The Long Pursuit

by on May 1, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Stephen Douglas was a very able speaker and politician on what turned out to be the losing side of history, is mostly remembered for being Abraham Lincoln’s foil (or more properly, the other way around). Enough so, that basic history textbooks will go into the Lincoln-Douglas debates, even though they don’t have time to mention much else about him.

This book goes all in on this, tracing both careers from their initial arrival in Illinois, to Douglas’ death in 1861.

It’s a good idea, and you certainly learn a lot, but their careers are not quite as tightly coupled as needed to make it the best format.

So, it’s a pair of parallel biographies at the general history level. There’s not a bunch of detailed analysis of their lives and speeches, but all the basics are there. Morris seems fairly evenhanded in his treatment, though he shows Lincoln coming off far worse in the main Lincoln-Douglas debates than you generally hear in less detailed books. Certainly, Lincoln is shown with many of his problems here, though I think some more attention to the change in tone of Lincoln’s politics going into the 1850s would have been very useful.

Of course, part of the lack of digging into detail is that everything leading up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act is about a third of the book, while the remaining two thirds concentrates on the fallout over the next six years. This keeps it from being the extensive background book you might expect, and undermines the “thirty year struggle” idea given in the subtitle.

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California Missions

by on April 27, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked this book up mostly for the reproductions of a series of sketches of the California Missions. In 1856 they were already largely abandoned, and would soon decay into a ruined state (and by the text, this had already stared), but it’s a great resource so show what they had been like.

These were all done by Henry Miller, who did them as part of his journal of a trip from San Francisco to San Diego. He had arrived in California in 1850 (from Germany, by way of New York), and started a butchery business, and ended up as a powerful cattle rancher, eventually controlling some 22,000 square miles of land.

At this point, his fortunes are not so grand, and he made his solitary way down the state with a single mule. According to Belleorphon Books’ introduction, the text has been cut down (generally keeping just the part dealing with his travels), and there were previous editions of the sketches produced in very rare editions, so this is now the main accessible account of his journey.

The text itself is interesting, especially for someone that knows the names of places that would not grow up into large urban centers for quite a while yet. The illos are the main point though, and are great reference. It’s not produced to be a big expensive volume, and is a great value for what it is.

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Mating Flight

by on April 23, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Okay, with the title and subtitle, my original thought that this would be a look at draconic culture where power politics flows around and through the aspects of mating, and you know, not getting killed in the world.

I was a bit off. The titular mating flight is supposed to be more about picking a good mate, and hopefully love will come later. But it’s not supposed to all power and practicality either. There’s twelve years for the dragons to figure out where their lives are going. Since there’s always more males than females, a flight is normally three females and six males who have recently hit sexual maturity, and they go off away from parents to find who the females will choose, and have a bit of debauchery along the way, as fertilizing eggs is actually an involved process. So… nine very large and powerful adolescents on spring break for twelve years.

And in this case, nothing typical happens

There’s a large multiverse of worlds out there, some of which are ruled by dragons, some of which they haven’t gotten to. And nowhere, apparently, has been able to stand up to dragons who decide they want a place. The plan is to go to Hove, a “basic torroid” world (i.e., in the interior of a donut-shaped space), hang out for a duo-decade to figure things out, but not actually take over or anything inconvenient like that. That doesn’t go well.

Our viewpoint character is Jyothky, who hits sexual maturity a bit late at the start of the book, setting all this in motion, and keeps a diary of what’s going on. She is in a technical sense, disabled; she has no sense of touch. There are spells that let her monitor if anything has happened to her body, but it’s not the same thing. This also means that while she’s on a mating flight, she’s basically ace, there’s no feedback from the act, no endorphins, or any other positive feedback from the act, just the general sense/duty of wanting to have kids at some point.

By the end of the book, we’ve seen just how misfit all the dragons are even as they cause mayhem for the poor world that has ended up playing host to them, and trouble spreads in their wake over the course of a mere hundred days.

This is really just part one of two, so be ready to dive right into the second book if you read this. It is quite enjoyable, with Jyothky being a great sympathetic narrator, even with the amount of devastation that happens in Hove as it was struggling with it’s own version uni-polar politics.

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182 Strayer’s Strays

by on April 19, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Jason came over last Sunday for a long-overdue day of FtF gaming. It was my choice, and there were a number of good possibilities, but I stuck with my original provisional plan of introducing him to Advanced Squad Leader, so he can start comparing it to the other tactical systems he’s played. I cast around for a bit for a good starter scenario, and settled on the on the old tournament scenario, “Strayer’s Strays”, which was originally T16 in The General Vol 29 #1 (and Squad Leader scenario O in The General Vol 20 #4) and republished in Yanks as 182.

