Kit Carson – A Forgotten American Legend

Do you know anything about Kit Carson? Have you ever seen a movie about him? Read a book about him? Heard anything about him?

Your answer is probably, “no”. But don’t feel alone in that. You have lots of company.

Kit Carson was one of the early western heroes, and he does have a city, a county, a lake and a river named after him, but very few people know much about him anymore. Well, I’m going to tell you about him.

Kit Carson was born in Kentucky, but grew up in Boone’s Lick, Missouri. Like most kids in the early 1800’s he didn’t have a formal education, and he started his westward movement early in life, joining a wagon train on the Santa Fe Trail. That wasn’t too difficult for him, since the Santa Fe Trail began in Independence Missouri, about a hundred miles from Boone’s Lick.

Kit took to trail riding so well that he became a good guide and tracker. He eventually joined up with John Fremont as a guide, and he acquitted himself well enough that Fremont made him a national hero in his writings about exploring the west.

One of Carson’s many exploits was that he carried messages and dispatches to President James K. Polk, but this was before the famed Pony Express or the stagecoach routes. He rode three round-trips on horseback across the continent by himself, quite a feat in that untamed territory.

Another of his accomplishments took place in Arizona, where he was the leader of a volunteer group of the Union Army that dealt with renegade Navajo Indians in Canyon de Chelly. The troops didn’t slaughter Indians like some others did, (Custer’s 7th Cavalry, for instance) but they burned their crops and starved them into submission, eventually forcing them onto reservations in Oklahoma.

Kit Carson did fight in the Mexican War and again in the Civil War, and he even achieved the rank of Brigadier General in 1865. He moved to Colorado to command Fort Garland in 1866, and he died in 1868 at the age of 58. You might say that he died young, but the average life span in those days was 40 years, so he did pretty well for a man who took such great risks.

The capital of Nevada is named for Kit Carson, as are the Carson Sink (lake) and the Carson River, also in Nevada. But the place I first came across his name was in Colorado, where there is a town named Kit Carson.

So now you know. He was no Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett or Bat Masterson, but Kit Carson had more influence on the western expansion than many of the better-known heroes and gunfighters of the Old West.

One other fact: While Kit Carson County, Colorado is named for Kit Carson, the Carson County in the panhandle of Texas is named for Samuel Price Carson, a different person and no relation to Kit Carson.

Discrimination

dis-crim-I-nate (di skrim´i nāt´) vi. [See discern] 1 to distinguish 2 to make distinctions in treatment; show partiality or prejudice —dis-crim´i-nat´ing adj. —dis-crim´I-na´tion n.

I am guilty of discrimination. There are no two ways about it. I distinguish between choices and I am prone to show partiality, so I fit the definition of discrimination.

However, I don’t feel any sense of guilt about it, because I know that you, too are just as guilty of discrimination as I am. We are all guilty of discrimination.

That will cause a lot of you to close your mind to anything else I have to say on the subject, because you think you are not guilty as charged. And by doing so (closing your mind to me, that is) you are practicing discrimination. Aha, I got you!

It is a high compliment to say of a person that he or she has discriminating taste, be it in food, wine, literature, music, or any of the daily routines in which we engage. If that person chooses a cabernet wine over a sauvignon, he or she is discriminating against the sauvignon.

By definition, all choices that we make in life are discriminatory. Anything we choose is to the exclusion of something else, and is therefore discrimination. And let’s face it; life is a series of choices.

Now, since I’ve already confessed to be guilty of discrimination, I want to use the occasion to illustrate to you how our “PC” world has deprived us of some very colorful and appropriate lyrics to a lullaby that I used to sing when I was a kid. The title is Kentucky Babe and sometime around 1970 the lyrics got changed, because somebody must have considered it offensive. Well, I don’t (but then, I’m discriminating).

A quartet at the Dixie District Barbershop Chorus and Quartet Competition I attended last weekend in Boaz, Alabama sang Kentucky Babe. I couldn’t help but notice that the words were “cleaned up” by the arranger, and it certainly wasn’t the song I sang with my family quartet while a teenager in the 1950s.

