Be a hero. Plan a plesant surprise for your birding friends. Provide them a copy of On the Wings of Cranes: Larry Walkinshaw’s Life Story. Save ‘double’ shipping cost by sending them directly to your friends. Not only will they have a great read but you’ll be shopping smart in our tight economy! After ordering, tell them something special will soon arrive on the wings of cranes. Available in either paperback or hard copy.

Click below on the hot spot to BUY NOW.

"BUY NOW"

Any history buffs for friends? Lowell Schake’s La Charrette: A History of the Village Gateway to the American Frontier Visited by Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, Zebulon Pike - offers readers “A delicately crafted absorbing account of an American past seldom encountered in conventional history… meticulously researched,” according to Kirkus Discoveries. Others think the same attributes apply On the Wings of Cranes.

To purchase this STAR volume reissued by the publisher in 2006, click on BEST of AMERICAN FRONTIER HISTORY

The above volumes represent my two latest books fourteen years into retirement. My first post-retirement volume is free. This extensive Schake family history and genealogy, The Schakes of La Charette is posted on the Internet and recommended as a ‘Must read’ by Missouri geneagologists.

Click on READ for FREE to enjoy Germanic history, Missouri frontier life and genealogy galore. The geneanology of about 15,000 entries spans from the 1100s to the present and is on file at the Family History Center, Salt Lake City, Utah. Should you discover a need for assistance with your genealogy involving these families from Lippe-Detmold that came to Warren County, Charrette Township, Missouri, let me know. I have several valuable reference books that have benefitted many others.

To find more on these three topics, proceed down the ‘Books’ menu of these Web Pages to entries of May 2, 2006 for La Charrette: A History of the Village Gateway to the American Frontier Visited by Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, Zebulon Pike - and to April 18, 2006 for The Schakes of La Charette. Considering all the varied publishing options employed - hard copy, paperback, electronic with reissued volumes - eight ISBN book codes appear.

Genre: Nonfiction/Biography/Autobiography/History/American/Ethnohistory/Genealogy

Other menu alternatives within these Web Pages include the ‘Press Room’, ‘Reviews and Praise’, an ‘Events Archives’, and of course the all purpose ‘Blog’. Pages sometimes appear under more than one catagory as the topic dictates.

Search. Study. Enjoy. Leave a comment or two. Its been my pleasure sharing these thoughts and experiences. Thanks for the opportunity!

Shown above is Dr. Lawrence H. ‘Larry’ Walkinshaw (1904-1993) when searching the Kirtland’s Warbler nesting grounds associated with the Mack Lake burn of 1980, Crawford County, Michigan. Nonetheless, neither the exact location of the amateur Michigan birder when this portrait was taken nor its phototographer are known with certainty. During this interval Walkinshaw was asked to contribute to a research project funded by the USFWS and administered by Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources to help salvage another endangered species. The author was told by Kirtland’s Warbler experts that he was the only one who could find their nests with any regularity.

Phyllis Yochem concluded her review On the Wings of Cranes: Larry Walkinshaw’s Life Story saying the book exposed “one of the heros of American ornithology”. Certainly she was correct but if Larry Walkinshaw had heard or read such laudable praise he would downplay it in the extreme. Walkinshaw was a very reserve and unpretentious individual… perhaps even to a fault.

So much so that his modesty even became a motivating factor in the origins of his biography. Everyone in the Walkinshaw family knew how hard he worked, how he loved birding, traveling to study them in the wilds of nature and the long hours devoted to recording field notes, and writing. What we did not know was the eventual impact of it all. Did his sacrificing actually make a difference? That’s why Wendy, my wife - Walkinshaw’s daughter - asked that his biography be compiled.

Discovering for the first time the full reality of his species conservation successes places his family in Yochem’s camp…he really was one of the heros of American ornithology. Better than that however, the cranes and warblers he worked to save offer living testiment well beyond any other acclaim.

You can never really judge a book by its cover… or can you?

The origin of the ‘Cover Story’ and its message both followed what I had researched, written and later submitted for publication. What followed could only have been the work of serendipity.

Its composite picture was, at least to me, something of an accident. When I submitted the manuscript for publication only the picture of cranes flying across the face of the moon was to appear on the cover. Michael Boyce, Resident Manager of Michigan Audubon Society’s Baker Sanctuary had only recently photographed them. When Wendy, my wife - Larry Walkinshaw’s daughter, and I visited there in August 2007, Mike graciously offered it to us for the cover. Walkinshaw’s portriat beneath the cranes is the work of celebrated LIFE photojournalist Alfred Eisendstadt when assigned to Larry during week-long studies of Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska in the 1950s. It was submitted to iUniverse the publisher as the book’s Frontiespiece.

