Journal Notes

I traveled to Los Angeles yesterday to meet with director Walter Hill about writing the screenplay based on the book Thunder Over the Prairie. Mr. Hill is currently editing the latest film he directed starring Sylvester Stallone. The film will be released in April but the talented writer/director believes he can get the script written before the Stallone picture comes out. It was quite an experience having lunch with two motion picture icons – Walter Hill and Howard Kazanjian. I was glued to their conversation about the western movies they’ve made from The Wild Bunch to The Long Riders. Sometimes it seems I’m so busy trying to get a moment like that I don’t realize that it’s happening when I’m in it. Yesterday was the exception. I listened intently as they spoke of shooting the film Geronimo in Moab, Utah and The Wild Bunch in Mexico. They talked about some of motion picture’s greatest actors such as Alan Ladd. Mr. Hill shared a story about Ladd’s comments as he completed filming a sequence in the western Shane. Ladd walked off the set and someone asked him how he thought he did that day and Ladd responded with “I got a few good looks in.” It’s important to look like a cowboy who means business in westerns and evidently Ladd and Jack Palance were two of the best at that. No matter what strides are made in this movie making venture and how exciting it can be at times, my thoughts always go back to my brother Rick. It seems he might be allowed to get help for his eyesight soon. I can be happy and thankful for the opportunities I get to discuss western films with award winning industry folks but I’d trade all those chances and any chance I might ever get at success for my brother to be home and well again.

I live in the midst of a peaceful forest in Northern California. Very earlier in the morning all that can be heard is the sound of the creek below racing to its natural end and the owls gently calling out to one another from one end of the dense oak trees to the other. It’s the perfect time to reflect on the settlers who arrived at this spot more than one-hundred and fifty years ago. I consider the strength of pioneer women like Nancy Kelsey and Luzena Stanley Wilson. They came into the Gold Country with a dream for a better life and were determined to find it. They wanted to make a difference for their children and their children’s children and they did. Nancy was the only woman with the Bidwell-Bartleson wagon train. She made the journey here from Independence barefoot and carrying a one year old baby on her hip. The men in the party noted in their journals that whenever they felt they couldn’t go on they would look back at Nancy and gain the strength to continue on. Luzena arrived here with three children and the basic necessities to set up camp. Her husband left her alone to fend for herself while he went in search of gold. By the time he had arrived back to the make-shift home Luzena had opened a small restaurant and was selling her tasty biscuits to hungry miners. In the end she made more money than her spouse ever dreamed of finding panning for gold in the cold streams at the base of the Sierras. As you probably noticed the website has been updated. With that comes the great desire to update the content I’ve been pouring into the journal pages. As long as my brother suffers behind bars and my family is scrutinized so vigorously I don’t suppose I’ll be able to entirely leave the subject. It will find its’ way into my writing more often than not but my goal is to share more about how women influenced the west and how the impact of what they did is still felt today. I’ll still be writing about some of my favorite western characters but will add tales of the lesser known people who helped settle the frontier. Since I’ve already mentioned the Gold Country that spot of land between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe it seems fitting to write about a notorious criminal from these parts. It was on this day in 1856 that the outlaw, Tom Bell, was captured by vigilantes on the Merced River in Northern California. They patiently allowed him to write letters to his mother and his mistress and then strung him up. Bell was known as the “Gentleman Highwayman.” His true name was Thomas J. Hodges. He was a native of Rome, Tennessee, where he was born about 1826. His parents were most excellent, highly respected people, and gave young Hodges a thorough education. He graduated from a medical institution and, shortly after receiving his diploma, joined a regiment and proceeded to the seat of war in Mexico, where he served honorably as a non-commissioned officer until the close of the struggle. Like thousands of others, he was attracted to California by its golden allurements, and began life here as a miner. Evil associates, coupled with lack of success, caused him to follow in the footsteps of many, whose loose moral ideals led them into gambling as a means of subsistence. Soon tiring of this, he took to the road, where he continued his game of chance in a tenser setting, staking his revolver against whatever loose coin his victims had about them. He formed a band of desperados called the “Tom Bell Gang” and for nearly two years kept the State in a fever of excitement. Finally, his dishonest ways caught up to him. The lies he told were revealed and he was strung up for his misdeeds. That’s the way it should be. The way it ought to be, regardless of the sex of the criminal.

