Fish, any of approximately 34,000 species of vertebrate animals (phylum Chordata) found in the fresh and salt waters of the world. Living species range from the primitive jawless lampreys and hagfishes through the cartilaginous sharks, skates, and rays to the abundant and diverse bony fishes. Most fish species are cold-blooded; however, one species, the opah (Lampris guttatus), is warm-blooded.

 

The term fish is applied to a variety of vertebrates of several evolutionary lines. It describes a life-form rather than a taxonomic group. As members of the phylum Chordata, fish share certain features with other vertebrates. These features are gill slits at some point in the life cycle, a notochord, or skeletal supporting rod, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, and a tail. Living fishes represent some five classes, which are as distinct from one another as are the four classes of familiar air-breathing animals—amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. For example, the jawless fishes (Agnatha) have gills in pouches and lack limb girdles. Extant agnathans are the lampreys and the hagfishes. As the name implies, the skeletons of fishes of the class Chondrichthyes (from chondr, “cartilage,” and ichthyes, “fish”) are made entirely of cartilage. Modern fish of this class lack a swim bladder, and their scales and teeth are made up of the same placoid material. Sharks, skates, and rays are examples of cartilaginous fishes. The bony fishes are by far the largest class. Examples range from the tiny seahorse to the 450-kg (1,000-pound) blue marlin, from the flattened soles and flounders to the boxy puffers and ocean sunfishes. Unlike the scales of the cartilaginous fishes, those of bony fishes, when present, grow throughout life and are made up of thin overlapping plates of bone. Bony fishes also have an operculum that covers the gill slits.

 

The study of fishes, the science of ichthyology, is of broad importance. Fishes are of interest to humans for many reasons, the most important being their relationship with and dependence on the environment. A more obvious reason for interest in fishes is their role as a moderate but important part of the world’s food supply. This resource, once thought unlimited, is now realized to be finite and in delicate balance with the biological, chemical, and physical factors of the aquatic environment. Overfishing, pollution, and alteration of the environment are the chief enemies of proper fisheries management, both in fresh waters and in the ocean. (For a detailed discussion of the technology and economics of fisheries, see commercial fishing.) Another practical reason for studying fishes is their use in disease control. As predators on mosquito larvae, they help curb malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

 

Fishes are valuable laboratory animals in many aspects of medical and biological research. For example, the readiness of many fishes to acclimate to captivity has allowed biologists to study behaviour, physiology, and even ecology under relatively natural conditions. Fishes have been especially important in the study of animal behaviour, where research on fishes has provided a broad base for the understanding of the more flexible behaviour of the higher vertebrates. The zebra fish is used as a model in studies of gene expression.

 

There are aesthetic and recreational reasons for an interest in fishes. Millions of people keep live fishes in home aquariums for the simple pleasure of observing the beauty and behaviour of animals otherwise unfamiliar to them. Aquarium fishes provide a personal challenge to many aquarists, allowing them to test their ability to keep a small section of the natural environment in their homes. Sportfishing is another way of enjoying the natural environment, also indulged in by millions of people every year. Interest in aquarium fishes and sportfishing supports multimillion-dollar industries throughout the world.

 

Fishes have been in existence for more than 450 million years, during which time they have evolved repeatedly to fit into almost every conceivable type of aquatic habitat. In a sense, land vertebrates are simply highly modified fishes: when fishes colonized the land habitat, they became tetrapod (four-legged) land vertebrates. The popular conception of a fish as a slippery, streamlined aquatic animal that possesses fins and breathes by gills applies to many fishes, but far more fishes deviate from that conception than conform to it. For example, the body is elongate in many forms and greatly shortened in others; the body is flattened in some (principally in bottom-dwelling fishes) and laterally compressed in many others; the fins may be elaborately extended, forming intricate shapes, or they may be reduced or even lost; and the positions of the mouth, eyes, nostrils, and gill openings vary widely. Air breathers have appeared in several evolutionary lines.

 

Many fishes are cryptically coloured and shaped, closely matching their respective environments; others are among the most brilliantly coloured of all organisms, with a wide range of hues, often of striking intensity, on a single individual. The brilliance of pigments may be enhanced by the surface structure of the fish, so that it almost seems to glow. A number of unrelated fishes have actual light-producing organs. Many fishes are able to alter their coloration—some for the purpose of camouflage, others for the enhancement of behavioral signals.

 

Fishes range in adult length from less than 10 mm (0.4 inch) to more than 20 metres (60 feet) and in weight from about 1.5 grams (less than 0.06 ounce) to many thousands of kilograms. Some live in shallow thermal springs at temperatures slightly above 42 °C (100 °F), others in cold Arctic seas a few degrees below 0 °C (32 °F) or in cold deep waters more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) beneath the ocean surface. The structural and, especially, the physiological adaptations for life at such extremes are relatively poorly known and provide the scientifically curious with great incentive for study.

 

Almost all natural bodies of water bear fish life, the exceptions being very hot thermal ponds and extremely salt-alkaline lakes, such as the Dead Sea in Asia and the Great Salt Lake in North America. The present distribution of fishes is a result of the geological history and development of Earth as well as the ability of fishes to undergo evolutionary change and to adapt to the available habitats. Fishes may be seen to be distributed according to habitat and according to geographical area. Major habitat differences are marine and freshwater. For the most part, the fishes in a marine habitat differ from those in a freshwater habitat, even in adjacent areas, but some, such as the salmon, migrate from one to the other. The freshwater habitats may be seen to be of many kinds. Fishes found in mountain torrents, Arctic lakes, tropical lakes, temperate streams, and tropical rivers will all differ from each other, both in obvious gross structure and in physiological attributes. Even in closely adjacent habitats where, for example, a tropical mountain torrent enters a lowland stream, the fish fauna will differ. The marine habitats can be divided into deep ocean floors (benthic), mid-water oceanic (bathypelagic), surface oceanic (pelagic), rocky coast, sandy coast, muddy shores, bays, estuaries, and others. Also, for example, rocky coastal shores in tropical and temperate regions will have different fish faunas, even when such habitats occur along the same coastline.

 

Although much is known about the present geographical distribution of fishes, far less is known about how that distribution came about. Many parts of the fish fauna of the fresh waters of North America and Eurasia are related and undoubtedly have a common origin. The faunas of Africa and South America are related, extremely old, and probably an expression of the drifting apart of the two continents. The fauna of southern Asia is related to that of Central Asia, and some of it appears to have entered Africa. The extremely large shore-fish faunas of the Indian and tropical Pacific oceans comprise a related complex, but the tropical shore fauna of the Atlantic, although containing Indo-Pacific components, is relatively limited and probably younger. The Arctic and Antarctic marine faunas are quite different from each other. The shore fauna of the North Pacific is quite distinct, and that of the North Atlantic more limited and probably younger. Pelagic oceanic fishes, especially those in deep waters, are similar the world over, showing little geographical isolation in terms of family groups. The deep oceanic habitat is very much the same throughout the world, but species differences do exist, showing geographical areas determined by oceanic currents and water masses.

 

All aspects of the life of a fish are closely correlated with adaptation to the total environment, physical, chemical, and biological. In studies, all the interdependent aspects of fish, such as behaviour, locomotion, reproduction, and physical and physiological characteristics, must be taken into account.

 

Correlated with their adaptation to an extremely wide variety of habitats is the extremely wide variety of life cycles that fishes display. The great majority hatch from relatively small eggs a few days to several weeks or more after the eggs are scattered in the water. Newly hatched young are still partially undeveloped and are called larvae until body structures such as fins, skeleton, and some organs are fully formed. Larval life is often very short, usually less than a few weeks, but it can be very long, some lampreys continuing as larvae for at least five years. Young and larval fishes, before reaching sexual maturity, must grow considerably, and their small size and other factors often dictate that they live in a habitat different than that of the adults. For example, most tropical marine shore fishes have pelagic larvae. Larval food also is different, and larval fishes often live in shallow waters, where they may be less exposed to predators.

 

After a fish reaches adult size, the length of its life is subject to many factors, such as innate rates of aging, predation pressure, and the nature of the local climate. The longevity of a species in the protected environment of an aquarium may have nothing to do with how long members of that species live in the wild. Many small fishes live only one to three years at the most. In some species, however, individuals may live as long as 10 or 20 or even 100 years.

 

Fish behaviour is a complicated and varied subject. As in almost all animals with a central nervous system, the nature of a response of an individual fish to stimuli from its environment depends upon the inherited characteristics of its nervous system, on what it has learned from past experience, and on the nature of the stimuli. Compared with the variety of human responses, however, that of a fish is stereotyped, not subject to much modification by “thought” or learning, and investigators must guard against anthropomorphic interpretations of fish behaviour.

 

Fishes perceive the world around them by the usual senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste and by special lateral line water-current detectors. In the few fishes that generate electric fields, a process that might best be called electrolocation aids in perception. One or another of these senses often is emphasized at the expense of others, depending upon the fish’s other adaptations. In fishes with large eyes, the sense of smell may be reduced; others, with small eyes, hunt and feed primarily by smell (such as some eels).

 

Specialized behaviour is primarily concerned with the three most important activities in the fish’s life: feeding, reproduction, and escape from enemies. Schooling behaviour of sardines on the high seas, for instance, is largely a protective device to avoid enemies, but it is also associated with and modified by their breeding and feeding requirements. Predatory fishes are often solitary, lying in wait to dart suddenly after their prey, a kind of locomotion impossible for beaked parrot fishes, which feed on coral, swimming in small groups from one coral head to the next. In addition, some predatory fishes that inhabit pelagic environments, such as tunas, often school.

 

Sleep in fishes, all of which lack true eyelids, consists of a seemingly listless state in which the fish maintains its balance but moves slowly. If attacked or disturbed, most can dart away. A few kinds of fishes lie on the bottom to sleep. Most catfishes, some loaches, and some eels and electric fishes are strictly nocturnal, being active and hunting for food during the night and retiring during the day to holes, thick vegetation, or other protective parts of the environment.

 

Communication between members of a species or between members of two or more species often is extremely important, especially in breeding behaviour (see below Reproduction). The mode of communication may be visual, as between the small so-called cleaner fish and a large fish of a very different species. The larger fish often allows the cleaner to enter its mouth to remove gill parasites. The cleaner is recognized by its distinctive colour and actions and therefore is not eaten, even if the larger fish is normally a predator. Communication is often chemical, signals being sent by specific chemicals called pheromones.

 

Many fishes have a streamlined body and swim freely in open water. Fish locomotion is closely correlated with habitat and ecological niche (the general position of the animal to its environment).

 

Many fishes in both marine and fresh waters swim at the surface and have mouths adapted to feed best (and sometimes only) at the surface. Often such fishes are long and slender, able to dart at surface insects or at other surface fishes and in turn to dart away from predators; needlefishes, halfbeaks, and topminnows (such as killifish and mosquito fish) are good examples. Oceanic flying fishes escape their predators by gathering speed above the water surface, with the lower lobe of the tail providing thrust in the water. They then glide hundreds of yards on enlarged, winglike pectoral and pelvic fins. South American freshwater flying fishes escape their enemies by jumping and propelling their strongly keeled bodies out of the water.

 

So-called mid-water swimmers, the most common type of fish, are of many kinds and live in many habitats. The powerful fusiform tunas and the trouts, for example, are adapted for strong, fast swimming, the tunas to capture prey speedily in the open ocean and the trouts to cope with the swift currents of streams and rivers. The trout body form is well adapted to many habitats. Fishes that live in relatively quiet waters such as bays or lake shores or slow rivers usually are not strong, fast swimmers but are capable of short, quick bursts of speed to escape a predator. Many of these fishes have their sides flattened, examples being the sunfish and the freshwater angelfish of aquarists. Fish associated with the bottom or substrate usually are slow swimmers. Open-water plankton-feeding fishes almost always remain fusiform and are capable of rapid, strong movement (for example, sardines and herrings of the open ocean and also many small minnows of streams and lakes).

 

Bottom-living fishes are of many kinds and have undergone many types of modification of their body shape and swimming habits. Rays, which evolved from strong-swimming mid-water sharks, usually stay close to the bottom and move by undulating their large pectoral fins. Flounders live in a similar habitat and move over the bottom by undulating the entire body. Many bottom fishes dart from place to place, resting on the bottom between movements, a motion common in gobies. One goby relative, the mudskipper, has taken to living at the edge of pools along the shore of muddy mangrove swamps. It escapes its enemies by flipping rapidly over the mud, out of the water. Some catfishes, synbranchid eels, the so-called climbing perch, and a few other fishes venture out over damp ground to find more promising waters than those that they left. They move by wriggling their bodies, sometimes using strong pectoral fins; most have accessory air-breathing organs. Many bottom-dwelling fishes live in mud holes or rocky crevices. Marine eels and gobies commonly are found in such habitats and for the most part venture far beyond their cavelike homes. Some bottom dwellers, such as the clingfishes (Gobiesocidae), have developed powerful adhesive disks that enable them to remain in place on the substrate in areas such as rocky coasts, where the action of the waves is great.

 

The methods of reproduction in fishes are varied, but most fishes lay a large number of small eggs, fertilized and scattered outside of the body. The eggs of pelagic fishes usually remain suspended in the open water. Many shore and freshwater fishes lay eggs on the bottom or among plants. Some have adhesive eggs. The mortality of the young and especially of the eggs is very high, and often only a few individuals grow to maturity out of hundreds, thousands, and in some cases millions of eggs laid.

 

Males produce sperm, usually as a milky white substance called milt, in two (sometimes one) testes within the body cavity. In bony fishes a sperm duct leads from each testis to a urogenital opening behind the vent or anus. In sharks and rays and in cyclostomes the duct leads to a cloaca. Sometimes the pelvic fins are modified to help transmit the milt to the eggs at the female’s vent or on the substrate where the female has placed them. Sometimes accessory organs are used to fertilize females internally—for example, the claspers of many sharks and rays.

 

In the females the eggs are formed in two ovaries (sometimes only one) and pass through the ovaries to the urogenital opening and to the outside. In some fishes the eggs are fertilized internally but are shed before development takes place. Members of about a dozen families each of bony fishes (teleosts) and sharks bear live young. Many skates and rays also bear live young. In some bony fishes the eggs simply develop within the female, the young emerging when the eggs hatch (ovoviviparous). Others develop within the ovary and are nourished by ovarian tissues after hatching (viviparous). There are also other methods utilized by fishes to nourish young within the female. In all live-bearers the young are born at a relatively large size and are few in number. In one family of primarily marine fishes, the surfperches from the Pacific coast of North America, Japan, and Korea, the males of at least one species are born sexually mature, although they are not fully grown.

 

Some fishes are hermaphroditic—an individual producing both sperm and eggs, usually at different stages of its life. Self-fertilization, however, is probably rare.

 

Successful reproduction and, in many cases, defense of the eggs and the young are assured by rather stereotypical but often elaborate courtship and parental behaviour, either by the male or the female or both. Some fishes prepare nests by hollowing out depressions in the sand bottom (cichlids, for example), build nests with plant materials and sticky threads excreted by the kidneys (sticklebacks), or blow a cluster of mucus-covered bubbles at the water surface (gouramis). The eggs are laid in these structures. Some varieties of cichlids and catfishes incubate eggs in their mouths.

 

Some fishes, such as salmon, undergo long migrations from the ocean and up large rivers to spawn in the gravel beds where they themselves hatched (anadromous fishes). Some, such as the freshwater eels (family Anguillidae), live and grow to maturity in fresh water and migrate to the sea to spawn (catadromous fishes). Other fishes undertake shorter migrations from lakes into streams, within the ocean, or enter spawning habitats that they do not ordinarily occupy in other ways.

 

The basic structure and function of the fish body are similar to those of all other vertebrates. The usual four types of tissues are present: surface or epithelial, connective (bone, cartilage, and fibrous tissues, as well as their derivative, blood), nerve, and muscle tissues. In addition, the fish’s organs and organ systems parallel those of other vertebrates.

 

The typical fish body is streamlined and spindle-shaped, with an anterior head, a gill apparatus, and a heart, the latter lying in the midline just below the gill chamber. The body cavity, containing the vital organs, is situated behind the head in the lower anterior part of the body. The anus usually marks the posterior termination of the body cavity and most often occurs just in front of the base of the anal fin. The spinal cord and vertebral column continue from the posterior part of the head to the base of the tail fin, passing dorsal to the body cavity and through the caudal (tail) region behind the body cavity. Most of the body is of muscular tissue, a high proportion of which is necessitated by swimming. In the course of evolution this basic body plan has been modified repeatedly into the many varieties of fish shapes that exist today.

 

The skeleton forms an integral part of the fish’s locomotion system, as well as serving to protect vital parts. The internal skeleton consists of the skull bones (except for the roofing bones of the head, which are really part of the external skeleton), the vertebral column, and the fin supports (fin rays). The fin supports are derived from the external skeleton but will be treated here because of their close functional relationship to the internal skeleton. The internal skeleton of cyclostomes, sharks, and rays is of cartilage; that of many fossil groups and some primitive living fishes is mostly of cartilage but may include some bone. In place of the vertebral column, the earliest vertebrates had a fully developed notochord, a flexible stiff rod of viscous cells surrounded by a strong fibrous sheath. During the evolution of modern fishes the rod was replaced in part by cartilage and then by ossified cartilage. Sharks and rays retain a cartilaginous vertebral column; bony fishes have spool-shaped vertebrae that in the more primitive living forms only partially replace the notochord. The skull, including the gill arches and jaws of bony fishes, is fully, or at least partially, ossified. That of sharks and rays remains cartilaginous, at times partially replaced by calcium deposits but never by true bone.

 

The supportive elements of the fins (basal or radial bones or both) have changed greatly during fish evolution. Some of these changes are described in the section below (Evolution and paleontology). Most fishes possess a single dorsal fin on the midline of the back. Many have two and a few have three dorsal fins. The other fins are the single tail and anal fins and paired pelvic and pectoral fins. A small fin, the adipose fin, with hairlike fin rays, occurs in many of the relatively primitive teleosts (such as trout) on the back near the base of the caudal fin.