Unbeknown to me the iUniverse, Inc. graphic artists thought otherwise. They combined the two images to creat the stunning one appearing on the front cover (more subdued here than in actuality). Little did they know the interwinning of aesthetic beauty and history they had created!

The essence of this is its poignancy. For years, Walkinshaw led the charge as Chairman of Michigan Audubon Society’s Crane Sanctuary Committee leading to establishment of Baker Sanctuary in 1941. At that time it represented the world’s first and only sanctuary devoted exclusively to saving cranes. During the 1930s Walkinshaw and Aldo Leopold, the preeminant academic conservationist with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, thought fewer than 40 pairs of Greater Sandhill Cranes nested in the United States. Once there were thousands. After Larry published The Sandhill Cranes in 1949 and Cranes of the World in 1973, everyone knew he had established the foundation upon which all future crane research and salvation would reside. Thus Baker Sanctuary… within walking distance of Larry’s boyhood home, where he first sighted Sandhills and encountered their first nest providing him inspiration … represents the very genesis of all worldwide crane recovery - for Larry and for cranes.

Today, thousands of crane lovers flock to Baker Sanctuary each October when attending CraneFest. Thanks to the foresight and actions of Larry Walkinshaw they sometimes see as many as 8,500 roosting Sandhills in a single day… a new Michigan record.

Restoring the World’s crane populations… It all started at Baker Sanctuary. As noted on the front cover, the return of the cranes is “the wildlife equivalent of putting a man on the moon“, according to John Christian, USFWS, 2003.

Everyone knows you can’t judge a book by its cover… or can you now that you know the rest of the ‘Cover Story’? To proceed with rest of Larry Walkinshaw’s improbable Life Story,, obtain a copy and probe beyond its cover.

Copies available across the Internet, call the publisher at 1-800-288-4677 or purchase several from your favorite conservation organizations: International Crane Foundation; World Birding Center; Aransas National Wildlife Refuge; Corpus Christi Audubon Outdoor Club; Michigan Audubon Society; The Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper among many other commercial outlets.

Book explores life of hero of American ornithology

I am reading the fascinating biography of a remarkable man who researched and helped to preserve several species of birds, among them the greater sandhill crane, the whooping crane and the Kirtland’s Warbler.

He was Dr. Larry Walkinshaw, member of a pioneer Michigan family. His life and achievements are all the more impressive because they took place against the background of the Great Depression. His hard-earned formal education included the difficult choice of first becoming a dentist to support his family. Ornithology research and field documentation were not a second choice but a co-choice by him for a career.

Lowell M. Schake, author of the book, is another remarkable man. He was Walkinshaw’s son-in-law. He and Wendy, his wife are residents of Port Aransas [Texas]. The book, “On the Wings of Cranes: Larry Walkinshaw’s Life Story,” will be featured in Corpus Christi Northwest Library’s Amateur Birding Series, the first of which will take place Nov. 15. Schake is a retired Texas A&M University college professor.

Schake, in writing this biography, fully used the abundant notes and documentation of research by his subject, a dedicated scholar, and worked it into the minute history of the family.

Walkinshaw’s interests began early and he was faithful to them all his life. A favorite book in boyhood was “Two Little Savages,” by E. T. Seton. Walkinshaw was later able to tell the author what inspiration he had found in his works.

One of his most remarkable skils was his ability to inspire others to cooperate and work with him. He led with total enthusiam in many public projects, was a dedicated Boy Scout leader, and was a member of many boards, including service as president of the Wilson Ornithological Society.

Walkinshaw’s pioneer ancestors settled around the Big Marsh in Michigan, so he spent many of his early years exploring the territory. Here he found bird nests and observed the development of their habitants. He felt a strong conviction and a compulsion to learn more about everything natural that came his way. As an adult he almost single-handedly saved the marsh from a fire.

On another occasion, he and his wife, Clara, found an anbandoned cranelet and raised it to adulthood. The little chick was named Brownie and became totally imprinted on human beings. Wendy (Walkinshaw’s daughter and Schake’s wife) was 3 years old at the time and remembers her little bird sister well.

Of special interest is a chapter on Walkinshaw’s field techniques. Dr. George Archibald said of this aspect, “His mother taught him how to take field notes.”

