I have not watched TV much in the last two months and none at all in the last two weeks. So, imagine my euphoria when I did sleepily push the power button Thursday night and I saw that, within a few minutes, the Turner movie channel would show Union Pacific. The last--and only time--I had ever seen this thundering Cecil B. DeMille classic was over thirty years ago. And I never forgot it; imagined I would never see it again in this lifetime. But....God Bless Ted Turner.
If the "Golden Age" of Hollywood was the 1930s and 40s, the Golden Year was 1939. Jesse James, Dodge City, Gone With the Wind, Young Mister Lincoln, Stagecoach, Drums Along the Mohawk....and those are just some of my '39 favorites with a Western theme. Throw in The Wizard of Oz, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Gunga Din, and Goodbye Mr. Chips, and you see why it was such a stellar year. Add Union Pacific to the list.
With literally a cast of thousands, with sets that are right out of the period, with costuming as accurate as any movie ever made, before or since, and with a wonderful script and plot that holds you throughout, the film is pure DeMille. Then add an incredible cast. Joel McCrey as the hero, Barbara Stanwyck (left) as the saucy Irish engineer's daughter that every one loves, Robert Preston as the formula-villain who proves his mettle in the end, the leering Brian Donlevey who proves nothing in the end except that he is still a wretch, his hired gun and card shill, a young Anthony Quinn....there are already enough headliners to ensure box office bullion.
But in typical, epical DeMille fashion, Union Pacific tells a mighty story--The Winning of the West. From the brawny Irish gandydancers who brawl their way through one Hell-On-Wheels after another, to the young Indian warriors (real Indians) who imagine they can halt the Iron Horse by shooting arrows into it, this is one movie that everyone who loves the Old West must see.
Wat moet de taal met de geschiedenis van Wilde Westennen doen?
¿Qué la lengua tiene que hacer con historia del oeste salvaje?
On a typical day, I interact with three Dutch women and three Mexican men. Thus, the constant in my life is seemingly always language, or rather, my inability to understand it. Since the women were born and bred in Holland, and since the same goes for the men in Mexico, they speak with one another in their natural and native tongues. When exchanging with me, or with one of the other group, they jump to English. The results vary from very good communication to stone age sign language.
What the heck does language have to do with Wild West history? That's the question raised above in Dutch and Spanish. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. As one who has done his share of research into the Nineteenth-Century, I can vouch that I have never seen a totally accurate portrayal of those times. Almost always left out in any modern depiction of the Old West is the lack of homogeneity. Watch a typical TV Western or a John Wayne movie and one comes away with the impression that everyone more or less looked alike and everyone more or less spoke alike. Only occasionally is a Swedish, Italian or Irish accent heard, and these are always just sprinkled around and always obligatory, it seems.
Fact is, America in the 1800s was a Babel of languages and strong accents. A traveler crossing the continent back then would have been hard-pressed to move ten miles and not encounter ten languages spoken. Hard as it may be for modern Americans to understand, America was a far less homogeneous place back in the 'good ol' days,' than now. Indeed, could they come back and visit us today, I think our ancestors might be as much amazed by the loss of our linguistic variety as anything.
General Orders No. 11 is perhaps the most draconian act committed by the US Government against its own people in American history. Following the Lawrence (Kansas) Massacre of August, 1863, several Missouri counties bordering Kansas were burned from the face of the earth. A sanctuary for the guerrillas ... that was the official reason given for destroying the area; revenge for years of strife along the state line was the unofficial reason. Millions of dollars in property were destroyed or stolen, scores, perhaps hundreds, of civilians were killed, and an entire people were cast from their homes, never to return.
The author and executioner of the edict was Thomas Ewing, Jr. The author and expert of a new book on General Ewing is Ronald D. Smith. Smith, a Kansas attorney, knows his subject. Although the above mentioned disaster was perhaps the singular event in Ewing's life, the book covers the gamut. A foster brother (and later a brother-in-law) of William Tecumseh Sherman, a Kansas supreme court justice, a brave and very capable Union officer in the American Civil War, a defender of the conspirators at the Lincoln assassination trial, an Ohio politician, Tom Ewing not only lived through stirring times, but played an active role in them. Thomas Ewing, Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General: Check it out at amazon.com, or order through your bookstore.
