Sweet Corn Colorado

A lesson in how dinner gets to the table

It’s August in Colorado: hot days, cool nights and crops ripening just beyond the city limits. Colorado sweet corn was calling my name. So yesterday, I took to the fields of Sakata Farms in Brighton. I arrived with a hunger for sweet corn. I left with a whole case. (What was I thinking?)

Now, I’m fanatic about freshness, and corn plucked from the stalk loses sweetness faster than a new car driven from a dealership lot loses the smell of money. The freshness clock was ticking. I had to act decisively…and I had to find the kitchen.

Day One: Dinner Time. With the freshness clock ticking, I steam-zapped half a dozen ears in the microwave, making sure everyone at the table had immediate access to butter and salt. And plenty of napkins. Because the corn was fresh - probably picked that very day - it was the best we’d ever tasted.

But what to do with the four dozen remaining ears? Listening from their waxed cardboard case, they heard me answer my own question: “I’ve got Joanna Sakata’s personal recipe for freezing corn.”

Seriously, using Joanna’s recipe provides a great lesson for kids about where our food comes from…and how much work goes into its preparation. (I can already see you moms nodding and smiling knowingly.) Take the kids to a farmers’ market. Let them talk to the farmers. Show them the fruits and veggies in their natural state, free of plastic wrap and Styrofoam. Bring home some corn! I suggest buying enough to eat the first night and two dozen more for the freezing process.

Day Two: 0700 Hours. With the freshness clock now clanging loudly, I was on the back deck shucking corn in the cool of the morning.

Back in the kitchen, I removed the kernels using a large knife and a Bundt cake pan. You place the butt end of the cob on the center hole of the cake pan and slice downward. Ingenious! The plump kernels fall into the pan all around.


Following Joanna’s recipe closely, my junior assistant and I placed 16 cups of corn and four cups of water in a kettle on the stove. By this stage in the operation I could see that the scope of the clean-up phase would be a bit daunting.

So fresh was this corn that my junior assistant was sprayed with juice. I found her an apron.





Almost done! (Sounds easy, doesn’t it?)

Next, cool the kettle by setting it in a sink filled with ice and cold water. When cool, fill quart-size freezer bags or other containers with corn, placing a little liquid in each one.  Two dozen ears of corn yield about five quart bags. They are now labeled and dated and chillin’ in the freezer even as I type these words.

The cleanup proved to be not only a daunting job but a lonely one, too. My junior assistant - and representatives of two other generations in the family - had already lost interest. I prefer to think that they had already mastered the lessons I hoped to teach. Sure, I'll go with that.

Lots of work, indeed. But that taste of summer will be welcome long into the fall.

P.S. Music always helps a task seem lighter, so here’s another suggestion. While working together in the kitchen, sing the following lyrics to the tune of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Sweet corn Colorado 
Where the skies are so blue 
Sweet corn Colorado 
Lord, you always make me drool

Colorado

Mmm Mmm Mmm

To share Bob Sakata’s inspiring story with your kids, check out my biography for young readers: Bob Sakata: American Farmer.

Memorial Day in Leadville, Colorado

Evergreen Cemetery, Leadville, Colorado, Memorial Day, 2011

I spent Memorial Day weekend in historic Leadville, Colorado, in the mountains 120 miles west of Denver. 

If the snowcapped peaks that completely encircle Leadville don’t take your breath away, the altitude will.  At 10,200 feet above sea level, even those of us from the Denver area - only a mile high - occasionally pause to take an extra breath or two.  

By 1880, silver taken from Leadville's mines made rich men of some of its 30,000 residents, including Horace Tabor, whose second marriage to a much younger woman known as Baby Doe was tabloid fodder in the 19^th Century.  

But the residents who caught my attention - and my heart - were the lesser known folks, some nameless, now "inhabiting" Evergreen Cemetery on the edge of town.  Cemeteries provide a fascinating look into the past, and Evergreen is no exception.  Probably a mountain meadow at its founding in 1879, Evergreen Cemetery, appropriately, has been overgrown by a shady, green pine forest.  

A few famous names associated with the town's history are commemorated on headstones at Evergreen, but more intriguing were those recording the deaths of children.  It’s a cliché to say that “Life was hard back then,” but it is no less true for having said it.  In studying the past it's important to remember that early childhood mortality was a fact of life in the 1800s.  

