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The New American Digest

For Followers of Gerard Van der Leun's Fine Work

  • About American Digest
  • About New American Digest
  • “The Name In The Stone”
  • Remembering Gerard Van der Leun
    • from the website: Through the Looking Glass
    • from the website: Barnhardt
    • from the website: Neo’s Blog
  • Articles
    • The Overland Stage
      • The Holladay Overland Stage: 1 – The Central Route
      • The Overland Stage – 2 Company Operations
      • The Overland Stage – 3 Exploring The Route – An Overview
      • The Overland Stage: 4 – South Platte/Julesburg/Ft Sedgwick
        • Jack Slade
      • The Overland Stage: 5 – Julesburg to Junction Station (aka Ft Morgan)
      • The Overland Stage: 6 – Junction Station to Latham
      • The Overland Stage: 7 – Latham Crossing to Fort Collins
      • The Overland Stage: 8 – LaPorte to Virginia Dale
      • The Overland Stage: 9 – Virginia Dale to Cooper Creek
      • The Overland Stage: 10 – Cooper Creek to Pass Creek
        • Fletcher Family
      • The Overland Stage: 11 – Pass Creek to Bridger Station
      • The Overland Stage: 12 – Bridger Pass to Duck Lake
      • The Overland Stage: 13 – Duck Lake to LaClede
      • The Overland Stage: 14 – LaClede to Almond
      • The Overland Stage: 15 – Almond to Rock Springs
      • The Overland Stage: 16 – Rock Springs to Fort Bridger
      • The Overland Stage: 17 – Fort Bridger to Weber Station

I find I don’t wish to explore new lands, but to explore again those I have already passed through, trying to see what I’d missed in the first hectic rush … Gerard Van der Leun

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Stats

The New American Digest Posted on April 22, 2025 by DTApril 22, 2025

Was poking around the Dashboard; thought I’d share site stats for the past 30 days.

Averaging between 40 and 60 visitors per day, depending on the time period selected. Not sure what the difference is between “Views” and “Visitors”. I suspect the peak there in the middle is from when Neo shut AD down and referenced people to this site.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Replies

Urth Day

The New American Digest Posted on April 22, 2025 by DTApril 22, 2025

I remember the first earth day: a warm sunny day in April 1970 giving us an excuse to cut class and enjoy the day.

Like my time hearing George McGovern give a speech in person, the lasting effect was the opposite of that intended. “Earth Day” was a cover for something; I still don’t exactly know what but I have my suspicions.

Giving a bit of myself away, I spent time as a professional in a closely-related field … and many of the so-called “problems” were manufactured to provide an excuse for mandated “solutions”.

Earth Day. Bah, humbug!

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Replies

Seattle 1990

The New American Digest Posted on April 22, 2025 by DTApril 22, 2025

It was crazy then, but nice crazy … not “they’re coming to take me away” crazy like it is now.

A work-friend whose name I’ve now forgotten.
I left Seattle not long after I took this photo.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Replies

Two Tunes For Tuesday – On “Jane”

The New American Digest Posted on April 22, 2025 by DTMay 7, 2025

A sample of some obscure – and some maybe not obscure – tunes from my strange and off-the-wall collection.

Today’s selections: Jon Astley “Jane’s Getting Serious” 1987 and Superfine Dandelion – “Janie’s Tomb” 1967
They just seem to go together …

Jon Astley is a British record producer and recording engineer. The list of groups he worked with is extensive: The Who, Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones, etc. He recorded two albums as songwriter/singer in the late ’80s. “Jane’s Getting Serious” is the most prominent of these.

Superfine Dandelion was a 1967 garage rock band out of Phoenix. They recorded one no-hit album and broke up in 1968. One of their members – Rick Anderson – became the founding bassist for the Tubes.

Posted in tunes | 2 Replies

The Pussification Of The Western Male

The New American Digest Posted on April 21, 2025 by ghostsniperApril 21, 2025

(written in 2003 by kim – Splendid Isolation @ www kimdutoit dot com)

Submitted by ghostsniper as a comment
A re-printed article


Prequel: from “After The Pussification” – an explanation by Kim Du Toit of the web site “Splendid Isolation”

For those who’ve been living on another planet for the past two decades, I once wrote a screed called The Pussification Of The Western Male, which took about an hour to write and was a stream-of-consciousness rant against the demeaning of men in Western society. The piece  garnered an immediate and voluminous online response (thank you, Insty), caused my host’s (website and email) servers to crash and necessitated finding a new host because they kicked me off.

Follows is the forbidden text. The article is long enough that the post is an excerpt with a rarely used “Read More”


We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)

There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.

There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.

We’re not like that anymore.

