Journal Notes

Giveaway! Enter now to win a copy of the new book More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Brigham Young became an explorer and hero to many when he embarked on the best-organized westward migration in U.S. history in 1847. Motivated by a vision to find a safe haven for his religious ideas, he brought the Mormon Church to Utah and, in so doing, helped shaped the American West.

When he came upon the Great Salt Lake Valley, he said, “It is enough, this is the right place.” For thirty years he supervised Mormon settlements in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and California. Before Young died at the age of seventy-six in 1877 of acute appendicitis, he had more than fifty wives.

To learn more about Brigham Young and others like him who left their mark on the American West read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Enter now to win a copy of the new book More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Pocahontas, a nickname meaning “little spoiled one,” was born Amonute, daughter of Chief Powhatan in 1595. She was an extrovert from a young age, inquisitive and naturally good-natured. At eleven years old she played a minor role in securing John Smith’s survival. Later she was the go-between for trade among the settlers and Indians bartering at Jamestown.

The fictionalized version of her love affair with Smith may, in fact, bear some truth, but in a much more disturbing way for our modern sensibility. Today, a thirty-year-old having sex with a preteen is pedophilia and a crime. But, in the era, intercourse with non-Christian pagans of any age was not considered wrong. Pocahontas was known to have “long, private conversations” with Smith during her frequent visits to the Jamestown complex, yet the true dimensions of these encounters are a matter of conjecture.

A few years later she was betrothed to the older Englishman John Rolfe, only after she agreed to be baptized in 1614. Two years later Rolfe took her to London, where she was received as a celebrity, billed as a real live Indian princess by high society, and held an audience with King James. In 1617, she believed the smoky air of London was the cause of her coughs and bouts of weakness and wished to return to Virginia, but the vessel only made it to the end of the Thames River before it turned back. Pocahontas died in London at age twenty-two of a disease called the king’s evil, a form of tuberculosis characterized by swelling of the lymph glands.

To learn more about Pocahontas and others like her who left their mark on the American West read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Sir Tony Robinson and the giant.

I’m deviating from my usual giveaway today to review my life as a giant. Recently I have had my picture taken alongside several fine people and I look like Andre the Giant’s sister in all of them. I did a documentary for the BBC with actor and knight Sir Tony Robinson a few weeks ago, and in the photos taken after the shoot of the two of us and I look like Ruth Buzzi if she were stung by a thousand bees.

I’ve always been big. My father used to try and console be about my height and general size by assuring me that I wasn’t fat just big boned. The last I looked there were no bones in the area that I’m most concerned about. But the effort, Pop was most appreciated.

Now physical exercise is not the answer. Years ago I remember watching a beefy President Bill Clinton exercising. He was living proof that physical exercise could be a complete waste of time. The more he jogged, the bigger he got. I recall thinking, if this guy is reelected, the leader of the free world will be Bib the Michelin Man.

I do notice I’m suffering from a chin crisis as I get older. If I don’t keep my head above sea level when pictures are taken I resemble the dinosaur that got into the jeep with the lost traveler in the first Jurassic Park movie.

When I think about I, the only exercise program that has ever worked for me is occasionally getting up in the morning and jogging my memory to remind myself exactly how much I hate to exercise. Well-meaning friends have suggest I start walking. Walking? If it’s so good for you, how come my mailman looks like Jabba the Hut with a quirky thyroid?

The treadmill? You take your eyes off the thing for one second and you end up like Gary Busey on…well, let’s say, any weekend.

I’ve thought about joining a gym, but honestly I think they’re too complicated. You know, there’s nothing quite as humiliating as finishing a thirty-minute workout on a piece of gym equipment only to have the instructor tell you you’ve been sitting on it backward.

I guess I only really have one fitness goal. I’d like to be able to run a few down and outs with the kids in my Bible study without having to take a two hour nap afterwards.

Enjoy the photos of the giant that accompany this diatribe. I guess we are what we are. Now, where’s that pizza?

Members of the WWA Players. I’m the giant on the far right.

It’s just a dead Giveaway! Enter now to win a copy of the new book More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

In 1839 Samuel Colt patented the revolving-chamber pistol. As a teen he had worked as a sailor and had spent long hours staring at the ship’s wheel. He used this principle to invent a gun that could shoot multiple bullets without reloading. He excelled at both invention and marketing and today would be considered a compulsive workaholic.