 

The skin of a fish must serve many functions. It aids in maintaining the osmotic balance, provides physical protection for the body, is the site of coloration, contains sensory receptors, and, in some fishes, functions in respiration. Mucous glands, which aid in maintaining the water balance and offer protection from bacteria, are extremely numerous in fish skin, especially in cyclostomes and teleosts. Since mucous glands are present in the modern lampreys, it is reasonable to assume that they were present in primitive fishes, such as the ancient Silurian and Devonian agnathans. Protection from abrasion and predation is another function of the fish skin, and dermal (skin) bone arose early in fish evolution in response to this need. It is thought that bone first evolved in skin and only later invaded the cartilaginous areas of the fish’s body, to provide additional support and protection. There is some argument as to which came first, cartilage or bone, and fossil evidence does not settle the question. In any event, dermal bone has played an important part in fish evolution and has different characteristics in different groups of fishes. Several groups are characterized at least in part by the kind of bony scales they possess.

 

Scales have played an important part in the evolution of fishes. Primitive fishes usually had thick bony plates or thick scales in several layers of bone, enamel, and related substances. Modern teleost fishes have scales of bone, which, while still protective, allow much more freedom of motion in the body. A few modern teleosts (some catfishes, sticklebacks, and others) have secondarily acquired bony plates in the skin. Modern and early sharks possessed placoid scales, a relatively primitive type of scale with a toothlike structure, consisting of an outside layer of enamel-like substance (vitrodentine), an inner layer of dentine, and a pulp cavity containing nerves and blood vessels. Primitive bony fishes had thick scales of either the ganoid or the cosmoid type. Cosmoid scales have a hard, enamel-like outer layer, an inner layer of cosmine (a form of dentine), and then a layer of vascular bone (isopedine). In ganoid scales the hard outer layer is different chemically and is called ganoin. Under this is a cosminelike layer and then a vascular bony layer. The thin, translucent bony scales of modern fishes, called cycloid and ctenoid (the latter distinguished by serrations at the edges), lack enameloid and dentine layers.

 

Skin has several other functions in fishes. It is well supplied with nerve endings and presumably receives tactile, thermal, and pain stimuli. Skin is also well supplied with blood vessels. Some fishes breathe in part through the skin, by the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the surrounding water and numerous small blood vessels near the skin surface.

 

Skin serves as protection through the control of coloration. Fishes exhibit an almost limitless range of colours. The colours often blend closely with the surroundings, effectively hiding the animal. Many fishes use bright colours for territorial advertisement or as recognition marks for other members of their own species, or sometimes for members of other species. Many fishes can change their colour to a greater or lesser degree, by movement of pigment within the pigment cells (chromatophores). Black pigment cells (melanophores), of almost universal occurrence in fishes, are often juxtaposed with other pigment cells. When placed beneath iridocytes or leucophores (bearing the silvery or white pigment guanine), melanophores produce structural colours of blue and green. These colours are often extremely intense, because they are formed by refraction of light through the needlelike crystals of guanine. The blue and green refracted colours are often relatively pure, lacking the red and yellow rays, which have been absorbed by the black pigment (melanin) of the melanophores. Yellow, orange, and red colours are produced by erythrophores, cells containing the appropriate carotenoid pigments. Other colours are produced by combinations of melanophores, erythrophores, and iridocytes.

 

The major portion of the body of most fishes consists of muscles. Most of the mass is trunk musculature, the fin muscles usually being relatively small. The caudal fin is usually the most powerful fin, being moved by the trunk musculature. The body musculature is usually arranged in rows of chevron-shaped segments on each side. Contractions of these segments, each attached to adjacent vertebrae and vertebral processes, bends the body on the vertebral joint, producing successive undulations of the body, passing from the head to the tail, and producing driving strokes of the tail. It is the latter that provides the strong forward movement for most fishes.

 

The digestive system, in a functional sense, starts at the mouth, with the teeth used to capture prey or collect plant foods. Mouth shape and tooth structure vary greatly in fishes, depending on the kind of food normally eaten. Most fishes are predacious, feeding on small invertebrates or other fishes and have simple conical teeth on the jaws, on at least some of the bones of the roof of the mouth, and on special gill arch structures just in front of the esophagus. The latter are throat teeth. Most predacious fishes swallow their prey whole, and the teeth are used for grasping and holding prey, for orienting prey to be swallowed (head first) and for working the prey toward the esophagus. There are a variety of tooth types in fishes. Some fishes, such as sharks and piranhas, have cutting teeth for biting chunks out of their victims. A shark’s tooth, although superficially like that of a piranha, appears in many respects to be a modified scale, while that of the piranha is like that of other bony fishes, consisting of dentine and enamel. Parrot fishes have beaklike mouths with short incisor-like teeth for breaking off coral and have heavy pavementlike throat teeth for crushing the coral. Some catfishes have small brushlike teeth, arranged in rows on the jaws, for scraping plant and animal growth from rocks. Many fishes (such as the Cyprinidae or minnows) have no jaw teeth at all but have very strong throat teeth.

 

Some fishes gather planktonic food by straining it from their gill cavities with numerous elongate stiff rods (gill rakers) anchored by one end to the gill bars. The food collected on these rods is passed to the throat, where it is swallowed. Most fishes have only short gill rakers that help keep food particles from escaping out the mouth cavity into the gill chamber.

 

Once reaching the throat, food enters a short, often greatly distensible esophagus, a simple tube with a muscular wall leading into a stomach. The stomach varies greatly in fishes, depending upon the diet. In most predacious fishes it is a simple straight or curved tube or pouch with a muscular wall and a glandular lining. Food is largely digested there and leaves the stomach in liquid form.

 

Between the stomach and the intestine, ducts enter the digestive tube from the liver and pancreas. The liver is a large, clearly defined organ. The pancreas may be embedded in it, diffused through it, or broken into small parts spread along some of the intestine. The junction between the stomach and the intestine is marked by a muscular valve. Pyloric ceca (blind sacs) occur in some fishes at this junction and have a digestive or absorptive function or both.

 

The intestine itself is quite variable in length, depending upon the fish’s diet. It is short in predacious forms, sometimes no longer than the body cavity, but long in herbivorous forms, being coiled and several times longer than the entire length of the fish in some species of South American catfishes. The intestine is primarily an organ for absorbing nutrients into the bloodstream. The larger its internal surface, the greater its absorptive efficiency, and a spiral valve is one method of increasing its absorption surface.

 

Sharks, rays, chimaeras, lungfishes, surviving chondrosteans, holosteans, and even a few of the more primitive teleosts have a spiral valve or at least traces of it in the intestine. Most modern teleosts have increased the area of the intestinal walls by having numerous folds and villi (fingerlike projections) somewhat like those in humans. Undigested substances are passed to the exterior through the anus in most teleost fishes. In lungfishes, sharks, and rays, it is first passed through the cloaca, a common cavity receiving the intestinal opening and the ducts from the urogenital system.

 

Oxygen and carbon dioxide dissolve in water, and most fishes exchange dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in water by means of the gills. The gills lie behind and to the side of the mouth cavity and consist of fleshy filaments supported by the gill arches and filled with blood vessels, which give gills a bright red colour. Water taken in continuously through the mouth passes backward between the gill bars and over the gill filaments, where the exchange of gases takes place. The gills are protected by a gill cover in teleosts and many other fishes but by flaps of skin in sharks, rays, and some of the older fossil fish groups. The blood capillaries in the gill filaments are close to the gill surface to take up oxygen from the water and to give up excess carbon dioxide to the water.

 

Most modern fishes have a hydrostatic (ballast) organ, called the swim bladder, that lies in the body cavity just below the kidney and above the stomach and intestine. It originated as a diverticulum of the digestive canal. In advanced teleosts, especially the acanthopterygians, the bladder has lost its connection with the digestive tract, a condition called physoclistic. The connection has been retained (physostomous) by many relatively primitive teleosts. In several unrelated lines of fishes, the bladder has become specialized as a lung or, at least, as a highly vascularized accessory breathing organ. Some fishes with such accessory organs are obligate air breathers and will drown if denied access to the surface, even in well-oxygenated water. Fishes with a hydrostatic form of swim bladder can control their depth by regulating the amount of gas in the bladder. The gas, mostly oxygen, is secreted into the bladder by special glands, rendering the fish more buoyant; the gas is absorbed into the bloodstream by another special organ, reducing the overall buoyancy and allowing the fish to sink. Some deep-sea fishes may have oils, rather than gas, in the bladder. Other deep-sea and some bottom-living forms have much-reduced swim bladders or have lost the organ entirely.

 

The swim bladder of fishes follows the same developmental pattern as the lungs of land vertebrates. There is no doubt that the two structures have the same historical origin in primitive fishes. More or less intermediate forms still survive among the more primitive types of fishes, such as the lungfishes Lepidosiren and Protopterus.

 

The circulatory, or blood vascular, system consists of the heart, the arteries, the capillaries, and the veins. It is in the capillaries that the interchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, and other substances such as hormones and waste products takes place. The capillaries lead to the veins, which return the venous blood with its waste products to the heart, kidneys, and gills. There are two kinds of capillary beds: those in the gills and those in the rest of the body. The heart, a folded continuous muscular tube with three or four saclike enlargements, undergoes rhythmic contractions and receives venous blood in a sinus venosus. It passes the blood to an auricle and then into a thick muscular pump, the ventricle. From the ventricle the blood goes to a bulbous structure at the base of a ventral aorta just below the gills. The blood passes to the afferent (receiving) arteries of the gill arches and then to the gill capillaries. There waste gases are given off to the environment, and oxygen is absorbed. The oxygenated blood enters efferent (exuant) arteries of the gill arches and then flows into the dorsal aorta. From there blood is distributed to the tissues and organs of the body. One-way valves prevent backflow. The circulation of fishes thus differs from that of the reptiles, birds, and mammals in that oxygenated blood is not returned to the heart prior to distribution to the other parts of the body.

 

The primary excretory organ in fishes, as in other vertebrates, is the kidney. In fishes some excretion also takes place in the digestive tract, skin, and especially the gills (where ammonia is given off). Compared with land vertebrates, fishes have a special problem in maintaining their internal environment at a constant concentration of water and dissolved substances, such as salts. Proper balance of the internal environment (homeostasis) of a fish is in a great part maintained by the excretory system, especially the kidney.

 

The kidney, gills, and skin play an important role in maintaining a fish’s internal environment and checking the effects of osmosis. Marine fishes live in an environment in which the water around them has a greater concentration of salts than they can have inside their body and still maintain life. Freshwater fishes, on the other hand, live in water with a much lower concentration of salts than they require inside their bodies. Osmosis tends to promote the loss of water from the body of a marine fish and absorption of water by that of a freshwater fish. Mucus in the skin tends to slow the process but is not a sufficient barrier to prevent the movement of fluids through the permeable skin. When solutions on two sides of a permeable membrane have different concentrations of dissolved substances, water will pass through the membrane into the more concentrated solution, while the dissolved chemicals move into the area of lower concentration (diffusion).

 

The kidney of freshwater fishes is often larger in relation to body weight than that of marine fishes. In both groups the kidney excretes wastes from the body, but the kidney of freshwater fishes also excretes large amounts of water, counteracting the water absorbed through the skin. Freshwater fishes tend to lose salt to the environment and must replace it. They get some salt from their food, but the gills and skin inside the mouth actively absorb salt from water passed through the mouth. This absorption is performed by special cells capable of moving salts against the diffusion gradient. Freshwater fishes drink very little water and take in little water with their food.

 

Marine fishes must conserve water, and therefore their kidneys excrete little water. To maintain their water balance, marine fishes drink large quantities of seawater, retaining most of the water and excreting the salt. Most nitrogenous waste in marine fishes appears to be secreted by the gills as ammonia. Marine fishes can excrete salt by clusters of special cells (chloride cells) in the gills.

 

There are several teleosts—for example, the salmon—that travel between fresh water and seawater and must adjust to the reversal of osmotic gradients. They adjust their physiological processes by spending time (often surprisingly little time) in the intermediate brackish environment.

 

Marine hagfishes, sharks, and rays have osmotic concentrations in their blood about equal to that of seawater and so do not have to drink water nor perform much physiological work to maintain their osmotic balance. In sharks and rays the osmotic concentration is kept high by retention of urea in the blood. Freshwater sharks have a lowered concentration of urea in the blood.

 

Endocrine glands secrete their products into the bloodstream and body tissues and, along with the central nervous system, control and regulate many kinds of body functions. Cyclostomes have a well-developed endocrine system, and presumably it was well developed in the early Agnatha, ancestral to modern fishes. Although the endocrine system in fishes is similar to that of higher vertebrates, there are numerous differences in detail. The pituitary, the thyroid, the suprarenals, the adrenals, the pancreatic islets, the sex glands (ovaries and testes), the inner wall of the intestine, and the bodies of the ultimobranchial gland make up the endocrine system in fishes. There are some others whose function is not well understood. These organs regulate sexual activity and reproduction, growth, osmotic pressure, general metabolic activities such as the storage of fat and the utilization of foodstuffs, blood pressure, and certain aspects of skin colour. Many of these activities are also controlled in part by the central nervous system, which works with the endocrine system in maintaining the life of a fish. Some parts of the endocrine system are developmentally, and undoubtedly evolutionarily, derived from the nervous system.

 

As in all vertebrates, the nervous system of fishes is the primary mechanism coordinating body activities, as well as integrating these activities in the appropriate manner with stimuli from the environment. The central nervous system, consisting of the brain and spinal cord, is the primary integrating mechanism. The peripheral nervous system, consisting of nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to various body organs, carries sensory information from special receptor organs such as the eyes, internal ears, nares (sense of smell), taste glands, and others to the integrating centres of the brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system also carries information via different nerve cells from the integrating centres of the brain and spinal cord. This coded information is carried to the various organs and body systems, such as the skeletal muscular system, for appropriate action in response to the original external or internal stimulus. Another branch of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, helps to coordinate the activities of many glands and organs and is itself closely connected to the integrating centres of the brain.

 

The brain of the fish is divided into several anatomical and functional parts, all closely interconnected but each serving as the primary centre of integrating particular kinds of responses and activities. Several of these centres or parts are primarily associated with one type of sensory perception, such as sight, hearing, or smell (olfaction).

 

The sense of smell is important in almost all fishes. Certain eels with tiny eyes depend mostly on smell for location of food. The olfactory, or nasal, organ of fishes is located on the dorsal surface of the snout. The lining of the nasal organ has special sensory cells that perceive chemicals dissolved in the water, such as substances from food material, and send sensory information to the brain by way of the first cranial nerve. Odour also serves as an alarm system. Many fishes, especially various species of freshwater minnows, react with alarm to a chemical released from the skin of an injured member of their own species.

 

Many fishes have a well-developed sense of taste, and tiny pitlike taste buds or organs are located not only within their mouth cavities but also over their heads and parts of their body. Catfishes, which often have poor vision, have barbels (“whiskers”) that serve as supplementary taste organs, those around the mouth being actively used to search out food on the bottom. Some species of naturally blind cave fishes are especially well supplied with taste buds, which often cover most of their body surface.

 

Sight is extremely important in most fishes. The eye of a fish is basically like that of all other vertebrates, but the eyes of fishes are extremely varied in structure and adaptation. In general, fishes living in dark and dim water habitats have large eyes, unless they have specialized in some compensatory way so that another sense (such as smell) is dominant, in which case the eyes will often be reduced. Fishes living in brightly lighted shallow waters often will have relatively small but efficient eyes. Cyclostomes have somewhat less elaborate eyes than other fishes, with skin stretched over the eyeball perhaps making their vision somewhat less effective. Most fishes have a spherical lens and accommodate their vision to far or near subjects by moving the lens within the eyeball. A few sharks accommodate by changing the shape of the lens, as in land vertebrates. Those fishes that are heavily dependent upon the eyes have especially strong muscles for accommodation. Most fishes see well, despite the restrictions imposed by frequent turbidity of the water and by light refraction.

 

Fossil evidence suggests that colour vision evolved in fishes more than 300 million years ago, but not all living fishes have retained this ability. Experimental evidence indicates that many shallow-water fishes, if not all, have colour vision and see some colours especially well, but some bottom-dwelling shore fishes live in areas where the water is sufficiently deep to filter out most if not all colours, and these fishes apparently never see colours. When tested in shallow water, they apparently are unable to respond to colour differences.

 

Sound perception and balance are intimately associated senses in a fish. The organs of hearing are entirely internal, located within the skull, on each side of the brain and somewhat behind the eyes. Sound waves, especially those of low frequencies, travel readily through water and impinge directly upon the bones and fluids of the head and body, to be transmitted to the hearing organs. Fishes readily respond to sound; for example, a trout conditioned to escape by the approach of fishermen will take flight upon perceiving footsteps on a stream bank even if it cannot see a fisherman. Compared with humans, however, the range of sound frequencies heard by fishes is greatly restricted. Many fishes communicate with each other by producing sounds in their swim bladders, in their throats by rasping their teeth, and in other ways.

 

A fish or other vertebrate seldom has to rely on a single type of sensory information to determine the nature of the environment around it. A catfish uses taste and touch when examining a food object with its oral barbels. Like most other animals, fishes have many touch receptors over their body surface. Pain and temperature receptors also are present in fishes and presumably produce the same kind of information to a fish as to humans. Fishes react in a negative fashion to stimuli that would be painful to human beings, suggesting that they feel a sensation of pain.

 

An important sensory system in fishes that is absent in other vertebrates (except some amphibians) is the lateral line system. This consists of a series of heavily innervated small canals located in the skin and bone around the eyes, along the lower jaw, over the head, and down the mid-side of the body, where it is associated with the scales. Intermittently along these canals are located tiny sensory organs (pit organs) that apparently detect changes in pressure. The system allows a fish to sense changes in water currents and pressure, thereby helping the fish to orient itself to the various changes that occur in the physical environment.

 

Although a great many fossil fishes have been found and described, they represent a tiny portion of the long and complex evolution of fishes, and knowledge of fish evolution remains relatively fragmentary. In the classification presented in this article, fishlike vertebrates are divided into seven categories, the members of each having a different basic structural organization and different physical and physiological adaptations for the problems presented by the environment. The broad basic pattern has been one of successive replacement of older groups by newer, better-adapted groups. One or a few members of a group evolved a basically more efficient means of feeding, breathing, or swimming or several better ways of living. These better-adapted groups then forced the extinction of members of the older group with which they competed for available food, breeding places, or other necessities of life. As the new fishes became well established, some of them evolved further and adapted to other habitats, where they continued to replace members of the old group already there. The process was repeated until all or almost all members of the old group in a variety of habitats had been replaced by members of the newer evolutionary line.

