Journal Notes

Deception can be achieved one of two ways: Directly, by explicitly saying things which are not true, and indirectly, by leaving out critical information. For instance, you can be a person who lies to authorities about being sexually abused, or you can be a person who lies to the court that an individual has prior criminal convictions when you have evidence to the contrary. Both types of people are reprehensible curs. The one who lies and withholds evidence that would prove they are lying is worse, however – especially when that deceiver is a prosecuting attorney. Clinical physiatrists at Harvard University noted in a study done in the 2001, that people who regularly deceive by leaving out critical information cannot be cured. I thought about individuals like that a lot while writing the book about outlaws of the Old West due to be released this summer. It’s interesting to me that some of the most diabolical outlaws these have law degrees and claim to be protecting the rights of the people. I’ll take the bad guys and gals of the Old West over that kind of outlaw any day. As a rule, Old West outlaws could not be reformed. Frequently, however, they tired of being chased and became temporarily law abiding. Bill Longley, a gunfighter known as the deadliest in the Old West, tired of being hunted in Texas, went to Salt Lake City. Frank James left Missouri for California for the same reason. John Wesley Hardin left Texas for Florida from the same motive. All three soon returned to their old haunts and sooner or later renewed their old habits (except Frank). George Coe, a member of Billy the Kid’s gang, used to the free and wild New Mexico, when back on a Missouri farm with a wife felt like a “bird in a cage.” He moved to the West to become a reliable rancher. Henry Plummer’s (a lawman turned criminal), Boone Helm’s (a murderer and thief), and Ben Thompson’s (a Texas gunman and gambler) good wives and children could not turn them from their wayward careers. Henry Starr tried to quit robbing banks, but could not. Frank Jackson (bank robber with Sam Bass’s gang)stopped his career temporarily at Sam Bass’s death and was not heard of for a long time, until posting as a Mr. Downing in Arizona, he got drunk and was shot by a Ranger named Speed. Arkansas Tom, one of the very few remorseful killers, after several tires to reform, finally wailed, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me!” No doubt, some of the bad men were sincere in their attempts at reformation, but because of their past record, society was prejudiced against them. John Wesley Hardin actually tried to reform, but society would not accept him with his lurid background and prison record. At the very least quarrel he got into as lawyer and as a candidate for public office charges were made that he was back in his old boots again. Society would not let outlaw reform nor the good officer retire, because of their past records. People feared the former and wanted the latter for protection he afforded. They demanded, for instance, that intrepid Wyatt Earp continue as Marshal even after the work became distasteful to him. Everywhere he went he was met by a petition to represent the law. Restless Marshal Frank Canton could not settle down to normal, peaceful life. He was officer of the law wherever he went-be it Oklahoma, Montana, or Alaska. We sure could use someone like Frank Canton patrolling the halls of the U.S. Department of Justice in Kansas City, Missouri these days. And if he couldn’t spot the outlaws right off I could give him a couple of names to get him started.

A Fitting End for Badguys and Badgirls

I’m often asked if there were any legendary Old West characters who died with their boots off. There certainly were and the following are just a few. Ed Tewksbury and Doc Holliday died of consumption. Robert Younger died while in prison, Cole Younger died of heart disease, and Frank James died on his farm in Missouri. Judge Roy Bead, “The Law West of the Pecos,” passed away peacefully in the arms of his friend, Billy Dodd. With him went much of the spirit of the Old West, the lawlessness he had unofficially helped to control. He died a natural death. And probably so did Burt Alvord, who took, together with Bob Downing and Billy Stiles, $10,000 from a Union Pacific train near Wilcox, Arizona, at the same time he was sheriff there. Downing was killed by Arizona Ranger Speed when he went on a drunken spree and beat up a disreputable woman. Billy Stiles escaped to the Philippines, joined the Army there, returned to Nevada, and was actually made a sheriff there. He was killed while making an arrest. Alvord buried his part of the loot, was captured, tried, sentenced. But he was double-crossed the Mexican desperado Augustine Chacon and had been instrumental in his capture by Captain Mossman, and so his term was cut short to seven years. He went out, upon his release, and dug up his treasure and rode away to the South, to Panama, where he died a few years later. There’s no telling what a bad man will say just before he leaps that unfathomable gulf into eternity. “Let me go. The world is bobbing around,” said Sam Bass just before he expired. Tom Horn, just before hanging, said, “Ed, that’s the sickest looking bunch of sheriffs I ever saw!” It is often said that they believed him innocent of murder of the youthful sheepherder, Willie Nichols for which he was hanged. Doc Holliday had bet frequently that a bullet would win out over tuberculosis in his death; but he lost the bet, saying just before he succumbed, “This is funny.” One thing the truly bad guys never did before they died was admit their wrongdoings. They had lied about what they had done for so long the lie was now truth to them. I know at least three murderers who currently operate on the same principle. If they’re ever brought to justice it will be a miracle. Whenever they meet their Maker however, I’m sure they’ll go without boots on.

