John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder Was Born in Bedford, England

THE REVEREND JOHN GOTTLIEB ERNESTUS HECKEWELDER

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

1743

March 12, Saturday (1742, Old Style): John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder was born in Bedford, England.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

John Heckewelder “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

1754

The Heckewelder family emigrated to America when John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder was 11 years old. They would settle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where he would attend the Moravian School for boys. He would be working as an apprentice to a cooper when an opportunity would arise for him to travel into the Ohio territory with a Moravian missionary. At this early point John had spent no time among native Americans and had no words of any of their languages — but this missionary needed some warm body as a teacher for Delaware children, and John was it.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

1772

John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder helped found a settlement named Schoenbrunn (“Beautiful Spring”) near the present New Philadelphia, Ohio. The first church in Ohio was built in this community. As many as 400 natives converted, mostly Delawares. The settlement would be so successful that additional settlements, Gnadenhutten, Lichtenau, Goshen, and Salem, would be founded.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

1782

March 9, Saturday morning: During the Revolution, the Christianized native Americans were being trusted by the whites and by non-Christianized native Americans no more than they had been trusted earlier, during King Phillip’s War. The village of Gnadenhutten had about 100 Christian Indians, mostly Delawares, there to gather crops from their fields. Although the Christianized natives professed and practiced neutrality, the British, Americans, and other native Americans did not trust those living at Gnadenhutten. The leader of the mission, the Reverend David Zeisberger, had been tried by the British for treason but had been cleared of the accusations.

During the maize harvest, some white settler families were attacked, and whites blamed those at Gnadenhutten for the violence. An American militia unit marched on Gnadenhutten and claimed to find there clothing from the murdered whites. They incarcerated these Christians in their church while they voted on their fate. Fewer than 20 of the approximately 100 whites voted against the slaughter. When the Christians learned of their fate, they spent the night praying and singing hymns, until the following morning all 28 adult males, 29 adult females, and 39 children were led from the church in pairs to have their skulls crushed with mallets. Soon after this massacre, other native Christian towns such as Schoenbrunn would of necessity be abandoned. After a final service was held at the church in Schoenbrunn the structure would be torn down to prevent desecration as the settlement was abandoned. Eventually everything that had been created in Schoenbrunn would be torched. The life work of the missionary teacher John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder was quite destroyed. All that would remain would be the record of the attempt that had been made. Hey, guys, you made a jolly good try, you did, and blessings on you for that! HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

1801

Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder met a native on Paumanok Long Island who passed along a cultural memory of his tribe’s 1609 encounter with the Discovery of Henry Hudson.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

1819

Presumably in this year, a series of the letters of John Wedderburn Halkett appeared in London as CORRESPONDENCE IN THE YEARS 1817, 1818, AND 1819, BETWEEN EARL BATHURST, AND J. HALKETT, ESQ. ON THE SUBJECT OF LORD SELKIRK’S SETTLEMENT AT THE RED RIVER, IN NORTH AMERICA.

Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE INDIAN NATIONS, WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES. Philadelphia: A. Small; Volume I of the American Philosophical Society Transactions, of 1819. Thoreau would copy the following materials into his INDIAN NOTEBOOKS:1

Between the Mississippi & the ocean eastward & the Hudson’s Bay Company’s possessions on the north — “There appears to be but 4 principal languages,” some of their dialects “extend even beyond the Mississippi.” • 1st The Karabit — of the Greenlanders & Esquimaux... • 2d The Iroquois “This language in various dialects is spoken by the ... Six Nations ... Hurons ... and others.” • 3d The Lenape “This is the most widely extended of any of those that are spoken on this side of the Mississippi.” • [4th] The Indians further N.W. Blackfeet &c. of whose language we cannot judge “from the scanty vocabularies which have been given by Mackenzie ... and other travellers.”

REVEREND HECKEWELDER In Volume #8 of these notebooks, Henry David Thoreau would also copy from this source that after some HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

hostilities the white intrusives into Virginia were given the new name Mechanschicau meaning “Long Knives” to distinguish them from other intrusives who had not killed natives with swords. “‘They never apply it [murderer] to the Quakers’ — They call them Quakels, not having in their language the sound to express your letter R.” RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Thoreau would also copy from this source the information that the original name for the place where Philadelphia stands had been Ku/egriena/ku meaning “the grove of the long pine trees,” and that this placename had been pronounced koo-ek-wen-aw-koo.2

June 6, Sunday: The North American Review mentioned that “a whole race of people has become nearly extinct,” an “unfortunate people, whose fate it has been, like the morning dew, insensibly and mysteriously to disappear, before the lights of civilization and christianity.” “That they should become extinct is inevitable,” the journal explained but “this cannot excuse us for pressing upon them with indecent haste. If they must perish, let them die a natural, and not a violent death.”3