These were the exact lyrics as sung last week:

Skeeters are a-hummin’ on the honeysuckle vine,
Sleep, Kentucky Babe!
Sandman is a-comin’ for this little girl of mine,
Sleep, Kentucky Babe!
Silvery moon is shinin’ in the heavens up above,
Bobolink is pinin’ for his little lady love,
You are mighty lucky,
Babe of old Kentucky
Close your eyes in sleep.

Fly away,
Fly away, Kentucky Babe, fly away to rest.
Fly away,
Lay your little curly head on your mommy’s breast.
Um-um, Um-um,
Close your eyes in sleep.

Here are the original lyrics, written by Richard Henry Buck in 1896:

’Skeeters am a hummin’ on de honeysuckle vine,
Sleep, Kentucky Babe!
Sandman am a comin’ to dis little chil’ of mine,
Sleep, Kentucky Babe!
Silv’ry moon am shinin’ in de heabens up above
Bobolink am pinin’ fo’ his little lady love:
Yo’ is mighty lucky,
Babe of old Kentucky,
Close yo’ eyes in sleep.

Fly away,
Fly away, Kentucky Babe, fly away to rest,
Fly away,
Lay yo’ kinky, woolly head on yo’ mammy’s breast,
Um—um—, um—um—
Close yo’ eyes in sleep.

Daddy ’s in de cane-brake wid his little dog and gun,
Sleep, Kentucky Babe!
’Possum fo’ yo’ breakfast when yo’ sleepin’ time is done,
Sleep, Kentucky Babe!
Bogie man ’ll catch yo’ sure unless yo’ close yo’ eyes
Waitin’ jes outside de doo’ to take yo’ by surprise:
Bes’ be keepin’ shady,
Little colored lady,
Close yo’ eyes in sleep.

Fly away,
Fly away, Kentucky Babe, fly away to rest,
Fly away,
Lay yo’ kinky, woolly head on yo’ mammy’s breast,
Um—um—, um—um—
Close yo’ eyes in sleep.

There you have it. I can picture a black woman cradling her sweet little girl while she sings her to sleep, and every word helps to paint a picture of peace and contentment. I ask you what could be offensive about that? Why did we have to change it?

I suppose there are some of you who’ve never heard Kentucky Babe, so just in case you would like to know what it sounds like in the (almost) original lyrics, here’s a recording by the Crew-Cuts from 1959.

Shopping Tips

I have always enjoyed going grocery shopping with my wife. That usually entails going to at least two stores, in our case Wal-Mart and Kroger. But Judy also has shopping cards for Albertsons, Price Chopper, Hy-Vee, Tops and Weis—none of which has a store in Augusta.

We do a lot of traveling, so we do get to use the other cards in different areas of the country. The discounts available when you have the store card can be pretty darned good, so it pays to sign up for them.

One of the benefits of holding the Kroger card is that we get discounts at the gas pump. Kroger gas prices are always competitive with all other gas stations in the area, and often lower. The everyday discount from the posted price is three cents per gallon, but there is also a discount of ten cents a gallon for every $100 worth of groceries we buy during any calendar month.

Gift cards receive double points—each dollar of value purchased is doubled toward the gas discount. Prescription purchases give even better points, since generics cost only $4.00, but register as $50 toward the gas discount.

The reason I relate all of this to you is that twice in the past two weeks, we have gotten home and reviewed our register tape, only to discover that we did not get the advertised discount on certain products. Of course, we took the tapes with us on our next trip and received the discount from Customer Services. But the fact remains that there is a lot of error possible, and you have to be vigilant to detect one when it occurs.

I don't know about your store, but at ours the full price of the item is posted on a visible screen, followed by a quick (-) with the discount amount for that item. It occurs very rapidly and the clerks scan items quickly, so the prices flash by continuously. It is almost impossible to follow the progression and keep track of whether or not we get the right prices.

Standing at the register reading your receipt is not a great idea, since it holds up the line, so review is generally done when we get home. Most of us probably do not bother to do that. Big mistake.