Thomas and Mary Flannery, Irish-Americans judging
from the family names, lost five children to smallpox
in an epidemic in 1883.

Take the case of one Leadville couple, Thomas and Mary Flannery.  According to a stone placed sometime after their own deaths, the Flannerys lost five children to a smallpox epidemic in one year, 1883.  Incredibly, at the time of their deaths, their children ranged in age from one to 21.

(In Europe, at the close of the previous century, smallpox was killing an estimated 400,000 people per year.  After vaccination campaigns throughout the19th and 20th Centuries, the World Health Organization was finally able to certify the eradication of the disease, but not until  1967.)

Headstone art from the 1800s fascinates me.  A common theme for children's markers in Leadville is the tree of life, cut short, of course, by death, with the comforting image of a sleeping child.  At rest. 

A child "rests" beneath the tree of life.
The tree - and the life - cut short and far too early

For me, it was a different kind of Memorial Day.  I hadn't planned on visiting a cemetery...just happened to come upon it. (As most of us will some day, I suppose.)  

My visit to Evergreen Cemetery  gave me the opportunity to reflect on Leadville's past, not only its Silver Barons and celebrities but  also its common folks, like you and me.

Adobe Castles on the South Platte River

Fort Lupton
Replica of the 1840s
trade center north of Denver

Museum docents get some astute questions from school kids.  “Where’s the giant T-Rex?” one young visitor asked in the entryway at our local museum.  In answering, I was careful not to squash his enthusiasm.  We have no fossils there, or at least I’ve not seen any. 

In the gallery I focused the class’ attention on the subject at hand: the history of our area, the St. Vrain Valley.  I explained that the name of our valley, the river that flows through it, and the local school district all hark back to buffalo robe trader Ceran St. Vrain.  He, along with William and Charles Bent, operated the most successful trading company on the plains in the 1830s and ‘40s.  In 1833 they built Bent’s Fort, on the Santa Fe Trail, and in 1837 Ceran St. Vrain supervised the construction of a second “adobe castle,” this one on the South Platte River, not far from our museum. 

It’s a good sign when kids catch the contemporary tie-ins to history so I was glad to see the group make the connection with Mr. St. Vrain.  Then a hand went up.  It belonged to the young man so earnestly searching for a dinosaur earlier.  “You mean...” he started hesitantly, “they named him after a river?”

Powder horns and leather
haversacks in the trade room
at Fort Lupton

Well, not exactly, but his question put me into research mode looking for details about the four trading forts that once attracted mountain men and Native Americans alike to the banks of the South Platte River. They've gotten far less press than Bent's Fort, the original business model of success on the prairie.

What I found was the spirit of American cutthroat competition.  Two years after Bent's Fort was built on the Arkansas River, entrepreneurs Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette went north, in 1835, to the Platte and began their own adobe trading fort near present-day Platteville.  They called it Fort Vasquez.  Today the Fort Vasquez historical site and a small museum are managed by the Colorado Historical Society.

In 1837 a man named Lancaster P. Lupton erected his own adobe trading fort...just seven miles south of Vasquez's namesake!   Fort Lupton is now being replicated near its original site by the South Platte Valley Historical Society.  Though SPVHS volunteers are not employing the 19th Century construction techniques used by the National Park Service to reconstruct Bent's Fort, their final product will be a fine evocation of Colorado's early history.


Traps at Fort Lupton


Business must have been brisk on the South Platte in 1837.  That same year a third trading fort - this one probably a wooden stockade - was built by Peter A. Sarpy and Henry Fraeb.  Called Fort Jackson, it was half way between forts Vasquez and Lupton.  Location, location, location!!!

The three new forts represented a challenge the Bent brothers and Ceran St. Vrain evidently could not ignore, and, not to be outdone, they joined the building frenzy of 1837.  St. Vrain himself supervised construction of a fourth Platte River castle, a few miles north of the upstart contenders.  The name of Ceran's trading post evolved for a few years but soon became known widely as Fort St. Vrain.

