Robert E. Lee's chicken

Lots of odds & ends in this post--catching up!

In the spirit of the holidays, I am looking for topics that are a touch more lighthearted than casualty statistics. It's cold, and no one hates a mud march of sadness and bitter results at Christmas more than I do.

So, I am researching Robert E. Lee's chicken. Apparently she was a hen, and laid an egg for him every morning under his cot. I know this is hardly the stuff of which great history is made, but it makes the Marble Man more real, at least in my opinion.

I have been very gratified at the response to my post about Fort Tejon, especially from out-of-state. It has gotten more hits than any other post (followed closely by the elusive Panic of 1837!!) and more comments.

If anyone has a picture of the Fort with snow, I'd love to have it. I plan on doing another post soon, and would like to use it. It is the least I could do for a place that was pretty good to me. Several folks have written to say that they have contacted CA legislators.

If there are any teachers out there in CA who have visited the fort, it might be nice to have your students write to the State government as well. When I taught 5th grade, I used to have my kids write letters to the soldiers so we would have some real "mail" at "fake mail call."

The book is going well. The second rewrite is almost done--very close, in fact. The next thing is to put the individual chapters together as a unified whole, and hope I haven't used the same quote in two different chapters, etc. So far no one has offered to read for me, so I keep reading to my cat.

The picture is a Black Star hen. I think the entire idea of back-breeding animals is fascinating. More on that later, but I wanted an image of a hen as close to one from the 1860s as possible. This is an older breed.