Tombstones, like the one to your left, dot the western landscape. Many settlers died traveling over the plains. Some of those brave souls had doctors to tend to them and they still died. That’s because the country doctors of old weren’t that great. In truth, many of the so-called physicians that traveled West with the wagon trains were actually no more than venturesome prescribers. Because their diagnosis was based on guesswork their therapy was totally unreliable. Sometimes it cured – often it killed. All things being relative, the compression with today may seem unfair, but even allowing for the state of the art during the 1860s through the 1890s general practice in the United States was backward, commercial and often fraudulent. The lack of education and proper licensing exposed the sick to hordes of ignoramuses masquerading as doctors. More a trade than a profession, medicine attracted not the sons of the elite-who preferred law or theology-but mediocrities who saw a chance to get rich quickly. And even this was not enough to satisfy one graduate, who declared, “Hell if I hadda knowed a feller had to git up every night I would never have started to learn doctoring.” In the latter half of the nineteenth century there were 460 “medical schools,” most of them private enterprises run by practitioners who were less concerned with standards than tuition. Students were required to take courses of two 4-to-6-month terms at about $60 a term, and often the second term was a verbatim repetition of the first. Frontier doctors got paid $.50 for house calls. Some were paid off in jam or poultry. At one time America was known as a “bastion of medical humbug,” a reputation that prompted Oliver Wendell Holmes to declare: “If the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes.” Of course we’ve come a long way since then. An example of how fabulous some doctors are now of days is Doctor Thomas Borsky of Grass Valley, California. Through his kindness and generosity my brother Rick will now have eyeglasses. Rick has been struggling with his eyesight for years and contrary to what one might see in movies or television, there are few doctors in prison and those that are associated with the facility don’t care about the patients. Now, if I could at long last get Rick some teeth, he’d be a least able to eat solid food. If I had his dental records from twelve years ago I could have dentures made, but Rick’s ex-wife took his files from the office and destroyed them. No matter how good doctors become or how many medical advances are made there will still be no way to cure a demented soul like hers.

The kind of bad man who reveled in his notches and gloated over his reputation was unusual in the Old West, although there were a few who did so. When Luke Short, a bad man bartender who shuttled back and forth from Kansas to Texas, was asked why he put notches on his gun, he replied, “When you come right down to it. I don’t know. It’s kind of a habit, I guess.” Henry Starr, the unparalleled Oklahoma bank robber, offered the most satisfactory and reasonable explanation why some gunmen cut notches in their weapons: “A skilled workman is proud of his tools. Watch a barber honing and fondling his favorite razor. It’s the best razor in seven states, if you believe him, and he’ll brag about how many thousand faces it has shaves, the wonderful steel in its blade and how it holds its edge. Or listen to a conductor or engineer bragging bout his watch that never varies a hundredth part of a second; or a carpenter talking about that saw he has had for nineteen years. We’ll the six-shooter is the working tool of the outlaw and the fellows who chase him, and a darned sight more important to him than a razor to the barber or the watch to the engineer, for his life hangs on it. A good six-shooter costs about forty dollars, and if you want to go in for ivory, stag horn, silver or gold mountings, you can go up a lot higher. A fellow gets into a hole and it downs the other fellow, he’s proud of it. He gives it a notch for remembrance. By the time there are six or eight notches on the stock he is a killer. He’s likely to be case-hardened by then and drop a man just to add another notch. Maybe he’s jealous of somebody that’s got fourteen notches on his shooting iron. It gets to be a kind of contest, like a fellow getting a lot of medals.” It was customary that the gun notches, literal, pretended or creditable, of the desperado were inherited by his killer who sought the reputation. That is, according to this custom, Pat Garrett, the New Mexico sheriff, would have been justified in cutting twenty-two notches in his gun – one for killing Billy the Kid and twenty-one for the men the Kid had killed – that is, if Pat Garrett had been the kind of braggadocious bad man sheriff some of them were. Wyatt Earp told his biographer Stuart Lake, “I never knew a man who amounted to anything to notch his guns with ‘credits’ as they were called for me he had killed. Outlaw, gunmen of the wild crew who killed for the sake of brag, followed this custom. I have worked with most of the noted peace officers – Hickok, Tilghman, Masterson, Bassett, and others of like caliber-have handled their weapons many times, but never knew one of them to carry a notched gun.” It does seem reasonable that the bad man, as a rule, would not care to have people estranged from and suspicious of themselves, especially their friends. They probably would be if they sported a notched gun. I think it’s a shame we can have some ‘notched’ system today. It’s hard to tell who the bad guys are many times.  There are so many vicious women who want out of a relationship who falsely accuse men of the most outrageous actions. There are a great many women who date men who have children from previous relationships that want them to make false allegations against their ex-wife’s family because they are jealous of his past relationship. It’s vicious and unforgivable and these women are oh so proud of themselves. Now if there was a way for them to ‘notch’ their foreheads or something they could be avoided all together. Until then, we just have to watch our own six.  Here’s a tip however; the bad guys now of days are generally someone our brothers have married.

