Odds & Nods

For the first time in my adult life, I am single. Once I get the hang of it, I'm sure all will be just fine. Right now, however, it is mostly a pain. Many of the things I relied upon women to do, I now must struggle with. Things like bill-paying, shopping for groceries, buying clothes, and horror upon horror, Zen and the Art of Computer Maintenance. This last has caused me more grief than I care to mention and I feel no better than a child or a chimp trying to figure things out. Because I never concerned myself with matters cyber, but left that to vastly smarter women, I now must make up for lost time asap.

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Advice for novice writers

"Easy readin' is hard writin'," as Mark Twain (above) was wont to say. 'Tis true. Some folks never make the connection. They have great ideas and some actually manage to set those ideas down on paper . . . and that is usually where the trail goes cold. When Sam says "hard writin'," he means hard editin', i.e., going over and over your work until it becomes polished and perfect.

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Email

A Texas Cow Gal (in response to my query, "what's for supper?"):

A glass of wine. I'm on a diet and had too many calories at noon. . . . I am also going to help a . . . friend plant a vineyard and eventually make wine and God knows what else. Someday I want to play a whole Mozart sonata by heart. And I have another novel in me.

A Kansas Cow Guy:

I ran across a newspaper item from the 1890s that told of Wyatt refereeing a prize fight. I don't remember where, but think it was in Colorado. A spectator was unhappy with how Wyatt was calling the fight, and proceeded to beat the hell out of him. Regardless of the BS in Stuart Lake's Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, Wyatt was a complete a-s hole.

A Mississippi Mud Rat:

I agree. Tombstone next month will be a zoo. But hey, Tombstone has always been a zoo.


J. Jefferson Broome, PhD, Original Thinker and Hands-on Historian:

Saturday (our anniversary!) I am the keynote speaker in Crook, Colorado . . . where there is a dedication of two new monuments. . . . In my recent journey to the National Archives, researching a final time for my next book, Custer's First Stand, which will recount the 7th Cavalry and Custer in the year 1867, I came upon a report from Lt. Col. J. A. Potter, detailing soldiers assigned at various stations between Forts Sedgwick and Morgan in Colorado Territory. Dated August 4, 1867, one corporal and four privates were assigned to the following stations: Gillet's Station, Antelope Station, Mound Station, Riverside Station (not Ranche). They were men from Company F, 30th Infantry.

TG: Such is the arcane world of the history nerd. HistorySpeak is a language all its own. But Dr. Jeff Broome is not your normal pampered and insulated academic. He may be the most remarkable human I have ever known. Jeff came from as far down as a man can come. Slamming heroin as a teen, hooked hopelessly; a life of homelessness, misery and woe; a family "life" I will not even mention. Two brothers committed suicide; cuckolded by a former wife. After years of this living death, Jeff found God, then Kelley, and his turnaround was so great that he has been spotlighted on national TV. I was honored to be with Jeff and Kelley last year when they were married. We celebrated in Golden, Colorado. Jeff is one of the finest historians in America and his forth-coming study on Custer will be a very good book. Best book, however, would be Jeff's life story. Much more on Dr. Broome later.

Speaking of Jeff, we share the podium next year at the Little Big Horn Associates annual convention. This takes place in the town that Buffalo Bill built, North Platte, Nebraska. Jeff is an excellent speaker and I hope I don't have to follow his act. For more info, check out the group's web site: www.LBHA.org

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Jest of the Day

One night Lafe Lumpkin's wife tripped over the coon dog and knocked herself cold on a rock.

Lafe rushed to the telephone and called 911.

"What's your address, sir?" asked the dispatcher.

"820 Eucalyptus Boulevard," answered the excited husband.

"Can you spell that, sir?"

Lafe thought for a moment, then another moment.

"U . . .k . . .a . . .l . . . ."

He tried again: "Y . . . o . . .u . . . c . . . ."

"Aw hell," the exasperated husband finally burst out, "I'll just drag the old woman up to Elm Street and you can pick her up there."

The Hitchhiker

Miserable "sleep" last night. Woke bolt upright at 4 AM, and that was mostly it for the duration. Conked off later, a semi-delirium, but not true rest. In my foggy, groggy state, however, a few things did come to me. It occurs: The Irony. I spend my first years on a farm near Lamar, Missouri . . . Wyatt Earp spends several early years in Lamar and lands his first job as a law dog. I spend much of my childhood where John Brown (right) stalked and chopped his way through Kansas . . . Now, I may have a job at the end of Brown's long road, Harpers Ferry. The irony. Life is rich.

