Sources
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88

 
TAZARA ... a journey by rail through world-history © KJS / 2009
www.indianer-web.de
CHAPTER 36  



CONTROL! THE BOOK-TEXT PLEASE!

17 He opened his gun-cabinet, took out the first completed Henry-Stutzen, explained to me composition and use of it and guided me to his shooting range where I was supposed to test the unsurpassable gun and to comment on it. I was, of course, delighted but I repeated my warning that dissemination of this automatic gun would cause great harm in the West to the world of animals and humans as well.
»Know it, know it,« he nodded; »explained it to me already; going to produce only a few. This first one is a gift for you. Made my old bear-killer famous, shall keep it and this Stutzen with it. Calculate, will be of good service during your travels beyond the Mississippi.«


„To produce only a few? ... Ridiculous!
Never met this man. What did you say, what‘s his name?“

Karl May!
During your time, and far beyond, his adventurous travel-stories did guide generations of German speaking readers into exotic worlds although he never had been there himself — only as an old man when the profit out of book-sales allowed it — and a public debate about his claims of authenticity forced him to travel — alas, as a tourist.
Nowadays, his way of describing foreign territories and foreign people would be called „virtual travelling“. Wilbur Smith never was present when and where his stories happened, and he never claimed to be part of them as Karl May did. However, May was, as Smith, a meticulous researcher, although it was, at his time, much more difficult for him to access such detailed information as presented by him in an astonishing diversity to his readers.
He never met you, Mr. Henry, but he obviously had access to some sort of contemporary reporting about technical innovations, a newspaper perhaps or a book? Who knows …
There is a rifle, or „Stutzen“ as he called it, on display for visitors of his museum-turned „Villa Shatterhand“ in Radebeul, Germany — however, it is well known that he had tasked a gunsmith in nearby Dresden to built it for him.
Anyway, that automatic weapon which you invented was introduced by Karl May to the world of literature not as a tool to kill but as a tool to bring into effect ethical principles.
And, at the beginning of his serial of novels about his friendship with Chief Winnetou, he made this so convincingly clear in this fictitious conversation with the inventor of the Henry-„Stutzen“ that no one actually asked what effects your invention in reality meant to history and environment of North America …
We are going to make up for it and invite you, together with everyone on this train, to have a look through the windows!


— ratingtingting — ratingtingting — ratingtingting ...

On the time-line we drove back again into another period of history, and geography has changed as well. We are in North America … again as a ghost-train because there is no railway yet, even no white settlers …

A cloud of dust at the horizon! Is it a tornado?

My goodness! It looks like a huge dark wave, like an avalanche, which is rushing closer …

Now the windowpanes vibrate, now the metal plates …

The whole train trembles! Are we safe?

It’s closing in, it pounds, it rambles, it stamps … there is life in that wave, dark, furry, compact bodies!

Fifty million bison roved the prairies between the Rocky Mountains in the West and the Mississippi in the East, between the Rio Grande in the South and the Great Slave Lake in the North. That was at the beginning of the Nineteenth century. No other mammal has been observed by human eye in such huge herds. The roving bison whose bodies darkened the prairie had been like a gift from Manitou, a source of food, which never dried up ...

The wave is splitting …

They are storming before and behind us over rails and gravel …

We are lucky that the train does not move!

Not for long! We are going to roll forward again — on the timeline. Watch what is happening on the other side of the train …

— ratingting — ratingting — ratingting ...

But what is this? …

Scattered, limy heaps … where the huge herd should have come together again.

Where are the buffalos, which approached the train?

Bulky, like splints in the landscape … unmovable … heaps of bones!

— ratingting — ratingting — ratingting ...

We left behind us the middle of the Nineteenth century. A year ago, another train passed these rails. All windows wide open, on both sides. Men lean forward, almost hanging out of the frames, pointing their Winchester guns.
They fire left; they fire right.
A second train follows, stops repeatedly to release skinners — men with knives whose task it is to save the skins of the killed bison, not the meat, not the bones.
Hunters and skinners have been tasked to remove the herds of buffalos as quick and as efficient as possible; they were in the way of the railroad.
In addition, by extinguishing the herds the resistance of the Indsmen could be weakened, their food being shot away.
And now, please, everybody on the other side of the train again, we have reached the year 1867 …


— rating — rating — rating ...

Bison again … but this time men mounted on horses too.

These are cowboys! But cowboys were driving cattle not bison!

They don’t drive them, they shoot them!

— rating — rating — rating ...

We are rolling along the line of the Kansas Pacific Railway, part of the transcontinental rail-network, which is in the making. The owners thought it a good idea to save not only the skin of the bison. Instead of the Indsmen, their rail-workers should have the meat. And, by the way, they invented the instant-beef-powder as a way to make money out of beef their workers could not consume.
Therefore, they contracted that gentleman over there who is just waving from the saddle of his horse. Memorize his turned-up moustache — we are going to meet him again in another context.
The man’s name is William Frederick Cody, and since he — according to his own estimation — succeeded to shoot four thousand two hundred eight bison within eighteen months he was known as Buffalo Bill.
Of the fifty million bison, a couple of thousand animals survived until 1883 — thanks to the railway and to the development of a very efficient weapon …


18 The history of the civilisation of so-called wild or semi-wild people by the colonial powers is connected inseparably with the technical advancement of the ‚civilizers‘ on the one hand and with the primitive way of life of the ‚civilized‘ on the other.
Ownership and command of the machine are pivotal when it comes to decisions about freedom or subjugation.
In Karl May’s Winnetou-cycle, written in a time when bloody fights between indigenous people and white invaders were on a peak and about to be decided such correlations between technique and civilisation are abundantly present.



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