 

The earliest vertebrate fossils of certain relationships are fragments of dermal armour of jawless fishes (superclass Agnatha, order Heterostraci) from the Upper Ordovician Period in North America, about 450 million years in age. Early Ordovician toothlike fragments from the former Soviet Union are less certainly remains of agnathans. It is uncertain whether the North American jawless fishes inhabited shallow coastal marine waters, where their remains became fossilized, or were freshwater vertebrates washed into coastal deposits by stream action.

 

Jawless fishes probably arose from ancient, small, soft-bodied filter-feeding organisms much like and probably also ancestral to the modern sand-dwelling filter feeders, the Cephalochordata (Amphioxus and its relatives). The body in the ancestral animals was probably stiffened by a notochord. Although a vertebrate origin in fresh water is much debated by paleontologists, it is possible that mobility of the body and protection provided by dermal armour arose in response to streamflow in the freshwater environment and to the need to escape from and resist the clawed invertebrate eurypterids that lived in the same waters. Because of the marine distribution of the surviving primitive chordates, however, many paleontologists doubt that the vertebrates arose in fresh water.

 

Heterostracan remains are next found in what appear to be delta deposits in two North American localities of Silurian age. By the close of the Silurian, about 416 million years ago, European heterostracan remains are found in what appear to be delta or coastal deposits. In the Late Silurian of the Baltic area, lagoon or freshwater deposits yield jawless fishes of the order Osteostraci. Somewhat later in the Silurian from the same region, layers contain fragments of jawed acanthodians, the earliest group of jawed vertebrates, and of jawless fishes. These layers lie between marine beds but appear to be washed out from fresh waters of a coastal region.

 

It is evident, therefore, that by the end of the Silurian both jawed and jawless vertebrates were well established and already must have had a long history of development. Yet paleontologists have remains only of specialized forms that cannot have been the ancestors of the placoderms and bony fishes that appear in the next period, the Devonian. No fossils are known of the more primitive ancestors of the agnathans and acanthodians. The extensive marine beds of the Silurian and those of the Ordovician are essentially void of vertebrate history. It is believed that the ancestors of fishlike vertebrates evolved in upland fresh waters, where whatever few and relatively small fossil beds were made probably have been long since eroded away. Remains of the earliest vertebrates may never be found.

 

By the close of the Silurian, all known orders of jawless vertebrates had evolved, except perhaps the modern cyclostomes, which are without the hard parts that ordinarily are preserved as fossils. Cyclostomes were unknown as fossils until 1968, when a lamprey of modern body structure was reported from the Middle Pennsylvanian of Illinois, in deposits more than 300 million years old. Fossil evidence of the four orders of armoured jawless vertebrates is absent from deposits later than the Devonian. Presumably, these vertebrates became extinct at that time, being replaced by the more efficient and probably more aggressive placoderms, acanthodians, selachians (sharks and relatives), and by early bony fishes. Cyclostomes survived probably because early on they evolved from anaspid agnathans and developed a rasping tonguelike structure and a sucking mouth, enabling them to prey on other fishes. With this way of life they apparently had no competition from other fish groups. Cyclostomes, the hagfishes and lampreys, were once thought to be closely related because of the similarity in their suctorial mouths, but it is now understood that the hagfishes, order Myxiniformes, are the most primitive living chordates, and they are classified separately from the lampreys, order Petromyzontiformes.

 

Early jawless vertebrates probably fed on tiny organisms by filter feeding, as do the larvae of their descendants, the modern lampreys. The gill cavity of the early agnathans was large. It is thought that small organisms taken from the bottom by a nibbling action of the mouth, or more certainly by a sucking action through the mouth, were passed into the gill cavity along with water for breathing. Small organisms then were strained out by the gill apparatus and directed to the food canal. The gill apparatus thus evolved as a feeding, as well as a breathing, structure. The head and gills in the agnathans were protected by a heavy dermal armour; the tail region was free, allowing motion for swimming.

 

Most important for the evolution of fishes and vertebrates in general was the early appearance of bone, cartilage, and enamel-like substance. These materials became modified in later fishes, enabling them to adapt to many aquatic environments and finally even to land. Other basic organs and tissues of the vertebrates—such as the central nervous system, heart, liver, digestive tract, kidney, and circulatory system— undoubtedly were present in the ancestors of the agnathans. In many ways, bone, both external and internal, was the key to vertebrate evolution.

 

The next class of fishes to appear was the Acanthodii, containing the earliest known jawed vertebrates, which arose in the Late Silurian, more than 416 million years ago. The acanthodians declined after the Devonian but lasted into the Early Permian, a little less than 280 million years ago. The first complete specimens appear in Lower Devonian freshwater deposits, but later in the Devonian and Permian some members appear to have been marine. Most were small fishes, not more than 75 cm (approximately 30 inches) in length.

 

We know nothing of the ancestors of the acanthodians. They must have arisen from some jawless vertebrate, probably in fresh water. They appear to have been active swimmers with almost no head armour but with large eyes, indicating that they depended heavily on vision. Perhaps they preyed on invertebrates. The rows of spines and spinelike fins between the pectoral and pelvic fins give some credence to the idea that paired fins arose from “fin folds” along the body sides.

 

The relationships of the acanthodians to other jawed vertebrates are obscure. They possess features found in both sharks and bony fishes. They are like early bony fishes in possessing ganoidlike scales and a partially ossified internal skeleton. Certain aspects of the jaw appear to be more like those of bony fishes than sharks, but the bony fin spines and certain aspects of the gill apparatus would seem to favour relationships with early sharks. Acanthodians do not seem particularly close to the Placodermi, although, like the placoderms, they apparently possessed less efficient tooth replacement and tooth structure than the sharks and the bony fishes, possibly one reason for their subsequent extinction.

oh flowers, what else?:)

 

If you have trouble understanding what "All Rights Reserved" means, please refer to this thread in the Help Forum www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/69498/

 

My award is your presence. Please don't leave badges, group images and invitations on my stream!!

Not sure I think he was writing "send me 3 and 4pence as were going to a dance" but I thought I heard his Captain asking "Send us reinforcements were going to advance" :))

This is Felix Wilkins , a street musician in Philadelphia.Life has dealt him many twists and turns but he always remains true to his passion for music.You can hear him play here

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qvIenwgjnA and read his fascinating life story written by Michelle Alton here...

Beat

By Michelle Alton

Felix Wilkins was playing “Anchors Aweigh” on the City Hall Concourse in Suburban Station when I first saw him during my commute.

I had just begun a new job in Philadelphia after a period of unemployment. Raised in Edison, New Jersey, I‘d built my career in central New Jersey pharmaceutical companies as a clinical researcher. Then suddenly, like so many others across the country, one morning I drove to work only to find myself without a job on the drive home. Now I was making a new start, with a whole new understanding of how it felt to be down and out. Perhaps that’s what drew me to the street musician as I still struggled to overcome the confidence loss I’d suffered after the layoff.

In the past, large cities had always been sources of fear and intimidation to me. So coming to Philly each day was opening my eyes to so many sources of its wonderment — and also to its darker, gloomier sides.

A street flutist in Center City, Felix (I did not even know his name at the time) was a tall, lean, older, striking-looking black man. He was usually dressed in a stylish suit, starched shirt, perfectly-knotted tie and matching handkerchief, and had Old Glory draped over his rolling suitcase’s extended handle. He played the notes flawlessly, and every so often a passer-by smiled and placed a dollar bill in his flute case.

I noted that Wednesday was his usual day, and found myself happily anticipating those mid-week mornings. In addition to his patriotic fare, he also played show tunes, other popular music and a collection of national anthems.

An avid amateur photographer, during lunch breaks, I trek about the city with my camera chronicling the “HYPERLINK "http://maltonphotos.zenfolio.com/philadelphia/slideshow"Philadelphia Experience,” for my website. As I became more familiar with the city, my feelings about it changed as well. My photographer’s eye noticed more details and my other senses became more attuned to its sights, smells, textures, and sounds.

On one noon-time jaunt, I was short-cutting through the east entrance of City Hall, camera conspicuous around my neck, headed toward Market Street, when I caught wind of the flutist in the concourse near the souvenir shop.

Noticing my camera as I passed through, he barreled up to me and asked if I would photograph him. “It’s my birthday!” he announced, thrusting his drivers’ license into my hand to prove it. He turned 68 that day. “Will you put my picture on the Internet?”

Happy to accommodate, though a bit wary at first, I made camera adjustments to compensate for the difficult lighting conditions: half dark with midday light streaming in through the low archways. While I snapped shot after shot, the flutist played, on bended knee, by his American flag. Moments later, a heavy-set, mustached man of about 45, sporting a red headband and yellow printed bandana, and leaning heavily on his cane, hobbled into the hallway.

The flutist approached him, and began speaking in Spanish. Suddenly, the man was singing his country’s national anthem, accompanied by the flute player. Though absorbed by the rapport that had sprung up spontaneously between the two men, I just kept shooting until the man finally limped off.

Later that week, as my birthday gift to the flutist, I posted the photos to my website. On the following Wednesday morning, I presented him with two full-color prints, mounted in gift folders. “You’re a good photographer, “he exclaimed, to my great pleasure.

I waved to him as I hustled off to work. But during the next week, my thoughts repeatedly returned to him. One day, on a coffee break, I typed, “Philadelphia + flutist + Suburban Station” into a Google search box to see what I could learn. On the first hit, I read about Felix’s arrest near Rittenhouse Square about three years before. There was no law on the books forbidding the playing of music on street corners, but he had been handcuffed and spent 45 minutes in jail. The next item was a headline announcing that he was being awarded compensation to settle his suit against the city for unlawful arrest. The article went on to say that Felix was a Panamanian musician and a retired professor of music at Brooklyn College. His life was beginning to fascinate me.

I also found rave reviews of his music and several outstanding decades-old recordings. Renowned jazz flutist, Andrea Brachfeld, in an internet interview, explained that Felix had been an early mentor to her in New York, and she credited Felix with having “shown her the ropes” back in 1972. He was so accomplished, —and judging from the mp3s I downloaded, an amazingly talented musician. Now I was determined to understand how such a man had wound up busking on the streets of Philadelphia, playing patriotic tunes for small change and occasional smiles. Convinced Felix had a story to tell, I made it a point to strike up conversations with him on several subsequent Wednesdays, and our chats became warm and friendly. “I’m an ethnomusicologist,” he told me one day, when we were talking outside City Hall. "Whatever is that?" I wondered.

Suddenly energized, Felix, not trying to disguise his passion, explained that you don’t just learn the music -- you learn the geography, culture, cuisine, customs, literature, architecture, and ethnicity of a country. Then, when you play the music, you impart the feel of the region from which it arose. To provide a more visual explanation, he went on “Take music from the Baroque period. It’s a very rough sort of music.” To illustrate, he sang a few sort of choppy sounding segments from a Bach fugue.

“Now look at that baroque carving near that window,” he went on, pointing at a portion of the City Hall façade and growing more animated. “It is also rough, just like the music from that period.” Though I didn’t really understand the analogy, the teacher in Felix was surfacing before my eyes and ears. And I thought, “He is not down and out, or a loser. He actually loves what he does!” Felix speaks fluent Spanish and English, and “gets by” in Greek and Portuguese and can also utter several phrases in a Chinese dialect. I was awed at the knowledge and passion of this man who played for coins in the train station. And although flute is Felix’s major love, he also plays saxophone, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, and other instruments. And he sings! He describes himself as a classical flutist, jazz and dance band performer. As we spoke, he artfully played and sang excerpts from Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Pachelbel, and Chopin.

Then he stood, suddenly switching to Charanga, a spirited Cuban/African dance genre, played on the flute in impossibly high registers. His crocodile leather-clad feet stepped and danced rhythmically in place on the pavement. I looked around in disbelief, astounded that no one on the plaza seemed to be paying any mind to the music. I would have expected other lunchtime shade seekers to be lined up, ears cocked, to hear what was going to happen next. But as I was becoming more and more mesmerized by his performance, they went about the business of enjoying their sandwiches, oblivious to Felix’s performance.

When he finished, we talked some more, and I learned that this man who takes such joy in his music does so in spite of a hard-lived life. That was when I realized the common ground we shared: My passion and gift for photography had carried me through one of the most difficult periods of my life –the sudden loss of livelihood. Could it carry me farther? I think it was at that moment that I began to plan a new chapter in my life.

Born to Jamaican parents in Panama City, Felix’s family lived in a rough neighborhood where his father worked by day as a laborer and played saxophone in local clubs at night. The elder Wilkins didn’t want his children following in his footsteps because of the drug-infused lifestyle typical of nightclub musicians there. But when his father came home one night to find his reed protector wedged into the belly of the horn, he realized that young Felix must have been playing while he was at work. So his father began to teach him Saxophone, but also made him agree to attend vocational school to learn a marketable skill. Felix promised. He became certified as an automotive mechanic and then studied at Panama’s National Conservatory of Music, where his romance with the flute began.

Active in Latin dance bands, most notably in Conjunto Impacto, (Joint Impact), he also played first flute in the Panamanian police band, and dabbled in composition. Some of his work was recorded by other artists.

Ambitious and married with two small children -- a boy and a girl -- his dream was to immigrate to America to play in the big jazz and Salsa bands. Felix brought his family to New York City, where a relative had offered to sponsor him. Supporting himself as a mechanic, and later, working at a bank, he played flute in various bands around the city. He played and recorded with Latin legends like Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, Machito, Patato and Johnny Pacheco. During this time, his flute was also featured in the album Tico Alegre Allstars Live at Carnegie Hall with Joe Cuba. At the same time he began to study music at Brooklyn College, struggling to work full time, attend classes, be a family man, and hone his performance skills by playing in clubs.

So Felix left his day-job and joined the welfare rolls. A divorce from his wife soon followed. When he speaks about the woman he still carries a torch for to this day – 40 years later – his facial muscles flatten and his voice becomes muted as he allows the memory of those painful years to settle on his mind.

“But why,” I asked, “would she not have given you another chance, knowing that you cared so much for her?”

"Well," he offered, “In those days, I was a machismo man.” Felix, like most of us, also had a dark side. I did not question him further on this as I watched the sadness spread across his eyes. I didn’t want to prolong the grief he seemed to be reliving. But he told me that what transpired caused his wife to forbid contact with his children until many years later, when they were grown and had families of their own.

But that grief, I learned, nourished his music. He says he still loved her with all his heart and soul, and to keep his sorrow from overwhelming him, he threw himself into his education. One of his dreams had been to teach music to young people. He returned to Brooklyn College, where he completed a four-year degree in less than three years, earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1977 and eventually accepted a teaching position. He returned to Panama in the mid-1980s where he taught at the U.S.-supported Panama Canal College, the National Conservatory of Music, and the University of Panama. While there, he also played with a consortium called "Jazz Unlimited," and arranged and performed his own salsa version of "Baroque and Blue," a classical and blues fusion composition by the acclaimed pianist, Claude Bolling. In 1994 he returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia.

He supported himself meagerly, playing gigs with a Cuban dance band called "Foto y su Charanga" and giving private music lessons to both adults and children. He says he loves to work with children because their lives are uncomplicated and they don’t skip as many lessons as adults.

Now, one or two days a week, Felix keeps his performance skills honed by playing on the streets of Center City, Philadelphia. He plays the morning commute in Suburban Station, outside a wig shop near the City Hall exit. In the afternoon, he migrates to the Historic District, where his flute fills the air with patriotic American tunes mixed with World Music. He is retired now, collects a very modest Social Security check, and lives in subsidized senior housing. He still loves to play his flute, saying, “Music is my soul. “If I don’t play, I will lose it,” he explains with a sort of distant look in his dark, expressive eyes. He truly enjoys the smiles and good will of the “regulars” at the train station, and of all who appreciate his warmth, his enthusiasm, and most of all, his spirited playing.

The next week, as I hurry through the train station, I hear in the distance a most heavenly flute rendition of Beethoven's "Fur Elise." As I round the next bend, I spot Felix, perched on a high stack of newspapers outside the wig shop, eyes closed, playing as though to an audience of angels. I stand and listen quietly as he finishes the piece, completely unaware of my presence. It is a brilliant and thrilling performance.

###

   

I rarely spent time with my Dad while I was growing up. I lived with my Grandparents for most of my life. I met my Mom a handful of times. It has been more than 20 years since I've seen her last. I still talk to my Dad and we try to forge a relationship. When I was younger, when I did see him, he would take me to interesting places like this one. I understand, Dad. I'm just thankful for the time we did spend together.

- Understanding your teenage kids -

I dedicate this photo to Michelle a fellow 'Lupie' with whom I have shared tears with this evening.

This goes to show that having Lupus cannot be all that bad if you get to meet special people like her xx

here is a link to her wonderful photos...

www.flickr.com/photos/littlelies4u/1526224520/

"understanding how light works"...you think that's simple?!? try it and you'll change your answer to a simple NO.

when you're able to see it, and use it to take amazing pictures, you are a good photographer...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQk2iXj1u28

Serials

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01-0053

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94-0045

KC135s - 61-0264 60-0366 & 58-0030

KC10s - 83-0080 84-0185 86-0037

 

(C) DM Parody 2018 (www.dotcom.gi/photos) These images are protected by copyright. You CANNOT copy or republish any of these photos without written consent of the photographer even if you retain the watermark (if present) and/or credit the photographer. You cannot use on any media including social media either. You CAN post a link to the page where the image appears without reference to the photographer only if not promoting a commercial product or service. Copyright infringements will be followed up, legally if necessary. Thank you for your understanding.

  

Leipziger Buchmesse 2015 / Leipzig Book Fair 2015

2015-03-14 (Saturday)

2015_052

2015#174

 

CALISTO (___) 492830 as Harley Quinn from Batman

Dickerliebhaber96 (Nico) 655114 as Joker from Batman

 

Thank you for any group invites which I'd be glad to accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thanks for your understanding.

Leipziger Buchmesse 2019 / Leipzig Book Fair 2019

 

2019-03-23 (Saturday)

2019_031

2019#379 Rose Red (___) ______ as _____ from _____

 

Thank you for any group invites which I'd be glad to accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thank you for your understanding.

It was late spring in the year 1832.

 

A guy named William Davis had dammed up a creek about fourteen miles north of Ottawa Illinois so that he could use water power to turn the wheels and the saw of his mill.

 

Davis had moved there from Kentucky about two years before with his wife and six children.

 

Tensions had been running high between the natives and the new Illinoisans.

 

Some dude named Blackhawk was stirring shit up a little north of there and a lot of the indians, having been pretty much pushed around for a number of years, they liked Blackhawk's attitude and the fact that him and a large force of indians had returned to Illinois from reservations they'd been forced onto out west.

