George Washington's Headquarters in Newburgh, NY
And Ninja "Franken-films" and the Chinese of the 19th Century in Denver and Colorado
Greetings, I find myself very busy this week. Among other things, I am currently working hard on paying pieces for EMS providers on spider and scorpion venoms and the treatment of their bites and stings as well as a second one on burns and their treatment based on the wonderful programs I attended in early May at the FDNY Search and Rescue Conference. I will share the links here when they are published.
Therefore, following my self-imposed mandate of “mostly” Asian history and Asian studies, and being short on time, I am sharing photos of my visit to not just a New York State American Revolutionary War Site, but what is the first, publicly owned historic site in the United States, opened to the public in 1850, George Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh, New York.
The American Revolutionary War and its history is another major interest of mine.
Sunday, May 26, I headed down to Poughkeepsie, NY, where I had the good fortune to meet with Tom Bolden, a highly respected instructor of the Filipino Martial Arts ( see https://youtube.com/@americanarnis95?si=n6TByYDT1hj3-JSe. ) and then headed down to see this site. It’s well worth a two or three hour visit and there are two other nearby American Revolutionary War sites nearby that can also be visited, although I did not see them this visit. I do hope to see them on a future visit ( Ishl Allah).
After the battle of Yorktown in 1781, it was pretty clear that the British had lost the war and peace negotiations were begun. However the British still held the city of New York and the Hudson River / Lake Champlain corridor between NYC and British held Canada and Montreal, etc, was still an important route and an area where the not yet United States was vulnerable should the British decide to renew hostilities. Therefore it was decided that the lower Hudson River, north of fortified West Point, would be a good location for the Continental army until things were completely settled.
It was here that many important things happened, and if few have heard of them that's because they were handled well and faded into history. Among these was a proposed conspiracy by unpaid American officers to march on congress and demand their backpay at gunpoint (Washington made efforts to get them their pay while reminding them that if they did this it would defeat the purpose of everything they had fought for for 8 years.) Other important issues, foreign and domestic, were discussed.
George Washington's headquarters in Newburgh, New York, is well worth about a 3 hour visit. This was the headquarters of Washington and the Continental Army after Yorktown and until disbanding of the army. A surprising number of very important things happened here. Often the transition from revolutionary war to peacetime government is where revolutions fail. In that sense, one has to really value Washington's achievements at this place and time.
Seriously, this nation really does owe a great debt to George Washington. I learned that he apparently had to leave school when he was 11 years old after the death of his father, and because of that made a point of surrounding himself with educated and well informed advisers. He was a great man who set the pattern for how presidents should act.
Minute Man Monument. Interestingly enough, this is a second casting of the same statue as one can see at the Lexington and Concord Battlefield, first battle of the American Revolutionary Wars. As this is the site of where the Continental Army spent time at the end of the war, it seemd fitting to place a casting of the statue here as well.
Finally, a picture of yours truly, doing the “Asian school girl grinning in front of important monument style pose.” In all seriousness, should I appear to be mocking Washington, the more I learn about this great man, the more I think our nation owes him a great debt for modelling through his actions what a president of a democracy should be and how one should act. Still, it’s a cute picture, I hope. Very “kawaii.”
And now some Asian history related stuff
Real quickly, I have been trying to include something each week on the current threads, which are “Chinese in the Old American West” and Ninjas and the image of ninjas. Where did they come from and what is this “ninja stuff” all about.
The Chinese in 19th Century Colorado and the Denver area.
If one watches enough pulp style media, occasionally your “Old West Cowboy Hero,” finds himself under assault by the Chinatown Tongs and their mysterious and deadly assassins with their exotic, lethal Asian fighting arts. Two examples that come to mind are the pilot episode of the wonderful comedy-adventure serial series, The Adventures of Brisco County Junior from 1999 and Season 1, Episode 17, of the Wild Wild West TV show, an episode entitled “The Night the Dragon Screamed” from 1966. The Wild, Wild West was and remains a very strange TV show being an attempt to combine two of the most popular TV and movie genres of the early 1960s, the Western and the Super-Spy, Secret Agent fantasy shows a la James Bond, etc. Our two heroes are, of course, super-spy, secret agents under the direct orders of President Ulyssess S Grant roaming the Old West defeating bizarre pulp style supervillains and strange menaces with over-the-top plots. This particular episode stands out for its execrable stereotypes and dumb story line and perhaps I will write it up completely some time in the future.