Hawkins Wheeler saw a sea serpent, and reported that it “was entirely black; the head, which perfectly resembled a snake’s, was elevated from four to seven feet above the surface of the water, and his back appeared to be composed of bunches or humps, apparently about as large as, or a little larger than, a half barrel; I think I saw as many as ten or twelve.... I considered them to be caused by the undulatory motion of the animal — the tail was not visible, but from the head to the last hump that could be seen, was, I should judge, 50 feet.” SEA SERPENT SIGHTINGS

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 6th of 6th M / Our Meeting this morning was large & tho’ to me a season of some barraness, yet others no doubt were favord with life. - Jonathon Dennis - D Buffum & Hannah Dennis were in succession engaged to bear testimony. — In the Afternoon we were silent With Br D Rodman took tea at Jona Dennis. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

1. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials. 2. Henry David Thoreau’s INDIAN NOTEBOOKS are now at the Pierpont Morgan Library. These notebooks together comprise in total 2,800 handwritten pages. There are 11 of them, the 1st probably being completed during Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond: for instance, on the 1st sheet of his 1st volume Thoreau jotted “Bug ate out of a table in Williamstown 73 years after the egg was laid.” He noted that he had gotten this material which would find its way into the final chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS from J.W. Barber’s MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. See:

Fleck, Richard F. (ed). THE INDIANS OF THOREAU: SELECTIONS FROM THE INDIAN NOTEBOOKS. Albuquerque NM: Hummingbird Press, 1974 3. Unsigned review of the Reverend Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE INDIANS NATIONS WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA…, in North American Review, 6 (June 1819) 156, 170. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

1823

January 31, Friday: Back in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the missionary teacher John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder died.

The Cortes having refused to make changes to the Spanish Constitution, the ambassadors of the Holy Alliance (Austria-France-Prussia-Russia) departed from Madrid.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

John Heckewelder “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

1824

4 James Buchanan, Esq. (British Consul to the State of New York). SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS WITH A PLAN FOR THEIR MELIORATION (New York: William Borradaile, two volumes in one). This work confessedly had based itself not upon any direct experience of the native American tribes but instead merely upon a reading of Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE INDIAN NATIONS, WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES, which although published in 1819 had never been made extensively available (and Heckewelder had died in 1823). Buchanan had been

assisted in its preparation by Samuel Farmar Jarvis. Its material on Indian languages included a chapter by Peter Stephen DuPonceau. Henry David Thoreau would have a copy of this in his personal library. The Concord Free Public Library now has, under accession number 14003, a copy from Bronson Alcott’s library (rebound in green cloth), that was in 1878 presented to the library by Louisa May Alcott (raising a possibility that Thoreau’s volume had been inherited by Alcott in 1862). FOR THEIR MELIORATION

James Buchanan, H.B.M. Consul, was the long-term Elder of the New-York congregation of Scotch Baptists. The young Henry James, Sr., a follower of the thought of Sandeman, Walker, and Buchanan, had enlisted in this sect. To understand his faith, consult James Buchanan’s 1845 THE ORDER TO BE OBSERVED IN A CHURCH OF GOD (London: Jones and Dublin: Carson). Buchanan was a true believer in unrestrained capitalism: market regulation was always mistaken. Here is THE FATHER, by Alfred Habegger: James’s new congregation was headed by James Buchanan — not the future President but rather Her Majesty’s consul in New York. For two decades this man had not only represented the mother country in business and diplomatic affairs but also functioned as the crucial link between radical congregational separatists in Britain and America. If the tiny Anglo-American movement to 4. It is clear that there was no close relation between this James Buchanan, Esq., a British official out of Ireland, and the future American president also named James Buchanan. He had been born on February 1, 1772 at Strathroy, Omagh, in County Tyrone of Ireland, had gotten married on December 24, 1798 with Elizabeth Clarke, served as the British Consul in New York from 1816 into 1844, and would die on October 10, 1851. Most of his children settled in Canada. In his will he would mention a “silver dirk, which it is alleged, has been about four hundred years in the family,” bequeathing this thingie that had been lying around to his son Robert Buchanan (perhaps so that it would be lying around in the family for yet another four hundred years). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