 

Life really sucked back then and lots of people were looking for someone's ass to kick.

 

The local band of Potowatami were tryin' to stay out of the whole thing... what would later become known as 'The Blackhawk War.'

 

They told Blackhawk that they wouldn't help him.

 

But William Davis...

 

he wouldn't remove that dam and that was causing the Potowatami to go hungry.

 

They were dependent of the fish they would catch at their village on Indian Creek.

 

Davis puts up a dam and all of the sudden they're going hungry.

 

That wasn't real cool.

 

They asked Davis to take the dam down and Davis told 'em to bug off every time.

 

Then one day Davis caught one of the Potowatami dudes tryin' to tear the dam down and he beat him up with a stick.

 

Chief Shabbona tried to keep all of his Potowatami cool but tribal politics were pretty democratic and the people were hungry and the dude who got beat with the stick was pissed off too.

 

Shabbona went to Davis and told him he was about to get his ass kicked and maybe he should high tail it outta there until things cooled off.

 

A lot of the settlers decided to take a vacation and get out of town.

 

But not Davis.

 

In addition to being an asshole he was kinda stupid... and manipulative... because he convinced a few families that there was no danger and that they should stay.

 

He had interests to protect.

 

Namely the mill he'd built that had started all of this shit.

 

The fuse was lit on what might have been the biggest massacre of American civilians by the indians ever.

 

And the fuse was pretty short.

 

They say between forty and eighty Potowatami warriors headed out to Davis' mill and they were packin' heat and really pissed off.

 

It's not cool to take away people's food like that.

 

It's also not cool to kill innocent women and children...

 

which is what the Potowatami did.

 

They slaughtered Davis, a few other guys and a bunch of women and children.

 

The indians killed 15 people that day in May of 1832.

 

They mutilated the bodies in ways that contemporary writers refused to describe.

 

They took hostage a couple of sisters who were 19 and 17, one of whom fainted as they took her away on horseback when she recognized one of the scalps tied to the horse as her mother's.

 

People were pretty brutal back then.

 

Davis seems kinda like an asshole for not listening to the indians pleas that he remove the dam.

 

And his act of building that dam not only violated the indian treaty it also violated their water rights.

 

I'm sure they didn't like seeing their families go hungry because some new guy messed up the creek they'd been eating from for generations.

 

The indians shoudda stopped after they killed Davis and maybe the other adult males because killing innocent women and children isn't cool and never scores you PR points.

 

But then I wondered how the indians felt seeing their wives and children go hungry because of what Davis did.

 

The viciousness of the massacre was a propaganda victory for the US Government and it enraged the white population and led to popular support against Blackhawk and his crew up north even though they had nothing to do with the Indian Creek Massacre.

 

In the end, a whole bunch of people died and many indian women and children were massacred too.

 

I just wanted a good excuse to draw a map today and a little roadtrip to the site of the massacre would give me that excuse.

    

Tate Modern, London

S, Mansur by Mansoor Saleem

Some notes ABOUT MY WORK (a brief sample of local or regional anthropology at micro level):

The word "Gravity" is a symbol of reality that exists. Similarly E=mc2 is a combination of symbols trying to express some reality. In similar fashion my depiction of flashes (kashf) should be conceived that they are equations not in math but in language that nature uses. Perhaps fate had dropped flashes in my lap and I am depicting these flashes for world to know how to derive knowledge out of these flashes. May be from Archetypal plane I am receiving flashes and transforming these into phenomenal plane, but for more perfect transformation, sponsorship is required, like flashes roughly depicted demands super realistic treatment or animations at some points, or arrangements in 3- Dimension or performing activities or etc. at some other points, because each of my work either illustrated or arranged for photo is a part of animation and is just a one shot from one angle of bigger reality, therefore I am not a sur-realist. For deriving knowledge from my flashes their access to wider researchers in form of website, book, Museum, CD, video, etc. are required. And due to unavailability of resources, most of the paintings were sold before I could photographed these works which basically are like the fossils of the time and region and are done with hope that in future in order to get some data out of these works, the dimensions of anthropology, psychology, historiography, neurology, neuro-physics and other aspects will also be taken into account and the result may benefit in understanding some aspect of the complex Nature. The importance of flashes can be realized from the ripple effect observable in art and multi-media community that somehow came in contact with the work and hijacked ideology out of these flashes, such benefits, scientific community has not taken yet. From art point of view the art community produced high quality variations out of flashes but their work lack archetypal dimension which is one of the aspect, useful for scientific community to explore.

For cataloguing purpose somewhere title or art terminology like: "oil on canvas", "collage", "performance", "installations", "construction", etc. are used has nothing to do with meaning of the work, flashes are independent of these terminologies borrowed from art for cataloguing purpose only, flashes are beyond art. Flashes can include any ism, any element, bizarre thing, anything or things we don't know, that's why thousands of my flashes goes waste due to lack of energy and resources. Besides colorful images, performance and animation, Flashes also comes in form of sound as well, for instance I heard the sound: "Quranic archaeology is a mighty subject," this flash took me into the archaeology.

Researchers are invited to reply on enigma of colorful flashes. From where they come? they come to all or to few,? Few interesting pieces of writing below could be the starting point for debate: One is by David V. Tansley in his book: 'Subtle body' , author writes,..."the pineal gland has been found to contain vestigial traces of optic tissue. Experiments have shown that nerve impulses arise in the pineal in response to stimulation by light. Galen claimed that the pineal was a regulator of thought, and the Greeks said that the soul was anchored there. According to esoteric tradition this gland is the focal point for the masculine positive energy of spirit which is represented by the first hexagram of l-Ching, its six yang lines symbolizing the primal power of heaven and the creative action of the holy man".

But spirituality or metaphysical dimension is relevant in my case or not is a question unsolved or perhaps I should confine myself to physical dimension of Flashes (or call it images) which stay in my eyes just for less than a half second, perhaps for 0.01 second and I simply illustrate these Flashes and what it holds for future Fine Art, Sciences, Meta-science or Spirituality, I do not know yet, so I isolate myself from dada and sur-realism because I avoid title and avoid mixing my imagination or experimentation in recording of Flashes which is very rare or unrecorded. In dada and sur-realism we do read about dreams and drug infused random thoughts, but not flashes, so far no word about flashes I find even in Freud or Jungian psychology, they talk about dream importance. And in Christian art history so far I have only observed mixing of dream and inspiration from Bible. No body so far I have read in Dada and sur-realism that somebody is claiming that he is depicting Flashes or depicting flashes without mixing his imagination or experimentation. After seeing the difference between two (1) Pure Flashes and (2) some of my work based on mixing of imagination or experimentation with Flashes, now I can pin point the Flash, mixed or unmixed. My major work which is unmixed are pure Flashes (1) and my mixed work (2) can be termed as sur-realistic which I did for commercial reason on client's demand who was mad of sur-realism, I wish I could destroy these sur-realistic works. Since I can now perceive the difference between Flashes and work based on mixing of imagination or experimentation, now I can pin point the Flash, mixed or unmixed, so my major work should not be equate with William Blake, Dali, De Chirico, Carra, Marcel Duchamp, Magrette, etc., because I am not competing in art aesthetic, or in painterly compositions, I have no experience of spirituality, so my work should not also be confuse with any oriental mystics or artists who refer to the metaphysical in some form or another.

My work from (1974-81) of installations, performances based on flashes is still unpublished, so new generation do not know about it, in South Asian art also so far, no artist has ever claimed flashes mixed or un-mixed. For future science world, un-mixed flashes will be more important. Please inform on email mansursalim@hotmail.com, if reader come up with something related to science of flashes, or near to it, for instance few near relevant things I found are:

Physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum (reported in the New York Times, 1984), that when inspiration came to Feigenbaum, it was in the form of a picture, a mental image of two small wavy forms and one big one. This gave him an idea about scaling, the way the small features of a thing relate to the large features, it gave him the path he needed. For period doubling, scaling showed not only when one value-a total population or a fluid speed-would break into two, but also just where the new values would be found, Scaling was an intimate feature of the peculiar world Feigenbaum was beginning to explore.

Arthur I. Miller in a discussion of "redefining visualizability" makes it clear...the experimental evidence prevents us from forming a mental image bridging the wave-particle duality, such an image is available by 'Anschaulichheit' (German term for intuition, plus more) of another kind. It is the kind of image the physicist Werner Heisenberg had in mind when he asserted that, although the causality of classical mechanics has no access to quantum theory, quantum mechanics should not be considered unanschaulich, that is, excluded from imagery (Miller, Imagery in Scientific Thought). One example of such image is Albert Einstein's famous thought experiment in which he demonstrated the equivalence of inertia and gravitation by imagining an observer pulled through empty space in a closed container. Such images, however, lead by degrees of abstraction to others limited to spatial diagrams of a theoretical situation. Sigmund Freud, for example, writes, "We assume that the psychic life has the function of an apparatus, to which we attribute spatial extension and which we imagine as being composed of several pieces, similar to a telescope or microscope" Although such an image provides complementarity with a concrete percept of its models, it would not seem to provide it with a representable reality. But some physicists disagree that Niels Bohr never apply his notion of complementarity to subject other than physics. But for some physicists the contrary is true. (From Rudolf Arnheim's essay: “Complementarity from the outside” in book: Rescue of art).

May be or may not be these above references are relevant here for flashes I do not know, but for scientific analysis it is important to state briefly here the background of how I realized the importance of these flashes, but for scientific cause I have to write what I should not. I hope my friends will forgive me for this cause, because for good Gestalt one should have all the possible details in mind, it is beyond humans to perceive Perfect Gestalt, only Allah knows everything. A year before Metric and much before Diploma in fine art, my art works (flashes, mixed and unmixed) since 1974 were on display at Atelier BM and at Indus gallery, and since then I am observing the ripple effect of those works. After solo show of my works at Pakistan American Cultural Center, January 1979, I went to CIAC, Karachi Arts Council, to check effects of my Flash-works among artists. Before flashes since 1973 I was only doing super realistic sort of paintings of surrounding and of interior Sindh culture and capturing the local environment to come up with something: Pakistani avant-garde which I displayed at PACC solo show in Jan. 1979. But was ignored by media, only small press coverage came with a suggestion: "Mansoor has to stick to his remarkably sound realistic style instead of delving into many styles". (Art show, Daily News, Jan. 9, 1979). But anyhow I was realizing the importance of my flashes which were inspiring the most intelligent and talented of artist community for example: Ghalib Baqar changed his Dali sort of Sur realism into experimental water color, other water colorists like Abdul Hayee, Ather Jamal, Zahin Ahmad, Hanif Shezad, etc. added Karachi and interior Sindh imagery into their work. But at the same time I was learning the techniques of art from them. From Hayee and Baqar I learned the techniques of water color, from Farhan Ehsan I learned the techniques of drawing and calligraphy, from Amir Khan Tareen I learned the techniques of Rembrandt, from Abul Fateh I learned the techniques of ceramics, from Dr. Sajid Khan and Naseem Khan I learned the techniques of photography, from A.G. Khalid I learned the techniques of using computer and so on.

One of world's best super realist artist Shakil Siddiquei changed his Rembrandt sort of style into super realistic abstraction, for instance his paintings of Book shelf, Notice board, door, windows, composition with Dawn news paper, Sindhi dari, fruit packing wooden peyti, Chilmun and etc., in subject matter, were directly inspired by my flashes in form of photos or artworks I shared with him. Art critic Dr. S. Amjad Ali in his article: "Growing trend towards realism", wrote;..."Saleem Mansoor was the first to begin this kind of realism in Karachi but he was well advised to give up after creating a few interesting pieces. It is a good way of gaining command over technique and then putting it to other use in which more thought and feeling comes into play." (Dawn, April 20, 1984).

Ejazul Hassan wrote in Page 17, 123 in the catalogue of 5th National Exhibition, 1985, Published by Idara Saqafat Pakistan, written by Ejazul Husan.

"Young Mansoor Saleem has his own unusual way with objects and space. He sometimes likes to call his work as "installation" in the environment around him. He always wants to place things where he thinks these should be placed. The coiled wire, with a crescent on top, placed on a gray composition is evidence of his restless imagination. The title "Pakistani Avant Garde" also shows his wit." (—page 123, Ejazul Husan)

"The young painter Saleem Mansoor....investigates new methods and techniques not only meant to widen the scope and definition of realism but also to discover fresh methods to stimulate the viewers' response. His 'painting' titled The Pakistani Avant-garde' is wittily fabricated with tan-gue-in-cheek humor making an apt comment on elitist attitudes and trends in modern art."—(page: 17, from the introduction of 5th National Exhibition by Ejazul Hasan)

Most helping and highly creative artist and multi media man Imran Mir in 1975 appreciated my work in high remarks when he was discussing with Bashir Mirza at Atelier BM. BM was telling him that before going to Canada what Imran observed in art scene was still the same when he returned after many years, that Ahmed Pervaiz is repeating Allen Davy, and Shakir Ali, Mansur Rahi and their students were repeating Picasso and Braque's cubism in Indian or Bengali styles and Jamil Naqsh, Lubna Agha, Mansur Aye, Mashkoor, and others are repeating the same compositions, Rabia Zuberi and Shahid Sajjad repeating Henry Moor and so on. Imran pointing towards my work replied: "he is the change"! and BM acknowledged it. Imran like Zahoor ul Akhlaque, also absorbed elements from my flashes (like geometry, etc) but both only absorbed post modern art-elements from my flashes (but they absorbed postmodern element from other sources like we see in work of Herbert Bayer, Jennifer Bartlett, Ross Blacker, Sean Scully and etc) which not much is my concerned.

During my slide show at NCA in 1981, Zahoor and his wife asked me about my future plan, they were surprised to hear that I will soon be joining Archaeology Department in some university because from inside I am an anthropologist also. All my work is not only a statement in anthropology, but is also a statement in neurology, physics, and other sciences. Imran sincerely wanted to bring post modern trends in the region, perhaps for variety he introduced me to many artists, for instance, one day Imran came to me and carried my work's photos in his car and took me to David Alesworth's house and showed my work to him and his wife Durriya and Imran told them to do something like that and after one month of that, Imran's wife Nighat, told me; "Mansoor! You know Durriya is taking your sort of Truck art from Karachi to Peshawar". Nighat was saying that because she much before this event has written an article in press on my 1977 Truck art collection and Sara Irshad has written on my 1981 work: "Taking art show on donkey cart to the folk". Durriya and David not only took the advantage of my flashes but others also followed similar ideology, for instance Ruby Chisti, Masooma Syed, Naiza Khan, Adeela Khan, Rashid Rana, Noorjehn Bilgramy, Huma Mulji, Farida Batool, Ali Raza, Sophie Ernst, Faiza But, M. Ali Talpur, Imran Qureshi, Ameen Gulgee, Jamal Shah, Nazish Ataullah, Aaisha Khalid, Risham Syed and many others who spread the ideology to Melbourne, Dubai, London, New York, Berlin, etc.

Before their first thesis, IVSAA'S principal invited me for slide show of my work, but to my surprise only the faculty staff was invited and not the students. After a month or so one of the faculty member Kamran Hamid told me, "Mansoor go and see student's thesis at IVSAA where teachers has influenced students to do work which is similar to your ideology"." Now it is a tradition there. Even their very architecture is based on the ideology of some of my old flashes and on article published in press. Against me, I even find wrong propaganda by hijackers of my work. And rather through lobby in media they even sensor or edit my interviews according to their need of representing me with those works which they have not preferred to hijack from my flashes. In Shisha, Shanakht, Carce, IVSAA, Fomma and VASL works I have observed direct influence of ideologies, imageries derived out of my flashes. For assessment of the influence, historiographical approach is required. For commercial reason, they can ignore me too but future history will not. Local art magazine and art book writers were chased to ignore me.

I also held slide show of the work at NCA in 1981, where Zahoor-ul-Akhlaque, his wife and his students saw the show. Salima Hashmi wrote an article on my exhibition at Alhambra gallery Lahore, in March, 1984. The effort bore its fruit, through historiography one can trace after 1981, the change in NCA and change in Zahoor, Ejazul Hasan, Salima Hashmi, Shahid Sajjad, Mehar Afroze, etc., and change in their younger generation of students. They and other agents and technology (since 1974 perhaps) spread the influence of my flashes abroad as well, for instance on Beverly Pepper, Nicole Eisenman, Anish Kapoor, Mohsin Zaidi, Susanne Kessler and etc.

All the names mentioned above have the right to disagree with me, these are just friendly assumptions for researchers to look at such debate too to guess what the Flashes are? I too was inspired by many but after receiving Flashes from nature, I painted these with realization that they are more important than Mona Lisa, E=mc2 or Taj Mahal. I have no solo shows in prestigious gallery abroad I have no big post, scholarship or any sponsorship or awards, etc. But what Nature has given me in form of Flashes is more important that they are prototype for all time to come, back to the future or forward into the past. All artists are free to make anything they wish or according to market forces but I have to make (for science) what I receive in form of Flashes. Historiographicaly speaking Flashes' influence is more than what the work of Shakir Ali, Sadequein, Gulgee, M.F. Hussain and etc. had. But no comment I see in the catalogue of 2007- National exhibition, even the Karachiets have ignored me too. Sindh Governor is not using his Legend Fund; I now in time of Parkinson disease need sponsorship to continue the mission, if possible Inshallah. ...MS

 

Mansoor Saleem's solo show, May, 2008

Shakil Ismail Art Gallery

Ground Floor, Marine Point, Block 9, Clifton Karachi. Tel: 0321-2409949, E-mail: shakilismailartgallery@yahoo.com

Gallery is not responsible what artists express freely

 

BEAUFORT SEA (March 15, 2018) - The Royal Navy hunter killer submarine HMS Trenchant (S 91) surfaces in the Beaufort Sea during Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2018. ICEX is a five-week exercise that allows the U.S. Navy to assess its operational readiness in the Arctic, increase experience in the region, advance understanding of the Arctic environment and continue to develop relationships with other services, allies and partner organizations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication 2nd Class Micheal H. Lee) 180311-N-LY160-321

 

** Interested in following U.S. Pacific Command? Engage and connect with us at www.facebook.com/pacific.command | twitter.com/PacificCommand |

instagram.com/pacificcommand | www.flickr.com/photos/us-pacific-command; | www.youtube.com/user/USPacificCommand | www.pacom.mil/

  

This is Miss Indian Arizona 2024-2025 Isabella Newman, San Carlos Apache Tribe

missindianarizona.com/index.html

Isabella Kara Newman is representing the San Carlos Apache Tribe. She is the 23 - year-old daughter of Darice and Garrold Newman. Isabella graduated from Dartmouth College and received her Bachelor's degree in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages with a minor in Government. She currently works as an executive assistant for the San Carlos Apache Tribe in the Office of the Chairman. Isabella would like to pursue law school to practice international indigenous law as an attorney. Isabella states, "I have a passion for history and understanding cultures around the world." Some of her accomplishments include Most Improved Player in pickleball and Cadet of the Year in her high school JROTC program. In her free time, Isabella enjoys reading, writing, playing pickleball, beading, and hanging out with her friends and family. 2024 - 2025 Miss Indian Arizona, Isabella plans to "Promote Achieving Confidence and Success through Education." Isabella won Miss Congeniality Award - Community Service Award - Essay Award - Evening Wear Award - Oral Presentation Award the Best Evening Wear award, and a $5,000 educational scholarship.

