The bald cypress used to be one of the most common trees in the swamp but from logging and other causes the numbers diminished tone replaced by red maple and other deciduous trees.
Bald cypress is itself deciduous and drops its leaves/needles in the fall. They are a beautiful and vivid orange with a hint of purple. A concerted effort to re-establish the bald cypress in the swamp was begun. One of the most interesting and, for me, creepiest feature of the bald cypress is something called cypress knees. No one knows why they exist but the theory is that they help bring oxygen to the roots.
The orange surface is the dropped needles. All the small trunks are cypress knees.I found these knees totally creepy. There are hundreds and hundreds of them and to me it looks like an alien life form (the pod people or something) taking over.
One of the main characters in A Circle of Dead Girls is a tightrope walker, Called rope dancers, the tightrope walkers have been a feature of the circuses for centuries. The Romans called them funambulists.
My rope dancer is nicknamed Bambola, a name that I borrowed from a famous Italian tightrope walker. These aerialists have always been popular acts. I imagine the excitement in a small farming community at seeing this act would have been high.
Many of the rope dancers were women but not all. In fact, as the circuses traveled around, dynasties that were known for aerial acts formed and became famous in their own right.
Will Rees and others in the audience of that time would not have seen an act that became arguably the most popular of all: the trapeze artists. The trapeze was developed from the tightrope; more accurately from a slack rope that the artist then hung from. The first tricks were done from a static trapeze; a rope that hung without moving. The flying trapeze was not invented until the mid-1800s by a young aerialist: Jules Leotard. He invented it by practicing over his father’s swimming pool.
For many decades, the flying trapeze was one of these most popular acts ever.
When we think of circuses, we usually think of exotic animals: lions and tigers and elephants.
But the first animals that were used in the early circus in the United States were not those exotics (especially then). The first elephant l did not come to this country until 1794. One elephant was brought from the Orient (which covered India, China, Japan and more then) by the Salem merchants.
No, most of the animals that would have been used in a circus were more homey. Dogs, pigs ( like the pig used by Billy the clown in A Circle of Dead Girls), and maybe bears. Horses were the stars for many years since the circus begun by Astley in England had begun as an equestrian show.
Some of the primary sources I read quoted farm boys who went home after the circus and tried to train their farm horses to circus tricks.
A Circle of Dead Girls is set against the beginnings of the circus in the new U.S.
The circus itself, of course, is very old. Acrobatics began with the Ancient Egyptians and, independently, in China. By the Middle Ages, traveling troupes went all through Europe and England, performing at fairs and other events. But when the Puritans came to power in England, such frivolity as the circus was forbidden. The circus did not begin again until 1768 when a retired military instructor, Sergeant-Major Philip Astley, decided to display his equestrian prowess. It proved surprisingly popular and a few years later he decided to add jugglers, acrobats and other performers, ending each show with a pantomime.
A student of Astley, John Bill Ricketts, was the man who brought the circus to the United States. He’d planned to open a riding school/circus in France but with the increasing hostilities between England and France chose to go to the United States instead. Following the lead of Astley, Ricketts opened a riding school in Philadelphia first in 1792. Philadelphia was the capital of the United States at that time. When that was established and his reputation made, he built an arena for his circus in 1793.
By 1900 the circus was the most popular form of entertainment in the country.
In A Circle of Dead Girls, I posit the beginnings of the traveling circus that makes a stop in Maine. And from there lies a tale . . .
So happy to receive the following review – in a UK source no less.
Simply Dead’ by Eleanor Kuhns
Published by Severn House, 30 April 2019. ISBN: 978–0–727 –8884–6 (HB)
Researching a historical novel is a straightforward matter of looking at books, documents and the internet. Making it feel right is a whole different skill, and it’s a skill Eleanor Kuhns has in bucketloads.
North-eastern America in the late 18th century is almost an alien world: one-roomed houses with dirt floors, three-mile walks to school for the children, values and customs far removed from the more relaxed approach we now adopt. Life was hard for ordinary people trying to scrape a living off the land. All this and more comes richly to life as background for Kuhns’s Will Rees series.
Rees and his family live close to a Shaker community which is possibly the most dangerous of its kind in the country. Not only does the murder at the centre of the narrative take place there; mention is also made of murders in previous volumes in the series, which Rees has been involved in solving.
that he is a lawman; that role falls to Constable Rouge, who also runs the local bar and res- taurant. But Rouge is something of a bull in a china shop; Rees usually thinks before he jumps. He is called in to help search for Hortense, a young midwife who has apparently been abducted en route home from delivering a baby; he finds her, hurt and distressed, and it soon becomes apparent that she isn’t telling the whole truth about what happened to her.
