The (Unconfirmed) History of General Hardware Border Morris
This Wisconsin Border Morris side goes waaaaay back
Morris dancing? Have you heard of it? Did you know there is a team in rural northwest Wisconsin?
If you (like most Americans) are wondering what Morris dancing is, think of it like square dancing for English people, but throw in some clashing of sticks and waving of hankies and silly outfits known as “kits.”
Morris dancing may seem like a quirky thing that the BBC made up to have an interesting background when one of their murder mysteries occurs at the same time as a village country fair. I think there are several BBC-related conspiracy theories that are true, but this one is not. Indeed, Morris dancing has a long and storied history that predates BBC television by hundreds of years.
Our team (known in the lingo as a “side” — like fries or coleslaw) is based in Western Wisconsin, far from the original home of Morris dancing in the Midlands of England.
How did we get here? And, perhaps more importantly, why?
Would you believe me if I told you that the history of our little Morris side in rural Wisconsin goes back over 250 years? Would it seem unusual if I told you that my research has revealed that our team has connections to most of the important events of the last quarter millennium? This includes but is not limited to the US Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Depression, and the ongoing climate crisis.
In my spare time, I am something of a genealogist. I am experienced at entering scant information into internet search engines and then building elaborate histories for my deceased family members. You will be impressed to know that I am descended from every royal family in Europe, as well as related to almost every former US President and most celebrities. My research skills are impeccable.
When I started digging into our team’s history for what we thought was our 25th anniversary year, I discovered that we are not the first incarnation of General Hardware Border Morris. Not by a long shot.
Border is a style of Morris dance from the English side of the border with Wales. The old traditions run deep in the Border region. DNA analysis reveals that many of the populations of the rural towns have roots that reach back before the Norman conquest and before the Anglo-Saxon invasion to the early Britons and Picts that fought the Romans almost 2000 years ago.
The Welsh border region of England is an area of great spiritual importance for the world. The magical forces that make Spring happen every year, and make children be born without excess limbs, and make rain fall in the right season are all maintained by the people of this part of the world. They do it quietly, without fanfare, on behalf of all of us.
These are proud people with deep connections to the land, the waters, the trees, and the rocks. The seasonal rituals required for the continued functioning of the world’s ecosystems require that they form secret societies that can span generations. These societies require a “front” and for most of them, that means a Morris side that meets at the town pub.
This is where my genealogy research skills helped me discover the true origins of how General Hardware Border Morris ended up in Wisconsin.
Through fragments of documents and censuses, as well as court records and pub receipts, I was able to piece together that back in Colonial times in 1600s North America, there was a migration of peasants from the Border region of England to the rural areas of New England. Some of those peasants were Morris dancers who were also members of the aforementioned secret societies responsible for planetary ecosystem continuation. These remnants of the secret societies (apparently aided by an ecstatic trance psychic state achieved only after Morris dancing for the whole night on the longest night of the year) discovered locations in the countryside of New England with immense spiritual power embedded in the rocks and waters.
This group of New England Morris dancers used iron hardware to augment the power of the seasonal rituals. They were known to steal iron bolts and nails from pious pilgrims’ houses. The god-fearing people of New England would wake up in the morning and discover a missing door hinge or see a fence board hanging on by only one nail, and they would blame the “Hardware Ghosts.” They would scare their children with stories of these Hardware Ghosts who would come in the night and take the bolt from the door, allowing anyone to walk in any time.
As I found more and more information, I put the pieces together. There were house fires throughout Colonial New England, and in the mornings, all the nails were mysteriously gone from the ashes. It had to be the notorious Hardware Ghosts gang! And coincidentally, there were police records for rowdy Morris dancers disturbing the peace on those same nights in every town with hardware disappearances!
I didn’t need any more information to put the pieces together.
There is a gap in the paper trail. We need to fast forward here to the US Revolutionary War. By this time, the rural American Morris dancers had been maintaining their sacred rituals for over a hundred years. In a tongue-in-cheek nod to the children’s scary stories, many of the dancers had adopted the last name “Hardware.”
When General Washington sent a lieutenant to rural New Hampshire, he encountered a charismatic squire for a Morris side named George Hardware. Washington’s lieutenant challenged George Hardware to recruit 100 men for the militia and said he could become an officer if he did.