Judy, the lady living on the south twenty, had some trouble last week. The woman came home one afternoon and found a small snapping turtle in her kidney-shaped pool. Judy did eventually get a net over the nasty little brute but senor snappo was so aggressive that the would-be rescuer lost her balance in the tussle. The leap from the diving board to the concrete was not a good one. Result: A badly sprained ankle.
A few weeks previous, Judy was compelled to perform the same rescue with a large armadillo. Now, a snapping turtle in a swimming pool makes much more sense than an armadillo in a swimming pool. These poor, dumb little beasties (above) seem to set new standards for stupidity. I am told that when a car approaches an armadillo on the road, the little things--instead of fleeing to the right or left--jump straight into the air. That tactic might work for some natural encounters, but not with a car. Whenever one enters the range of the armadillo, the roads and ditches are littered with the carcasses of the stupid little things.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the armadillo that it can be done.
Like Louisianans and their crawdads, some opportunistic Texans have apparently acquired a taste for armadillos, or "possum on the half shell", as they call them. Armadillo chili, Barbecue 'Dillo, Coon on the Rocks--which only proves that if something can be eaten, it will be eaten.
Since February 17 is the last entry posted on this blog, a normal person might assume that either the blogologista) has gone to his long home or b) there has been a lot of water under the blogologist's bridge. If a "normal person" chose a little from line a) and a little from line b) they would be just about dead on.
For reasons I will note in another post, one fine day I picked up my twenty year-old dog and a box housing my one year-young tom cat, tossed some rags and my bike into the back of my cowboy limousine (which a normal person might call a beat up pickup truck), and made my way to Dallas, Texas. Except for the fact that I chose to abide in the Lone Star State directly in the teeth of the fiery furnace Texans charmingly call "Spring," things have progressed as well as could be hoped for. Although I have been pretty busy since coming here, and will be busier still in the months ahead, I do promise to make a better attempt at posting on this blog.
And so, to all you cowboys and cowgirls out there, from me to you, I send you a "Big D" HOWDY!
The latest issue of Wild West magazine has a great article on the classic movie, The Searchers, and the true story behind it. Sometimes Hollywood gets history right. Here is something I wrote way back that has more than a whiff of The Searchers to it:
The tiny bottle lay on the sand. Nearby, gentle waves lapped softly against the beach. How long the bottle had been laying there no one knows. Whether it was the tide or a storm that placed it, we do not know that either. This much we do know: At some point, someone walking along the sand spotted the bottle and instead of breaking it or hurling it back out to sea, they stooped to pick it up. We also know that when the finder uncorked it he discovered that a note was folded inside. After fishing out the note and reading the incredible words on the paper, whoever held it must have been dumb-struck. Finally, we also know that soon after the finder read the note and recovered from his shock, word quickly spread.Thus ended one of the most remarkable journeys ever recorded.
The little bottle's story began somewhere on the dry and desolate plains of northwest Texas or eastern New Mexico, hundreds upon hundreds of miles from where it was found. Here, at a camp of the Southern Cheyenne Indians, a ragged and frightened young white woman secretly brought out her hidden treasure--a bottle, a cork, a pencil, a piece of paper--then nervously scratched out a note, a desperate plea for help. The girl quickly folded the paper into the bottle, corked the end tightly, then tossed it into the headwaters of the Brazos River. In this arid region, the Brazos in the best of times is a mere trickle of water; at worst, it is just a sandy draw. Nevertheless, this bottle and the tiny trickle that floated it were the best, and perhaps last, hope for freedom that the young woman would know.
Several months earlier, in September, 1874, Catherine German and her family had been moving up the Smoky Hill River with everything they owned in the back of a covered wagon. The Germans, from Elgin, Kansas, were bound for Colorado and a fresh start. Just moments after breaking camp that morning, the family was surprised by Indians. Within minutes the wagon was in flames, the mother, father, and two children were dead and scalped, and four daughters--Catherine, aged 17, Sophia, 12, and little Julia and Addie, aged 7 and 5 respectively--were carried off into captivity.