When we were first married and were dirt poor, my wife used to take a hand-held calculator with her on shopping trips. As she selected each item to place in the cart, she would enter the amount in the calculator. At the end of the rounds and before she went through the checkout line, she would estimate the tax and add that to the subtotal. It wouldn't be completely accurate, but she would know within a few cents how much the bill should be. If it didn't tally at the register, she would review the cash register tape prior to leaving the store.

Sometimes she would discover that she had miscalculated, but often it would be the clerk who had put in the wrong item, or the price was not correctly programmed into the register. Then she could present her tape and get a "refund" prior to leaving the store.

I'm thinking of going back to the old method. Even on principle alone, it makes good sense to check the accuracy, because if the store consistently makes the same errors with all their customers, they are getting a huge windfall from overcharging, whether intentional or not.

You might say that it's only a few pennies here and there, but even if it were trivial, consider the effects of a fifty cents average per customer overcharge. Then multiply that by the number of customers who shop each day at the typical grocery store. Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?

There have been articles written proclaiming that registers are programmed to overcharge on certain items, but I tend to doubt that. I think there are mistakes in programming and in how the clerks scan items that cause the problems. Customers are mostly given a fair price and charged the correct amount. It is still a good practice to double check. As Ronald Reagan used to often say, “Trust, but verify.”

You might want to consider taking some action on your own to check for errors in pricing at the grocery store. Take a calculator if necessary. Do the math, and keep from being ripped off. Prices are high enough as it is, so there is no reason to give away your hard earned money. And if I'm addressing the wrong member of the family and you "don't do shopping" then show this to the one who does. You might be appreciated for it.

E-Mail “Tricks”

In response to my recent column on Forwarding E-mail messages, one respondent asked me to again publish the tip on how to get to and use the bcc: address field. That is the field that hides the list of people to whom you forward your e-mails. I’m happy to do that, but I’ll also give you another tip that most of us can use to assist in reading e-mail messages.
These tips will work for any IBM-type PC with Microsoft Windows installed in any version. They will probably work on Apple Computers, too, but I do not use Apple and never have, so I’m not sure how the processes differ. I tell you so you know and can make adjustments if you own an Apple product.
The heading, Bcc:, stands for Blind carbon copy, a rather outdated term referring to when we used to use that nasty carbon paper to make copies of documents. Even so, the term is a god one, because it relates to copying in others on your message without having to retype and resend it.
Every e-mail program I’ve used has only two address fields up at the top: To: and Cc:. Many people use those two a lot, usually putting the main addressee in the To: field and any secondary addressees in the Cc: field.
The quick way to get those addresses into their respective fields is to right click on the To: heading, which brings up a window with your address book in it, and then you select the names/addresses from there to insert them into the To: or Cc: field. So far, so good…
When you right click on the To: heading the window that appears also has the third field, Bcc:, which was not in the message heading. However, once you add a name/address to it, it will now appear in your message.
Using the Bcc: field for all addresses prohibits any of your addressees seeing who else you sent the message to, and it also prevents them from ever getting access to those addresses. They will never appear in the body of future message forwards or replies. The privacy of your family and friends is guarded when you use the Bcc: field.
There is only one more thing to learn on this topic. I already put it up above, but I’ll repeat it for emphasis. You do not have to put any address in either the To: or the Cc: field in order to use the Bcc: field. Every address is protected when you use only the Bcc: field, so try to always use only that one for any message that you send to two or more people, unless everyone is known to each other and needs to have the list of recipients.
Okay, now on to the other tip… If you have trouble reading fine print in messages, or maybe you want to see more detail in a picture or graphic, there is an easy way to enlarge it. Depress and hold down that little key at the bottom left side of your keyboard labeled ctrl. Now, use the scroll wheel on your mouse and roll it forward. Watch what happens on your screen.
You can do this on any document, e-mail message, picture, web page, in short, anything on your computer screen can be enlarged by those two easy actions.
Have fun playing with these two tips.

Forwarding E-mail

It appears that it is time once again for a lesson I call, E-mail 101. This week alone, I have received several e-mails that required either A) half a dozen or more mouse clicks to open multiple attachments, B) scrolling down through hundreds of prior email addresses from multiple forwarding actions, or C) attempting to read misspelled words, strange punctuation marks and spaces in the middle of words and phrases and embedded messages from unknown people who forwarded the original message without editing it.