Truly, autumn has arrived in the heartland. Gorgeous, sweet sundowns; toasty, golden days. Here in Kansas we must, like honey bees to nectar, sally forth and savor the moment. We really have only two seasons here, viz., Boil-Up and Freeze-Over. Since summer and winter take up about 11 1/2 months of each year, that means we Kansans must dash out to enjoy each spring and autumn for these seasons are numbered in mere days.

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Noon--Back after a breezy bike ride. Herds of robins on the trail today. No doubt they are on their annual hajj south.

An email from my friend, Good Gomber:

No one ever talks about what a horrible shot Doc Holiday was. At the OK Corral gunfight, he shot Tom McLaury with one barrel of the shotgun he was holding, peppering Tom from "knee to throat." However, Tom didn't go down, and instead went lunging up Fremont Street. Doc, thinking he had missed, even at the range of a few feet that it was, threw away the shotgun -- with one barrel still loaded -- jerked his pistol, and continued missing with that. Unless you were four feet in front of him -- OR A BARN -- he would probably miss you.

Well, there we have it. In that final duel with Ringo near the end of the movie, Tombstone, Deadly Death-Dealing Doc (above) not only skins his smoke-wagon well before his opponent, but he drills a neat black hole right through the center of Ringo's head. Chuck Rabas also was contemptuous of Tombstone and when it was released, and when I asked him what he thought, he dismissed the film with a sneer, a look-away and a flick of his cigar ash. His terse comment: "Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner is much more accurate." Whatever, I wish Drew, Chuck and the other historical curmudgeons out there would take a hike. If Tombstone ain't the way it really was, it's the way it should have been. More on accuracy in films later.

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2 PM

Stopped in at Barnes and Noble with my sister-cousin, Ezzie. Noticed the latest issue of "Wild West" on the rack. What a beautiful magazine. And so full of great pieces and interesting stuff. Tons on Tombstone, tons on the Wild West, tons of unusual and just plain interesting stuff (the photo of Wyatt as a little boy is priceless and Wild West is the first mag to publish it). I am one lucky hound dog to be hitched to the Weider Group's history wagon.

All this talk about Tombstone and the 125th harkens me back to my first trip through Arizona. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I was a seventeen-year-old, just out of high school, trying to hitchhike from California to Texas. Haven't a clue where I was going except that I had heard there were jobs available working on Texas oil wells. "Roughnecks," these workers were called. I liked the sound of that.

My first ride was in a convertible driven by a gay-looking fellow who wore lots of jewelry and looked like Harpo Marx. Nothing very remarkable about that, I suppose, since we both were coming from La La Land.

It wasn't long after I got out of Harpo's car when another car stopped; this maybe an hour west of Phoenix. The driver was a middle-aged fellow and unlike the first ride, he looked normal in every respect. But he wasn't. This man was what we would now call a "road-rager." I feel somewhat privileged that I was able to study up close a member of this distinct human sub-species long before the world had coined a name for them.

"GET OVER . . . GET OVER, YOU S--N OF A B---H," he yelled out his window between horn honks. The "s-n of a b---h" in question was going too slow in the fast lane of a four-lane highway.

"Lady, move your BIG, fat a-s! MOVE IT YOU FAT A-S!" The "fat a-s" in question was going too slow in the slow lane.

"G-D D--N YOU, YOU S-N OF A B---H. GET OFF MY A-S. YOU DIRTY, LOUSY BAS----RD, GET OFF MY A-S." The "dirty, lousy bas--rd" in question apparently got too close to this man's rear bumper.

And so on. Mile after mile. I had never met anyone like this. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, jump out the window, or join him in cussing the other drivers. Judging by his angry looks and actions, it was apparent that the man considered the road his personal highway and everyone on it was subject to his rules. Since his entire focus was on identifying and punishing those miscreants who broke his "laws," I do not remember any conversation whatsoever with the fellow. Mercifully, this maniac let me out on the west side of Phoenix. Hardly had Psycho Man pulled away when I heard his horn honk at another car.

Thus, my first trip through the Grand Canyon State. Perhaps it is the mad dog Arizona heat that created the first road ragers in America and perhaps it was the mad dog heat that set the stage for perhaps the greatest shoot-out in world history, the OK Corral.........or maybe it was just a coincidence. Whatever it was/is/or ever will be, whether personal or historical, whether animal/vegetable/mineral, the high sky, rare air, and zero people beyond Fenix and Two-sahn are certainly conducive to making mucho macho history. Amen.

