Journal Notes

In the middle distance I saw it – a huge plume of dust, reaching for the sky. When the dust settled a bit the source of the disturbance could be seen. More than a dozen wild mustangs were racing across the open range to destinations unknown. It was a remarkable sight and a perfect way to end a research trip about the Old West. Coincidentally I was listening to classic radio programs on SirusXM and an episode of the Lone Ranger was playing. The pair were on a quest to capture a bad guy and hold him accountable for his misdeeds. It’s a theme that never fails to capture my attention and leaves me aching for someone like the Lone Ranger to ride right through Norborne, Missouri and bring the bad guys to heel. So what happened to the Lone Ranger? Clayton Moore played the masked cowboy riding high on his horse Silver in the popular radio and TV show during the fifties. With the help of the wise, quiet Indian Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels, the duo went about righting injustices in over two hundred episodes. Moore had the odd fate for an actor of wearing a mask onscreen so that even during the fame of the show, he was hardly recognized. Perhaps for this, there is no other actor who clung to his role so diligently, regularly donning the mask and costume to go out in the public, some say even while in his car at a drive-through for fast-food. He was seen wearing his Lone Ranger costume shortly before his death of a heart attack in 1999 at the age of eighty-five. Silverheels took much less affinity to his role as Tonto and passed away quietly, though coughing laconically, at age sixty in 1980, of pneumonia. Hi-Ho, Silver, no more.

I’m on the road tomorrow and through the rest of the week, doing further research on a book about outlaws of the Old West. I’m fixated on the subject. According to the code of the West, a murderer was one who shot in the back or from ambush, who gave no warning or who shot an unarmed man. A bushwhacker was a “murderer.” Of course, if a bad man “got the drop,” and the enemy, instead of going for his weapons, signified his surrender by raising his hands, it would be downright murder to shoot him; but it was self-defense if the enemy reached for his gun. To violate his code would incur the wrath of witnesses and would usually cause a hanging bee. There was limit beyond which even the worst bad man of the West could not go with impunity. No one had to guess what those limits were, they were written on the hearts of every person who ventured west of the Mississippi. The “ten commandments” of the Old West were as follows: 1. Thou shalt not appear too inquisitive about one’s past. 2. Thou shalt be hospitable to strangers. 3. Thou shalt give thine enemy a fighting chance. 4. Thou shalt not shoot an unarmed man. 5. Thou shalt not make a threat or wrongly accuse someone of a crime without expecting dire consequences. 6. Thou shalt not practice ingratitude. 7. Thou shalt defend thyself whenever self-defense is necessary. 8. Thou shalt not rob. 9. Thou shalt honor and revere all womankind; shalt never thing of harming one hair of a woman. 10. Thou shalt look out for thine own. These commandments were binding and effective. It was the unwritten law of the Western frontier, and the pioneers understood it quite plainly and they appreciated it-and what’s more, they enforced it! I’d sure like to see enforcement of the fifth commandment right now.