The tips I am about to give you are not my own. They were compiled and fine-tuned by a fellow Georgian named Cal Hendrix. Cal had one of the best websites I have ever visited, called Cal’s Gallery. Cal died on June 11, 2007, and even though I never met the man, I was deeply saddened by his passing. His daughter maintained the website for a year or two after his passing, but it is now history.

I’m going to borrow only a few of Cal’s e-mailing tips, so that I can show you how to ‘clean up’ an e-mail prior to forwarding it. I will type keyboard keys in italics, so that you know exactly which ones to depress. It is really quite simple, because you only have to use six keys on your keyboard: Ctrl, A, C, V, Shift and Delete.

First up: How to copy and paste.

If you want to forward an attachment that is essentially a text document with no video, audio or still pictures in it, it is easiest and best to open the actual attachment (go through all those mouse clicks until you get the genuine message) and copy / paste it into either your word processor or a new, blank e-mail that you are creating. I prefer to paste into a blank Microsoft Word document, because then I can edit and spell-check it prior to converting it to e-mail message format using the same copy / paste procedure.

Here is how to copy / paste any text to or from e-mail and Word.
1. First, you'll need to select the text you wish to copy. You do this by putting your mouse cursor at the first character you want to copy and, holding down the left mouse button, drag the cursor to the last character you need copied. As you drag, you'll notice everything gets highlighted (selected).
2. Next, simultaneously depress Ctrl + C for a moment and the selected text will be copied. You wont see it, but it is on your clipboard for you to use.
3. Finally, move your cursor to the area in your new document where you would like to insert the text. Then, simultaneously depress Ctrl + V and the text will appear on your screen. You can now work with it in its new position.

That's it. The steps are basically the same for any copy / paste procedure you need to do. Remember, you can copy / paste from e-mail to Word, or from Word to e-mail the same way.
If you have a really long area of text that you want to copy / paste, here is another way to handle it.

Place your cursor at the first character you want selected and left-click it. While holding down the Shift key, move your cursor to the last character you want selected and left-click again. All of the text in between will now be highlighted. Now simultaneously depress the Ctrl + C to copy and the Ctrl + V to paste as explained above. It's sometimes easier to follow this procedure than to make selections by dragging, especially when you’re wrestling with a lengthy document, and you only want to copy/paste part of it. I can't remember the number of times the area I wanted to stop selecting at zipped right by me on a document!

Another fun way to use the Shift key is adding to an existing selection. Let's say you select an area of text and you came up short of what you really needed. Rather than trying to re-select the whole thing, try this. While the partial text is still highlighted, just depress the Shift key, move your cursor to the last character you intend to copy and left-click your mouse. (You can also shorten a selection by doing this.) After you have used the Shift key to get your text selected, follow the previous steps to copy / paste.

Finally, if you have that lengthy text and you want to copy every word of it, (you can edit it later for spelling and other tidbits you want to remove) that is the easiest copy / paste procedure. Just depress Ctrl + A on your keyboard to highlight the entire text. Then depress Ctrl + C to copy it. Lastly, place your cursor wherever you want to place the text and depress Ctrl + V, and it will appear there. Remember that you have to press Ctrl and hold it down while pressing the other keys.

Once you do this a few times you will see how easy it is. It took me a year to learn it, trying to read those fancy tutorials on the net! That's why I'm trying to keep this very basic.

Next up: How to forward an attachment containing graphics

If you want to forward that video, audio or slide show presentation, (any type of attachment that has photos or graphics in it), copy / paste won’t always work, so it is best to forward it as an attachment.
1. Go through all the mouse clicks necessary to open the attachment. When you reach the genuine one, and you decide you want to forward it, close the attachment and display the previous screen. Stop there.
2. Click on the Forward button on the menu at the top of your screen. That will only forward the attachment, but none of the prior screens you had to go through to get to it.
3. Add e-mail addresses for your recipients in the ‘bcc:’ area. That way, nobody receiving the message sees whom else you sent it to. It respects privacy.
4. Change the Subject line so that all the ‘Fw:’ and ‘Re:’ marks are gone and only the subject title remains.
5. Delete any text that might already be in the text box on your current screen, and compose your own accompanying text for the attachment. Sign your message.
6. Click on the Send button, and your “clean” e-mail with attachment will be on its way.