I have copies of sample chapter booklets for anyone who emails and lets me know they’d like a copy.  Marshall Bill Tilghman is my favorite Old West lawman, but Sam Sixkiller is right behind him. 

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life. — Henry Ward Beecher.   The future of libraries was the topic of conversation at the Authors on the Move event I attended this past weekend.  Will there even be such things as libraries in another ten years?  I can only hope so.  Technology and the economy are threats to the life of libraries across the country.  Libraries in the Old West got their start by pioneer women who wanted to compile all the reading material they had brought with them over the plains.  They wanted the material housed in a central location for everyone to enjoy.  Calvin E. Stowe, a professor and librarian at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, was chiefly responsible for the development of largest academic library in the world.  His wife, famous educator Harriet Beecher Stowe, believed her husband was destined to do create libraries.  “I was married when I was twenty-five years old to a rich man in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic and alas in nothing else,” she wrote in her memoirs.  “My husband had a large library of books and a great deal of learning but nothing else.  What else could he do?” A panel discussion was held at Authors on the Move between two best-selling authors about the future of libraries.  The two writers were so enamored with themselves that an answer was barely touched upon.  They spent a great deal of time bragging about themselves and their rise in the literary field.  Several at the signing left midway through their mutual praise fest.  Convinced the pair would eventually get back on topic, I stayed.  The speakers ended the commercial for their work with a challenge for authors and library lovers in the audience to consider what we need to do to help libraries remain relevant.  I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know it’s an important question.  Libraries like the one in Dodge City, Kansas are thriving.  Cathy Reeves is the head librarian there and has seen to it that her library continues to be a necessity.  Maybe we need to send enthusiastic, driven women like Cathy to speak at major book signings and conferences like the event I participated in this weekend.  She could answer all the questions asked and share her innovative ideas.  Those who attended the event could actually learn how to save a library instead of listening to two authors go on and on about how much better their work is than the Twilight series of books.

One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised. Betrayal, though … betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope

It’s hard to imagine that mother and dauther teams were scamming business owners out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1893.  That’s the kind of thing I thought only happened today and not so much with businesses but in divorce cases.  The mother is always right and the father is always pond-scum.  Pond-scum that ends up paying everything they have to visit with their children who will probably grow up to hate him because the children have been primarily raised by pain-killer addict mothers who teach the kids that their fathers are worthless.  And if that doesn’t work let’s tell the courts he raped you….but I digress.  It happened in Chicago, New York, Boston and San Francisco – Jennie Freeman and her daughter Fannie pretended to be hit by cable cars, trucks (like the one in the photo) and horse drawn carriages.  Doctors for the rail line companies they would sue for damages would call on the scammers and examine their so-called injuries.  Often times Jennie would claim Fannie was paralyzed.  The company hired doctors couldn’t figure out how they always made their symptoms seem so real.  It wasn’t until a private detective rented an apartment above the Freeman’s place in Chicago that the truth was learned.  Through a hole in the floor the investigator spied on his downstairs neighbors.  He caught them soaking their feet in freezing cold water.  Jennie and Fannie would leave their feet in the water until they became numb.  The company doctor would arrive after the water treatment and when he examined their limbs of course mother and daughter couldn’t feel a thing.  The private investigator exposed their scam and the women went to jail.  That’s how it should be when liars are exposed.  Now of days we just let them go free so they can pretend to be victims.  Jennie and Fannie were eventually shot and killed by unknown assailants.  Authorities suspected the men who shot them were hired gunmen working for the rail lines.  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