Wild West

Wild West . . . Wild, Wild West . . . Really Wild West. . . .

"Was the 'Wild West' really Wild?"

That question has been asked of me a lot over the years.

Usually I cite a few well-known towns: Dodge, Deadwood, Tombstone. . . . then a few well-known characters: Wild Bill, Wyatt, Doc . . . then a few well-known incidents: OK Corral, No. 10 Saloon, Lincoln Courthouse, and that generally suffices to convince anyone that the Wild, Wild West was, in fact, a very feral place, especially when compared to the Mild, Mild East.

But the proof of the pudding, for me at least, are the other, lesser-known places and the other never-known folks who peopled the plains and deserts. Places like Shanghai, Arizona, Sheridan, Kansas, Sundance, Wyoming, Virginia City, Nevada, and scores of other sinful sinkholes were every bit as wild and woolly as the more famous others. And many of the anonymous folks in these places made Hickok, Earp and Holliday look tame by comparison. To wit:

Never in the history of St. Joseph have we been so cursed with so great a number of loose women as at the present. At night they may be seen emerging from their dens and upon entering the saloons, their loud and fierce demands for beer, gin and rot-gut whiskey can be heard at a distance of several squares. Then, with cigars stuck in their mouths, they are out again, making the night hideous with yet more hooting and hollering........ St. Joseph (Missouri) Morning Herald, 1863

Instead of asking "Was the West really 'wild," maybe one should ask, "Was the West really 'west.' " Most of the romance we associate with the Wild West actually took place in the center of the continent--Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, the Dakotas, cowboys and cattle, Indians and buffalo, Custer and Crazy Horse, Dodge, Deadwood and Dallas. Accurate though it may be, somehow something seems lost if instead of the Wild West, we called it the Wild Middle.

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Spoke with Drew Gomber (left) the other night. For some reason I can never find his phone number and thus I must always go online and search the white pages to get it. From that point on, however, it gets easy. My long, lean, lanky, Lincoln, New Mexico friend is the only "Drew Gomber" in all these here United States. In more ways than one is Drew unique.

Now at home in the town that Billy built (the Kid, that is), Drew is a much-sought, much noted, and much traveled, celebrity. My hawk-eyed friend was a staple on "Wild West Tech" and a talking noggin for a zillion documentaries. A month or so ago, Good Gomber was in Spain shooting another film. He stayed in the same hotel where Clint Eastwood drank and sported during his spaghetti western days.

Last month, Drew attended the Golden Boot Award in Hollywood. Clint Eastwood was the feature attraction. Next month, October 26, Drew and ten thousand others will be in Tombstone for the big 125th anniversary celebration of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Drew agreed to be my OK imbed at the affair. I may get there myself and do my own embedding. Drew says it will be the "Disneyland" of the Wild West. I suppose one can take that several ways.

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An email from my KC bud, Chuck Rabas. Chuck just may be the greatest Wild West authority still standing--which is saying a heap. If Chuck says a certain arcane nugget is fact, you can take it to the bank. He mentions in his email that Johnny Ringo of Tombstone fame was related by marriage to Jesse James of Missouri fame. Fancy that! Actually, this is not so hard for me to swallow. Vast as the West was, it was actually a very small world, demographically speaking. The Wild West was almost incestuous. I once thought it strange that on the plains Wild Bill (right) kept bumping into Buffalo Bill and Buffalo Bill kept bumping into Medicine Bill and Medicine Bill kept bumping into Wild Bill, and so on and so on, Bill on Bill on Bill. But when I realized that there were only a relatively small number of white folks out there at the time, and a relatively small number of towns and forts, and these men were scouts and hunters always on the move, then it made sense. That scene in Little Big Man where Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) keeps running into the whisky peddler in town after town (and each time he meets him another body part is missing), is probably closer to the truth than not.

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Noon--Back from my daily dose of bikeology. Other than nearly offing a neurotic squirrel who dashed under my wheels, nothing to note. And that is a good thing. Any day without a bike wreck is a good day. But mighty! Cold as a titch's wit on the trail today. Walking the trail would be pleasant, I am sure, but zipping along at 15-20 MPH on my self-mobile is pretty chilly. Compare that with the one hundred degrees we had a day or so ago and we have one radical weather swing. I have lived around. Without exception, everywhere I have lived the locals say to me, "If you don't like our weather, stick around five minutes . . . it'll change!" Sounds good, and I suppose these folks really believe it; but the only place on earth I have found this to be true is Kansas. Much more on this later.