Another friend commented, “I swear Larry never filled his boots, he glided through the cattails with his hands folded…never getting stuck in the mud. He reminded me of St. Peter, walking on water.”

Accounts of sometimes perilous adventures always enjoyed by Walkinshaw make this book a page-turner. It has extensive extras including the catalog of acronyms and abbreviations, a list of characters who are famous or well-known friends and fellow scientist with whom Walkinshaw worked. Black and white snapshots and family portraits add to the insider feel given to the reader.

Of special interest are the chapters about Walkinshaw’s research at Aransas Wildlife Refuge and with the whooping crane. There are anecdotes of revelance to his writing two books, “The Sandhill Crane” and “Cranes of the World.” The book was edited by Walkinshaw’s son James R. Walkinshaw. This very complete, yet readable, book was obviously a labor of love, collecting the episodes and work of one of the heros of American Ornithology.
_______________
Published in the weekly BIRD WATCH column of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Saturday, October 11, 2008, City Edition, Home & Garden Section, page 8E. Authored by columinist Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi resident in ‘America’s Birdiest Region’, who has studied birds since 1960.

La Charrette A History of the Village Gateway to the American Frontier Visited by Lewis and Clark * Daniel Boone * Zebulon Pike has gained another notable distinction with its approval by the National Park Service for two of their interpretative centers in and around St. Louis, Missouri. The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (Gateway Arch) in St. Louis at http://www.nps.gov/jeff/ and the Camp River Dubois site of Hartford, Illinois from where The Corps of Discovery started their westward journay at http://www.campdubois.com/ will both offer La Charrette at their interpretative center bookstores.  

These sites represent two of the 385 National Park System centers across the nation. ”I am excited about this decision allowing interested parties visiting these sights to acquire this detailed history of this frontier village from where Lewis and Clark departed civilization. They will discover a missing-link in our national heritage revealed by its rich history,” stated author Lowell M. Schake upon learning of the decision on August 21, 2006. He added, “The review process leading to approval took well over six-months.”

Lee Kirk of OZARKs  Magazine has offered these words of praise for La Charrette.

After Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out to explore the West, St. Charles wasn’t the last European settlement that they saw. A few miles up the Missouri River, they stopped off at La Charrette, a small village of French mountain men, Indians, Creoles, African-American slaves, and tough American pioneers, including the Boone family. 

Lowell Schake, who grew up in Charrette Township in Warren County, Missouri, spent years researching the long-gone settlement he had heard about in his childhood. The result is a fascinating story of a short-lived community that played an important role, however briefly, in America’s surge westward. Along with the story of the village, Schake’s text digresses to explain cultural and social habits of the people and the times, further enriching the volume for the reader. 

Equally as interesting as the story of La Charrette village is the story of Schake’s meticulous research. A retired university professor of animal science who has published hundreds of technical papers, he is careful to explain every step of the way where he gathered his data and why his research led him to the conclusions he drew. There is further information in extensive footnotes.

Proceed to OZARKS Magazine’s Web Page at http://www.ozarksmagazine.com/index.html?b=25 for more about this publication and other reviews.  Subscribe to OZARKS Magazine!

Two of Missouri’s most prestigious magazines carried reviews of La Charrette in their June 2006 issues. Ozarks magazine presented an impressive half-page plus spread picturing the front cover on page 46. Missouri Life included La Charrette along with other new selections on page 69. Both offered comments enticing to their readerships. (Ozarks had a little faux pas over the supposed absence of an index, but a retraction will be forthcoming). 

In both cases, I wish to thank the Editors, Susan Kirkpatrick of Ozarks and Danita Allen Wood of Missouri Life, for their support in helping tell the La Charrette Village story.

Stop by your local news stand to acquire a copy, or visit their web pages on-line for more details. Better yet, subscribe to these enjoyable and informative midwestern magazines, then buy your copyHERE.

“La Charrette” transports the reader back in time to the village’s unique place in America’s history and the fascinating lives, including both the hardships and the adventures, of its people.

Visitors to this sleepy little Missouri River village include Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery during their epic journey of 1804 and triumphant return in 1806.  Zebulon Pike visited La Charrette before exploring and opening the trade route over the famous Santa Fe Trail.  Other historical figures such as trapper Jim Bridger, Major Stephen Long, and the Duke of Wurttemberg visited La Charrette.