There are times I believe I was born one hundred and seventy-five years too late. I like wide open spaces, horses, Old West justice, John Wayne, and the prospect of venturing into rugged territory just to see what’s over there. The fact that I am addicted to modern day plumbing and an advanced health care system makes me a poor candidate for a pioneer however. The technological advances of the Gilded Age were not accompanied by corresponding advances in medicine; health care in the 1800s was woefully neglected. What were the medical equivalents of the steam engine or the telegraph? True, it was the age or Pasteur and Lister, but it took decades for their discoveries to affect public health. The way people with emotional issues were treated in the Old West was horrifying. The question of mental illness was bound up in dark suspicion, shame and ignorance. Families hid a demented member as if he or she were evidence of sin. People suffering from depression, bi-polar conditions, etc., were kept in attics and in cellars; in Tucson, Arizona a lunatic was confined to an outhouse so narrow that “his flexor muscles permanently stiffened.” I’ve spent several hours in the office of a psychiatrist discussing the situation with my brother. Now that the situation with Rick is no more, my visits have increased. I’ve cried often and am thankful I wasn’t locked in a cold, dark room because no one in the medical profession could understand the extreme grief I’m still feeling. I don’t think I’m any the worse off because I’ve employed a sophisticated therapist to plumb the depths of my psyche, but I do think sometimes it’s as tragic and futile a gesture as the loading of the ice-making machine onto the Titanic. I feel so very betrayed by people I could have sworn loved my brother…and me for that matter. I thought that way mainly because they were people who swore they loved us. No matter how many $150 sessions I attend I’ll never understand why my niece told me she loved me, exchanged emails with me, let me pay for some of her wedding and accept the wedding veil I wore at my wedding, then shortly after the ceremony told me she didn’t want anything to do with me. Please note, she never asked me to pay for any part of her wedding. I wanted to help because I love her. In spite of everything, I still love her. But I don’t want to have anything to do with her ever again because I don’t trust her. How is a therapist going to help me with that? I want to think psychotherapy works. It would help if the practice weren’t so susceptible to every goofy trend that rolls down the Mental Health Freeway. There’s aromatherapy, pharmaceutical therapy, couples therapy, there’s even psychotherapy for dogs. How messed up are you if you have to bring your dog? I don’t think therapy works much of the time because people are so eager to Scotchgard themselves from taking personal responsibility and they are allowed to get away with it. They conveniently blame the bad in their lives on bad that supposedly happened to them, and they take everybody down with them when they go. Let me give you an example: Any restitution Rick owed after being falsely accused now becomes the responsibility of the family caring for him. Oh, yeah! It’s a fair court. When my therapist or any sincerely concerned individual asks me “what is it that won’t let you get past this hurt?” My answers is always “if I were allowed to get some distance from it all, maybe it wouldn’t always feel like a fresh wound.” And for those readers who might be thinking that the federal government doesn’t make family members pay restitution, I invite you to come with me to the prison next month and see for yourself. You’d be surprised what the federal government gets away with. I think Wyatt Earp was very aware of that and that’s why he decided a vendetta ride was the best way to handle the problem. I can’t imagine Earp sitting through a therapy session anyway. I bet he…oh, I’m sorry, our time is up. We’ll continue with this next week.

The Gold Rush of 1849 brought thousands into the foothills of Northern California. Everyone wanted to find a gold claim of their own and most were willing to work hard to make their dream come true. Not everyone who came west with the Rush were honest and industrious however. The influx of people included an evil admixture of adventurers and criminals. As miners went along the trails with pack animals, a long period of roadside banditry began. Brutal, cold-blooded robbers, some working in gangs, often shot down their victims on little or no provocation. The shotgun and the six-shooter ruled supreme in a day when might was master over right; when life was cheap and often brief. Bullets usually settled feuds and for years justice was administered by lynch law with rough and ready men acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Rarely were they criticized. For years theft brought stiffer punishment than murder because, as one writer explained, “human beings could defend themselves while property was helpless.” No mercy was shown to horse thieves and there were many of them. Typical of the spirit of the times was this item in The Alta California in February 3, 1851: “LYNCHING – A Mr. Bowen at Curtis Creek killed Alex Boggs by shooting him through the head at second fire. Several persons present thereupon seized Bowen, put a lariat around his neck, dragged him to a butchers’ shop to the place where they hang their slaughtered animals upon.” There were times when an innocent man was accused of a crime and hanged for something he didn’t do. That’s exactly what happened to Lucas Hood, a gold miner in the area around French Camp, California. A laundress in the camp was having an affair with a trapper but couldn’t bring herself to tell her husband the truth. He knew she had been with someone and after a heated argument she told her husband she had been assaulted by Lucas Hood. The outraged husband called several of his friends and neighbors together and told them what had happened. The laundress stood by and watched as the furious mob grabbed Lucas away from his claim, beat him, and hung him from the nearest tree. Several months later the laundress was caught with her lover and in a heat of anger confessed she lied about Lucas. In an effort to try and conceal what they had done, a coroner’s jury was promptly called together. They decided the best thing to do was to change Lucas’s cause of death from a “hanging” to “death from emphysema of the lungs.” I can’t help but wonder what happened to the laundress. Did she continue on as though nothing had ever happened? Did the people who helped destroy an innocent man go to church on Sundays? Act as missionaries to other camps, work their jobs like nothing ever happened? Did they sleep well at night? If the subject was ever brought up did they insist that they deserve peace? Did they justify the horror of what they did with excuses about how difficult their own life has been? When people won’t listen to their conscience, it’s usually because they don’t want advice from a total stranger.

