I received another shipment of books to
review from the magazine editor of the Western Writers of America.
The first one I picked to read - Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal
History of Dodge City. No, that
doesn't refer to dragging the famous Wyatt Earp around on the ground.
It has to do with the author and his friends driving back and forth
along Wyatt Earp Boulevard in that city. A strong theme runs
throughout his writing. He made reference to the Greek mythology
character Sisyphus who is condemned to forever rolling a rock uphill,
then when it comes tumbling back, must start all over again. That's
what teens did (and do), drive endlessly back and forth on main or
whatever the name of the street. He referred to his parents and
their never ending home remodeling projects, the repetitious work in
the junkyard his family owned, then later, the never-ending work on a
ranch they built, and so on. A cousin managed a cattle feedlot out
of Dodge City. The author asked if he could come experience their
daily routine. Here again he saw the repetition of life, the endless
looking after the cattle, doctoring their ailments, feeding, etc.
I remember entering
a farm field with a tractor and some implement to start working a
large field and thinking I will never get done with this job. Another season and there I would be again. One of
the worst jobs, no, the worst job, I ever took was helping a turkey
rancher working his flock doing something. Several of us teenagers
went out there one day to wade through those twenty-some thousand birds.
Talk about never ending. One bird at a time. The figure of 20 hours
of labor sticks in my mind. But there are many rolling-a-rock-uphill
tasks: milking cows, washing clothes, feeding hungry workers, …
…
Sometimes I
accompany the wife to the mall for walking in the winter months. She
walks over half an hour, me half that. While I'm waiting, I often
have a book in my pocket to pull out and pass the time. This morning
I opened a Matt Braun book, The Last Town, that told the story of Bill Tilghman, a
famous lawman, . The first chapters caught my attention. Tilghman
accompanied the Governor of Oklahoma plus a couple cars full of state
troopers to a small town where the Ku Klux Klan had established
themselves very deeply. The governor said the intimidation they
created among the folks of that community was going to stop. As a
result of that visit, he ordered the national guard in to restore the
order of law. A little later on Tilghman got called to come into an oil boomtown and clean up the corruption and crime there. I couldn't help but think that a century later similar
scenes occur. This business of guns in the hands of unstable people
keeps coming up, and the NRA keeps up their ranting to protect their
“right” to own. The issue really isn't that guns be taken away
from those mentally able to enjoy their guns in a sporting sense or a
self-defensive sense, but that screwballs shouldn't have access to
them, background checks. One of the parents of the twenty slaughtered first
graders said the NRA always says guns don't kill people, people do.
This parent's comeback on that was if that's the case, let's start
looking at those people then through background checks. A group of Republicans senators have vowed to block an up or down vote on the issue by filibustering. When it comes time for them to meet face to face with the parents of the slaughtered kids, I wonder how they'll act. One network called it "Gunfight at DC Corral." I think politics will get very interesting in the next couple of years.
…
Finding
background for stories takes lots of time. I'm still very interested
in the livery stable business in my hometown and one of the men who
ran one in the early 1900's. One of the few sources of information
I've found said that livery stables have been generally ignored by
historians. So it was with satisfaction that one source named an
article in a 1986 edition of Montana: The Magazine of
Western History - “The Livery
Stable in the American West.” I spoke on the phone with a staff
member of that journal today in Helena and ordered a back copy. She patiently
explained what the article contained until I was satisfied that it
would be worth spending $12.95 to receive it.
An online article
in the Corpus Christi, TX newspaper said “The old livery stable was
a male stronghold... was a place where men could congregate in the
shade, sit on their heels, talk horses, and maybe share a sip of
whisky.” Another source out of Buffalo, NY stated things a bit
more harshly, “Often the scene of gambling, cockfighting, and stag
shows, they were condemned as sources of vice.” Well, I'm just
gonna have to look into it in more depth.