A hodge-podge of American paratroopers are trying to get to a Utah Beach exit on D-Day, and have to cross board 6 with the bulk of their forces (10 EVP out of 19 possible) in 3.5 turns. The catch is that they’re doing it the narrow way, and the full width of the board is in play, so the Germans need to delay them with twelve squads to cover 33 hexes. Much worse, the only machine gun in the scenario is an American MMG. The Germans have no support weapons at all, other than inherent PFs. There’s a few tricks that could still be done, but I settled for a skirmish line that would hopefully delay the Americans near their board edge while I raced to concentrate.

Once Jason arrived, we went over a lot of basics (and showed him the old and new versions of board 6). Once we got going, one of the things I had to warn him about is “don’t stack”, which thinking about it, is the opposite lesson of Last Hundred Yards, where you generally keep platoons grouped together except when you desperately need to cover more area. At any rate, he came in in the U-Z area, looking to use the road across the board. The MMG set up in Z9, and I had to self-break a squad in V9 to keep from being taken out in CC. Poor dice rolls hampered both of us for a turn, though my one good roll (3) broke a squad. A squad and a half (including the self-break) ended up isolated and surrendering in W7 on his second turn. At the same time, his 8-1 and a squad got too aggressive down the road, and had to take shelter in X5.

As to be somewhat expected with a small and short scenario, things flip-flopped between looking very and and very bad for the Americans. The main thing was to keep moving and not get tied down with prep fire. My efforts to get in front of him was harder than it initially looked, but my occupation of the edge of the direct road helped, especially when a timely low roll got two squads with a 1KIA. After a good lecture on the ASL concept of Random Selection, I yahtzeed the die rolls, killing both outright. Meanwhile, ELR 2 was steadily eroding my force, and a couple squads disrupted by the end of the game.

All said, he got a lot of troops to the edge of the board, ready to exit through woods on turn 4, but it was only 9 EPV worth. For his final RPh, the 8-1 self-rallied to provide additional possible EVP, and survived a shot in the open to exit as well. (I thought I had got him on a second shot, but then realized I’d miscounted ranges and I couldn’t manage SFF on him.)

Afterword

It’s an interesting little scenario, and provides a nice dynamic situation. I could have certainly done a bit better, but my attention was a bit split with rules explanations, and that is fine. Certainly, placing one of the 467s in 6M6h2 was a worthy idea, since there’s a lot of ground they can see from there, and use 2FP long-range attacks on. It’s also not quite as tactically intricate as “Gavin Take”, which is a good learning scenario, but both sides need to have some grasp of the options available.

Jason seemed to enjoy the game, and certainly appreciated all the little details (understandably) stripped out of games like LHY, such as defensive fire, Dash, and bypass. Something with good opportunities for fire lane use seems like a good next scenario, which certainly suggests something like “Gavin Take” (though switching to different nationalities would also be nice).

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Men to Match My Mountains

by on April 15, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is an expansive history of about sixty years, across a fair amount of space.

It’s also a fairly limited history, largely confined to what “white people” were doing. This is, in large part, man-vs-nature history, with strange people coming into a strange place and having all sorts of adventures. This is entirely about the early exploration and expansion of Anglo-American culture across four states of the US. Stone does take time to note that there’s just no written sources available from the Chinese who worked on the railroads being built through here. And that objection would also hold true for a lot of the previous inhabitants of the region. And this is a flowing narrative history, not in the least bit technical and willing to go into the weeds of population levels and other non-written evidence.

Certainly, there is a lot to cover here as it is. A good chunk of the book is dominated by the various discoveries of gold and silver that dominate the initial settlement of the region. Places where a few men found something valuable, and instantly, or so it would seem, towns sprang up. Many of the immediate places would go away again when the strikes ran out, but not all, and of course, the mineral wealth built other places as well, most notably San Francisco. The development of the Bay Area is one of several threads running through the entire book.

Later portions deal with the railroads, and the chokehold the Southern Pacific had on much of California’s economy. One of the more amusing chapters near the end deals with the Santa Fe finally gaining access to southern California, and the subsequent free-fall of passenger ticket prices from $100 to $25 (with a dip all the way down to $1).

Much of the earlier parts of course deal with problems of individual expeditions and bands of settlers trying to cross the region at all. It isn’t a coherent account of things like the Oregon Trail at all (that one especially, as Oregon is out of Stone’s scope). But there is enough to contextualize a lot of these early struggles.

Organizationally, it is interesting that Stone very much sets his book only in modern California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Events that take place outside these borders are barely touched on at all. The book is not formally divided up into these four states as well, but Stone does very much keep them in mind, and certainly groups things in accordance with those borders.

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