restore the primitive church had a pope, it must have been Buchanan, who was nearing the end of a remarkable life by the time young James came within his reach. Starting out in northern Ireland thirty years earlier, he had established a pioneering breakaway congregation and a large nonsectarian school for both Protestant and Catholic children. In some respects, his vision was similar to that of the early Reformation Anabaptists and Mennonites: he advocated passive obedience of one’s king, adult baptism, and a believers’ church modeled on the New Testament reports of the earliest Christian gatherings. “I close my labors,” he wrote in old age, “by calling on all to come out from every system of worship in which the authority of Man in any manner, or way, has place.” He opposed all forms of coercion in religion, he favored Catholic emancipation in Britain, and he denounced the “separation of castes” in “the slave-holding states of America.” But Buchanan was no leveler: he aligned himself with big-money interests, extolled New York State’s liberal banking laws, and argued against every kind of restrictive governmental intervention in the economy. He was a free-market missionary who proclaimed “the principle of free agency and self-dependence,” and yet he was a Tory who spoke out against democracy, universal suffrage, education of the lower classes, the weakening of parental authority. Proud of his own virility, he boasted of having fathered seventeen children. He recommended that seduced women be transported to asylums in distant colonies. Self-taught, opinionated, and armed with a remedy for every evil, Her Majesty’s consul now took on the additional task of regulating young Henry James. Meeting at 183 Canal Street, Buchanan’s congregation sanctioned only those practices that were explicitly ordained by New Testament precedent. Every prayer had to be on those “subjects mentioned by the apostles.” Because Christ did not die for those who depend on their own good deeds, there were no rules requiring members “to believe they must abstain from Balls, Theatres, and gross violations of rules of morality” before taking Communion. (The Sandemanians’ tolerant view of the stage helps explain why James, breaking with the custom of his class, took his children to numerous plays in the late 1840s and early 1850s.) Every worship service included a collection designed to transfer money from rich to poor members. Instead of a sermon, there was an “exhortation and teaching.” Any brother who had a gift to speak was encouraged to do so, always remembering to be plain and simple and avoid “the sermonizing, logic, and display of learning, by which so many [clergymen] get their living.” An ordinary municipal guidebook from 1839, NEW-YORK A S I T I S, vividly captures the marginality of James’s new fellowship. In the long section that lists Manhattan’s many churches, the Presbyterians proudly lead off with thirty-four congregation. They are the dominant sect, followed by the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and so forth. Finally, there is a catch-all category, “Miscellaneous,” which includes a New Jerusalem Church and a Floating Bethel. At the absolute end of the list of HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

Gotham’s houses of worship comes James’s church — “Primitive Christians, 183 Canal, Mr. Buchanan.” Other congregations were led by a man with a “Rev.” in front of his name. The son of William and Catherine James had traveled very far from his childhood moorings.

So, how did this British author recommend that the ascendant white man “meliorate” the lot of the remaining native American tribalists? His grand concept was that the crown should set aside a 4,000,000-acre tract of land in the Lake Huron/Lake Simcoe region as a single massive race-asylum for all redskins regardless of tribal affiliation, and grant to the firm but benign administrators of this Royal Asylum all funding already allocated for all such purposes. The charter of the white men in charge of this asylum was to emphasize that “It is above all things necessary to lead the Indians to a sense of Christianity.” Sarcastically, it would seem to me that if the motto of Auschwitz would be ARBEIT MACH FREI, the motto of this woodland concentration camp might parse as BE A CHRISTIAN BUT DON’T TRY TO LEAVE.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

John Heckewelder “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

1836

October 13, Thursday: Before this date David Henry Thoreau had renewed Volume I of Professor Adam Ferguson’s THE HISTORY OF THE PROGRESS AND TERMINATION OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC from the library of the “Institute of 1770.” THE ROMAN REPUBLIC, I

On this day he obtained from that source the 2d volume of John Hoole’s translation of Torquato Tasso’s JERUSALEM DELIVERED (London, 1764, 1783, 1797; Exeter, New Hampshire: 1810).