Hardware had no trouble recruiting the men from the many Border Morris sides in the area. Soon, Hardware and his men marched out of the hill country and joined Washington at his camp in New Jersey. It is well-recorded in the newspapers of the day that Hardware’s regiment always carried ironwood sticks with them into battle. The sticks were useful as weapons for close-contact fighting, as well as for impromptu Morris dancing between the action.
It is a false, but persistent rumor that Hardware’s regiment only fought with sticks. They tended to be in the front of the fighting, and when they fell to the enemy, the British soldiers would take their rifles but leave their sticks, giving the appearance that the Hardware regiment went to battle with only sticks as weapons.
It is also a false but persistent rumor that Hardware held the rank of General in the army. Multiple cross-referenced sources say that the highest recorded rank for the man was second lieutenant. But the rumor had staying power. I did not initially find the source of the rumor, but in digging around in a set of family letters from one of his soldiers, I discovered that George Hardware was what they call “a character.” He designed his own uniform with pieces of fabric from every military uniform he could find. It was a coat of “tatters” that flowed in the wind and bounced when he rode his horse. He was constantly singing and humming Morris dance tunes and demanded that his men sing or hum along in harmony. His regimental band included melodians and fiddles. He also wanted his men to call him “General Hardware” whenever any regular Continental army officers were not around.
Self-styled General George Hardware was also something of an anarchist. He insisted (again, when there were no Continental officers in earshot) that all of his soldiers were also “Generals.” Each soldier was equal to every other soldier. The regimental meetings could go on for a long time. But there was some order to the regiment, which was organized into 21-man “sides.” Each side had a leader whom the others elected to be “squire.” And each side had three musicians, who each supported a 6-man “set.”
The “Hardware Generals,” as they called themselves, would drill fighting techniques in their 6-man sets to the various Border Morris dance tunes. It was sometimes hard to tell if they were dancing or drilling.
After the war, and the subsequent War of 1812, the Hardware Generals regiment disbanded and went back to farming, with the occasional Morris dance and sacred life-sustaining ritual thrown in. Many of the families moved west to the Ohio River Valley and then up into Northern Michigan, where they used ecstatic Morris dancing to discover new forces of spiritual energy flowing through rocks, pine trees, and bogs. Wherever they went, it appears they continued their clandestine rituals, their theft of hardware to enhance the rituals, and their public Morris dancing.
The next record I found in the old lumber town newspapers of Michigan refers to a bar fight where one of the fighters claimed to be a direct descendant of General George Hardware, and the other fighter said he had never heard of a General Hardware. Those “fightin’ words” started a brawl that was said to have lasted three days.
After the brawl, the local judge ordered all of the Morris dancers of the region who called themselves “Hardware Generals” to carry a small can of nuts and bolts around with them at all times. It was meant to be a signal to anyone who did not want to be around them. The cans would rattle and announce their presence as they walked the town roads. Children would hide as they walked down the street because their parents would tell them scary stories of the “Hardware Men.” Some things never change.
When the Civil War broke out, the Hardware Generals again formed a regiment. They cut fresh ironwood sticks and marched off to join Mr Lincoln’s army.
At the time, there were not enough rifles to adequately arm all of the soldiers. During the battle known today as “The Wilderness,” the green recruits of the Hardware Generals regiment were sent as reinforcements into battle armed with only their ironwood sticks. They were told to pick up the rifles of the dead soldiers who had fallen. In a cruel twist of fate, a fog fell over the battlefield, and the Hardware Generals marched right into the Confederate right flank before they could gather any rifles. The Generals fought bravely and did some damage by both knapping and throwing their sticks. But they were no match for the cannons and rifles of the battle-hardened Army of Northern Virginia. Every member of the Hardware regiment in their glorious “tatter kit” uniforms died on the battlefield that fateful day. But they died with their sticks in their hands.
Later speculations suggested that they might have gotten close enough to do real damage to the Confederates in the fog if they had not insisted on wearing their signature tin cans filled with iron hardware.
After the disaster of the Civil War, the thread of the history of the Hardware Generals thinned out to almost nothing. It was more than 60 years without a single newspaper story or court record or unpaid bar bill that I could find. I feared that the fabled Hardware Generals were actually not related at all to the modern General Hardware Border team that I dance with.