In 1850, an anonymous letter from San Francisco arrived at a newspaper office in New York. It read, “A smart woman can do very well in this country – true there are not many comforts and one must work all the time and work hard but…it is the only country that I ever was in where a woman received anything like a just compensation for work.” One of the ladies I had the privilege of writing about a few years ago who lived out that claim was Elizabeth Blackwell. Blackwell was America’s first woman doctor. She was admitted to New York’s Geneva College in 1847 as a joke, and was expected to flunk out within months. Nevertheless, Blackwell prevailed and triumphed over taunts and bias while at medical school to earn her degree two years later. While in her last year of medical training, she was cleaning the infected eye of an infant when she accidentally splattered a drop of water into her own eye. Six months later she had the eye taken out and had it replaced with a glass eye. Afterward, American hospitals refused to hire her. She then borrowed a few thousand dollars to open a clinic in New York City, which she called the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. She charged patients only four dollars a week, if they had it, for full treatment that might cost at least two thousand dollars a day at the going rate. During the Civil War she set up an organization to train nurses. Women’s Central Association of Relief, which later became the United States Sanitary Commission. In 1910 at age eighty-nine she died after a fall from which she never fully recovered. A truly dedicated individual can do such remarkable things.

The popular biography and pictorial books, entitled The Cowboy and The Senorita and Happy Trails about the famous, singing cowboy duo Roy Rogers and Dale Evans will soon become a Broadway musical starring Grammy award winning country music star, Clint Black. Emmy and Three-time Tony award winner Thomas Meehan will collaborate with Joseph Meehan on the script with original music and lyrics written by Clint Black. Executive film producer and Emmy award winning author Howard Kazanjian co-wrote the books with western author Chris Enss, which are the basis for the musical. The Package is repped by William Morris Endeavor.

Rollo Tomasi is a metaphor for the criminal who gets away with the crime. Tomasi is a purse-snatcher, murderer, false-accuser, the one never held accountable for the evil they’ve done. The Old West’s version of Rollo Tomasi was known simply as PO8. PO8 was a highwaymen and stage robber. After stole from his frightened victims he left poems behind to brag about the job he did. One such poem read as follows: “Here I lay me down to sleep, to await the coming morrow. Perhaps success, perhaps defeat and everlasting sorrow. Let come what will, I’ll try it on my condition can’t be worse, and if there’s money in that box, ’tis money in my purse.” The poem was signed PO8. Law enforcement agents in the 1870s, believe the bandit and talent less poet was Black Bart, alias Charles Bolton. Detectives finally tracked the thief to a hotel in Northern California using the laundry marks found on a handkerchief left behind at the scene of the crime. He spent six years in prison and when he got out he returned to his life of crime. Police could never catch him a second time. Rumor had it that Black Bart had been killed by police. But when highway robberies persisted and ridiculous verses scrawled on a pieces of paper and signed PO8 continued to be deposited at the scene of the crime, there was doubt the police really did their job. According to one newspaper report from 1895, PO8 stole more than one hundred thousand dollars after his so-called death. PO8 was never held accountable for those crimes. I spent my morning dealing with prison officials trying to get the situation with my brother resolved. It’s a grueling undertaking brought on by the Rollo Tomasis and PO8s in this world. Whatever can be done to hold people accountable for the evil they do I’m going to do it. Even if I have to stand alone, I will not be afraid to stand alone. I’m going to fight for real victims. I’m going to fight for what’s right. I’m going to fight to hold people who destroyed lives accountable. Now, where’s my horse?! It’s time to ride.