However, in real life, the idea of Chinese Tong assassins in the old American West attacking (generally) White heroes and such, does not really hold up and I am having difficulty finding anything like it, although I am still looking. By contrast, the much uglier and, sadly, more socially pressing image of anti-Chinese race riots was a recurring feature of life in the old west and a major one, one of several, occured in Denver.
Very quickly, the first Chinese came to Colorado in 1860 heading there from California. They were initially encouraged to come by the governor as he saw the arrival of Chinese a good way to address significant labor shortages in this under-populared territory of the USA. A Chinese community was estabished in Denver. Like most such Chinese communities of the time, it was overwhelmingly male with a very small number of women, many or most of them prostitutes. Denver Chinatown, commonly called “Hop Street,” got a reputation for vice, particularly prostitution and opium, as well as filth, and disease (actually a surprising amount of the population of Denver, both Chinese and non-Chinese, had chronicdisease according to what I read. Medicine was not terribly advanced at the time.)
There was great fear that the Chinese were “stealing jobs” and growing in number too quickly. Although there were reportedly 238 Chinese in Denver that year, there had only been four ten years earlier.
On the afternoon of Halloween, 1880, four years after Colorado became a state, a drunken brawl between some Chinese and some Whites spilled over and became a race riot. Much of Chinatown was destroyed and looted. By the next morning, one Chinese man was dead and many others badly injured. The small number of police could do little to stop it, but the next morning the mayor had the fire department come with “pump wagons” and use their hoses to chase the white rioters out of the area, and then housed many of the Chinese in the city jail for four days for their own protection. After the riots, many Chinese fled the city, and a famous Denver madame helped some of them with their transportation costs. (Being a cynic, I must wonder if this was out of benevolence or to get the Chinese prostitutes out of town and remove competition. No idea, Perhaps clues or answers are hidden away in the historical record some place. )
Today, Denver is working to find ways to incorporate this event into the narrative of the city’s history and do so in a way that satisfies its current Asian Pacific population.
Links about the Chinese in 19th Century Colorado and Denver:
Please let me know what you think if you follow these links:
https://southparkheritage.org/asian-history-in-park-county/
https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/denver-apology-anti-chinese-riot-1880/
https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/rocky-mountain-pbs/140-years-after-race-riot-denver-honors-chinese-immigrants/
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/history-chinese-japanese-immigrants-colorado/
Ninja!!
Shinobi-Geddon, the 1980s Nina Craze and Why It's Awesome
I offer a link to a YouTube Video which offers an introduction to a subject that brings awful movies to a new level of awfulness. “The Franken-Film Ninja Movie.” While quite frankly, there are parts of this video that I disagree with, its the coverage of this subject that makes sharing this all worthwhile. The term “Franken-Film Ninja Movie” refers to the way in which some low budget, primarilly Hong Kong based, filmmakers of the 1980s jumped on the ninja craze by, first, getting a bunch of stunt fighters dressed in ninja masks do a lot of stunt fighting in public parks (one can film in a public park, it seems, for free without a permit) and then, second, get a lot of white people who are willing to appear in a film (while Hong Kong is a primarilly Chinese city, there was and still is no shortage of White people who might enjoy appearing in a film if one knew where to look, with cheap backpacker type hostels being a good place to find them).
Next you film these white people talking on the telephone a lot and then film them putting on and off ninja masks as they go out the door of wherever you happen to be filming them. You can dub in whatever conversation you want later. The White actors don't even have to be able to speak English.
Next, splice together the telephone scenes with some ninja fight scenes, and you have a movie!! And you can sell it and flood the market! And you can then take the same fight scenes, add in new telephone scenes with new, different White people, and give it a new title and sell it as a completely new movie, often to the same theaters and for the same audiences.
Since the ninja stunt fighters are masked, the audience will just assume the fighter whose mask matches the White guy who just spoke on the phone is the same character! So long as you reuse the same masks in different films, then you can also reuse the fight scenes. With some imagination, these fights scenes could be reused again and again and again (like the corpse parts that were sewn together to make Frankenstein’s moster) and thus the term “Franken-film,” a wonderful term, although I admit I had never heard it before watching this video.
Having said that there are portions of this video, I disagree with or would have done differently, but there is enough good stuff there so I consider it worth sharing.