Journal Notes

With any luck and a firm understanding of the laws of 1888 as it applies to the Indian Nations, I’ll be finishing the last chapter of the Sam Sixkiller book today.  He was a remarkable man and I’m anxious for the world to know this brave deputy marshal.  There seems to be a theme that runs throughout the books I write about western lawmen – they stand up for family wrongly killed, track down the murderers who took their loved ones lives and make them pay for their misdeeds.  Punishment was sure.  I particular like it when the bad guys are living their lives as though there will never be a day they have to answer for what they’ve done and then someone like Sixkiller comes calling.  The bad guys didn’t always get what was coming to them, however, as the following example shows.  On this day in 1877, a man named Robinson accused John Good in Blanco City, Texas of being a horse thief, which was probably true.  Robinson angrily drew his gun but it caught in his clothing and Good put four shots into him.  Also on this day, but a few years later in 1881, Bill Leonard and Harry Head were killed by Ike and Jim Haslett in Eureka, New Mexico.  Leonard and Head were in a gang that tried to robe the Kinnear stage near Contention, Arizona on March 15, 1881.  The Haslett brothers owned a store in the same New Mexico town and they fought off Leonard and Head when they threatened to steal from the business.  Siblings looked out for one another in the Old West and the still do today.  Was looking at a few great houses on-line in the Tombstone area.  There’s one really fabulous house I’d like to have.  It sits on a hill overlooking Allen Street.  It’s a sweet dream.

I’m off again today to do another lecture series and signing.  The hardest part of this job is hauling the boxes of books around.  It was on this day in 1892, after back shooting Jesse James, Bob Ford became a saloon keeper in Creede, Colorado.  Ford was shotgunned by Ed Kelly ins a dispute over a missing diamond ring.  The shotgun blast drove a collar button through Ford’s throat.  Ford deserved nothing less for his cowardice act.  More information about Ford’s demise and the shot that killed Jesse James can be found in the book Tales Behind the Tombstones.  It’s one of my favorite titles in the Go West series of books that I’ve been fortunate enough to write.  I’m looking forward to working on a pictorial about Dodge City’s Front Street.  Any opportunity to return to Kansas is a plus.  The Roy Rogers/Dale Evans book The Cowboy and the Senorita might be adopted as a musical for Broadway.  I’ll have more news about that and the book I’m writing about my brother on Thursday.  Time to load up the truck now and be on my way.

If not for the persistent rain and cold, the time at Coloma and Placerville this weekend would have been perfect.  When you’re already feeling low in spirit, the constant rain seems to add to the blues.  So I’ll turn my attention to the west and the men and women who helped shape the frontier and lose myself in their daring.  At sunrise on this day in 1886, John Slaughter, the Sheriff of Cochise County, and posse jumped some Mexican bandits at a wood lot in the Whetstone Mountains.  Two of them, Manuel Robles and Nieves Deron, were survivors of Jack Taylor’s vicious gang of train robbers.  Guadalupe Robles, and innocent woodcutter, was Manuel’s brother.  When the smoke cleared Guadalupe lay dead and Nieves died of his wounds shortly thereafter.  Manuel was hit twice but escaped on foot.  Slaughter got part of his ear shot off.  Before becoming a sheriff, Slaughter had an interesting past.  He enlisted in the Confederate Army at the start of the Civil War as a private in Company E, 36th Woods Cavalry, Texas before moving on to another unit. He was mustered out May 15, 1865. Serving in the 3rd Frontier Division, Texas State Troops, he earned the reputation of a fearless fighter, skilled with firearms. After the war, he formed the San Antonio Ranch Company with his brothers and in the 1870s, bought a ranch in Charleston, Arizona. In 1886, he was elected Sheriff of Cochise County, served two terms and then helped the US Cavalry track Geronimo’s Apaches. He also was the inspiration for Walt Disney’s TV series, “Texas John Slaughter” in the 1950s. Can you imagine being so tough entertainment executives just have to do a series about your life?  Long live western legends.