But, as usual for me, persistence usually pays off when I use random internet searches to try to uncover the truth.
I found had been looking in the wrong place! After the Civil War, the wives and children of the fallen soldiers had moved out of the logging towns of Michigan and into the wilds of Northern Wisconsin (a path much like our later-day squire, Rick Nagler). They carried the tradition of Morris dancing with them to Wisconsin, as well as maintaining the secret rituals necessary for the continuation of life on the planet. The secrets had always been shared within the families. So in the wilds of Northwest Wisconsin, the elders taught the children both the Morris dances and sacred rites of the seasons.
The families made a pact to never send all of the members off to war again. They dedicated themselves to lumbering. They would cut the white pine, but leave the birds-eye maple and the ironwood. At this point, the kit for these Border Morris sides started to include the typical plaid shirts of Northern Wisconsin logging camps.
The Hardware Generals Morris Teams formed co-ops throughout the area, selling nuts, bolts, nails, hinges, and more to loggers in the area (they categorically deny stealing any of their products).
I found a compelling advertisement for the “General’s Hardware” in a local newspaper. The clue was that the address listed on the advertisement was the same one that was listed later as the home of a “squire of the local Morris side” who was found lost in the forest. Searchers were able to find him because he was one of “those people” who always carried a can of hardware around. He had been gone for three days. By the time they found him, the only words he could say were “diddle diddle diddle all the day.”
At this point, it seems that the Hardware Generals disappear again from the historical records for a while. The next reference I found is during the Great Depression. It was a hard time in Wisconsin farm country. Prices were low, and the weather had yielded one dry year after another. Families were surviving by eating roots and wild greens. Apparently, the Hardware Generals Morris sides of Wisconsin had disbanded and become itinerant salespeople. They would travel from place to place and make stick furniture for people and salvage old iron hardware, and find new uses for it. The sacred rituals continued in limited ways, but they had lost connections to any powerful convergence places.
There is considerable evidence from this time period that the Morris sides of the border region in England had also lost too many members to the Great War, and with those losses, they had lost most of the sacred knowledge and rituals. The global droughts of the 1930s can largely be attributed to the discontinuation of these secret rituals on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Great Depression further worsened when so many people were displaced and lost their connections to specific lands and waters. They lost the knowledge of where to perform the rituals, and then they lost the knowledge of the rituals themselves. They were left with traditional dances and dance kits, but a dwindling connection to secret rituals. It was lucky for all of us that the dances themselves held deep magic going back to the early Britons and their pagan shamans. The world was unwittingly being held together by a few lingering Morris sides.
During World War II, the Hardware Generals hit another low point. All of the young people of the sides were drafted and went to war. They did not bring their ironwood sticks with them this time and did not dance in their units. They were separated and sent all over the world.
The dancing would have disappeared altogether (possibly causing a planetary ecosystem collapse) were it not for the protest of the young women of the community. They had been attending dance practice for years, and had been allowed to be musicians, but they had not been allowed to dance until that moment (of course, the women and girls had been dancing all along, but in secret, so they knew all the steps). The women stepped in and saved the Hardware Generals (and the life of the planet).
One of the lesser-known stories of the Hardware Generals has recently been declassified. As part of my research, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and what I learned shocked me to my core.
During the Second World War, the women of the Hardware Generals were bored by the same old dances. They played around with the form and added new elements. But they were still looking for more challenge. So they translated each of the standard moves of a Border Morris dance into a letter, and they rechoreographed the dances so they spelled out risqué jokes.
The Hardware Generals women were recruited to perform on a USO tour to Europe, and during the tour, they met their Soviet counterparts, who used traditional Russian folk dance to entertain the Red Army. They taught the women of this group their dance language, and they learned some of the Russian dances. And that was that. Or so it seemed.
Years later, when one of the women of the Morris side was watching a newsreel before a motion picture screening, she saw a Russian folk dance being performed in the background of a Soviet military parade reel. She recognized the dance language and, after the screening, asked the theater owner to replay the reel, frame by frame. She discovered a secret message about danger and missiles and Cuba, and she sent a coded telegram to her previous USO commander. The rest is history, of course.