Catherine's story is not a pretty one to relate. There are no Harlequin Romance endings here; no Dances With Wolves Hollywood nonsense; no silly sentimentality. Catherine was raped repeatedly during her captivity; she was traded back and forth from one brave to the next; she was transformed into the tribal prostitute, her worth being measured in horses. Each time the frail young woman was forced to fetch wood or water for her lodge, she trembled in fear for she could expect to be raped as many as six times per trip.
Hence, Catherine's desperate attempt one day with her little bottle along the Brazos. Pathetic as her gesture was, it was all she had. Over the next several months, as her prayer drifted slowly down a shallow stream, this hope was the only thought that kept the young woman going. When all else had been stripped from her--her virtue, her freedom, her dignity--Catherine at least had her little star of hope.
Finally, after five months of captivity, the band holding Catherine and her sister, Sophia, at last returned to their reservation and surrendered the girls. Along with the two younger children, who earlier were rescued during a thundering cavalry charge, the two shattered girls tried to pick up the broken pieces of their lives.
Unbeknownst to Catherine (left), throughout her captivity, during all the rapes and beatings, during the freezing nights and terrifying days, the little bottle that she had secretly tossed into a trickle of water on the high plains had, despite snags and shoals and rocks and floods, continued its slow journey down a winding river.
Four months after Catherine's rescue, the Ellsworth (Kansas) Reporter picked up an article from a Houston, Texas, newspaper. The startled editor then informed his readers:
"Strange to say, after having traveled eight hundred or one thousand miles along the devious windings and changing current...a bottle...was picked up on the beach of the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Brazos River, in which upon examination, was a written account of the capture of...."
Thus ended an incredible journey. After the message was uncorked and read, it can only be hoped that the reader saved the little bottle and today, passed from one generation to the next, it sits atop some bookshelf, an antique, curious and pretty...if nothing more.
In previous posts I have mentioned Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and the shoot-out at the OK Corral; I have written about George Custer, Crazy Horse and the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Wild Bill and the Rock Creek Massacre; and dozens of other 19th-Century topics. When most folks read the gory details about any of the above, and when they get over their shock and horror, a certain disconnection unavoidably sets in. After all, these incidents occurred well over a century ago and to most people anything that happened that far back seems as remote and distant as the Bronze Age. I felt much the same way until a couple of interviews I did a dozen years ago while researching my book, Scalp Dance.
One of the interviews was with a lady in her 95th summer; her Kansas mother had been captured by Indians in 1874. The other meeting was with Agnes Shrader of Topeka; she was 92 at the time and her aunt had suffered the same fate in the same state in the same year. Mrs. Schrader was as lucid and bright in her chat with me as most people half her age. She still lived in her own home and kept it neat and tidy. Indeed, it was immaculate. Mrs. Schrader even walked around the block every day for exercise. Although neither woman knew much about the ordeal of their loved ones, this to me was unimportant. Just sitting and talking to someone who was a single generation removed from the Indian Wars was everything. It was something akin to time travel.
A few years later, during the Q&A following a talk we had just given in San Francisco, Deb mentioned that William F. Cody (top) was her hero and that he was perhaps the greatest American of all time. Out in the audience, an old man stood up and, with the drama of a Shakespearian actor, he announced: "I'll have you know that I SAW Buffalo Bill!" The feeling was electric.
Suddenly, after being with the ladies above and hearing the words of this old Californian, the accounts of Wild Bill Hickok, or Wyatt Earp (above), or the Little Bighorn, were not something from the dark and dead past. They were close, very close . . . and they were real. For me, from that time forth, History Lives!
I have not watched TV much in the last two months and none at all in the last two weeks. So, imagine my euphoria when I did sleepily push the power button Thursday night and I saw that, within a few minutes, the Turner movie channel would show Union Pacific. The last--and only time--I had ever seen this thundering Cecil B. DeMille classic was over thirty years ago. And I never forgot it; imagined I would never see it again in this lifetime. But....God Bless Ted Turner.
with a wonderful script and plot that holds you throughout, the film is pure DeMille. Then add an incredible cast. Joel McCrey as the hero, Barbara Stanwyck (left) as the saucy Irish engineer's daughter that every one loves, Robert Preston as the formula-villain who proves his mettle in the end, the leering Brian Donlevey who proves nothing in the end except that he is still a wretch, his hired gun and card shill, a young Anthony Quinn....there are already enough headliners to ensure box office bullion.