Ceran left his youngest brother, Marcellin, in charge, and the Bent-St. Vrain brand whomped on its competitors.  Within a year the Bent & St. Vrain Company bought - and burned - Fort Jackson.  Fort Vasquez changed hands once and then was abandoned.  In 1844 Fort Lupton was shuttered by its financial backers.  (I joke that Bent's Fort was the WalMart of its day.  The analogy seems complete to me now, since that merchandising giant too is often the death knell for local businesses.)

By 1845 the entire buffalo robe trade was drying up.  The era of good feelings between whites and Native Americans was dying.  Fort St. Vrain slipped into a state of neglect.  When Francis Parkman saw it in 1846, the building was already "miserably dilapidated."  But according to Halaas and Masich in Halfbreed, their great biography of George Bent, in 1849 William Bent was still able to make the fort liveable, compelled as he was to flee with his family to the crumbling Fort St. Vrain to escape the cholera epidemic wiping out half of the Cheyenne Indians on the southern plains.

I'd you love to time travel back to the 1840s.  Comparison shopping in the adobe castles along the South Platte River would have been quite an adventure.

Here are some book titles and links for further reading:

Bent's Fort: Crossroads of Cultures on the Santa Fe Trail by Melvin Bacon and Daniel Blegen


Bent's Fort by David Lavender
Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent by David Fridtjof Halaas & Andrew E. Masich
The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
Links: Fort Vasquez    Fort Lupton    National Park Service

A Vote for Women and Colorado

Reading Tom Noel’s recent column in the Denver Post, I thought I had caught good Dr. Colorado, the foremost expert on our history, in an embarrassing mistake.  "Name the first state," Noel challenged, "where men voted to give women the vote."  His answer: Colorado.

No, I thought, that’s not the way I heard it.  It was Wyoming that first gave women the vote.  Wyoming, that hot-bed of liberalism to our north.  (Feel free to use the “Comment” section below.)  What a coup I had accomplished.  I was ready to overthrow the Good Doctor and accept his crown. 

Then I did some double-checking, always a prudent thing to do before starting The Revolution.   I started with the source of all knowledge: Wikipedia.  Yes, Wiki said, Wyoming’s women have been free to vote since December 10, 1869, when Wyoming was still a U.S. territory.  Here’s visual proof courtesy of the Library of Congress:

An Act to Grant Women of
Wyoming Territory
the Right of Suffrage
and to Hold Office

As you can see - if you zoom in on the page - in the territorial constitution is Chapter 31, “An Act to Grant to the Women of Wyoming Territory the Right of Suffrage and to Hold Office.”  It falls immediately after guidelines for dealing with lunatics and drunkards, just before the apportionment of the territorial House of Representatives.  (Again, the “Comment” section is below.)

In 1890 the Equality State was founded, and women's suffrage came along for the ride.

 

So what about Noel's claim that Colorado was first in women's suffrage?  Puzzled, I reread his challenge: "Name the first state where men voted to give women the vote."  Colorado joined the Union in 1876.  Colorado men voted suffrage for Colorado women in 1893, just as Dr. Colorado claimed.  A trick question if ever there was one. 

Anyone determined to keep Colorado history alive should read Dr. Noel’s column.  “Some of us think Colorado is a special place,” he writes.  “We need to educate our youngsters on why Colorado is special and how to keep it that way.” 

Bravo!

Unfortunately, Dr. Noel’s comments are a reaction to what he sees as a sad situation.  Colorado history - and the social studies in general - have been deemphasized in our public schools in recent years.  The reason?  Vital topics like history, geography, civics, and economics are not tested on the almighty CSAPs.  So, we teach to the test and forget the rest.  Well, not completely, but he makes a valid point. 

Teachers, you know what I mean.  You push your kids to improve - to excel - in reading, writing, math and, later, science.  Those are the subjects the kids are tested on each spring.  Those are the areas we emphasize.  Of course, they're fundamental, though fundamentals are empty without content and context, people and place and time - history, in other words.  But enough preaching to the choir.  Read Tom Noel's column for yourself.  It actually contains some good news on the history front. http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16820725

If you've forgotten the details of your own civics class, here's another pertinent fact: The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1920, well after women were already voting in Wyoming and Colorado.  The 19th states simply "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

P.S.  The Wikipedia article on women's suffrage is quit fascinating.  Check it out,too.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage-in-the-United_States