It is not clear when the Hardware Generals stopped dancing. But sources say it was in the mid-1970s. There was a “free love” commune that moved into the area on a “magic” school bus. Their leader, a woman with fiery red hair and a dazzling array of outfits and handkerchiefs, lured the core of the Generals away with promises of teaching them how to double-step and caper and galley. That group left one day, and rumor has it they ended up in California. They were last seen touring with the Grateful Dead, and their dancing no longer resembled Border Morris. At all.
When the core of the side left on the magic bus, Morris dancing stopped entirely. There were 25 years when no Morris dancing happened at all in Northwest Wisconsin. The name Hardware Generals receded from memory and faded into myth.
In addition, every secret, life-sustaining ritual maintained for centuries was lost. This was happening all over the planet because all of the folk dance groups worldwide were experiencing similar declines, and they were the keepers of the ancient rites. It was in this period that the consequences of the loss of the ritual started to show.
What we know as the “climate crisis” is a direct result of the end of global peasant culture that was tied to the land. The peasant cultures of the world had seasonal dance activities that honored the land and the water. These activities sustained the soils, trees, and wild animals. But with the Industrial Revolution and the displacement of the global peasantry, the exploitation of people, plants, and soil was accelerated.
When the seasonal rituals started to be lost, there was no check on the planetary destruction. There was no annual reset. There was no passing of responsibility on to the next generation. The children grew up and left their families, and went to Minneapolis or Madison, and forgot about the sacred dances that their grandparents used to do. The ungrateful generation didn’t even send thank-you notes for birthday cards with $5 bills in them.
It was in this moment of despair and ongoing ecological collapse that one Morris dancer moved into the former territory of the Hardware Generals. His name is Rick Nagler, and he decided to form a Morris side in rural Wisconsin after sleeping on a grassy stream bank for seven straight nights. Each night, he would wake up from a dream where Border Morris dancers would walk out of a foggy forest and grab him by the shoulders. Instead of bells on their legs, Rick saw that the dancers had tin cans attached to their legs, and those cans would rattle, as if they had nuts and bolts in them.
The dancers never spoke in the dreams except to say “Oh, diddle all the day” over and over again. Those words would haunt Rick for years until he had another dream of choreographing a new dance to them.
By chance, Rick was already a Morris dancer, having danced in sides in Michigan and Minnesota. So he decided to follow his visions and start a new side in rural Wisconsin. Little did he know he was restarting an old side.
Fate is an interesting friend. Some of the first practices for Rick’s new group were in the Sheridan Town Hall. Hanging in the town hall is a backdrop for the stage, and on that backdrop is an advertisement for the old Hardware Generals’ co-op that was called “General Hardware.”
Rick’s side practiced for months in the shadow of that fateful advertisement. Each of the members of the team independently had a dream that the team should be named “Hardware Generals,” but we, as a society, have collectively lost the ability to perceive magical dreams, so the name got scrambled, and the team members all proposed the name “General Hardware.” It just felt right.
The elements of the kit that also seemed to “feel right” were the plaid shirts, the tatter vests, and the cans filled with hardware. Of course, these were all suggested through dreams. The ancestors were smiling upon us.
Later, we were guided by dreams and psychedelic visions to other sites in rural Wisconsin where information about the original Hardware Generals was recovered. We found dance kits in antique stores and at estate sales, along with letters and dance notes.
As the General Hardware Border Morris side grew in numbers and variety of dances, it was not so much a beginning as a “remembering.” Each of the dancers would have moments when they would forget a dance, only to have muscle memory kick in. The strangest cases were when dancers would have muscle memory for dances they had never done before.
The original dance side that Rick recruited was all male, but just like the Hardware Generals discovered during World War II, the side could only survive and continue by welcoming all genders to join as dancers. And, as we are discovering, it is vitally important that General Hardware and other folk dance traditions continue.
At this point, the forces of climate disaster have been fully unleashed. There are more and more hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes. The heat waves and droughts are overwhelming populations around the world. This crisis is destabilizing and displacing what is left of the peasant cultures. The only things keeping the planetary systems functioning are the secret and sacred rituals contained in the various folk dance traditions around the world. In many cases, even the dancers themselves do not know the existential importance of their dances. The dances are spells that are repeatedly cast during practice and performance. If we are to heal from the planetary crisis, we will need to rescue the lost dances.
General Hardware Border Morris practices weekly in the Menomonie, Wisconsin area. We are always open to accepting new dancers and musicians, and, of course, warrior poets.