Read the whole article – if you dare … and the follow-up

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Replies

How We Die(d)…

The New American Digest Posted on April 21, 2025 by JeanApril 21, 2025

there will be
a time
when we die
that others
will say
it happened so fast
so unexpected.
when in truth
the soul had been
crying
for ever so long
praying for comfort
for healing the wounds
that drained
the life
from the life
that could have
been saved.
But no one
noticed. or heard.
or cared.
How sad.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Replies

Church vs. Religion

The New American Digest Posted on April 21, 2025 by DTApril 20, 2025

So … Easter’s over, time to put religion away until Christmas season begins in July (/snark)

I love memes; been collecting them almost as long as they’ve been in existence. Just saw these; seem appropriate for me.

Been to too many like this … or worse. All talk but …
so I don’t go anymore
Works for me
My mustache doesn’t droop as far
I don’t wear glasses in general
My hair’s not yet that white but it’s usually that long
I haven’t been on a horse for a long time
but the hat’s close
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Replies

Easter

The New American Digest Posted on April 20, 2025 by DTApril 20, 2025
Royal Choral Society
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Replies

Badass Of The Week – Samuel Whittemore

The New American Digest Posted on April 19, 2025 by ghostsniperApril 20, 2025

Submitted by ghostsniper via comments … with slight edits

Samuel Whittemore 1695-1793

Born in 1695, just 75 years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the stone-cold hardass who would be made a state hero of Massachusetts was first unleashed on colonial America in the 1740s while serving as a Captain in His Majesty’s Dragoons – a badass unit of elite British cavalrymen much-feared across the globe for their ability to impale people on lance-points and then pump their already-dead bodies full of gigantic pistol ammunition that more closely resembled baseballs than the sort of rounds you see packed into Beretta magazines these days. Fighting the French in Canada during the War of Austrian Succession (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as King George’s War because seriously WTF did colonial Americans care about Austrian succession), Whittemore was part of the British contingent that assaulted the frozen shores of Nova Scotia and beat the shit out of the French at their stronghold of Louisbourg in 1745. The 50 year-old cavalry officer went into battle galloping at the head of a company of rifle-toting horsemen, and emerged from the shouldering flames of a thoroughly ass-humped Louisbourg holding a bitchin’ ornate longsword he had wrenched from the lifeless hands of a French officer who had, in Whittemore’s words, “died suddenly”. The French would eventually manage to snake Louisbourg back from the Brits, so thirteen years later, during the Seven Years’ War (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as the French and Indian War because WTF we were fighting the French and the Indians, and also because it lasted nine years instead of seven), Whittemore had to return to his old stomping grounds of Louisburg and ruthlessly beat it into submission once again. Serving under the able command fellow badass British commander James Wolfe, a man who earned his reputation by commanding a line of riflemen who held their lines against a frothing-at-the-mouth horde of psychotic, sword-swinging William Wallace motherfuckers in Scotland (this is a story I intend to tell at a later date), Whittemore once again pummeled the French retarded and stole all of their shit he could get his hands on. He served valiantly during the Second Siege of Louisbourg, pounding the poor city into rubble a second time in an epic bloodbath would mark the beginning of the end for France’s Atlantic colonies – Quebec would fall shortly thereafter, and the French would be chased out of Canada forever. So you can thank Whittemore for that, if you are inclined to do so.

Beating Frenchmen down with a cavalry saber at the age of 64 is pretty cool and all, but Whittemore still wasn’t done doing awesome shit in the name of King George the Third and His Loyal Colonies. Four years after busting up the French for the second time in two decades he led troops against Chief Pontiac in the bloody Indian Wars that raged across the Great Lakes region. Never one to back down from an up-close-and-personal fistfight, it was during a particularly nasty bout of hand-to-hand combat he came into possession of another totally sweet war trophy – an awesome pair of matched dueling pistols he had taken from the body of a warrior he’d just finished bayoneting or sabering or whatever.

After serving in three American wars before America was even a country, Whittemore decided the colonies were pretty damn radical, so he settled down in Massachusetts, married two different women (though not at the same time), had eight kids, and built a house out of the carcasses of bears he’d killed and mutilated with his own two hands. Or something like that.

Now, all of this shit is pretty god damned impressive, but interestingly none of it is actually what Samuel Whittemore is best known for. No, his distinction as a national hero instead comes from a fateful day in mid-April 1775, when the British colonies in the New World decided they weren’t going to take any more of King George’s bullshit and decided to get their American Revolution on. And you can be pretty damn sure that if there were asses to be kicked, Whittemore was going to be one of the men doing the kicking.

