Western Travel

Next stop Vegas. The Single Action Shooter’s Society convention gets underway this week at the Riviera Hotel and I’m schedule to speak about lady gamblers of the Old West, mail-order brides of the frontier and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. I’m looking forward to visiting with others who enjoy talking about the Wild West. This is the last year SASS will be holding a convention. Low attendance and a poor economy prompted the organizers of the event to call it quits. SASS itself will live on however. I find myself completely over extended and will have to cancel a few signings in the next few months. I’m not quite sure how it happened but I’ve fallen way behind. I hate not living up to commitments I made with regards to book promotions but the situation with my brother is reaching a critical point and I’m forced to rearrange my life for that. In truth, my life has become just that. And with every adjustment I have to make because of the false allegations leveled against him I become more resentful. Every day is a fight against that. Wednesday I’ll be engaged in another fight of sorts – travel. Whatever glamor used to be associated with the idea of traveling by plane has gone for me. It now has all the allure of hanging out in a Greyhound bus station only minimally faster. It’s still much more comfortable than travel in the Old West. It’s difficult to comprehend that a little more than a century ago the horizon for most people was limited to the spot where fate had deposited them. For the affluent, traveling via steam packed, Pullman train or stagecoach was often a costly ordeal where consideration of human comfort and safety was at best an afterthought. The most fearful means of transportation was also the most widely used – the railroad. Train wrecks due to broken trestles, poor track, exploding boilers, faulty signals, and careless engineers and switchmen were a daily occurrence, producing an accident rate in the United States five times that of England. In 1890 railroad-connected accidents caused 10,000 deaths and 80,000 serious injuries. And while the primitive technology had built-in dangers, railroad management was the real villain, prompting George T. Strong to diarize: “We shall never travel safely till some pious, wealthy, and much beloved railroad director has been hanged for murder….” I feel the same way about the folks that run the airlines.