The heart and soul of La Charrette belonged to its citizens and neighbors including the one and only Daniel Boone, his son-in-law Flanders Callaway, “Mountain Man” John Colter and Charles “Indian” Phillips.  As a fourth great grandson of John Colter, I enjoyed reading about his home on Little Boef Creek.  There he lived with his wife Sarah, his children Hiram and Evelina, and neighbors John Sullens and Charles Phillips.  Of particular interest to the reader concerns Nathan Boone’s last tribute to John Colter.

The author, himself a native of Charrette Creek, insightfully describes the interdependency between the Native Americans, French Canadians, African Americans, American trappers, and later the German populations of La Charrette as a “continuing process of cultural assimilation.”  Lowell Schake skillfully ties together the microcosm of the village to the national events shaping history such as the Louisiana Purchase, War of 1812, and the Trail of Tears.

This book is highly recommended not only as a result of the impeccable research by the author, but also his talent for “bringing to life in print” the village of La Charrette.

Timothy Forrest Coulter
St. Wendel, Indiana

“Boone descendants will be happy to see this new and original book pertaining to a part of Daniel Boone’s life, and the lives of his family members, that has not been written about before…. If you are interested in learning more about the earliest life of those who moved to and settled Missouri when it was still the edge of the American frontier, you will enjoy this book.”—Margy Miles, Boone family descendant

Reviewer: Clive G. Siegle, Southern Methodist University
Executive Director, Zebulon Pike Bicentennial Commission

For several decades that straddled the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the small Missouri River settlement of La Charrette served as the virtual gateway for the westering impulses of Euro-Americans on the frontiers of Louisiana. The village proper never probably amounted to more than around seven permanent residences, with a smattering of outlying farms nearby. But during its brief existence as the westernmost European settlement on a river whose course led nearly two thousand miles into the heart of the northern Great Plains, it played host to an astonishing assortment of frontiersmen and settlers whose exploits largely defined the era of exploration and Indian trading ventures in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, despite its unique niche in frontier history, La Charrette remained at best a paragraph or footnote in most histories of the era until the publication of Lowell Schake’s book, La Charrette: A History of the Village Gateway to the American Frontier. In this endeavor, Schake has done an admirable job of teasing a coherent and compelling portrait of a significant but largely neglected community from an uneven and complex multi-cultural trove of sources.

Poised as it was on the western edge of Euro-American settlement, La Charrette saw a constant parade of cultures and conditions walk, ride, and float past its eclectic assemblage of ramshackle bousillage dwellings. Although the village always retained an element of French flavor throughout its brief lifespan, its crossroads location assured that besides having a core of original French settlers, villagers and nearby neighbors also included the legendary Daniel and Nathan Boone, mountain man John Colter and his Lewis and Clark comrade Robert Frazer, and such frontier characters as “Indian” Phillips. One of the book’s strong suites is Schake’s effective employment of genealogy and primary legal documents to reconstruct the lives if these early settlers. This is particularly important for the French settlers, whose everyday lives have often been lost or overshadowed by the historical focus on downriver towns like St. Louis, or the romance of the fur trade. When Lewis and Clark passed through in 1804, they noted that the village consisted of but seven households. The author has skillfully identified and documented all seven, giving the reader a glimpse into the little-known lives of each of those families who largely came to define the community.

The book also does a fine job of fitting Charrette and its environs into a greater regional context by not only touring the immediate “suburbs,” but linking the greater village and its gateway metaphor to the larger pageant of the West on the cusp of the nineteenth century, whether as a port of call for Lewis and Clark or Zebulon Pike, or as the base for the fur trading adventures of its own sons like the Cardinal family, or Jean-Baptiste Luzon.

The footnoting in this work is at times a bit spare, and in a few places they rely a bit too heavily on secondary sources—although these are, in general, usually authoritative in their field. To better showcase its scholarship, this book would have benefited from a formal, detailed bibliography, rather the convention of relying on the reader to fish one out of the endnotes. Often this is the result of a regrettable cost-cutting trend in scholarly publishing these days, and whether or not that is the case here, the book deserves better. The reader soon realizes from the text, for example, that the author has done extensive primary documentary research in both microfilm and hard-copy media, but the resources have not been compiled in a comprehensive bibliographic form that would enhance its academic value as a scholarly resource. The book also lacks an index—not surprising, since this sort of enhancement goes hand-in-hand with a formal bibliography. While these may mean little to the avocational historical reader, this book is the product of much too serious a research effort to lack these enhancements.

For both the scholar and the avocational historian, La Charrette adds much-needed pages to the history of the westering experience and the Missouri River. Incredibly, La Charrette’s eventful few decades of existence on the Missouri ended so mysteriously that its demise can only be conjectured to have been due, not surprisingly, to a catastrophic flood. Today, not a trace remains.