You know, lately I find myself gripped by an overwhelming desire to smack some people upside the head.  The rude and the inconsiderate need a good beat down.  I’d start first with those people who treat bookstores like libraries.  Why are these individuals allowed to lay in the aisles reading novels without paying for the item?  How is that not theft?  And why do paying customers have to walk over these human speed bumps?  They never bother to make room for anyone to get where they need to go.  Common sense and common courtesy isn’t just dead, it’s been cremated and Willie Nelson is smoking his ashes in his lucky skull bong.  There is so little common sense that Thomas Paine is spinning over in his grave so rapidly that there is talk about hooking him up to a turbine to light up the Vegas strip.  You can’t get off an elevator anymore without colliding with some idiot who is trying to spawn upstream onto the elevator while everyone else is trying to get off.  You can’t get in your car and not run into another idiot who pulls into the gas station with her fuel tank on the wrong side and then has to get instructions from a NASA team at Houston Control to figure out how to maneuver her car so that the tank is on the correct side.  What happened?  It would seem a chalk outline is slowly being drawn around common decency and common sense and most people can’t even identify the victim.  Sure.  I know I’m coming across like a 90 year old man frustrated with the neighborhood kids who continue to throw their ball in my backyard, but I’ve had it!  I just heard another story on the news this morning about someone who sued a coffee shop because she spilled coffee on herself and was burned.  She said it wasn’t her fault, sued for $3 million and won!  She won!  We have trouble convicting people who actually confess to murder, but this woman is able to take three mil of a coffee shop.  If the judges had any common sense, the trial should have gone like “Will the plaintiff please rise?  Yeah, it is your fault.  You’re stupid.  Coffee is supposed to be hot.  Why didn’t you blow on it before you chugged it down like a pledge having his first beer?  Get out of my courtroom, you stupid, stupid woman and take your pin-striped parasite lawyer with you.  Next case.”  Where does common sense come from?  It’s slapped into the back of your head by your mother when you try and touch the hot stove.  It’s the Dodge Ram crest branded onto your forehead for all of eternity because you didn’t want the seat belt to wrinkle your new shirt.  Lack of common sense and common decency were easily dealt with in the Old West.  Repeatedly crossing the line in either area ended at the point of the gun.  As Humphrey Bogart’s character said to Herman Brix’s character in Treasure of Sierra Madre when Bogart learned Brix has been stealing water from his land.  “Next time you try that, I’ll let it out of your through little round holes.”  If bookstore owners took that approach to the thieves sprawled out in the middle of the aisles….  Who am I kidding?  I think I need coffee.

At 4 a.m. I abandoned the idea of being able to sleep and made my way to my office.  Waiting for me was the chapter I’ve been working on for the second edition of the Hearts West book and the last chapter of the Sam Sixkiller book.  I’m thankful every day that I get to write about the west for a living and I look forward to being able to do it for the rest of my life.  While I was working this morning my mind drifted to some classic film moments I thought were exceptionally well written.  The Godfather isn’t a western, but it could have been.  The story line would resonate just as well with a western setting as it did in the setting of New York.  The dialogue could have been dialogue any cowboy and outlaw might have had.  I let my mind settle on the opening scene from Godfather II.  Not only because I think the film is wonderful, but because the opening scene fits my mood this morning and best conveys the frustration I’m feeling.  My brother had a particularly hard weekend.  He suffers so and knowing that makes me deeply sad.  Which leads me to the Godfather II.  Little Vito Andolini, the boy who would grow up to be the Godfather, was born in Sicily.  In 1901 his father was murdered for an insult to the local Mafia Chieftain.  His older brother Paolo swore revenge and disappeared into the hills, leaving Vito, the only male heir to stand with his mother at the funeral.  His mother eventually takes him to see the Don Ciccio, the man who had killed her husband and son and the Godfather’s father and brother.  After recapping for the Don what he had done she pleads to him for the life of her one and only son.  The Don refuses her request.  He believes Vito will try to get revenge on him when he grows up.  Vito’s mother pulls a knife on the Don and holds it to the man’s neck, giving her son just enough time to run away from the scene.  When Vito turns and looks back he sees his mother being shot and killed by the Don.  Vitto does get away and escapes to the United States .  Decades pass.  Vito never forgot what was done to his family at the hand of the Don.  As the Don predicted, Vito does return to exact justice on the Don for his actions.  So much time had lapsed, the Don had forgotten about Vito.  That’s how I see the situation with my brother.  So much time has lapsed that the outlaws in this long tale have forgotten what they’ve done.  I remember every day.  I’m forced to.  I will not stop pursuing justice until the real criminals are behind bars and that will happen – sooner than they ever allowed themselves to imagine.  Until that day I’ll continue writing my western stories.  Ti amo, Rick.

