Tonight's
meal is dedicated to a Gold Rush Legend stage coach driver called
One-eyed Charley! Read about this wild west character is a short
article after the recipe. This is being presented for our first pot
luck dinner of the year.
It
will sound strange but this meal was fixed originally in a dutch oven
on an open campfire. Here by using modern techniques and helpers we
present a taste of the Wild West without resorting to sitting on
rocks! Potatoes, onions a bit of garlic roasted in root beer! Yes
you read that right! Try it, you will be amazed at the flavors you
can pull out of that pot!
Ingredients
- 1.5 lb. sack mini red potatoes
- 3lbs bag of yellow onions caramelized
- 5 large garlic cloves minced
- Root
Beer soda
Night before: An easy way to caramelize the onions is to wipe out the slow cooker and spray it. Melt 1 stick of butter in the microwave, set aside. Carefully using a mandolin, slice the onions into the cooker. Use the whole 3 lbs bag because any extra will go to good use! Stir in the butter and cover. Cook on low overnight, stirring once or twice. Cook for a full 12 hours to get a nice light mahogany color. The onions will be naturally sweet and you don't have to stand over them stirring for hours!
You will be using about 1 and a half cups for this dish. Let the rest cool and store. You could bag it and keep in freezer for a year. Caramelized onions are like gold in soups and casserole or even just spooned on a hamburger!
When the onions are nearly ready:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Cut up the garlic and set aside.
Wash the potatoes and thick slice them into a large bowl.
Stir
the garlic into the onions then stir that into the potatoes.
Spray
a baking dish and pour in the potato/onion mixture.
Pour
the root beer in until it reaches about halfway up the potato
mixture.
Cover
and let set about 10-15 minutes. Do not forget this step!
Bake
at 375
degrees F., uncovered, for about 40 minutes
or until the potatoes are tender.
You
may need to add a little more root beer while cooking to make sure it
the dish doesn't become too dry.
What
a wonderful dish to bring to our first pot luck dinner of the year!
So
happy to be serving my Master Indy
socialslave
To
satisfy and restore.
To
nourish, support and maintain.
To
gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to
nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I
cook!
Please
buy slave's cookbook:
The
Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon
========
Charley
Parkhurst, A Gold Rush Legend
An illustration of
Charley Parkhurst. Earning the nickname “One-Eyed Charley” after
being kicked in the eye by a horse, which was perhaps startled by a
rattlesnake.
Charley Parkhurst was a
legendary driver of six-horse stagecoaches during California’s Gold
Rush — the “best whip in California,”
by one account.
The job was treacherous
and not for the faint of heart. This was before the Civil War and
before the railroads. These drivers had to pull cargoes of gold over
tight mountain passes and open desert.
They were in constant
peril from rattlesnakes and desperadoes. It was not an easy life, but
Parkhurst had the look for it: “short and stocky,” a whiskey
drinker, cigar smoker and tobacco chewer who wore a black eye patch
after being kicked in the left eye by a horse.
And there was one other
attribute, carefully hidden from the outside world. When Parkhurst
died in 1879 at age
67, of cancer of the tongue, a doctor discovered that the famous
stagecoach driver was biologically a woman.
“The discoveries of the
successful concealment for protracted periods of the female sex under
the disguise of the masculine are not infrequent, but the case of
Charley Parkhurst may
fairly claim to rank as by all odds the most astonishing of them
all,” The San Francisco Call wrote not long after ver death, in an
article that was reprinted in The New York Times under the headline
“Thirty Years in Disguise.”
Charlotte Darkey
Parkhurst was born in 1812
in New Hampshire. Abandoned by parents, ve
was consigned to an orphanage, from which historians believe ve ran
away wearing boys’ clothes. Charlotte wound up in Worcester, Mass.,
where ve got a job cleaning horse stables. There also found a mentor,
Ebenezer Balch, who taught ver how to handle horses.
“The story goes that
while in the poor house Parkhurst discovered that boys have a great
advantage over girls in the battle of life, and desired to become a
boy,” The Providence Journal in Rhode Island wrote in an article
after ver death, as reporters on both coasts tried to piece together
ver life. In fact we still do not know much about this interesting
soul.
After working as a
stagecoach driver on the East Coast for several years, Parkhurst
journeyed west. At that time many traveled by ship to Panama,
traversed a short overland route, and then boarded another ship to
San Francisco, where they arrived in 1850 or
1851.
In California, Charley
quickly became known for the ability to move passengers and gold
safely over important routes between gold-mining outposts and major
towns like San Francisco or Sacramento.
“Only a rare breed of
men (and women),” wrote the historian Ed Sams in his 2014 book “The
Real Mountain Charley,” “could be
depended upon to ignore the gold fever of the 1850s and hold down a
steady job of grueling travel over narrow one-way dirt roads that
swerved around mountain curves, plummeting into deep canyons and
often forded swollen, icy streams.”
Charley was considered one
of the safest stagecoach drivers — not a daredevil, like so many of
the contemporaries — and had a special rapport with the horses.
Parkhurst drove for Wells Fargo, at least once moving a large cargo
of gold across the country.
A 1969
article about Parkhurst in the Travel section of The New York Times
evoked some of the perils they faced: “Indians and grizzly bears
also were a major menace. The state lines of California in the
post-Gold Rush period were certainly no place for a lady, and nobody
ever accused Charley of being one.”
Parkhurst’s story has
long been shrouded in myth and thinly sourced anecdotes.
In “Charley’s
Choice,” a 2008 work of historical fiction,
the writer Fern J. Hill imagines that as a child, Parkhurst told of
dreams of driving a stagecoach. When the friend replied, “You
can’t, you’re a girl,” young Charlotte decided then and there
to live as a man.
And in another novel, “The
Whip,” by Karen Kondazian (2012), Parkhurst
is cast as a straight woman who wanted her freedom.
“I would have done
that,” Ms. Kondazian said in a telephone interview. “You can kind
of use her in any way you want, because we don’t have the total
facts about her.”
Some historians say that
had Parkhurst lived today, ve might well have identified as gay or
transgender.
“Being gay at that time
was seen as negative,” said Mark Jarrett, a textbook publisher who
included Parkhurst in a new book intended to comply with a California
law requiring social studies curriculum to recognize the historical
role of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
“It was illegal, it was
a crime,” he said, “so people didn’t go around professing what
their real identities were. They were hidden identities.”
In the late 1860s, as the
railroads grew across the country, stagecoach driving became a dying
profession. Parkhurst retired and opened a saloon for a time, and
also worked as a lumberjack in Northern California.
After Parkhurst died, The
Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote, “Her accumulations were regular and her
wealth considerable at the time of her death, which took place in a
lonely cabin, with no one near and her secret her own.”
Parkhurst could claim one
other distinction: An 1867 registry
in Santa Cruz County lists a Charles Darkey
Parkhurst from New Hampshire as having
registered to vote — more than 50 years before the 19th Amendment
gave women the franchise.
Even in the 19th century,
however, there was admiration for Parkhurst’s feat of disguise.
“The only people who have occasion to be disturbed by the career of
Charley Parkhurst are the gentlemen who have so much to say about
‘woman’s sphere’ and ‘the weaker vessel,’ ” The
Providence Journal wrote. “It is beyond question that one of the
soberest, pleasantest, most expert drivers in this State, and one of
the most celebrated of the world-famed California drivers was a
woman. And is it not true that a woman had done what woman can do?”
In spite of what little we
truly know about Charley we have more than enough to include this
story in any mention of LGBT heroes and legends.