If you have trouble performing the above steps, because you don’t have a menu bar with the icons on it to work with, then you are probably using your online account manager to read and store your e-mail messages. Most of them do not give you the ability to perform reply or forwarding of attachments. You have to go all the way back to the received message to get that menu across the top of your screen.

All PCs have some kind of built-in mail manager like Outlook or Outlook Express. That is what you should be using if you want to forward from within the message. It is simple to configure all your e-mail accounts in Outlook or Outlook Express.

Go to whichever search engine you use—I use Google or Yahoo or Bing—and input “configure (****) in (*******)”. Of course, you want to input your e-mail provider and your internal mail manager in place of the asterisks and parentheses and leave the quotes out as well. For example, configure yahoo in outlook, and click on the Search button. Follow the instructions in the webpage that comes up and you can receive and send all your e-mail from the internal mail manager. And now the procedure above will work fine.

We have one final step to cover: Cleaning up your forwards.

That is, let’s remove all those former e-mail addresses of everyone who previously got copies of the message, and delete all those >>> marks in front of each line of text and the exclamation points in the middle of words. You should try to do this with every message you decide to forward. It not only respects the privacy of others, it also makes it easier to get to the meat of the message. And it is so quick and easy to do that you should make it a “must do” before you send any e-mail. Here is the procedure.
1. Click on the Forward button on your upper menu. (You won’t have to do this for messages where you used the copy / paste procedure. You already got rid of all the garbage before you transferred the text.)
2. Put in all your “bcc:” addresses, clean up the subject line and put your cursor in the text box.
3. Using the same technique you used to copy / paste, highlight any text you want to get rid of, such as those lengthy e-mail addresses from prior forwards. You might have to do this in groups, especially if the texts are in different fonts.
4. Depress the Delete key on the keyboard. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for all unwanted text in your message, including ‘>’ and ‘!’ and all those other strange symbols that get added whenever a message is forwarded.
5. Use a spellchecker under Tools on the top menu bar to correct spellings.
6. When you have only the text that you want in your message, send it in the normal manner.

There you have it. If you follow these simple steps with any message, you will speed up the entire process, too. Uploads and downloads will be much faster, and no one will be forced to wade through all the junk to find the gem.

Now, do yourself a favor and copy / paste this message into your word processor, make your own document with the title “E-mail Tips” and keep it for future reference. “Try it – you’ll like it.”

Note: If you want to practice these techniques, once you have copied and pasted the entire message into a word processor document and saved it, reopen it and highlight a paragraph and copy / paste it below. That’s right, copy this paragraph, move your cursor down below this area, and then paste the same paragraph in. When you finish, just close the document again, only this time, when the pop up asks if you want to ‘Save Changes’, click ‘No’. Only the original text will remain in your saved document.

The New Word

We have a new word in the Urban Dictionary. The Urban Dictionary is an online dictionary that has a lot of invented, coined and combined words not found in your standard dictionaries. The newest word in this ever-evolving compendium is “surcame.” You won’t be able to guess its origin, so I’ll tell you in a few moments.

“Surcame” is defined in the Urban Dictionary as the past tense of “surcome.” Now, if that doesn’t help you, try the definition of “surcome” another word in the UD that isn’t found elsewhere. Well, that is defined as the same as “Succumb” which is further defined in the offline dictionary—Merriam Webster, New Oxford, or take your pick—as, “...to give way to, yield or die.”

Now that we know what “surcame” means, let’s examine, at least in my humble opinion, how it came to be.

I believe that someone twisted the word “succumb” into surcome, probably because they never took the time to look up the proper spelling. It sounds similar to succumb. It also is similar in spelling to the word “surcease,” which has a similar meaning to succumb and does contain the first syllable if the invented word. After that, the word became ingrained and was used repeatedly, so several others picked it up in their vocabularies.