Miracles happen and oh, how I pray they happen soon.

In 2001, an 11-year-old girl told a judge that her father raped her, sending the man to prison for nine years. Today, she admits that she lied. Now 23-years-old, Cassandra Ann Kennedy says made up the story because she was upset with her father following her parents’ divorce, The Daily News reports. Last week, authorities in Washington state finally released the father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, who was serving a 15 year prison term. All charges have been dropped thanks to the daughter’s statement, made in January. According to The Daily News: “Reached Friday, Thomas Kennedy, now 43, declined to comment, saying he’s simply trying to get on with his life. Longview police, who investigated both the initial allegations in 2001 and the details that later exonerated Kennedy, also declined to comment and referred questions to Baur.” Cassandra Kennedy told authorities that guilt prompted her to reveal the truth, according to the  Seattle Times. Cowlitz County Prosecutor Sue Baur says that the county will not take legal action against Kennedy, partly because authorities do not want to discourage individuals in similar circumstances from stepping forward. For more on this story, visit  The Daily News.

 

Beverly Hills, CA – Accomplished director Walter Hill is preparing to deliver another western to film audiences with the adaptation of the book Thunder Over the Prairie.  Published by Globe Pequot Press, Thunder Over the Prairie is the gripping, true tale of a murder in Dodge City in 1878 – and how legendary lawmen chased down the killer. Thunder Over the Prairie was written by Emmy award winning, executive producer Howard Kazanjian and western author Chris Enss. Hill, whose film credits include Broken Trail, the Long Riders, and Geronimo, will be writing the screenplay and directing the film. He recently completed directing the Sylvester Stallone movie Bullet to the Head.

 

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Talking heads on news programs and morning radio shows have been voicing their outrages about the manipulation of a 911 call made by George Zimmerman in Florida.  An NBC affiliate edited the 911 call to sound vastly different from the actual report.  Whereas I appreciate the fury over the fact that news corporations report current happenings with half-truths, innuendos, and outright lies, their methods are not new.  Newspapers as far back as 1881, (and I’m sure it goes back even further than that) have reported on stories based more on what they want people to think than what actually occurred.  More than one newspaper covered the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in October 1881, and each one had a different take on what went down.  Some newspapers were more biased towards the Earps and others were biased toward the Clantons and the McLaurys.  I’ve had personal experiences with misleading news coverage in the Kansas City, Missouri area.  I have about as much faith in their ability to do their job correctly as Andy Taylor had in Barney Fife.  There is a reason Andy made Barney keep his  bullet in his pocket and not in his gun.  He could hurt someone if the gun was loaded!  KMBC-TV should keep their microphones and  cameras in their pockets because they can and have hurt people.  When my brother Rick was arrested in 2006, the reported said that he had been “hanging around schools picking up young girls.”  The truth was that Rick was at the school at my brother and sister-in-laws’ request, to pick up his two nieces and take them home.   KMBC-TV used a half-truth and innuendo to sensationalize their story.  They also claimed my brother had prior arrests.  My brother’s last name is spelled E-N-S-S.  A background report was done by the authorities for a Richard E-N-N-S and that name did show as having prior arrests, but to affix that claim to my brother was a flat out lie.  The truth was my brother had no prior arrests or convictions.  KMBC-TV also claimed that Rick shook uncontrollably when he was led into the courtroom because he was “petrified.”  The truth was Rick had Parkinson’s disease and shakes uncontrollably because of his illness.  Guess no one at that station does any fact checking and why would they?  The truth is never as memorable as a lie.  KMBC-TV and its counterparts do not represent real journalism.  And if journalism schools keep kicking out reporters who’ve substituted attitude and ego in place of a reporter’s notebook newspapers, like the Kansas City Star, isn’t going to reflect real journalism either. Oh, and by the way, if you ever come across the story about Wyatt Earp’s sexual obsession with Greyhounds, just remember, all he said was, “I like dogs.”