Since I’ve returned home I’ve been working on completing the Sam Sixkiller book.  My focus in the last chapter has been on the men who shot and killed the Indian lawman, their character, or lack thereof.  Some historians hold to the belief that the two men who gunned down Captain Sixkiller were “victims of circumstance.”  There are many who believe no one is born bad – that he becomes that way because of environment or some traumatic experience.  I disagree.  In the research I’ve done I have found that many of the Western bad men came from fine, respectable families.  John Wesley Hardin’s mother was known as a good woman and his father a minister of the Gospel.  John Wesley himself was a schoolteacher for three months in Navarro County, Texas.  The degraded William Clarke Quantrill was also a schoolteacher before his more lurid career.  Joe Hill, notorious member of Curly Bill’s rustlers in Cochise County, Arizona, and the same man who shot Dick Lloyd off his horse for riding it into his poker game, was reputed to be a scion of a fine old aristocratic family.  Given the chance all of these men would lie about their upbringing to get out of having to answer for the crimes they perpatrated.  Nothing seems to have changed since that time period.  I’ve thought a lot about that with regards to the Casey Anthony trial in the news today.  I don’t know if she killed her daughter or not, but I think it’s despicable to blame your bad actions on your upbringing.  It’s something a coward would do and has done.  You shift the blame onto someone who in the majority of cases has done nothing wrong, but now find themselves in the unique position of defending their own life.  I feel for Casey Anthony’s father and brother who are now being accused of sexually molesting her.  False accusations such as that are the most heinous of crimes.  It comes down to a “he said – she said” situation and facts don’t matter much.  Father and son Anthony will never be able to reclaim their reputations.  It’s over for them and no one had to prove anything ever really happened.  There should be a special kind of hell for people who falsely accuse anyone of such an act.  Now that I think about it…there is – actually several I’m told.   No one gets away with that crime.  And as it was noted in the film True Grit, “punishment will come one way or another.”

I’m home and happy to be here. Happy to have a home to come back to. Many people in Joplin, Missouri and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma don’t have a home to go back to today. I drove in and out of storms en route to Dodge City, but never encountered anything worse than hail. Make no mistake about it however, the tornado season has set in with its usual severity. The launch of the book None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead was a lot of fun. The residents of Dodge City are extremely gracious and kind. They make you feel like you’re family. I don’t think I’d be overstating my feelings about the place if I said that I love it there. I left a piece of my heart behind when I drove out of town. I’m off to Placerville next – Hangtown some call it. I’m traveling continually through the month of June promoting the book. I will be visiting one Old West town after another. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to experience the West. I’m fascinated by the history of each place I venture to and, in some spots, are amazed at how unspoiled the area has remained. “Trees lie where they fall. And men are buried where they die,” someone once said of the frontier. Now to unpack and plan for the next trip. Photos of the Dodge City experience will soon be posted to the site. Stay tuned.