Okay, wrong word, but close.

Now we come to the quote that first used the word “surcame” in context:

President came to the White house with a lot of good intentions to help the little guy, to make things fair, but he surcame to the wishes of big business, and to the political pressures of Washington DC.

Leave aside the fact that this quote isn’t even a complete sentence, and examine the use of the word. It was very clever of the ignoramus who uttered it to conjugate the improper word in order to make it preterit—past tense for those of you who didn’t know that word.

Who do you suppose it was that first used the word “surcame” in that incomplete sentence? Some street corner gang-banger? Perhaps a rapper? How about a high school drop out?

Surprise! It was Dr. Cornel West, a Princeton professor, actor, author, and political activist. I’ll give him the benefit of his prestigious position for the poor sentence structure, but c’mon, Doc, you owe our kids better grammar and language for their $50,000 annual tuition.

I rest my case...

Tax Refunds

“If ever there was a time to review your withholding of federal income tax, this is the time.”

I cannot pass up this opportunity, which only comes at this time of year. It is, of course, “tax season.” For some it falls between January 31–about the earliest you can get copies of all the documents needed to file–and April 1. For others, it starts on April 1 and can run up to midnight on April 18, the last deadline this year to file taxes without penalties for dollars you owe to the IRS.

Last year the average federal tax refund passed the $3,000 level, a 10-percent increase from the 2008 tax year. An even more amazing statistic is that 4 out of 5 taxpayers will receive a refund this year.

Those people fall into the early file category above, because they want to get that huge lump-sum payment from Uncle Sam ASAP. (I’ll get back to that lump sum at the end of this column)

The latter group, those who file at the last minute, do so because they either owe some additional taxes, or they have a very modest refund coming. I am in that group, and I am going to tell you why we should all be in that 15-day filing window.

If you divide $3,000 by 12 it gives you a quotient of $250. That is the average amount of money taxpayers “lend” to the federal government each month with no possibility of growth in interest or dividends.

To my way of thinking, that is very poor investing.

In a few years there will be an even more compelling reason to quit giving the federal government that annual interest-free loan. If the Supreme Court upholds the current version of the health care reform law, failure to purchase health insurance will be punishable by a fine.

Where do you suppose the money to pay that fine will be collected? If you responded, “It will come from my tax refund.” Go to the head of the class. That’s right, the IRS will deduct the fine from your refund if you cannot provide proof of health insurance.

A better way to pay taxes is to estimate how much you will owe on April 15 and then have the correct amount withheld periodically as it is earned. The goal is to try to be within $100 of you total tax liability when you file.

If your income is mainly derived from a paycheck that you receive from an employer, you can easily change your withholding by filing a new W-4. Just ask your employer for the form, or you can download one from the IRS Website: http://www.irs.gov and then turn it over to your payroll department when you complete it.

There is an easy way to calculate the optimum number of allowances on the W-4. Go to the Kiplinger Website:
http://www.kiplinger.com/tools/withholding/index.php
and follow the easy steps. You might want to read the entire set of pages there as well, since Kiplinger gives excellent advice on the subject.

Even if you were to miscalculate (under-estimate) your optimum withholding amount, you can always file quarterly estimated taxes to catch up without penalty. The 1040ES form and instructions are also available at the IRS Website to help you.

The 1040ES is the same form you should use to file quarterly estimates if your income is from other sources, such as self-employment, pension, Social Security, interest or stock and bond dividends.

Now, back to that big refund of $3,000... There were approximately 221million taxpayers in the United States as of 2009. That includes a lot of families where only one tax return is filed for multiple citizens. Because of that, and because the earliest year I could find the actual number of individual tax returns filed was 2005 (134,372,678), I estimate the total number of returns in 2010 to be about 140 million. 112 million of those returns—4 out of 5—generated the average $3,000 refund last year. Simple arithmetic gives a total interest-free loan of $336 billion.

Let me write that out for you: $336,000,000,000. Even though those refunds go out every year, our system of tax withholding means that the federal government has a continuous use of that money—in effect, a gift that keeps on giving.

Wise up America! You can certainly use that extra $250 per month better than Uncle Sam can.