Frontier adventurer Wild Bill Hickok was the West’s most famous gunfighter. He was a tall man with an athletic physique. Residents in Ellis County, Kansas used to say that Hickok was “so tall he had to wear short stirrups to save his boot soles.” He didn’t play at being tough, he was tough. He overheard an outlaw threatening to drag a store owner out into the street and beat him if he didn’t turn over the money in his register. Hickok stepped forward and told the desperado, “There will be one less son-of-a-bitch when you try that.” The outlaw quickly changed his mind. Wild Bill was a dead shot with a pistol. He never grabbed for his gun and shot quickly. He eased the weapon out of the holster, carefully took aim, and then fired. On September 28, 1869, some drunk teamsters led by Sam Strawhim got to tearing up a beer joint in Hays City, Kansas. The riotous times stopped when the Ellis County Sheriff, Wild Bill Hickok, coolly shot Strawhim in the head. Contrary to rumors started by Calamity Jane, she and Hickok were never romantically involved. In late 1886, Jane was telling everyone that Hickok was the father of a daughter she had. Hickok was a bit too deceased to object to the tale. Outside of Bill Tilghman, Hickok was the most impressive lawman in the history of the Old West. I don’t envy lawmen. They are people who leave every day for work not knowing if they’ll come home alive. I couldn’t do the job. I don’t have the temperament. The first time some Chiclet-brain I pulled over for a traffic ticket gave me that “Hey, I pay your salary” rap, I’d be too tempted to flip him a quarter and say, “Here’s a refund, jerk,” and then I’d drag his behind out of the car and start beating him like he was a Hitler piñata at a Mossad picnic. Eighty percent of the time, my allegiances lie with the men and women in blue. The rights of the criminals should never supersede the rights of good, decent, hardworking people. On the other hand flashing a badge, stating you’re with the F.B.I. , and threaten a 62 year-old woman shouldn’t be allowed either. I believe the man that did that is named Brian Stone – the 62 year-old woman was my mother. Sure, I think law enforcement agents can be brutal sometimes, because it’s a brutal world we live and make them work in. I just wish Hickok was around to take care of the bad cops and make short work of the outlaws – particularly those outlaws who falsely accuse people of crimes.

Gunslinger, shootist, pistoleer, hired gun. Such terms conjure up an image of a western hero protecting lawful citizens on America’s uncivilized frontier. Yet the romanticizing of the Old West has clouded the precise meanings of these words over time. None of these terms are synonyms for lawman or outlaw, because in the Wild West, gunfighters frequently worked both sides of the law. Jesse James belonged in that category. On this day in 1872, James shot a little girl in the leg during a scuffle over a cash box that Jesse was trying to pilfer from Ben Wallace at the Kansas State Fair. Those people who lived in the Missouri counter where Jesse was raised were convinced Jesse was not an outlaw excused his actions away. The trouble with differentiating outlaws from the lawmen hasn’t changed much from the days of the Old West. I’d throw lawyers into the mix of professions the average citizen can’t determine if the individual is for upholding what is good and right and true or just wanting to make a name for themselves by racking up a series of so-called wins using any mean to get a conviction. I thought lawyers would be like the character Ransom Stoddard from the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I never imagined they misrepresented themselves for political gain. Watching the trust I had in the legal system disappear has been a sad, confusing experience, like watching smoke from a book-burning taint a cloudless sky. In the past, I revered the legal system as the backbone of democracy. Now I quite frankly fear it – its linguistic fog, the casualness of the brutal transactions, the sheer density of its unconcern, their lack of desire to really find the truth. Somebody has their thumb on the scales of justice, folks. “And he’s out of order, I’m out of order, the whole system is out of order.”

It’s so nice to be home again among my own things. Travel is tiring. But the trip was necessary. On the plane ride back from Norborne, Missouri I was thinking how we don’t hear much about the childhood homes of legendary Old West figures or the mothers that raised them. My brother Barry and I are working on a book to remedy this very subject by the way. As the plane took off from the Kansas City airport I considered the life and hard times of Wyatt Earp’s mother, Virginia Ann Cooksey. Virginia Ann had eight children – Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil being the most famous. She died in 1893, living long enough to see one of her sons gunned down and killed, another crippled by gunfire, and a third wrongly accused and tried for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m sure she was devastated by the events that followed the gunfight at the OK Corral. All this led to thoughts of my own mother. She has been through a hundred kinds of hell on earth since my brother was falsely accused of a crime, convinced to take a plea, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. She sat in a courtroom and listened to poisonous lies about her son from the true criminals in this matter. She’s been the subject of ridicule and abuse at the hand of the ignorant in the small Missouri town where she lives – just this past week she was informed that a resident near her hoped her son would be put to death. I wish I could ease her pain. Erase the toll this has taken on her, the years of worry and torment she has endured. I think Wyatt Earp helped do that for his mother with his vendetta ride. I’m sure Virginia was concerned for her son but I’m sure she was also rooting for Wyatt to track down the bastards that cost her so much. I’m on a legal vendetta ride for my brother, mother and every other mother of a person falsely accused of the things my brother was accused. I won’t stop until I see them pay for what they’ve done. And even when I’m gone I’ll leave someone from the next generation to carry on the mission. It will never be over – not for the accuser or her mother or the next generation of people they bring into the ugly scene. I live to hear the words the attorney played by Paul Newman in The Verdict issued. “You know, so much of the time we’re lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what’s true. There is no justice. The liars win, those that don’t know the system are powerless…. We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. And we become victims. And we become weak…and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions…and doubt our beliefs…we say for example, `The law is a sham…there is no law…I was a fool for having believed there was.’ But today you are the law. You are the law…And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court…all that they are is symbols of our desire to be just… All that they are, in effect, is a prayer – a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.’ If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. And act with justice. And I believe that there is justice in our hearts.” Hold on, mom, justice is not far off.