 

Miss Indian Arizona 1st Attendant Hannah Nockideneh is representing the Navajo Nation. she is the 21-year-old daughter of Lisa and Frank Nockideneh. Currently, Hannah attends Arizona State University and is majoring in Physics and Mathematics. She plans to continue her educational journey by earning a Ph.D. in physics. After graduate school, she would like to pursue a career as a particle physicist and hopes to someday be selected as the Nobel Prize winner in physics. Outside of her interest in physics and astronomy, Hannah enjoys beading, running, staying physically active, painting, and trying new places to eat. She states that her personal goals, "are to always learn something new and create good habits" such as undertaking beadwork and creating a healthy work-life balance. One of her accomplishments includes earning the Miss Indigenous ASU (2023-2024) title. Her platform, "Embrace education to transform our futures for Indigenous communities." Hannah Nockideneh won Best Talent and received a $2,500 educational scholarship.

 

Miss Indian Arizona 2nd Attendant Tonana Amber Ben is representing the Navajo Nation. She is the 21-year-old daughter of Brenlla Gilmore and Gerald Ben. Tohana is currently attending Arizona State University and majoring in Biomedical Sciences. Her educational goals are to successfully graduate college and pursue a doctorate in genetic research "to focus on how we can improve health and learn more about genetic diseases." Throughout Tonana's academic journey, she has been awarded the President's honors list and was an Education Forward Scholar. Other accomplishments include earning the title Miss Indian Arizona 1st Attendant 2023-2024 and being an elected member of the American Indian Science Engineering Society chapter at ASU. In her free time, Tonana enjoys sewing traditional clothes, running, playing intramural basketball at ASU with an all-native team she formed, and spending time with her dog Kora and cat Chitty. Tonana plans to "Promote cultural resilience amongst urban indigenous communities." and received a $2,000 educational scholarship

 

This year's theme was "Honoring Warrior Women." Celebrating the Legacy of Veronica Homer the 1st Miss Indian Arizona crowned in 1961.The Miss Indian Arizona Association congratulates all the winners and extends sincere thanks to all of the participants, their parents, our financial and In-Kind sponsors, and the many people who come out to enjoy the 63rd Annual Miss Indian Arizona Scholarship Program.

 

missindianarizona.com/2024_2025_Participants.html

 

scottsdaleparade.com/

"The annual parade & community celebration attracts over 30,000 people and provides an opportunity to showcase the history, participating school groups, bands, live musical entertainment, and great shopping. Plan on being in old town Scottsdale all day with your friends to experience Arizona’s old west entertainment. Groups and bus tours are welcome and there is plenty of parking for large vehicles.

 

"The Parada del Sol Historic Parade has been a Scottsdale, AZ tradition since 1953. The streets of Old Town Scottsdale welcome over 30,000 spectators and nearly 150 Parade entries marching down Scottsdale Road.

 

"Beginning immediately after the Parade, The Trail’s End Festival is a huge block party for all ages, featuring live concerts, food, and fun. And the KIDZ Zone with games, pony rides and much more will keep the lil cowpokes happy. There will be many food and merchandise vendors located throughout the area and food trucks featured during the Trail’s End Festival.

 

Scottsdale Parada del Sol 2025

Parada del Sol 2025

With a guest over for dinner I wasn't expecting to get over to the beach tonight. Fortunately he was very understanding when I asked if I could nip out between main course and pudding!

Goethe's approach to understanding nature: quotes from his writings

“After what I have seen of plants and fish in Naples and Sicily, I would be tempted — were I ten years younger — to undertake a journey to India, not to discover something new, but to view in my way what has been discovered.”Goethe (CH; Letter to Knebel, summer 1787)

“If we want to behold nature in a living way, we must follow her example and becomes as mobile and malleable as nature herself.”Goethe (CH; in Miller, p. 64)“There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age.”Goethe (in Miller, p. 307)“... Dr. Heinroth speaks favorably of my work; in fact, he calls my approach unique, for he says that my thinking works objectively. Here he means that my thinking is not separate from objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it; that my perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception.”Goethe (in Miller, p. 39)“If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole.”At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, but nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. I can do so by dissolving the particular without destroying the impression ...“If we imagine the outcome of these attempts, we will see that empirical observation finally ceases, inner beholding of what develops begins, and the idea can be brought to expression.”Goethe (in Miller p. 75)“[Morphology's] intention is to portray rather than explain.”Goethe (in Miller p. 57)“We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal — as so often thought — is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse.”Goethe (in Miller, p. 121) Goethe on Experimentation and Making Judgments (From “The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject,” written in 1772; in Miller pp. 11-17.) “We can never be too careful in our efforts to avoid drawing hasty conclusions from experiments or using them directly as proof to bear out some theory. For here at this pass, this transition from empirical evidence to judgment, cognition to application, all the inner enemies of man lie in wait: imagination, which sweeps him away on his wings before he knows his feet have left the ground; impatience; haste; self-satisfaction; rigidity; formalistic thought; prejudice; ease; frivolity; fickleness — this whole throng and its retinue. Here they lie in ambush and surprise not only the active observer but also the contemplative one who appears safe from all passion.”

“I would venture to say we cannot prove anything by one experiment or even several experiments together, that nothing is more dangerous than the desire to prove some thesis directly through experiments. ... Every piece of empirical evidence we find, every experiment in which this evidence is repeated, really represents just one part of what we know. ... Every piece of empirical evidence, every experiment, must be viewed as isolated, yet the human faculty of thought forcibly strives to unite all external objects known to it. ...”

“We often find that the more limited the data, the more artful a gifted thinker will become. As though to assert his sovereignty he chooses a few agreeable favorites from the limited number of facts and skillfully marshals the rest so they never contradict him directly. Finally he is able to confuse, entangle, or push aside the opposing facts and reduce the whole to something more like the court of a despot than a freely constituted republic.”

natureinstitute.org/about/who/goethe.htm

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases explains food allergy and offers tips on how to manage the condition.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKVjKC3u9hk&feature=youtu.be

 

Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health

  

Buttercup bokeh..... all gone now as the grass just had to be cut before it became an impossible job :( I need to create a meadow somewhere......

stanbonnar.net/

More Details Here:

ilovelowcostbirdly.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/understanding....

My understanding is that is now known as Broadstone Plaza or the Broadstone Gate and the original plan is described below:

 

"The Broadstone Gate will provide a key access to the Grangegorman site once complete and is being developed as part of the Luas Cross City works. It will be finished as a public plaza and the access will provide a major linkage between Grangegorman and Dublin city."

 

"The plaza is situated off Constitution Hill on the site of the old royal canal at the former Great Weatern Railway Station commonly known as Broadstone, and will mark a prominent entrance to the Grangegorman urban quarter."

 

"Under the Grangegorman Masterplan, the primary urban path through Grangegorman – St Brendan’s Way will link with the Broadstone Gate which when completed will reach as far as Prussia Street. The link with Broadstone can also be seen as an extension to the 18th century historic spine of Dublin City which covered Dublin Castle across Grattan Bridge, along Capel Street/Bolton Street, Henrietta Street and King’s Inn."

 

The new pedestrian/cyclist link between Grangegorman and Constitution Hill was officially opened in November. This link in its current format is temporary until site development in that area is completed. The initial opening hours for the link are Monday – Friday, from 7am – 4pm and on Saturdays, from 7.30am – 2pm. I have been advised by the Grangegorman Development Agency that it intends to expand these opening hours soon.

 

As you can see from my photographs the Plaza Area is currently a building site but I am hoping that it will be complete within a few months.

 

This was the most patient and understanding bird I've met in a long time. By the time I was done setting this camera up, any other bird would have left....but not this one! This one hung around until I was done...and I didn't even get her name.

An offer to save money was misread as advice until it became a desperate call to action. Unfortunately, understanding came too late. At least the pigeons seem to appreciate the irony.

 

Hope you had a good weekend kids ~

 

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson

 

I want to thank everyone who has purchased my images. At times, these sales have helped me get through some of the challenges I have faced. And, it has enabled me to donate some of my work to clinics that serve the poor in Virginia. Tomorrow, I will be taking a large framed print to the Johnson Clinic in Lynchburg. Thanks to all of your support I have been able to embark on this project which I have called Vision of Hope.

To read more about Vision of Hope: sites.google.com/site/robertmillerphotography/home/vision...

 

Again, I want to thank everyone and I want you to know that this project is because of you more than me.

 

To view large robertmillerphotography.smugmug.com/Other/Best-of-Vivid-L...

Martin Creed

Work No. 2630 UNDERSTANDING, 2016

Red Neon, Steel

Approx dims: 21 3/5 x 50 x 2 1/8 ft / 658.6 x 1524 x 66 cm. Base 25 x 25 feet at top / 33 x 33 feet at bottom

Presented by Public Art Fund, May 4 – October 23, 2016 at Pier 6, Brooklyn Bridge Park

Courtesy the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise New York/Rome, and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Jason Wyche, Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY

© Martin Creed 2016

 

"All beings with two, three, four, or five senses.... in fact all creation, know individually pleasure and displeasure, pain, terror, and sorrow.

All are full of fears which come from all directions. And yet there exist people who would cause greater pain to them...

Some kill animals for sacrifice, some for their skin, flesh, blood, ... feathers, teeth, or tusks; ... some kill them intentionally and some unintentionally; some kill because they have been previously injured by them, ... and some because they expect to be injured.

He who harms animals has not understood or renounced deeds of sin...

He who understands the nature of sin against animals is called a true sage who understands karma... "

(Acaranga Sutra, Jainism - Prayer n°3943)

 

A few hours ago I went back to take a few pictures of those huge Jain thirthankaras (saints) rockcut statues on the way to Gwalior Fort.

This is a close-up of the hand of one of the 24 statues which are standing there since the seventh century a.d..

It belongs to the tallest (about 20 meters) and it is overlooking the city of Gwalior which is located the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

View On Black

  

See how these 6 simple ways can change your life.

Although some religions have introduced us as sinners and guilty, it doesn't and hasn't changed

our reality. We are love covered by the conditioned mind which has taken command of our whole existence. Nevertheless it has never and will never be able to change our being.

Inside all and every single one of us there is a reality untouched by any mind and thanks to yoga and meditation, it is starting to reveal itself in a way it never had. Below are the six secrets we have found will lead to Living Your Truth and also Loving Your Life in the quickest amount of time.

 

Key 1: Know Your Truth

 

Exactly how can we listen to the body's knowledge if we're constantly hurrying, reflecting concerning the past, projecting into the future, as well as mishandling time? Our authentic self realities existing in silence. In order to disclose that self, we should find stillness and also silence for a dedicated time frame every day. During this moment, show on exactly how you were educated "fact." Were you encouraged to reject your personal fact? As an example, did you want to be an artist, instead were informed to obtain a degree in company due to the fact that the job market is a lot better? Were you interested in learning a particular sport, instead a moms and dad pressed you to play a different one at which they stood out? Lots of might have been shown that talking the truth was impolite if it somehow angered one more person, so you established the "Disease to Please" in order to maintain the peace and not hurt feelings. Journal concerning exactly what your reflections expose from youth as well as attach the dots onward to problems you could have today.

  

Key 2: Speak Your Truth

 

Once you have systems in position to aid you identify your fact, the following action is to be able to properly honor as well as interact it. Ask on your own: How do I really feel? What do I require? Just what do I want? Express the solutions without have to validate or safeguard. You have to start every interaction with the hope that your demands will certainly be satisfied. Occasionally, our requirements can not be fulfilled nor do we have the need or storage capacity to fulfill another person's, so we must also learn how to with dignity, yet absolutely, say and also get "no." Along with spoken expression, revealing your authentic self through garments, embellishing your individual area, and developing something from absolutely nothing (art, creating, etc.) are all fun as well as liberating ways to mirror your credibility back to you.

 

Key 3: Lose Your Mafia (FEAR) Mind

 

Consider exactly how much of your day is worked on autopilot. This is your subconscious mind which is helpful in enabling you to keep in mind ways to reach work and tie your shoes, yet is detrimental in that it creates you to hang onto the same ol' ways of believing and the "this is the means it's consistently been so this is the method it will certainly continue to be" attitude. This is where the initial key is also vital due to the fact that all unfavorable inner voices have a beginning. Allow yourself to peel back the layers to subject when/ where/ by which the fear came from and also why you have actually transformed it right into scripture. If your auto-pilot worry mind runs your life's show, it additionally extorts pleasure from it. Understanding that many anxiety is a sensation not a fact releases you to transform your feedback. Worry belongs to the human condition and insightful, instead you do have control over exactly how much it controls you. To be genuine, you need to want to extend of your comfort zone. Have faith that you will make it through, grow, as well as learn just what it is you are indicated to know when you do exactly what you are called to do. Fear can be your largest instructor or the obstruction to where you intend to go. You determine.

  

Key 4: You = The Only ONE

"Comparison is the thief of delight."-- Dwight Edwards

 

When you cannot accept and also celebrate your originality, you adapt as well as pack on your own down, ultimately bring about those high qualities being lost. This "opposite side" of us becomes our shadow self-- the component of ourselves that we reject, dismiss, and think to be unwanted. The building of the shadow self returns to your upbringing as well as what high qualities were kept in esteem. Residing in your fact indicates allowing and embracing all aspects of YOU. Because you are the just you, now and also evermore, attempting to live another's life is just impossible. Concentrate on the high qualities that set you apart, honor your stability in all you do, and also accept your shadow self with kindness. Nobody else has your distinct presents and also abilities.

 

Key 5: Downloaded Blueprints

 

A belief is merely a thought you've had sometimes. Any type of area of your life that is not working is more than likely built on a malfunctioning plan (aka belief) designed by others. Disclosing your restricting, acquired ideas is the start of redrawing your plan to actually match the life you wish to develop. Identify you have control to flip the old downloaded and install blueprint from the past into a new, fresh version that matches your reality. (Check out the Daily Living tab on my site for assist with downloaded and install blueprints around love, cash, and health and wellness.).

  

Key 6: Revealing as well as Building Core Self with Balance.

 

When encountered with a decision, ask yourself two concerns to find your reality and live from your core self. What is my highest excellent in this moment? Exactly what is the following ideal action for me to take? When you attain this quality, you are in balance as well as can examine where you run out equilibrium. In those locations that are imbalanced, replying these concerns will certainly set you on course to creating concrete modifications to come back to center. Chump changes will certainly include up to big shifts, so ditch the all-or-nothing mentality and also begin today to know your truth and melt in joy.

 

With love by Yogasensing

   

www.yogasensing.com/yoga/know-your-truth-and-melt-in-joy/

'Understanding the past' On Black

Never going to give in even with the strength.

 

Last night I got such a heartwarming phone call from this sweet old lady from a Women's Club around here. She called to let me know that the district photography contest I entered in, my photo won first place. (:

 

I'm in love with this song lately.

 

(+4 in comments)

"The Nightingale" arranged from the story by Hans Andersen, and illustrated by Rene Cloke. Undated, Edmund Ward of Leicester, England.

Leipziger Buchmesse 2015

2015-03-13 (Friday)

2015_002

2015#tbd

 

____ (___) ______ as ___ from ___

 

Thank you for any group invites which I will gladly accept. However, if I can't check the content of such groups ("This group is not available to you") I'd rather not add any of my photos. Thanks for your understanding.

My understanding is that there is considerable scratching of heads when it comes to this mural. It looks like a man in prayer, who to me, looks like he is impaled by a straw that has something in it. Is the life being sucked out of him, and that's why he is praying? Or is Heaven giving essence and nourishment to a troubled soul?

 

This mural is smack dab in the heart of Civil Rights country.

 

Frankly, when I first saw this mural, I scratched my head: 'What on earth?' What I now realize might be important that I did not understand or photograph at the time was that this image's bottom half is colored black, while the top half of the person is transparent. With a black outline. I suspect that the transparent half that is part of the black half represents us all, no matter one's color. I can cut and paste a self-image in here. The straw extends all the way down into the posterior of the black half.

 

—-

Mural title: ‘The Prayer’ (2011)

Artist: Sam3 (Spain)

Place: Atlanta

Edit: 2015 Version

Seen at the Tate Modern in London. I chose this image because I loved the colours. But beyond that, I am fascinated by how the artist may change the world-view of any viewer. This painting by Francis Bacon (1975) is called 'Three Figures and a Portrait' and offers an insight to Bacon's suffering. Two of the human figures may be George Dyer, his lover, who committed suicide in 1971, while the bird-like figure is linked to divine judgement in Greek mythology. Bacon describes his paintings as looking 'as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of past events'. By photographing this long chain of human reaction, it is interesting how the alchemy is passed along.

 

copyright: © varenne. All rights reserved. Please do not use this image, or any images from my photostream, without my permission.

 

www.fluidr.com/photos/varenneistanbul

We saw this monument a couple of days ago, and I didn’t really know then if / how I would share this. It represents one of my “watershed” moments, when the past, the present and the future explode into a singular crystal-clear understanding of how things work. The first of these moments was in Cape Town, South Africa, after reading the simple statement at a museum that South African only became a true democracy when apartheid ended. Part of my immense admiration for Prime Minister John DIefenbaker stems from the fact that he had the courage to push through legislation in 1960 that gave Canada’s Aboriginals the ability to vote in elections, something prohibited under the old Indian Act of the day. Canada only became a true democracy in 1960. The watershed moment then was that Canada until then had been existing until 1960 in a state of apartheid just like South Africa.