He struggled with a way to produce his guns cheaply but was forced to find a method of mass production after he received an order from the U.S. government in 1847 for 1,000 revolvers. By the time he died of exhaustion at age forty-seven, Samuel Colt had produced more than 400,000 Colt .45 revolvers. At his funeral in 1862 it was said of the Colt .45 he invented: “God created man, but Sam Colt [the Colt .45] made them all equal.”

To learn more about Samuel Colt and others like him who left their mark on the American West read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

It’s just a dead Giveaway! Enter now to win a copy of the new book More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Stephen Foster was the first full-fledged American composers, born, no less, on the Fourth of July, 1826, near Pittsburgh. Anyone who ever sat for a piano lesson has played his favorites including “Oh! Susanna”, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair“, and “Beautiful Dreamer.” By the age of twenty-five Foster had published twelve original songs and had engaged in earnest as a professional composer.

He labored to make his songs appeal to the sentiments of his contemporary America, and he is considered the country’s first pop artist. However, the struggle to get paid for his work was the things that did him in. Foster attempted to keep an exact accounting and even wrote out the first semblance of a royalty contract with the publisher, but he couldn’t prevent another sheet music company from printing and selling his songs royalty-free. Nor did he receive anything for performance rights.

For a lifetime of labor he earned $15, 091.08, all the while composing, bickering to get paid, and drinking. Drinking he did with equal passion so that by the age of thirty-seven he was holed up in a cheap hotel room in New York City’s theatre district suffering from fever induced by alcoholism and liver failure. The exact cause of his death was lacerations to his head. When he tried to get out of bed, he fell and shattered a porcelain washbasin, suffering a deep gouge. It took three hours before he was taken to the hospital, where he died three days later in 1864. He had thirty-eight cents in his pockets.

To learn more about Stephen Foster and others like him who left their mark on the American West read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

It’s a Giveaway! Enter now to win a copy of the new book More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett is remembered best for being the man who shot Billy the Kid, but his contribution to taming the American West consisted of much more than that single event. For more than eighteen years the United States lawman tracked down numerous outlaws running wild along the Texas-New Mexico border.

He was born on June 5, 1850 in Chambers County, Alabama. When he was three years old, his parents, John and Elizabeth, purchased a plantation in Louisiana and moved their children to their new home near the town of Haynesville, Alabama. At the age of nineteen the 6-feet, 4-inch Pat struck out on his own and made his way to the Texas Panhandle. He signed on with a team of ranchers driving herds of cattle to market. He later left work to become a buffalo hunter.

The first gunfight Garrett was involved in occurred in November 1876 in Fort Griffith, Texas. A heated exchange with a buffalo skinner over some hides resulted in a fist fight and further escalated to gunplay. Garrett, who was an excellent marksman, shot the man in the chest.

To learn more about Pat Garrett and other western legends like him read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

A giveaway written in stone. Enter now to win a copy of the new book More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

Throughout the month of July read a few tales that reveal the secrets surrounding the sometimes ironic, sometimes amazing, sometimes touching, sometimes surprisingly appropriate, and sometimes hilarious demises of a few western characters we thought we knew everything about.

Jesse James is perhaps the most beloved murderer in American history. He and his gang shot bank clerks in cold blood, killed passersby who looked the wrong way, and derailed trains and robbed the passengers as they lay injured.

But none of that mattered. To many alive at the time James a post-Civil War hero, satisfying the thirst of many defeated Confederates to get in a few last shots after the war. James, a handsome bearded man with blue eyes and a narrow face, was fashioned as a modern-day Robin Hood, though later historians were at a loss to find any evidence of charitableness.

As a Confederate guerrilla and later a bank robber, James came close to a violent death several times. But as long as he had his own guns, he always seemed to survive. During the war he was badly wounded in the leg and his horse was shot out from under him. Just after the war federal soldiers shot James in the lung and left him for dead. He lay on the ground for two days until a farmer aided him. When he was ambushed robbing the Northfield, Minnesota, bank in 1876, three of his gang were killed, three were shot and captured, and only Jesse and his brother, Frank, escaped.

