place on Old Monroe Benson’s farm as a very specific place. That place is even mentioned in a WPA tour account in the Ozark Foothills of Southern Illinois. However, no one I have ever talked to in Johnson county, Illinois, can tell me where it is. Dad always said that there was the American Way, the Marine Corps Way, and the Ole Man’s Way, and each was different. There are different ways to explain phenomenon also. Take the following story as an example. Aurora Borealis is explained differently by different sets of folks. When in school I learned that these Northern Lights were a phenomenon of light witnessed in the northern regions and that on very rare occasions they would be seen in northern Ohio. If a person was lucky s/he might catch a glimpse of some flickering curtains of lights, apparently dancing across the dark night sky. These are the northern lights, a celestial phenomenon that has amazed people for centuries. The scientific name for the phenomena is Aurora Borealis, which is Latin and translates into the “red dawn of the north”. The Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei, was the first to use the expression. On the latitude where Galileo was living, northern lights consist of mainly red color. Up in the sky, the threshold of space, the air molecules there respond to great flares from the sun by pulling them apart. Northern lights originate from our sun. During large explosions and flares, huge quantities of solar particles are thrown out of the sun and into deep space. These plasma clouds travel through space with great speeds. It takes these plasma clouds two to three days to reach our planet. When they are closing in on Earth, they are captured by Earth's magnetic field (the magnetosphere) and guided towards Earth's two magnetic poles; the geomagnetic south pole and the geomagnetic north pole. Northern lights occur as a result of solar particles colliding with the gases in earth's atmosphere. On their way down towards the geomagnetic poles, the solar particles are stopped by Earth's atmosphere, which acts as an effective shield against these deadly particles. When the solar particles are stopped by the atmosphere, they collide with the atmospheric gases present, and the collision energy between the solar particle and the gas molecule is emitted as a photon - a light particle. And when you have many such collisions, you have an aurora - lights that may seem to move across the sky. This glow that we see are the molecules coming back together. The following is a bit different explanation of these fantastic heavenly glows. Looking up in the winter night sky, one muses what the universe is, and the elders would tell the children stories to explain these wonders all about us. The Northern Lights are the pathways or the campfires of the souls as they traveled across the skies. It was just something that we always knew. The Storyteller, whom we called “Uncle”, would encourage us to play a game called “stump the adults”. One child asked “Uncle”, where do the colors come from? He said that the colors came from each of the clans. As each clan would come together they would gather something that was important to them and they would throw it into the fire. That makes the colors. The Flycatchers, he said, reached beneath their wings and pulled out little yellow feathers which they threw into the fire. This makes the Northern Lights glow yellow. The folk from the Turtle Clan took lilly pads and grasses and threw those into the fire. That makes the lights glow green. The Bear Clan took their favorite food, berries, and threw them into the fire. This forms the color red. And, the people from the Thunderbird Clan, the eagles, flew over with great spruce boughs in their talons, and they dropped these into the flames. This makes the Northern Lights glow a greenish-blue. These are the colors of the Northern Lights. Not to be left out, one child asked, but Uncle, what of the Sturgeons Clan?? They’re fish, what did they do? Threw water into the fire and put it out? Uncle turned and looked at her very seriously and said, “yes, that’s exactly what happened.” As the people from the Sturgeons Clan passed by they took their tails and their fins and they flipped water into the fire. This makes the flames hiss and crackle; they go out in some places and reappear in others. That is why the Northern Lights seem to pulse and dance about. Looking up at the fires in the sky and becoming very, very quiet, you can sometimes hear the hiss and crackle and the pop of the fires in the skies. I know which version I like best—but, my teachers in school never seemed to accept this latter one. e-la-Di-e-das-Di ha-wi nv-wa-do-hi-ya nv-wa-to-hi-ya-da. (May you walk in peace and harmony) and Wado, Bill -=- PostScript: * [http://www.thesouthern.com/articles/2006/03/23/local/columnists/gelman/10005846.txt] Other sites worth visiting: http://www.deannedurrett.com/codetalkers.html PostScript: = = = = http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/SOIL http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/ILMASSAC http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/state/BillsArticles/LittleEgypt/intro.html