 

This recent watershed moment was that a specific object like a bush plane could have radically different interpretations, depending on your own history and genealogy. To understand the pain that permeates the text here is to know a little about Canada’s residential school system, which is as old as Canada itself. Legislation was enacted early on allowing the government to remove children from Aboriginal families and have them taught in European-style residential schools. To put it bluntly, the schools literally tried to beat the Indian-ness out of the students. Although this sounds a bit harsh, it was in fact one of cruelest things a government could do its own people. Today it is understood that this school system was an act of genocide, one that continued the policies that had been started under British rule primarily through the destruction of the buffalo. The last of the residential schools ended in the 1980’s, and so for the last 50 years of the system, bush planes had been the instrument used to sever children from their parents, some who never see each other again, as not all children survived the schools, and not all parents survived being without their children. Or if they did, neither parent nor child would be the same person for the indignity and cruelty they suffered.

 

It may seem that Canada is painted here in an awful light, and this only portrays a small part this sad part of our history. But I believe, however, that the same can be demonstrated in every country in Western Europe, as well as in Russia, the U.S.A., China, Japan and elsewhere. Whether it is Buckingham Palace, the Louvre, the Empire State Building, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, etc etc, each of the empires which generated these marvels was built on the backs and from the blood of serfs, child-workers, slaves, and countless underclasses. As a result, today we have the immigration crisis out of Asian and African to Europe, and we have Black Lives Matter. None of us is exempt, none of us is not-guilty.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_...

   

Where is that fine line,

Where a pixl becomes a focus,

And the image looses the honor of the photograph, but moves out of illustration because no artist held a brush?

For me it's about trying to find meaning in the visual world, about detecting what Rupert Sheldrake called 'morphic resonance' the evolving sha ping of time space.

 

Why trying to understand the motives behind human behavior is well nigh impossible

In my more than 25 years of writing an advice column I regularly get asked several different versions of “When a woman does Y, what does that mean?” or “My husband did X. What did he mean by ...

 

howdoidate.com/relationships/communication/need-mind-read...

Western South Dakota is home to incredible sights like the Badlands and the Needles of the Black Hills, but nothing “sticks out” quite like Mount Rushmore National Memorial. This giant monument celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2016. In honor of this milestone, here are 75 facts about the sculpture that has captured the imaginations of so many.

 

1. The idea of creating a sculpture in the Black Hills was dreamed up in 1923 by South Dakota historian Doane Robinson. He wanted to find a way to attract tourists to the state.

 

2. It worked. Mount Rushmore is now visited by nearly 3 million people annually.

 

3. Robinson initially wanted to sculpt the likenesses of Western heroes like Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, explorers Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody into the nearby stone pinnacles known as the Needles.

 

4. Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum was enlisted to help with the project. At the time, he was working on the massive carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia, but by his own account said the model was flawed and the monument wouldn’t stand the test of time. He was looking for a way out when South Dakota called.

 

5. Borglum, a good friend of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, dreamed of something bigger than the Needles. He wanted something that would draw people from around the world. He wanted to carve a mountain.

 

6. Besides, the Needles site was deemed too narrow for sculpting, and the mountain had better exposure to the sun.

 

7. Borglum and his son, Lincoln, thought the monument should have a national focus and decided that four presidents should be carved.

 

8. The presidents were chosen for their significant contribution to the founding, expansion, preservation and unification of the country.

 

9. George Washington (1789-1797) was chosen because he was our nation’s founding father.

 

10. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was chosen to represent expansion, because he was the president who signed the Louisiana Purchase and authored the Declaration of Independence.

 

11. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was chosen because he represented conservation and the industrial blossoming of the nation.

 

12. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was chosen because he led the country through the Civil War and believed in preserving the nation at any cost.

 

13. The mountain that Borglum chose to carve was known to the Lakota as the “Six Grandfathers.”

 

14. It had also been known as Cougar Mountain, Sugarloaf Mountain, Slaughterhouse Mountain and Keystone Cliffs, depending who you asked.

 

15. The mountain’s official name came from a New York lawyer who was surveying gold claims in the area in 1885.

 

16. Charles E. Rushmore asked his guide, William Challis, “What’s the name of that mountain?” Challis is said to have replied, “It’s never had one…till now…we’ll call the damn thing Rushmore.”

 

17. In 1930, the United States Board on Geographic Names officially recognized it as Mount Rushmore.

 

18. The carving of Mount Rushmore began in 1927 and finished in 1941.

 

19. The actual carving was done by a team of over 400 men.

 

20. Remarkably, no one died during construction.

 

21. The men who worked on the mountain were miners who had come to the Black Hills looking for gold.

 

22. Although they weren’t artists, they did know how to use dynamite and jackhammers.

 

23. The Borglums did hire one artist, Korczak Ziolkowski, to work as an assistant on the mountain. But after 19 days and a heated argument with Lincoln Borglum, Ziolkowski left the project. He would later begin another mountain carving nearby, Crazy Horse Memorial, which today is the world’s largest mountain sculpture in progress.

 

24. Mount Rushmore once had an amateur baseball team.

 

25. Because Gutzon and Lincoln Borglum were so competitive, they would often hire young men for their baseball skills rather than their carving and drilling skills.

 

26. In 1939, the Rushmore Memorial team took second place at the South Dakota amateur baseball tournament.

 

27. The image of the sculpture was mapped onto the mountain using an intricate “pointing machine” designed by Borglum.

 

28. It was based on a 1:12 scale model of the final sculpture.

 

29. 90% of the mountain was carved with dynamite, and more than 450,000 tons of rock was removed.

 

30. Afterwards, fine carving was done to create a surface about as smooth as a concrete sidewalk.

 

31. The drillers and finishers were lowered down the 500-foot face of the mountain in bosun chairs held by 3/8-inch-thick steel cables.

 

32. Workers at the top of the mountain would hand crank a winch to raise and lower the drillers.

 

33. If they went too fast, the person in the bosun chair would be dragged up the mountain on their face.

 

34. Young boys (known as call boys) were hired to sit on the side of the mountain to shout messages back and forth to the operators to speed up or slow down.

 

35. Each president’s face is 60 feet high.

 

36. The faces appear in the order: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln.

 

37. Jefferson was originally intended to be on Washington’s right.

 

38. After nearly two years of work on Jefferson, the rock was found to be unsuitable and the partially completed face was “erased” from the mountainside using dynamite.

 

39. Washington’s face was completed in 1934.

 

40. Jefferson’s in 1936.

 

41. Lincoln was finished in 1937.

 

42. In 1937, a bill was introduced to Congress to add the image of women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony to the mountain.

 

43. Congress then passed a bill requiring only the heads that had already been started be completed.

 

44. In 1938, Gutzon Borglum secretly began blasting a Hall of Records in the mountain behind the heads.

 

45. The Hall of Records was meant to be a vault containing the history of the nation and vital documents like the Constitution.

 

46. Congress found out about the project and demanded Borglum use the federal funding for the faces, not the Hall of Records.

 

47. Gutzon reluctantly stopped working on the hall in 1939, but vowed to complete it.

 

48. That same year, the last face — of Theodore Roosevelt — was completed.

 

49. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum died in March of 1941, leaving the completion of the monument to his son Lincoln.

 

50. The carving was originally meant to include the bodies of the presidents down to their waists.

 

51. A massive panel with 8-foot-tall gilded letters commemorating famous territorial acquisitions of the U.S. was also originally intended.

 

52. Funding ran out and the monument was declared complete on October 31, 1941.

 

53. Overall, the project cost $989,992.32 and took 14 years to finish.

 

54. It’s estimated only 6 years included actual carving, while 8.5 years were consumed with delays due to weather and lack of funds.

 

55. Charles E. Rushmore donated $5,000 toward the sculpting of the mountain that bore his name.

 

56. In 1998, Borglum’s vision for the Hall of Records was realized when porcelain tablets containing images and text from the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and biographies of the presidents and Borglum himself were sealed in a vault inside the unfinished hall.

 

57. The Hall of Records played a role in the plot of the 2007 movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets, starring Nicolas Cage.

 

58. Visitor facilities have been added over the years, including a visitor center, the Lincoln Borglum Museum and the Presidential Trail.

 

59. The Lincoln Borglum Museum features multimedia exhibits that let you use an old-style explosives plunger to recreate dynamite blasting the face of the mountain.

 

60. You can also visit the Sculptor’s Studio, where Gutzon Borglum worked on scale models of Mount Rushmore.

 

61. The Grand View Terrace — one of the best places from which to see Mount Rushmore — is located just above the museum.

 

62. The Grand View Terrace is at the end of the Avenue of Flags; it has flags from all 50 states, one district, three territories and two commonwealths of the United States of America.

 

63. The Presidential Trail is a 0.5-mile walking trail that offers up-close and different views of each face.

 

64. If you start the trail from the Sculptor’s Studio, you’ll have to climb 422 stairs. Enter the trail from the Grand View Terrace and you’ll have an easier time of it.

 

63. Rushmore’s resident mountain goats are descendants of a herd that was gifted to Custer State Park by Canada in 1924.

 

64. They evidently escaped (naughty goats!).

 

67. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Ben Black Elk, a famous Lakota holy man, personally greeted visitors to Mount Rushmore.

 

68. Every night, Mount Rushmore gets illuminated for two hours.

 

69. Since illumination can impact the natural environment (think lost moths, among other things), a new high-tech LED lighting system was installed in 2015 to minimize the negative effects of lighting Mount Rushmore.

 

70. Some believe you can see an elephant, or at least the stone face of an elephant, if you look to the right of Lincoln. Others believe if you look at a picture of the mountain rotated 90 degrees, you can see another face.

 

71. Mount Rushmore is granite, which erodes roughly 1 inch every 10,000 years.

 

72. Since each of the noses is about 240 inches long, they might last up to 2.4 million years before they completely wear away.

 

73. After about 500,000 years, the faces will likely have lost some of their definition. But at this rate the basic shape of the presidents’ heads might last up to 7 million years.

 

74. Numerous things are being done to preserve Mount Rushmore. This has included installing 8,000 feet of camouflaged copper wire in 1998 to help monitor 144 hairline cracks. The copper wire was replaced with fiber optic cable in 2009.

 

75. So far preservation efforts have been successful, with Mount Rushmore celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2016 — all four noses, chins and foreheads (as well as all 8 eyes, nostrils, lips and ears) intact!

 

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore (Lakota: Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers) in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture's design and oversaw the project's execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features the 60-foot-tall (18 m) heads of four United States Presidents recommended by Borglum: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). The four presidents were chosen to represent the nation's birth, growth, development and preservation, respectively. The memorial park covers 1,278 acres (2.00 sq mi; 5.17 km2) and the actual mountain has an elevation of 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.

 

The sculptor and tribal representatives settled on Mount Rushmore, which also has the advantage of facing southeast for maximum sun exposure. Doane Robinson wanted it to feature American West heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud,[9] Buffalo Bill Cody, and Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse. Borglum believed that the sculpture should have broader appeal and chose the four presidents.

 

Peter Norbeck, U.S. senator from South Dakota, sponsored the project and secured federal funding. Construction began in 1927; the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. After Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln took over as leader of the construction project. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941.

 

Sometimes referred to as the "Shrine of Democracy", Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually.

 

Mount Rushmore was conceived with the intention of creating a site to lure tourists, representing "not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of western civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation." Though for the latest occupants of the land at the time, the Lakota Sioux, as well as other tribes, the monument in their view "came to epitomize the loss of their sacred lands and the injustices they've suffered under the U.S. government." Under the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government promised the territory, including the entirety of the Black Hills, to the Sioux "so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase." After the discovery of gold on the land, American settlers migrated to the area in the 1870s. The federal government then forced the Sioux to relinquish the Black Hills portion of their reservation.

 

The four presidential faces were said to be carved into the granite with the intention of symbolizing "an accomplishment born, planned, and created in the minds and by the hands of Americans for Americans".

 

Mount Rushmore is known to the Lakota Sioux as "The Six Grandfathers" (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe) or "Cougar Mountain" (Igmútȟaŋka Pahá); but American settlers knew it variously as Cougar Mountain, Sugarloaf Mountain, Slaughterhouse Mountain and Keystone Cliffs. As Six Grandfathers, the mountain was on the route that Lakota leader Black Elk took in a spiritual journey that culminated at Black Elk Peak. Following a series of military campaigns from 1876 to 1878, the United States asserted control over the area, a claim that is still disputed on the basis of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

 

Beginning with a prospecting expedition in 1885 with David Swanzey (husband of Carrie Ingalls), and Bill Challis, wealthy investor Charles E. Rushmore began visiting the area regularly on prospecting and hunting trips. He repeatedly joked with colleagues about naming the mountain after himself. The United States Board of Geographic Names officially recognized the name "Mount Rushmore" in June 1930.

 

Historian Doane Robinson conceived the idea for Mount Rushmore in 1923 to promote tourism in South Dakota. In 1924, Robinson persuaded sculptor Gutzon Borglum to travel to the Black Hills region to ensure the carving could be accomplished. The original plan was to make the carvings in granite pillars known as the Needles. However, Borglum realized that the eroded Needles were too thin to support sculpting. He chose Mount Rushmore, a grander location, partly because it faced southeast and enjoyed maximum exposure to the sun.

 

Borglum said upon seeing Mount Rushmore, "America will march along that skyline."

 

Borglum had been involved in sculpting the Stone Mountain Memorial to Confederate leaders in Georgia, but was in disagreement with the officials there.

 

U.S. Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson of South Dakota introduced bills in early 1925 for permission to use federal land, which passed easily. South Dakota legislation had less support, only passing narrowly on its third attempt, which Governor Carl Gunderson signed into law on March 5, 1925. Private funding came slowly and Borglum invited President Calvin Coolidge to an August 1927 dedication ceremony, at which he promised federal funding. Congress passed the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Act, signed by Coolidge, which authorized up to $250,000 in matching funds. The 1929 presidential transition to Herbert Hoover delayed funding until an initial federal match of $54,670.56 was acquired.

 

Carving started in 1927 and ended in 1941 with no fatalities.

 

Historian Doane Robinson conceived the idea for Mount Rushmore in 1923 to promote tourism in South Dakota. In 1924, Robinson persuaded sculptor Gutzon Borglum to travel to the Black Hills region to ensure the carving could be accomplished. The original plan was to make the carvings in granite pillars known as the Needles. However, Borglum realized that the eroded Needles were too thin to support sculpting. He chose Mount Rushmore, a grander location, partly because it faced southeast and enjoyed maximum exposure to the sun.

 

Borglum said upon seeing Mount Rushmore, "America will march along that skyline."

 

Borglum had been involved in sculpting the Stone Mountain Memorial to Confederate leaders in Georgia, but was in disagreement with the officials there.

 

U.S. Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson of South Dakota introduced bills in early 1925 for permission to use federal land, which passed easily. South Dakota legislation had less support, only passing narrowly on its third attempt, which Governor Carl Gunderson signed into law on March 5, 1925. Private funding came slowly and Borglum invited President Calvin Coolidge to an August 1927 dedication ceremony, at which he promised federal funding. Congress passed the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Act, signed by Coolidge, which authorized up to $250,000 in matching funds. The 1929 presidential transition to Herbert Hoover delayed funding until an initial federal match of $54,670.56 was acquired.

 

The chief carver of the mountain was Luigi Del Bianco, an artisan and stonemason in Port Chester, New York. Del Bianco emigrated to the U.S. from Friuli in Italy and was chosen to work on this project because of his understanding of sculptural language and ability to imbue emotion in the carved portraits.

 

In 1933, the National Park Service took Mount Rushmore under its jurisdiction. Julian Spotts helped with the project by improving its infrastructure. For example, he had the tram upgraded so it could reach the top of Mount Rushmore for the ease of workers. By July 4, 1934, Washington's face had been completed and was dedicated. The face of Thomas Jefferson was dedicated in 1936, and the face of Abraham Lincoln was dedicated on September 17, 1937. In 1937, a bill was introduced in Congress to add the head of civil-rights leader Susan B. Anthony, but a rider was passed on an appropriations bill requiring federal funds be used to finish only those heads that had already been started at that time. In 1939, the face of Theodore Roosevelt was dedicated.

 

The Sculptor's Studio – a display of unique plaster models and tools related to the sculpting – was built in 1939 under the direction of Borglum. Borglum died from an embolism in March 1941. His son, Lincoln Borglum, continued the project. Originally, it was planned that the figures would be carved from head to waist, but insufficient funding forced the carving to end. Borglum had also planned a massive panel in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase commemorating in eight-foot-tall gilded letters the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Louisiana Purchase, and seven other territorial acquisitions from the Alaska purchase to the Panama Canal Zone. In total, the entire project cost US$989,992.32 (equivalent to $18.2 million in 2021).

 

Nick Clifford, the last remaining carver, died in November 2019 at age 98.

 

South Dakota is a landlocked U.S. state in the North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Dakota Sioux tribe, which comprises a large portion of the population with nine reservations currently in the state and has historically dominated the territory. South Dakota is the 17th largest by area, but the 5th least populous, and the 5th least densely populated of the 50 United States. Pierre is the state capital, and Sioux Falls, with a population of about 213,900, is South Dakota's most populous city. The state is bisected by the Missouri River, dividing South Dakota into two geographically and socially distinct halves, known to residents as "East River" and "West River". South Dakota is bordered by the states of North Dakota (to the north), Minnesota (to the east), Iowa (to the southeast), Nebraska (to the south), Wyoming (to the west), and Montana (to the northwest).

 

Humans have inhabited the area for several millennia, with the Sioux becoming dominant by the early 19th century. In the late 19th century, European-American settlement intensified after a gold rush in the Black Hills and the construction of railroads from the east. Encroaching miners and settlers triggered a number of Indian wars, ending with the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. As the southern part of the former Dakota Territory, South Dakota became a state on November 2, 1889, simultaneously with North Dakota. They are the 39th and 40th states admitted to the union; President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the statehood papers before signing them so that no one could tell which became a state first.

 

Key events in the 20th century included the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, increased federal spending during the 1940s and 1950s for agriculture and defense, and an industrialization of agriculture that has reduced family farming. Eastern South Dakota is home to most of the state's population, and the area's fertile soil is used to grow a variety of crops. West of the Missouri River, ranching is the predominant agricultural activity, and the economy is more dependent on tourism and defense spending. Most of the Native American reservations are in West River. The Black Hills, a group of low pine-covered mountains sacred to the Sioux, is in the southwest part of the state. Mount Rushmore, a major tourist destination, is there. South Dakota has a temperate continental climate, with four distinct seasons and precipitation ranging from moderate in the east to semi-arid in the west. The state's ecology features species typical of a North American grassland biome.