Hortense takes refuge in the Shaker community, and shortly afterwards another young woman is found strangled, possibly in mistake for Hortense. Rees now has two mysteries to solve, and as if that wasn’t enough, his eldest adopted daughter is attacked.
That rich background really comes into its own as Rees travels up the nearby mountain and into the forest in bitter winter weather in search of answers. There are wolves, a wise woman, and several families made aggressive by solation and the conditions they live in, and Kuhns has the knack of drawing the reader in to feel part of the story.
The sharply drawn, well-rounded characters add to the sense of involvement: Rees himself, sometimes sensitive, sometimes clumsy, always well meaning; Lydia, his intelligent, self-possessed wife; Jerusha, his headstrong daughter; clumsy Rouge; emotional Bernadette, Hortense’s mother, Pearl the feisty teenage Shaker: they all come to life, as do the gentler members of the community who conceal iron strength under a calm exterior.
I was left feeling I’d visited late 18th century Maine, not just read about it. More than that – I wanted to go back for more, to get to know these people better, and explore their world further. It all felt right.
In the ninth entry in the Will Rees Series, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp to help a friend. Several murders occur – of course since these are murder mysteries.
This is a peat bog and in some places the peat is fourteen feet deep, Although we went in September, it was still really buggy. It is hard to imagine people living here, raising families and, on the drier places, trying to farm.
I am very happy to announce that A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees number 8, will be released March 3, 2020.
The Circus has come to town. Rees arrives for the performance but the sight of his old nemesis, Magistrate Hanson, sends him home again. On his way, he meets a party of Shaker Brothers searching for a young girl. Her body is found in a nearby field.
Who killed Leah? The circus trick rider? The strong man? One of the Shaker Brothers? Maybe even the Magistrate.
In my Will Rees mysteries, he meets people who are ill with tuberculosis several times. The frequency of deaths from this disease in my fiction in not an accident. It was an epidemic and still has not been eradicated. In 2017, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.6 million deaths; it is therefore the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. Most of these deaths, and most of the new infections, occur in the developing world.
I was mostly familiar with TB as ‘consumption’, a disease that afflicted Victorian poets. Although TB was common in both the poets, the upper classes and the slum-dwellers, it was not a new disease during Victorian times. It has been around for millennia. Bison remains from 17,000 years ago display the effects of the disease. (No one is sure if TB jumped to humans from the bovine like smallpox or whether it developed independently.) TB scars have been found on Neolithic skeletons and on the spines of Egyptian mummies.
So, it has been around a very long time. Despite that, it was not identified as a single disease until 1820 and the bacillus that caused it was not discovered until 1882 (by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel prize but failed to recognize that one of the transmissions of TB was via infected milk.)
Before the advent of antibiotics, and even with the best care in the sanatoriums set up for this purpose, 50% of the patients died within five years. In 1815, one in four died of the illness in England.
Antibiotics beat back the disease, but new drug resistant strains raise the possibility of a new epidemic. Even now, in modern times, about one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.
As Rees investigates murders, he invariably meets people who are ill. Illness and death was a constant companion. Illnesses: measles, mumps, diphtheria carried off infants and children; about one in five. Tuberculosis was epidemic. Women succumbed to childbirth. Simple accidents caused death, if not by the accident itself by sepsis.
Diseases we think of as modern, such as cancer or diabetes were present but not identified by name.
How do we know diabetes existed. About 3000 years ago the Egyptians described an illness with excessive thirst, urination and weight loss, the symptoms of Type I diabetes. In India they discovered they could use ants to detect the disease because the ants were drawn to the sweetness. And the Greeks called the disease diabetes mellitus ; diabetes for siphon or pass through and mellitus for sweet.
Early treatments included a diet of whole grains, milk and starchy foods, rancid animal meat, veal and mutton, green vegetables. Other treatments recommended exercising, reducing stress, wearing flannel – seriously. As one might expect, the true causes of Diabetes and possible treatments were not identified until modern times. In 1889, Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that removing the pancreas from dogs led them to develop diabetes. In 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer named the missing chemical, without which the body could not survive, insulin. That means island because the cells in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas produce it.
The first human subject took an insulin injection in 1922. So, although this illness has been with us a long time, its identification and the treatment is recent.
Why am I so interested in diabetes? Read Simply Dead and find out.
