One-Eyed Charley Roasted Potatoes

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
  

Instructions

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!

For our music –esp for Charley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8tQpCZEzg

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

 

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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.

Please note this seemed like the perfect opportunity to practice using the new pronouns. Any mistakes are not mean as disrespect. They are only from an old dog trying to learn new tricks, please forgive.

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.