He also checked out, from the Harvard Library, Volume 9 of the The North American Review, containing the June and September issues of 1819: • The North American Review. / Volume 9, Issue 24, miscellaneous front pages (pp. i-iv) • Hogg’s WORKS (pp. 1-23) • Bigelow’s AMERICAN MEDICAL BOTANY (pp. 23-26) • Milman’s SAMOR (pp. 26-36) • Dubois’ MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF INDIA (pp. 36-58) •Brown’s LIFE AND WRITINGS (pp. 58-77) • Lambrechtsen’s NEW NETHERLANDS (pp. 77-92) • Pickering on Greek Pronunciation (pp. 92-113) • Gorham’s ELEMENTS OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE (pp. 113-135) •Hall’s TRAVELS IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES (pp. 135-155) • John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s INDIAN HISTORY, MANNERS AND CUSTOMS (pp. 155-179) • Duponceau and Heckewelder on the Languages of the American Indians (pp. 179-188) • School Education (pp. 188-192) • Translation of Wyttenbach’s Preface to the SELECTA PRINCIPIUM HISTORICORUM (pp. 192-206) • Essay on Happy Temperament (pp. 206-211) • Quarterly List of New Publications (pp. 211-216) • Seybert’s STATISTICAL ANNALS (pp. 217-240) • State of Learning in the United States (pp. 240-260) • Rambles in Italy: –Foreign Travel (pp. 260-276) • Montgomery’s POEMS (pp. 276-288) • Buxton on PRISONS: –PREVENTION OF CRIMES (pp. 288-322) •SKETCH BOOK I. II. (pp. 322-356) •Sanford’s HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (pp. 356-376) • Novanglus and Massachusettensis – ESSAYS ON THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN G. B RITAIN AND HER COLONIES (pp. 376-412) • Translation of Wyttenbach’s Preface to the SELECTA PRINCIPIUM HISTORICORUM (pp. 412-426) • Trisyllabic feet in Iambic verse (pp. 426-432) • Quarterly List of New Publications (pp. 432-436) HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

1854

May 9, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau went to Cambridge and Boston, and visited the Boston Society of Natural History.5

He checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s A NARRATIVE OF THE MISSIONS OF THE UNITED BRETHREN AMONG THE DELAWARE AND MOHEGAN INDIANS FROM ITS COMMENCEMENT IN THE YEAR 1740 TO THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR 1808 (Philadelphia: M’Carry & Davis, 1820).

REVEREND HECKEWELDER

He would make entries from this source in his Indian Notebooks #5 and #8, and in his Fact Book. In addition, he would consult an account by the Reverend Heckewelder in Volume I of the American Philosophical Society

5. These would be the proceedings, for this year, of the Society: PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1854 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

Transactions, of 1819, and make entries from that source in his Indian Notebook #96 in about 1855:

REVEREND HECKEWELDER

He also checked out Robert Chambers’s ANCIENT SEA-MARGINS, AS MEMORIALS OF CHANGES IN THE RELATIVE LEVEL OF SEA AND LAND (W. & R. Chambers, 1848). ANCIENT SEA-MARGINS

Then, back in Concord, Thoreau planted watermelons.

Tuesday, May 9th To Boston & Cambridge. Currant in garden X, but ours may be a late kind. Purple finch still here — Looking at the birds at the Nat Hist Rooms — I find that I have not seen the crow blackbird at all yet — this season— Perhaps I have seen the rusty 6. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

blackbird — though I am not sure what those slaty black ones are as large as the redwings — nor those pure- black fellows — unless rusty-black birds. I think that my blackbirds of the morning of the 24 may have been cow-birds. Sat on end of long wharf— Was surprised to observe that so many of the men on board the shipping were pure countrymen in dress & habits, and the sea-port is no more than a country town to which they come atrading— I found about the wharves steering the coasters & unloading the ships men in farmer’s dress. As I watched the various craft successively unfurling their sails & getting to sea — I felt more than for many years inclined to let the wind blow me also to other climes. Harris showed me a list of plants in Hovey’s Magazine (I think for 42 or 3) not in Big’s Botany —17 or 18 of them — among the rest a pine I have not seen — &c &c q.v. That early narrow curved winged insect on ice & river which I thought an ephemera he says is a Sialis — or maybe rather a Perla— Thinks it the Donatia palmata — I gave him— Says the shad-flies (with streamers & erect wings — are ephemerae— he spoke of podura nivalis — I think meaning ours. Planted melons.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

John Heckewelder “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

1859

October: Henry Thoreau began writing “WILD FRUITS”. He would quote from John Claudius Loudon about cranberries: I learn from Loudon that “The ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray”; and “In the Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan La mont.” The apple-tree (Pyrus malus) belongs chiefly to the northern temperate zone. Loudon says, that it “grows spontaneously in every part of Europe except the frigid zone, ... and throughout Western Asia, China, and Japan.” No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make the best cider. Loudon quotes from the “Herefordshire Report,” that “apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and most watery juice.” And he says, that, “to prove this, Dr. Symonds, of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and insipid.”

He would quote from John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder about whortleberries (several plants of genus Vaccinium): The Moravian missionary Heckewelder, who spent a great part of his life among the Delawares toward the end of the last century, states that they mixed with their bread, which was six inches in diameter by one inch thick — “whortleberries green or dry, but not boiled.”

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Heckewelder HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE REV. HECKEWELDER JOHN HECKEWELDER

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: January 21, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN HECKEWELDER THE REV. HECKEWELDER

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.