Except, that is, in Schake’s book. He deftly and convincingly snatches back from the gloom of obscurity and the watery depths of the Missouri a relict landscape that lives again, where the great and the not-so-great strive in the tribulations and triumphs of this unassuming gateway to the West.

“Every square inch of earth has its own history. In this meticulously researched and compiled study, a small Creole village gets its due. La Charrette, one of the earliest settlements on the Missouri River flourished for 30 years in the late 1790s and early 1800s and then disappeared. Using this obscure village as his focal point, Schake covers a wide swath of classic American history—the Louisiana Purchase, Daniel Boone, the fur trade, black and Native-American slavery, the War of 1812, the Trail of Tears and the daily life of the Osage tribe—as it related to the daily life of small town settlers. He includes countless arcane yet fascinating little facts: The origin of the word “Missouri” may be smoky water. Male Osage warriors who showed cowardice in battle were forced to dress as, and live among, the squaws. One of the prime objectives of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to establish friendly relations among the Indians. A local Indian, tried for the murder of his wife, was acquitted on the argument that the prevailing citizenry were, by law, non-native aliens, and therefore he could not be expected to obey their laws. Observed with an acute eye for detail, life in a small river town in the early 1800s was just as complex and rapidly changing as our own confused era. A delicately crafted, absorbing account of an American past seldom encountered in conventional histories.”

– Kirkus Discoveries

Editor Leo E. Oliva of the Santa Fe Trail Quarterly, Volume 17:4, August 2003, concluded, “This is an important book and recommended.”

“[T]his is intriguing material … well organized … in an easy-to absorb presentation” was offered by Writers Club Press editors, April 12, 2003

“As Schake notes in this highly informative and entertaining book on La Charrette, the history of North America is that of various peoples—Asian, African, and European—coming together in many different settings, none of which are any more or less valuable than the others” was F. Todd Smith’s assessment of La Charrette’s unique diversities. Dr. Smith, associate professor of history, University of North Texas, Denton, specializes in the American frontier borderlands and Native Americans.

Another Smith and professor of history, this one named Stephen E. at Southwest Missouri State University, has his review posted HERE. (Scroll over the first dozen or so reviews to get to La Charrette.)

“If you have ancestors who moved to and settled in Missouri when it was still on the edge of the American frontier, you will be interested in … La Charrette.… I think you will find it an interesting historical and genealogical source,” states Martha Jones, PhD, in her “Relatively Speaking” genealogy column of September 7, 2003, Victoria Advocate, Victoria, Texas.

“Charrette Village is put in its universal, national and territorial place. For the strong interest now in the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this book should be useful matter” said Ralph Gregory, president, Franklin County Historical Society, in a 2003 Washington Missourian article.

Stephen E. Smith Manager, Missouri Southern News Bureau, Missouri Southern State University-Joplin, published his review at MyMissourian. He concluded, “If you are a history buff—or even if you’re not— La Charrette: Village Gateway to the American West will make a valuable edition to your personal library.”

History Professor Walter Kamphoefner Director of graduate studies at Texas A&M University said, “One might question whether a village of seven houses rates a book, but to do so would be to underestimate both Lowell Schake and La Charrette. This was not just any village … Schake has done a remarkable job of digging into French, Spanish, and territorial records to reconstruct the multiracial, multilingual, and multiethnic society of his hometown, the intriguing frontier village of La Charrette.” Kamphoefner is a native of nearby New Melle, St. Charles County, Missouri.

Timothy Forrest Coulter of St. Wendel, Indiana, a direct descendant of America’s first “Mountain Man” of La Charrette—John Colter of Lewis and Clark fame—wrote, “La Charrette transports the reader back in time to the village’s unique place in America’s history and the fascinating lives, including both the hardships and the adventures, of its people.… The heart and soul of La Charrette belonged to its citizens and neighbors including the one and only Daniel Boone, his son-in-law Flanders Callaway, “Mountain Man” John Colter, and Charles “Indian” Phillips. As a fourth-great-grandson of John Colter, I enjoyed reading about his home on Little Boef Creek. There, he lived with his wife Sarah, his children Hiram and Evelina, and his neighbors John Sullens and Charles Phillips.… Lowell Schake skillfully ties together the microcosm of the village to the national events shaping history such as the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the Trail of Tears.… This book is highly recommended not only because of the author’s impeccable research, but also because of his talent for bringing to life in print the village of La Charrette.