To learn more about the James boys and others like them read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

After spending six days with some of the most amazing western writers at the Western Writers of America convention in Lubbock, Texas and then two days participating in a documentary about the American West in 3-D, I’m finally home and eager to get back to work. I arrived on the other side of my journey minus my luggage. I’ve been told I’ll receive my bags in a couple of days. We’ll see.

Flying in this country has turned into an amazingly arduous process, especially boarding the plane, which has now become this tedious Bataan death march with American Tourister overnight bags. I always get stuck behind the one guy who takes forever to get situated. He clogs the aisle like a piece of human cholesterol jammed in the passenger artery. I just want to grab that soft drink cart and flush him out the back door. He folds his sport jacket like he’s in the color guard at Arlington National Cemetery.

If I’m not behind a human piece of cholesterol I am stuck behind a wizard who wants to beat the system by gaffer-taping a twine handle onto a refrigerator freezer box and calling it “carry on.” Wedging it into the overhead with hydraulic jacks.

You know what I hate is when you’re sitting in coach class and they pull that curtain on first class. Oh, I see, they paid an extra fifty dollars and I’m a leper. I always get the feeling that if the plane’s about to wreck, the front compartment breaks off into a little Goldfinger mini-plane. They’re on their way to Rio and I’m a charcoal briquet on the ground.

A lot of qualifications to set next to that exit door, huh? When did that happen? I’ve been a physical klutz for years. I’m like Clouseau. Nobody’s ever said a word. All of a sudden they want me to be a Navy SEAL. I guess they want to be sure the person sitting there doesn’t panic in the event that the plane goes down in water. Item number 8 on the qualification list was “You must not be Ted Kennedy.”

The new book More Tales Behind the Tombstone will be released in a week. I’ll be focusing on that title and the big giveaway next week.

Giveaway! Enter to win a copy of Mochi’s War: The Tragedy of Sand Creek.

After the massacre at Sand Creek the Indians assembled at a camp near Cherry Creek, Colorado. Mochi was one of the many survivors who has escaped with Black Kettle to the prairie. The forlorn band was grieving the loss of family and friends. Under normal circumstances Mochi would have been able to bury her mother, father, and husband soon after they had been killed. The Cheyenne believed that ghosts might linger near the bodies of the deceased and take their spirit if they weren’t buried quickly. This was particularly so with children. Wives would remain at the graves of their husbands, parents would stat at their children’s plot, and none could be persuaded to leave for days after their passing. Mourners would cut their hair and gash their heads or legs with a knife, shedding their own blood in remembrance of the loved ones lost.

If Mochi’s husband had any property that belonged to him she would have laid him to rest with those items. If the lodge she and her husband had lived in had not been burned to the ground, she would have torn it down herself and given it to others in the community. Mochi would have kept only one blanket for herself and returned to live with her parents. There was no one left from her immediate family to turn to, and, apart from the clothes she wore, she had no personal possessions.

Mochi’s despair turned to rage. She joined the warriors who attacked the outpost near Julesburg and vowed to avenge the death of her family.

To learn more about Mochi read Mochi’s War: The Tragedy of Sand Creek.

Giveaway! Enter to win a copy of Mochi’s War: The Tragedy of Sand Creek.

On the morning of November 27, 1868, the stillness in the camp along the Washita River was broken by rifle shots and cavalrymen that descended upon the lodges from all directions, and the unfamiliar strains of “Garry Owen” blasted through the early dawn.

When the sun made its full appearance Cheyenne leader Black Kettle got his first look at the chaos in and around the camp. Riding at the lead of the main column was General George Custer. Confused tribesmen scurried in every direction; each sought refuge from the stinging, death-dealing fire of the soldiers’ guns. High-pitched screams of tiny children mingled with the dying groans of old men. Brave Indian youths sacrificed their lives so others might have a few minutes longer on earth. Grief-stricken mothers clutched the limps bodies of children as they, too, turned the white snow scarlet with their blood.

Cheyenne history notes that Mochi fought valiantly during the Battle at Washita, but, while defending her home and children from the soldiers, she was separated from her daughter, Tahnea. The five-year-old girl panicked when she saw the people in the village running for cover. Tahnea fell in with the other racing about and became disoriented by the screams and gunfire. She ran toward the river behind several women and children who plunged themselves in to the icy water.

To learn more about Mochi read Mochi’s War: The Tragedy of Sand Creek.