 

While several Democrats have represented South Dakota for multiple terms in both chambers of Congress, the state government is largely controlled by the Republican Party, whose nominees have carried South Dakota in each of the last 14 presidential elections. Historically dominated by an agricultural economy and a rural lifestyle, South Dakota has recently sought to diversify its economy in other areas to both attract and retain residents. South Dakota's history and rural character still strongly influence the state's culture.

 

The history of South Dakota describes the history of the U.S. state of South Dakota over the course of several millennia, from its first inhabitants to the recent issues facing the state.

 

Human beings have lived in what is today South Dakota for at least several thousand years. Early hunters are believed to have first entered North America at least 17,000 years ago via the Bering land bridge, which existed during the last ice age and connected Siberia with Alaska. Early settlers in what would become South Dakota were nomadic hunter-gatherers, using primitive Stone Age technology to hunt large prehistoric mammals in the area such as mammoths, sloths, and camels. The Paleolithic culture of these people disappeared around 5000 BC, after the extinction of most of their prey species.

 

Between AD 500 and 800, much of eastern South Dakota was inhabited by a people known as the 'Mound Builders'. The Mound Builders were hunters who lived in temporary villages and were named for the low earthen burial mounds they constructed, many of which still exist. Their settlement seems to have been concentrated around the watershed of the Big Sioux River and Big Stone Lake, although other sites have been excavated throughout eastern South Dakota. Either assimilation or warfare led to the demise of the Mound Builders by the year 800. Between 1250 and 1400 an agricultural people, likely the ancestors of the modern Mandan of North Dakota, arrived from the east and settled in the central part of the state. In 1325, what has become known as the Crow Creek Massacre occurred near Chamberlain. An archeological excavation of the site has discovered 486 bodies buried in a mass grave within a type of fortification; many of the skeletal remains show evidence of scalping and decapitation.

 

The Arikara, also known as the Ree, began arriving from the south in the 16th century. They spoke a Caddoan language similar to that of the Pawnee, and probably originated in what is now Kansas and Nebraska. Although they would at times travel to hunt or trade, the Arikara were far less nomadic than many of their neighbors, and lived for the most part in permanent villages. These villages usually consisted of a stockade enclosing a number of circular earthen lodges built on bluffs looking over the rivers. Each village had a semi-autonomous political structure, with the Arikara's various subtribes being connected in a loose alliance. In addition to hunting and growing crops such as corn, beans, pumpkin and other squash, the Arikara were also skilled traders, and would often serve as intermediaries between tribes to the north and south It was probably through their trading connections that Spanish horses first reached the region around 1760. The Arikara reached the height of their power in the 17th century, and may have included as many as 32 villages. Due both to disease as well as pressure from other tribes, the number of Arikara villages would decline to only two by the late 18th century, and the Arikara eventually merged entirely with the Mandan to the north.

 

The sister tribe of the Arikaras, the Pawnee, may have also had a small amount of land in the state. Both were Caddoan and were among the only known tribes in the continental U.S. to have committed human sacrifice, via a religious ritual that occurred once a year. It is said that the U.S. government worked hard to halt this practice before their homelands came to be heavily settled, for fear that the general public might react harshly or refuse to move there.

 

The Lakota Oral histories tell of them driving the Algonquian ancestors of the Cheyenne from the Black Hills regions, south of the Platte River, in the 18th century. Before that, the Cheyenne say that they were, in fact, two tribes, which they call the Tsitsistas & Sutaio After their defeat, much of their territory was contained to southeast Wyoming & western Nebraska. While they had been able to hold off the Sioux for quite some time, they were heavily damaged by a smallpox outbreak. They are also responsible for introducing the horse to the Lakota.

 

The Ioway, or Iowa people, also inhabited the region where the modern states of South Dakota, Minnesota & Iowa meet, north of the Missouri River. They also had a sister nation, known as the Otoe who lived south of them. They were Chiwere speaking, a very old variation of Siouan language said to have originated amongst the ancestors of the Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin. They also would have had a fairly similar culture to that of the Dhegihan Sioux tribes of Nebraska & Kansas.

 

By the 17th century, the Sioux, who would later come to dominate much of the state, had settled in what is today central and northern Minnesota. The Sioux spoke a language of the Siouan language family, and were divided into two culture groups – the Dakota & Nakota. By the early 18th century the Sioux would begin to move south and then west into the plains. This migration was due to several factors, including greater food availability to the west, as well as the fact that the rival Ojibwe & other related Algonquians had obtained rifles from the French at a time when the Sioux were still using the bow and arrow. Other tribes were also displaced during some sort of poorly understood conflict that occurred between Siouan & Algonquian peoples in the early 18th century.

 

In moving west into the prairies, the lifestyle of the Sioux would be greatly altered, coming to resemble that of a nomadic northern plains tribe much more so than a largely settled eastern woodlands one. Characteristics of this transformation include a greater dependence on the bison for food, a heavier reliance on the horse for transportation, and the adoption of the tipi for habitation, a dwelling more suited to the frequent movements of a nomadic people than their earlier semi-permanent lodges.

 

Once on the plains, a schism caused the two subgroups of the Sioux to divide into three separate nations—the Lakota, who migrated south, the Asiniboine who migrated back east to Minnesota & the remaining Sioux. It appears to be around this time that the Dakota people became more prominent over the Nakota & the entirety of the people came to call themselves as such.

 

The Lakota, who crossed the Missouri around 1760 and reached the Black Hills by 1776, would come to settle largely in western South Dakota, northwestern Nebraska, and southwestern North Dakota. The Yankton primarily settled in southeastern South Dakota, the Yanktonnais settled in northeastern South Dakota and southeastern North Dakota, and the Santee settled primarily in central and southern Minnesota. Due in large part to the Sioux migrations, a number of tribes would be driven from the area. The tribes in and around the Black Hills, most notably the Cheyenne, would be pushed to the west, the Arikara would move further north along the Missouri, and the Omaha would be driven out of southeastern South Dakota and into northeastern Nebraska.

 

Later, the Lakota & Assiniboine returned to the fold, forming a single confederacy known as the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven council fire. This was divided into four cultural groups—the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota & Nagoda-- & seven distinct tribes, each with their own chief—the Nakota Mdewakan (Note—Older attempts at Lakota language show a mistake in writing the sound 'bl' as 'md', such as summer, Bloketu, misprinted as mdoketu. Therefore, this word should be Blewakan.) & Wahpeton, the Dakota Santee & Sisseton, the Nagoda Yankton & Yanktonai & the Lakota Teton. In this form, they were able to secure from the U.S. government a homeland, commonly referred to as Mni-Sota Makoce, or the Lakotah Republic. However, conflicts increased between Sioux & American citizens in the decades leading up the Civil War & a poorly funded & organized Bureau of Indian Affairs had difficulty keeping peace between groups. This eventually resulted in the United States blaming the Sioux for the atrocities & rendering the treaty which recognized the nation of Lakotah null and void. The U.S., however, later recognized their fault in a Supreme Court case in the 1980s after several decades of failed lawsuits by the Sioux, yet little has been done to smooth the issue over to the best interests of both sides.

 

France was the first European nation to hold any real claim over what would become South Dakota. Its claims covered most of the modern state. However, at most a few French scouting parties may have entered eastern South Dakota. In 1679 Daniel G. Duluth sent explorers west from Lake Mille Lacs, and they may have reached Big Stone Lake and the Coteau des Prairies. Pierre Le Sueur's traders entered the Big Sioux River Valley on multiple occasions. Evidence for these journeys is from a 1701 map by William De L'Isle that shows a trail to below the falls of the Big Sioux River from the Mississippi River.

 

After 1713, France looked west to sustain its fur trade. The first Europeans to enter South Dakota from the north, the Verendrye brothers, began their expedition in 1743. The expedition started at Fort La Reine on Lake Manitoba, and was attempting to locate an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean. They buried a lead plate inscribed near Ft. Pierre; it was rediscovered by schoolchildren in 1913.

 

In 1762, France granted Spain all French territory west of the Mississippi River in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. The agreement, which was signed in secret, was motivated by a French desire to convince Spain to come to terms with Britain and accept defeat in the Seven Years' War. In an attempt to secure Spanish claims in the region against possible encroachment from other European powers, Spain adopted a policy for the upper Missouri which emphasized the development of closer trade relations with local tribes as well as greater exploration of the region, a primary focus of which would be a search for a water route to the Pacific Ocean. Although traders such as Jacques D'Eglise and Juan Munier had been active in the region for several years, these men had been operating independently, and a determined effort to reach the Pacific and solidify Spanish control of the region had never been undertaken. In 1793, a group commonly known as the Missouri Company was formed in St. Louis, with the twin goals of trading and exploring on the upper Missouri. The company sponsored several attempts to reach the Pacific Ocean, none of which made it further than the mouth of the Yellowstone. In 1794, Jean Truteau (also spelled Trudeau) built a cabin near the present-day location of Fort Randall, and in 1795 the Mackay-Evans Expedition traveled up the Missouri as far as present-day North Dakota, where they expelled several British traders who had been active in the area. In 1801, a post known as Fort aux Cedres was constructed by Registre Loisel of St. Louis, on Cedar Island on the Missouri about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of the present location of Pierre. This trading post was the major regional post until its destruction by fire in 1810.[30] In 1800, Spain gave Louisiana back to France in the Treaty of San Ildefonso.

 

In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon for $11,000,000. The territory included most of the western half of the Mississippi watershed and covered nearly all of present-day South Dakota, except for a small portion in the northeast corner of the state. The region was still largely unexplored and unsettled, and President Thomas Jefferson organized a group commonly referred to as the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the newly acquired region over a period of more than two years. The expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, was tasked with following the route of the Missouri to its source, continuing on to the Pacific Ocean, establishing diplomatic relations with the various tribes in the area, and taking cartographic, geologic, and botanical surveys of the area. The expedition left St. Louis on May 14, 1804, with 45 men and 15 tons of supplies in three boats (one keelboat and two pirogues). The party progressed slowly against the Missouri's current, reaching what is today South Dakota on August 22. Near present-day Vermillion, the party hiked to the Spirit Mound after hearing local legends of the place being inhabited by "little spirits" (or "devils"). Shortly after this, a peaceful meeting took place with the Yankton Sioux, while an encounter with the Lakota Sioux further north was not as uneventful. The Lakota mistook the party as traders, at one point stealing a horse. Weapons were brandished on both sides after it appeared as though the Lakota were going to further delay or even halt the expedition, but they eventually stood down and allowed the party to continue up the river and out of their territory. In north central South Dakota, the expedition acted as mediators between the warring Arikara and Mandan. After leaving the state on October 14, the party wintered with the Mandan in North Dakota before successfully reaching the Pacific Ocean and returning by the same route, safely reaching St. Louis in 1806. On the return trip, the expedition spent only 15 days in South Dakota, traveling more swiftly with the Missouri's current.

 

Pittsburgh lawyer Henry Marie Brackenridge was South Dakota's first recorded tourist. In 1811 he was hosted by fur trader Manuel Lisa.

 

In 1817, an American fur trading post was set up at present-day Fort Pierre, beginning continuous American settlement of the area. During the 1830s, fur trading was the dominant economic activity for the few white people who lived in the area. More than one hundred fur-trading posts were in present-day South Dakota in the first half of the 19th century, and Fort Pierre was the center of activity.[citation needed] General William Henry Ashley, Andrew Henry, and Jedediah Smith of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and Manuel Lisa and Joshua Pilcher of the St. Louis Fur Company, trapped in that region. Pierre Chouteau Jr. brought the steamship Yellowstone to Fort Tecumseh on the Missouri River in 1831. In 1832 the fort was replaced by Fort Pierre Chouteau Jr.: today's town of Fort Pierre. Pierre bought the Western Department of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and renamed it Pratte, Chouteau and Company, and then Pierre Chouteau and Company. It operated in present-day South Dakota from 1834 to 1858. Most trappers and traders left the area after European demand for furs dwindled around 1840.

 

Main articles: Kansas–Nebraska Act, Nebraska Territory, Organic act § List of organic acts, and Dakota Territory

In 1855, the U.S. Army bought Fort Pierre but abandoned it the following year in favor of Fort Randall to the south. Settlement by Americans and Europeans was by this time increasing rapidly, and in 1858 the Yankton Sioux signed the 1858 "Treaty of Washington", ceding most of present-day eastern South Dakota to the United States.

 

Land speculators founded two of eastern South Dakota's largest present-day cities: Sioux Falls in 1856 and Yankton in 1859. The Big Sioux River falls was the spot of an 1856 settlement established by a Dubuque, Iowa, company; that town was quickly removed by native residents. But in the following year, May 1857, the town was resettled and named Sioux Falls. That June, St. Paul, Minnesota's Dakota Land Company came to an adjacent 320 acres (130 ha), calling it Sioux Falls City. In June 1857, Flandreau and Medary, South Dakota, were established by the Dakota Land Company. Along with Yankton in 1859, Bon Homme, Elk Point, and Vermillion were among the new communities along the Missouri River or border with Minnesota. Settlers therein numbered about 5,000 in 1860. In 1861, Dakota Territory was established by the United States government (this initially included North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Montana and Wyoming). Settlers from Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, Czechoslovakia[citation needed] and Russia,[citation needed] as well as elsewhere in Europe and from the eastern U.S. states increased from a trickle to a flood, especially after the completion of an eastern railway link to the territorial capital of Yankton in 1872, and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 during a military expedition led by George A. Custer.

 

The Dakota Territory had significant regional tensions between the northern part and the southern part from the beginning, the southern part always being more populated – in the 1880 United States census, the population of the southern part (98,268) was more than two and a half times of the northern part (36,909), and southern Dakotans saw the northern part as bit of disreputable, "controlled by the wild folks, cattle ranchers, fur traders” and too frequently the site of conflict with the indigenous population. Also, the new railroads built connected the northern and southern parts to different hubs – northern part was closer tied to Minneapolis–Saint Paul area; and southern part to Sioux City and from there to Omaha. The last straw was territorial governor Nehemiah G. Ordway moving the territorial capital from Yankton to Bismarck in modern-day North Dakota. As the Southern part had the necessary population for statehood (60,000), they held a separate convention in September 1883 and drafted a constitution. Various bills to divide the Dakota Territory in half ended up stalling, until in 1887, when the Territorial Legislature submitted the question of division to a popular vote at the November general elections, where it was approved by 37,784 votes over 32,913. A bill for statehood for North Dakota and South Dakota (as well as Montana and Washington) titled the Enabling Act of 1889 was passed on February 22, 1889, during the Administration of Grover Cleveland, dividing Dakota along the seventh standard parallel. It was left to his successor, Benjamin Harrison, to sign proclamations formally admitting North and South Dakota to the Union on November 2, 1889. Harrison directed his Secretary of State James G. Blaine to shuffle the papers and obscure from him which he was signing first and the actual order went unrecorded.

 

With statehood South Dakota was now in a position to make decisions on the major issues it confronted: prohibition, women's suffrage, the location of the state capital, the opening of the Sioux lands for settlement, and the cyclical issues of drought (severe in 1889) and low wheat prices (1893–1896). In early 1889 a prohibition bill passed the new state legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Louis Church. Fierce opposition came from the wet German community, with financing from beer and liquor interests. The Yankee women organized to demand suffrage, as well as prohibition. Neither party supported their cause, and the wet element counter-organized to block women's suffrage. Popular interest reached a peak in the debates over locating the state capital. Prestige, real estate values and government jobs were at stake, as well as the question of access in such a large geographical region with limited railroads. Huron was the temporary site, centrally located Pierre was the best organized contender, and three other towns were in the running. Real estate speculators had money to toss around. Pierre, population 3200, made the most generous case to the voters—its promoters truly believed it would be the next Denver and be the railway hub of the Dakotas. The North Western railroad came through but not the others it expected. In 1938 Pierre counted 4000 people and three small hotels.

 

The national government continued to handle Indian affairs. The Army's 1874 Custer expedition took place despite the fact that the western half of present-day South Dakota had been granted to the Sioux by the Treaty of Fort Laramie as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. The Sioux declined to grant mining rights or land in the Black Hills, and the Great Sioux War of 1876 broke out after the U.S. failed to stop white miners and settlers from entering the region. The Sioux were eventually defeated and settled on reservations within South Dakota and North Dakota.

 

In 1889 Harrison sent general George Crook with a commission to persuade the Sioux to sell half their reservation land to the government. It was believed that the state would not be viable unless more land was made available to settlers. Crook used a number of dubious methods to secure agreement and obtain the land.

 

On December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It was the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation, the massacre resulted in the deaths of 300 Sioux, many of them women and children. In addition 25 U.S. soldiers were also killed in the episode.

 

Railroads played a central role in South Dakota transportation from the late 19th century until the 1930s, when they were surpassed by highways. The Milwaukee Road and the Chicago & North Western were the state's largest railroads, and the Milwaukee's east–west transcontinental line traversed the northern tier of the state. About 4,420 miles (7,110 km) of railroad track were built in South Dakota during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though only 1,839 miles (2,960 km) were active in 2007.

 

The railroads sold land to prospective farmers at very low rates, expecting to make a profit by shipping farm products out and home goods in. They also set up small towns that would serve as shipping points and commercial centers, and attract businessmen and more farmers. The Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway (M&StL) in 1905, under the leadership of vice president and general manager L. F. Day, added lines from Watertown to LeBeau and from Conde through Aberdeen to Leola. It developed town sites along the new lines and by 1910, the new lines served 35 small communities.

 

Not all of the new towns survived. The M&StL situated LeBeau along the Missouri River on the eastern edge of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. The new town was a hub for the cattle and grain industries. Livestock valued at one million dollars were shipped out in 1908, and the rail company planned a bridge across the Missouri River. Allotment of the Cheyenne River Reservation in 1909 promised further growth. By the early 1920s, however, troubles multiplied, with the murder of a local rancher, a fire that destroyed the business district, and drought that ruined ranchers and farmers alike. LeBeau became a ghost town.

 

Most of the traffic was freight, but the main lines also offered passenger service. After the European immigrants settled, there never were many people moving about inside the state. Profits were slim. Automobiles and busses were much more popular, but there was an increase during World War II when gasoline was scarce. All passenger service was ended in the state by 1969.