So one day a bunch of colonial malcontents got together, formed a battle line, and opened fire on a bunch of redcoats that were pissing them off with their silly Stamp Acts and whatnot. The Brits managed to beat back this militia force at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but when they heard that a larger force of angry, rifle-toting colonials was headed their way, the English officers decided to march back to their headquarters and regroup. Along the way, they were hassled relentlessly by American militiamen with rifles and angry insults, though no group harassed them more ferociously than Captain Sam Whittemore. When the Redcoats went marching back through his hometown of Menotomy, this guy decided that he wasn’t going to let his advanced age stop him from doing some crazy shit and taking on an entire British army himself. The 80 year old Whittemore grabbed his rifle and ran outside:

Whittemore, by himself, with no backup, positioned himself behind a stone wall, waited in ambush, and then single-handedly engaged the entire British 47th Regiment of Foot with nothing more than his musket and the pure liquid anger coursing through his veins. His ambush had been successful – by this time this guy popped up like a decrepitly old rifle-toting jack-in-the-box, the British troops were pretty much on top of him. He fired off his musket at point-blank range, busting the nearest guy so hard it nearly blew his red coat into the next dimension.

Now, when you’re using a firearm that takes 20 seconds to reload, it’s kind of hard to go all Leonard Funk on a platoon of enemy infantry, but damn it if Whittemore wasn’t going to try. With a company of Brits bearing down in him, he quick-drew his twin flintlock pistols and popped a couple of locks on them (caps hadn’t been invented yet, though I think the analogy still works pretty fucking well), busting another two Limeys a matching set of new assholes. Then he unsheathed the ornate French sword, and this 80-year-old madman stood his ground in hand-to-hand against a couple dozen trained soldiers, each of which was probably a quarter of his age.

…[I]t didn’t work out so well. Whittemore was shot through the face by a 69-caliber bullet, knocked down, and bayonetted 13 times by motherfuckers. I’d like to imagine he wounded a couple more Englishmen who slipped or choked on his blood, though history only seems to credit him with three kills on three shots fired. The Brits, convinced that this man was sufficiently beat to shit, left him for dead kept on their death march back to base, harassed the entire way by Whittemore’s fellow militiamen.

Amazingly, however, Samuel Whittemore didn’t die. When his friends rushed out from their homes to check on his body, they found the half-dead, ultra-bloody octogenarian still trying to reload his weapon and seek vengeance. The dude actually survived the entire war, finally dying in 1793 at the age of 98 from extreme old age and awesomeness. A 2005 act of the Massachusetts legislature declared him an official state hero, and today he has one of the most badass historical markers of all time.


neveryetmelted dot com/2025/04/19/samuel-whittemore-1695-1793-2/

www dot badassoftheweek dot com/whittemore.html

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a reply

April 19 – 250 Years Ago

The New American Digest Posted on April 19, 2025 by DTApril 18, 2025

The American Revolution started at dawn in Lexington, Massachusetts. The Americans defeated a British force, driving them back to Boston.

The enemy doesn’t wear red uniforms these days … but their spirit still exists; among other places, still in the capital of Massachusetts.


However, lest we forget, also on this date in 1993, the Federal government showed us they were the true inheritors of the British Crown.

They might have had weapons …
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Replies

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Rules

Gerard Van der Leun
12/26/45 - 1/27/23


Gerard's Last Post
(posthumous): Feb 4, 2023
"So Long. See You All a Little Further Down the Road"

When my body won’t hold me anymore
And it finally lets me free
Where will I go?
Will the trade winds take me south through Georgia grain?
Or tropical rain?
Or snow from the heavens?
Will I join with the ocean blue?
Or run into a savior true?
And shake hands laughing
And walk through the night, straight to the light
Holding the love I’ve known in my life
And no hard feelings

Avett Brothers - No Hard Feelings

The following was posted along with the announcement of Gerard's passing.
Leonard Cohen - Going Home

For a 2005 interview with Gerard


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Most Recent Comments

  1. azlibertarian on Train TimeJune 29, 2025

    "...Having a record does not define you or your character...."I think that most of us knew that those school-day threats…

  2. jean on Comnenos Mosaic of AyasofyaJune 29, 2025

    Any time I see images like these I am reminded of my Mom and her family. Thank you, DT.

  3. Snakepit Kansas on Train TimeJune 29, 2025

    I suppose there will always be an element of society that are just screw ups. Then make the situation worse…

  4. Zaphod on Comnenos Mosaic of AyasofyaJune 29, 2025

    Lost another one of the good guys. RIP the Z Man.

  5. ghostsniper on Train TimeJune 29, 2025

    Can I be any more fatigued?


Blogroll
The New Neo
Jean's Blog

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,
play a song for me
I'm not sleepy
and there ain't no place I'm goin' to

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,
play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning,
I'll come followin' you

Take me for a trip upon
your magic swirling ship
All my senses have been stripped
And my hands can't feel to grip
And my toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin'

I'm ready to go anywhere,
I'm ready for to fade
Unto my own parade
Cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it


Men who saw night coming down about them could somehow act as if they stood at the edge of dawn.


From Gerard's site. The picture always caught my eye.

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