This is the week! I’ll be leaving for Dodge City on Wednesday where the launch of the book None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead will be held. I believe all will go well and I’m looking forward to being in that part of the states. I turned 50 today and the trip to Dodge is sort of a birthday present. Fifty. When I was 14 that seemed so old. I hope Father Time cuts me the same deal that Dick Clark has. Pre-stroke I mean. When I was growing up I think wanted to be model. Ask any little girl what she wants to be when she grows up. Chances are she won’t say president or astronaut. Chances are she’ll say “Supermodel.” Let’s face it. Nothing sounds fun about the theory of relativity. Now walking down a runway wearing beautiful clothes with the possibility of dating Val Kilmer after a show – that sounds fun. And by the way, isn’t it about time we passed an absolute edict forbidding any of the tall, lanky stick-figures from uttering the words, “Modeling is hard work.” Y’know, we’re conditioned, weaned on, and addicted to “looking like” rather than actually “being” or “feeling.” The fact that we prize beauty is the reason that we live in a perpetually disposable society. We worship something that is nothing but transitory. The standards for beauty have changed more over the ages than the names tattooed on Angelina Jolie’s arm. One of the most recent beauty gotta-haves is big, full, pouting lips. And it’s really easy. The doctor takes a syringe full of fat from your rear end and injects it into your lips. The fat injection takes care of the fullness, and the doctor’s bill takes care of the pouting. You can get Botox, tummy tucks, butt-lifts, and breast enlargments. If you don’t like surgery you can buy Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bra. Victoria Secret’s products are a little pricey for me. I have the Walmart version of the Miracle Bra. It’s called the Hey, Clara Sue, them ain’t your hooters bra.” That being said, I’ve got to get that item packed before my trip. Hope to see you all in Dodge.

I have been struggling with insomnia since I was 9 years old. It had become manageable until 7 years ago. I thought I had it taken care of, but these past two weeks lead me to believe that was just wishful thinking. It wasn’t until my brother was beaten and raped that I started having these fits of no sleep. I close me eyes and the hurt inflicted on my brother is all I see. I hear him call for help, but I can’t do anything. The dream repeats itself over and over again until finally I wake up and decide to stay awake. I’m exhausted and not thinking clearly. The only thing that keeps me going on at times is the next story, the next book. I love doing research and digging deep into a subject spurs me on. I’m ready for the Dodge City trip and excited about the number of people that will be there. I received a letter yesterday from a gentlemen in Colorado who “loves” the book Howard and I wrote about John Wayne. He was very complementary of how the story of told and was happy to learn that John Wayne was such a wonderful man. It was good to get a letter like that. Letters of praise are far in few in between. It seems only the hate mongers with pens that have been dipped in venom write. The letter from Colorado was a blessing. I’ve been close to giving up on everything and that letter helped lift my spirits. God knows the hurt that continues on. The hard feelings I have for the four that caused such anguish that are still walking around without a care in the world. I wish I were the Duke. He could sleep through any hurt. I can’t and I worry that I ever will again.

The launch for the Elizabeth Custer book is next week. It has arrived rather quickly and my sincere prayer is that those who attend the event will feel like it was worth the trip. I think just getting a chance to see some of Elizabeth Custer’s personal artifacts would be worth it all. She was one of the most inspiring women I have had the pleasure of writing about. About 135 years ago today, Elizabeth was enjoying life at Fort Lincoln, Nebraska. George and the other members of the 7^th Cavalry were camping some distance down the valley from the fort. Elizabeth and George sent letters back and forth to one another via a courier. In one of her letters she writes “The servants are doing very well…we are raising chickens. We have forty-three. So many cats about the garrison keep the rats away. The weather is very hot, but the nights are cool. The lights about the valleys are exquisite.” Rats and the weather, just what you’d expect to find in a letter from home. I’m sure if either one of them had any idea that George would not be around by July the contents of the letter might not have been so mundane. I suppose you’re never really prepared for life as you know it to end so abruptly. Who says goodbye to a friend or loved one after a visit as though you might never see them again? That would be a little odd. In retrospect I wish I had, however odd it might have been. If I had known I’d never see my grandmother on this side again when I left her at the retirement home, I would have taken her back to McDonalds for another cheeseburger and apple pie. We would have sat in the car, had our lunch, and talked about the world as we saw it one last time. If I had known I would have assured my brother that he was respected and loved no matter what lies were said. I would have… But who knew?