 

In the rural areas farmers and ranchers depended on local general stores that had a limited stock and slow turnover; they made enough profit to stay in operation by selling at high prices. Prices were not marked on each item; instead the customer negotiated a price. Men did most of the shopping, since the main criterion was credit rather than quality of goods. Indeed, most customers shopped on credit, paying off the bill when crops or cattle were later sold; the owner's ability to judge credit worthiness was vital to his success.

 

In the cities consumers had much more choice, and bought their dry goods and supplies at locally owned department stores. They had a much wider selection of goods than in the country general stores and price tags that gave the actual selling price. The department stores provided a very limited credit, and set up attractive displays and, after 1900, window displays as well. Their clerks—usually men before the 1940s—were experienced salesmen whose knowledge of the products appealed to the better educated middle-class housewives who did most of the shopping. The keys to success were a large variety of high-quality brand-name merchandise, high turnover, reasonable prices, and frequent special sales. The larger stores sent their buyers to Denver, Minneapolis, and Chicago once or twice a year to evaluate the newest trends in merchandising and stock up on the latest fashions. By the 1920s and 1930s, large mail-order houses such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward provided serious competition, making the department stores rely even more on salesmanship and close integration with the community.

 

Many entrepreneurs built stores, shops, and offices along Main Street. The most handsome ones used pre-formed, sheet iron facades, especially those manufactured by the Mesker Brothers of St. Louis. These neoclassical, stylized facades added sophistication to brick or wood-frame buildings throughout the state.

 

During the 1930s, several economic and climatic conditions combined with disastrous results for South Dakota. A lack of rainfall, extremely high temperatures and over-cultivation of farmland produced what was known as the Dust Bowl in South Dakota and several other plains states. Fertile topsoil was blown away in massive dust storms, and several harvests were completely ruined. The experiences of the Dust Bowl, coupled with local bank foreclosures and the general economic effects of the Great Depression resulted in many South Dakotans leaving the state. The population of South Dakota declined by more than seven percent between 1930 and 1940.

 

Prosperity returned with the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, when demand for the state's agricultural and industrial products grew as the nation mobilized for war. Over 68,000 South Dakotans served in the armed forces during the war, of which over 2,200 were killed.

 

In 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan was passed as part of the Flood Control Act of 1944 by the U.S. Congress, resulting in the construction of six large dams on the Missouri River, four of which are at least partially located in South Dakota.[83] Flood control, hydroelectricity and recreational opportunities such as boating and fishing are provided by the dams and their reservoirs.

 

On the night of June 9–10, 1972, heavy rainfall in the eastern Black Hills caused the Canyon Lake Dam on Rapid Creek to fail. The failure of the dam, combined with heavy runoff from the storm, turned the usually small creek into a massive torrent that washed through central Rapid City. The flood resulted in 238 deaths and destroyed 1,335 homes and around 5,000 automobiles.[84] Damage from the flood totaled $160 million (the equivalent of $664 million today).

 

On April 19, 1993, Governor George S. Mickelson was killed in a plane crash in Iowa while returning from a business meeting in Cincinnati. Several other state officials were also killed in the crash. Mickelson, who was in the middle of his second term as governor, was succeeded by Walter Dale Miller.

 

In recent decades, South Dakota has transformed from a state dominated by agriculture to one with a more diversified economy. The tourism industry has grown considerably since the completion of the interstate system in the 1960s, with the Black Hills being especially impacted. The financial service industry began to grow in the state as well, with Citibank moving its credit card operations from New York to Sioux Falls in 1981, a move that has since been followed by several other financial companies. In 2007, the site of the recently closed Homestake gold mine near Lead was chosen as the location of a new underground research facility. Despite a growing state population and recent economic development, many rural areas have been struggling over the past 50 years with locally declining populations and the emigration of educated young adults to larger South Dakota cities, such as Rapid City or Sioux Falls, or to other states. The Cattleman's Blizzard of October 2013 killed tens of thousands of livestock in western South Dakota, and was one of the worst blizzards in the state's history.

'Do you ever swear, Gavin?'

 

'Yeh Gav, how come you don’t ever say f*ck?'

 

'Or sh*t. Eh? How come you dinnae swear'

 

'Are you too gay?'

 

'Yeh! Are you a poof Gavin?'

 

'You look like a poof to me, ya poof'

 

And that was how that particular end started. Another day, another verbal kicking from the grotty and the great of class 3b, St Andrews Academy, Paisley. The words you have read above were the proud voices of your future. Scary isn't it? Every single day those creeps would whip themselves up into a clammer about something or other. From the moment you stepped onto the steamy early morning bus, to that blissful escape into the school yard at 3.30 in the afternoon you had to be tense, small and, if you could achieve the feat, invisible. If not, you were het, and if you were het, well nobody was going to step up and help you.

 

To begin with they would settle around you like flies on the proverbial. Sometimes they would acknowledge you; sometimes they would talk around, over and through you without ever addressing you. They were all too aware of the fact that you were there, you were scared and you were going nowhere. Their aim was to identify something that was different about you, with different being defined as bad. It could be anything from the make of your shoes to the place that you lived. All was game to them; it just never seemed that fair.

 

The thing I remember was that they were always bigger in some way. Particularly if you were me and you stood at a statuesque 5'2 long into your teenage years. The ones whose growth spurt had started in earnest used their jangling height and awkward limbs to nudge and judder you. Their uncoordinated new limbs bruising and grazing even when little harm was meant. Those who still had to look you in the eye would swell themselves with threats and demands. The smaller they were, the bigger the mouth seemed to be the rule. Either way, they were bigger, stronger and were always prepared to take things a step further than you ever could. As long as they had friends around.

 

Today was my turn. Today Christopher Burns, Derek Ferguson, Gary Kerr had chosen me as their wee plaything. I was a popular toy. I came from Edinburgh, different, I was polite, different, I worked hard, different, I hadn't kissed a girl, different, I had admitted I didn't know what a condom was, idiot.

 

On that day it was my lack of an appropriate 'street' vocabulary that was to lead to my latest bout of ignominy and opprobrium. The fact that I knew what those words meant but had little concept of what the c word was played a significant part in my downfall. On reflection, the earlier development of some sort of impression of their language might have been useful, but when you're running scared, thoughts tend to scatter rather than coalesce.

 

Anyway, as I was saying, the three turgid amigos were going to have their fun with me, and today there was nothing I could do about it. At the time my chosen protective stance was that of the meek tortoise. Close in the head, pull in the limbs, shut up the mouth and hope they get bored. It worked quite well in the corridors and the playgrounds and I swear there were times I came close to achieving the invisible benchmark noted previously.

 

The success of the tortoise came lay in the fact that if you remained static while all around you the world continued to move, there was usually too much stimulation for the never evolving minds of the bullies to cope with. Their thoughts would quickly scatter onto the next subject of their antagonising larks and they would flit away from your shell forgetting you were ever there.

 

This day was different though. Today I was trapped in a defined space that traps us all for the next 2 hours. Today was the day that Mrs Graham, the once admired French teacher, took my trust in her lovely, maternal hands, and snapped it across her knee. For no reason that I could discern then or now, she moved me. Shifted my seat from the nice warm table across from her desk. The table where my quiet friends sat and quietly learnt some of the quiet French she was teaching us.

 

My relocation was to the far corner of the room, to a 4-desk set up that now housed me, and the three aforementioned bullies. A small deed you may think? Well you think very wrong. This was feeding time at the zoo and I was the raw steak being hurled into the Tiger pen.

 

Why she did this I shall never know. Did I do her wrong? Were my 'Silvous Plait's and Je Voudrais not good enough for her? I mean, I could have expressed my emotions regarding the move in pigeon French, 'Je' m'apelle Gavin, j'ai peur'. Was that not reason enough to leave meek boys well alone? Apparently not. What was worse, those grubby cretins might not know have understood my French cry of despair, but they could clearly smell the sentiment a mile off.

 

It had already been a bad week, I was riding high in the bullying charts for whatever reason. Maybe because my Mum gave me Dunlop trainers rather than the much lobbied for LA Gear Regulators. Maybe it was because I had the temerity to ask the English teacher if I could be pardoned and go to the loo, or maybe I was getting shoddy at the whole tortoise thing.

 

Already I had suffered the perfect crack of a wet towel across my thighs in the sub medieval torture chamber that was the PE changing room. In Home Economics, where we learned how to achieve domestic tranquility, I turned around on my seat just in time to see a folder containing scone recipes swinging with a swingeing swipe at my face. As for Craft and Design, well lordy, I don't know if I can even go into that! I don't know what it was about Tech department teachers but they always seemed in an unseemly rush to leave those angry bags of hormones alone with us quivering sacks of nerves in rooms laden with an armies worth of potential instruments. I can't count the number of times my hand was forcibly held in a vice or a soldering iron was waved in front of my dilating eyes.

 

That week the teacher’s witless plan was to leave us alone with a video about suspension bridges. Fine you say, where lies the harm in that? Well, the harm emerges when the importance of adequate suspension was demonstrated by a slow motion video of a real girl in a real bra, with real breast jogging in really slow motion. I should admit that this was such a formative moment in my early sexual life, and when I say early sexual life, I mean the time when you try to figure out what bit goes where, and how. I also still remember everything about those breasts and have, since that day, found an odd sexual frisson run over my body whenever I approach a suitable engineered bridge.

 

Regardless, the short-term impact was barely worth all of that input. Every single girl, whether they had bloomed into the higher end of the bra cup scale or were still awaiting the onset of their curves, folded their arms in acute embarrassment while the likes of Derek, Gary, Christoper et al span around the room like agitated, spermed up gibbons. Rubbers were thrown, stools toppled, bags were emptied, girls ogled and the video paused, played, rewound, paused and played again. In a way the whole lesson was like a primitive S&M experience, newfound pleasure grazing up against untold pain and fear. Was it any wonder I had so many hard questions to ask of the R.E teacher. Life didn't seem to follow a path informed by the will of a kindly deity. The meek and good life I tried to lead was taking me into some pretty jagged dead ends and the thought that, even if us shy ones were to inherit the earth, we were going to get a hell of a kicking while we waited for ascension.

 

Well, this narrative has wandered has it not? Point is, it had been a bad week already and then I find myself am sat in this room, this one classroom where I used to feel safe, and those fools were sitting all around me. It's probably worth explaining why I was so fond of this class? Why of all the places that this brutal decanting of my youthful self could have taken place in, this would have been the last one I would have picked. One of the main things was that the room stood in opposition to the dilapidation that marred the rest of the building. There were times when it felt like that awful old school was demolishing itself before our very eyes. The toilets were permanently awash with youthful urine and second hand water that seeped out from the leaking pipes and up the trouser legs of all its patrons. The supporting walls moved so easily that if you leant against them with any force you found yourself reclining at awkward angles. As for the days it rained, well, you were as well standing outside as in. There was nothing about that shambles of a building that inspired pride or ownership the way a school should. The anonymous, tumbling old institution was an aesthetic nightmare that bogged down your thoughts the minute you trundled into it.

 

However, the French class was a world apart. It was clean, the walls and carpet (carpets for goodness sake, what luxury!) were a lovely light blue. The strip lighting never flickered and buzzed angrily like it did in every other class while the large north facing windows had a delightful, airy view of the fields and hills near the school. If one was inclined, you could take a break from your lesson and count the cows as they mowed the sloping drumlins in the distance. It had a freshness and security that felt right, that felt like an environment where you could focus on learning rather than survival.

 

What's more, in that class, I sat close to Mrs Graham. She was one of those teachers who was just the right age and of just the right attitude to remind me of my mother. This engendered some level of affection from me to her; she was like a safe chunk of home brought into my school life. I looked up to her, admired her gently firm stance on misbehaviour and misadventure and loved that she was not someone to fear, nor was she someone you would cross. The best thing about Mrs Graham though was that she never left her post. She was as faithful in her duties as the Royal Guards. Not once in our short time together did she walk out of this room, never once leaving us to the frenzy that always followed when a classroom was unsupervised. She knew what lay beneath, or at least I thought she did.

 

'Ho, d*ckhead! You gonnae answer us?' Derek’s nasal twangs buts into my godly wonderings. My inquest would not pass, I remember seeking some escape, some solution other than the endless escalation that was interaction. Mrs Graham was not far away, further than I would have liked, but still close. I could reach out for her, but deep down I knew that would be the end. I knew that she would react, I would be summoned to air my complaints and those boys would be punished. It would extricate me from my predicament for sure, but in relation to the ongoing battle between meek and wild it would have been the equivalent of throwing a water bomb at a teenage tank. The smallest, briefest win before those spotty tracks swung your way with deadly intent.

 

'Of course I swear' I said quietly. This was a lie. I didn't swear, I never swore. Well, once many years before I did call my Mum a b*stard but unless you entirely dismiss the concept of attribution and emotion, this one has to be chalked up as mere rote repetition by an ignorant 8 year old, no offence was intended nor understood as possible.

 

'Oh aye, and whit is it that you say?' says Christopher, grabbing the bone that was me and shaking it some more. I knew I was in trouble, but only then did I realise that I was locked into that most frustrating of traps, the logic loop of an idiot. Like a maze with only one corridor but no exit, it is inherently flawed yet devastatingly effective in its witless simplicity. You are in there; you know the limitations but are trapped by the very same thing. I hated them for it. I hated them for outsmarting me despite all their glaring flaws.

 

'I say lots, all the time. Just not very loudly' my defence was weak, porous and about to break. I was staring defeat in the face.

 

'Why don't you swear just now? Just one f*cking word and we'll leave you alone' says Gary. He always seemed the most sympathetic of them all, but here he had the scent and was more than happy to move on in. His final offer of release was a trap, but I promise that at that moment it looked like the kind of cloud lined sanctuary that all those priests and nutters had promised us for all those years.

 

Of course, I would have had to become a verbal martyr before I could lay my head down in that glorious condensation. Could I do this? Could I open my mouth and let fly a cuss, a curse, a naughty, a BAD word!?!? I didn't swear, I just don't, it was unthinkable. There seemed no need, no room, no point to the endless repetition of f's and c's and b's and w's and all the others that I didn’t even understand. Out there, away from the onetime harbour of peace that was French class, all you heard was the mindless blabbering of their grunting phrases. Sometimes they lay in some form of narrative context (I shall give them that) but other times were used to fill gaps while their sloppy synapses sluggishly formed some nonsensical sentence. I was not one of those people, I was not inclined, prone or even obliged to speak in such a careless, backwards way. There was no point to it and on this issue, I knew I was in the right, I knew virtue stood alongside me, hand gently placed upon my sloping, shaking shoulder.

 

But then, didn't he say they would leave me alone? Didn't my Edinburgh accent with it's smatterings of 'please' and 'may I' lie at the heart of so many of their aggressive deeds. Would it not be some grace on my part to bow down to their level, if only to reassure them that I too was just like them?

 

I looked around the table, their eyes were mocking and expectant, like football fans who see the ball bobbling in front of an open goal, they knew what the outcome was, they were just waiting for release. All around the room I could hear kind, gentle, homely 'Je'mappelle's' and 'J'ai 14 ans' and somewhere, a glorious 'J'ai deux souers'. Mrs Graham was firmly but generously admonishing someone for mixing up the etre verb, oh how I wished that was me. That glorious authoritative voice, if it was near me then I would have been in the clear. All of that was wishful thinking, this was my watershed. Was I to enter into a new world or stubbornly defend my own ways. Did I bow down to peer pressure and give up one more thing that makes me, me? Did I see enough worth in placing survival over pride? I considered all of this for a few seconds and then made my decision.

 

'F*ck' I said meekly.

 

'What's that!' said Christopher in a flash 'I didn't hear you' his voice rang with a mocking melody. Victory was his already, but he wanted to feel it some more.

 

'I said...' and my voice trailed off, but it was too late. I felt as if I had coughed up my heart and I knew there was no clawing it back in. I was more like them and that was that. With that one word I sank in my own estimation and yet still remained a joke to them.

 

'Go on, you've said it now' says Derek 'say another one'

 

'shhh...Shit' I say with enough firmness to ensure I am heard 'shit, bum, fuck, wank...' and with that my learned vocabulary was spent. My honour was slain and my life as an innocent was over. I gave it up with barely a fight. That motley, tawdry group sat back with a collective smugness that grates even now. I felt real anger then, not the normal fear and pensiveness, but genuine, burning anger. I wanted to stand on that desk and tell them to fuck off. I wanted to keep swearing right in their faces just, I wanted to tell them that just because I gave in, just because I spoke the way they did, that I was not one of them. I had never been one of them and had never been allowed to be me. From the day I moved to this stupid town with its stupid kids and their stupid ways I had been made to feel like I was wrong for wanting a little more, for learning the words and doing the sums and just being nice. I had done all that and been made to feel like a pariah and it was, not, fucking fair. It had never been fair.

 

The thing is though, they didn't care. They had a skinny wee pound of flesh to chew on. Someone had conformed, someone else had been beaten down and to them, and there were no repercussions. Just comforting conformity to ways they understood. A life changing moment to me was a moment’s diversion to them. Their conversation quickly span back to their usual mundane subjects. It was all football, drinking that and 'Kit-Kats' . A narrow band of interests that defined them for as long as I knew them, that from the things I here, still divert them now. With a few sniggers and a bored yawn, they slipped back into that world that lay parallel to mine. A world where aggression always wins, where affection is a joke, where to learn was frowned upon and where to just want to play your own way was tantamount to the gravest insult you could give.

 

I wanted to go home. I wanted out of that stupid classroom and out of that stupid school and this town and this world. I just wanted to be me and I could never understand why that was so wrong. I don't suppose they did either. Some things go beyond their range of thought.

 

'Fuck off' I muttered under my breath one more time. Derek looked up at me surprised. I looked back at him and for the first time did not lower my eyes.

 

That was how that particular end was started. That was the day I started to get angry rather than scared. That day I saw so many of those classmates for what they really were, dull eyed and frightened. Stuck in one way and one way only, unable to change and unwilling to learn. I lost my patience with the teachers too. Where were they when lives were being pulled away from a decent course by the low-lying weights of the school bullies? We needed to learn to fight our own fights for sure, but what price for a little help? A moment’s guidance when you had swung right off the rails and were heading to nowhere fast.

 

Nobody ever saw it that way though. They just thought I had crossed from good to bad, from white to black. They never stopped to think why, to ask any hard questions. Much of the fault lay with me for sure; my decisions were made out of anger and spite but also confusion and fear. But maybe with a quiet word, a moments understanding, more of the quiet crowd would make it through unscathed