If this were only 1881 and I could finish this war the way Earp did.  Here is today’s heartache.  It’s a statement from a cold-hearted woman who has no care for anyone but herself and no vision beyond her own grief.  Her mother died a year or so ago.  My niece is a liar and I’ve diaries and phone conversations to back this claim. “My father is not a good man.  He is sick.  The last time I saw him he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, shaking profusely, hand-cuffed and pale.”  Her father is my brother.  My brother is indeed sick.  He has Parkinson’s Disease.  He was wearing an orange jumpsuit because he was accused of something he never did.  He was shaking because he has Parkinson’s Disease.  He was pale because he has Parkinson’s Disease.  Not a good man?!  I’ll fight to my death before I let anyone accuse him of anything horrific again.  And with all the resources at my disposal I will make sure the world knows what was REALLY done and I’m not alone in that.  When the truth comes out ALL of it will come out.  You think that would make a difference but I know it won’t.

I begin the new week in much the same way I ended the old, cranky. The reasons for my cranky attitude are virtually limitless. In addition to hot flashes that rival anything Dante could imagine are the less than witty comments made by health care professionals about my age. One example: “Hot flashes are typical for a woman your age.” There’s nothing helpful in that diagnosis but the doctors seem especially proud for having made it. It’s imperative I leave the doctor’s office immediately after such keen observation or I’d be forced to insert the point of my Tony Lama cowboy boot right in the doctor’s…uh…let’s say prescription pad. I can’t help but wonder if this is such a natural progression of life why there’s no Barbie doll to represent that stage. We could call her Hot Flash Barbie – press Barbie’s bellybutton and watch her face turn beet red while tiny drops of perspiration appear on her forehead. She comes with a hand-held fan and tiny tissues. I’ve noticed a few whiskers emerging as of late. Maybe they aren’t really chin hairs just stray eyebrows. Whatever they are I can style them easier than my own hair which always looks like it’s been trimmed with a Bic lighter. And then there’s the issue of finding a quality bra that fits. When I was in my 20s I was told to look for a bra that both lifts and separates. Now I’m just looking for one that lifts. I cannot bring myself to take bra-sizing tips from the nineteen year-old working at Victoria Secret however. I simply cannot take advise from someone who purchased their breast as recently as last week. It was suggested recently that I take a trip to the ocean, maybe go for a swim. I’m sure that won’t help my cranky disposition. I could snap a thumb off getting this frame into an ill-fitting, spandex suit. I think the life expectancy of a woman my age decreases substantially swimming in the ocean too. You think the lifeguards try hard to rescue fifty year old women? My guess is they see a fifty year old woman with a few chin hairs in an ill-fitting, spandex suit with a pair of broken thumbs and they decide to stay on shore. I can hear them saying something like, “She’s lived a long life. Let her go.” I know that in the overall scheme of things these aren’t real challenging issues but I’ve had my fill of those. My brother Scott is struggling with serious health problems now. He’s been in the hospital and doctors are unable to figure out what’s wrong. I don’t want anything to happen to him. And then there’s my brother Rick. It’s been more than eight years since he was taken away. The bad guys continue to go unpunished. I count the lawyer who pretended to represent us in the case as one of the bad guys. I used to regard all lawyers with respect bordering on reverence. Not anymore. Like Pamela Anderson, the legal profession started out with good intentions, just somewhere along the line it got really scary. Speaking of Pamela Anderson, I bet she doesn’t take advice from the Victoria Secret gals either. But then I guess she doesn’t have to.