Journal Notes

I have multiple deadlines to make this month and I’m going out of town to see my brother. Looks like I’ll be at the computer night and day until the job is done. Somewhere along the way I hope to watch the western Hombre again. It’s one of my favorite westerns. The 1967 film starring Paul Newman, Richard Boone, and Diane Cilento has some great dialogue. Here’s a sample: “What are you doing here?” “Going bad, honey.” Landlady Jessie (Diane Cilento) and outlaw Frank Braden (Cameron Mitchell). “Any time a man weasels out on you, turns out that he’s doing you a favor.” Landlady Jessie (Diane Cilento). “And if you want to know if I’m carrying a gun, I’m not. My tongue is my only weapon, Mr. Grimes.” “And it’s deadly.” Landlady Jessie (Diane Cilento) to outlaw Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone). The excerpt the month on this site is A Beautiful Mine: Women Prospectors of the Old West. Contrary to popular belief, there were a number of lady prospectors in the hills, streams, and burrows of the west trying to find their fortune. According to a San Francisco in 1877, women were diligent hard-rock miners. The law would not allow any women under the age of 21 to work underground, but they could stake out claims for themselves and pan for gold alongside the men in the creek beds in Coloma, California, Leadville, Colorado, and Skagway, Alaska. In 1910, women were allowed to freely work in a gold or silver mines for major corporations. Their pay was substantially less than what a man got paid for the same work. Women earned $.30 an hour and a man made $.80 an hour. I’m not a feminist, but that seem really wrong. I saw the head of NOW – National Organization of Women – saying that women still only make 70 cents on the dollar to every man. I’m not sure I’m going to believe that. Women are notoriously bad at math. But seriously…I’ve got to get on with the next writing project.

Typically I start my day at the office dressed like a person going to…an office. I’ve got two deadlines for books to meet today, so I went with a casually look. Kaki pants, golf shirt, golf hat. Seems like years that I’ve been able to play a round of golf, but the clothes make me look like I frequent the links. The event held last evening at the Nevada County Library in Nevada City, CA. was wonderful. The people were engaging and sincerely interested in hearing the history of Elizabeth Custer. My Pastor and his wife were in attendance at the event. I was very impressed by the act of love and support. Not surprised though. Pastor Mike and his wife, Kyle are such giving people and reflect the true love of God. That’s something I’m far from feeling this morning. I’m thirteen days out from heading back to the prison to see my brother. It’s always difficult. His eyesight is going now and all efforts to get the okay from the powers-that-be at the facility to send him in new glasses have been met with indifference. I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Watching someone you love dissolve this way and being helpless to do anything to make it better is worse than I could describe. The pain cuts deep and bitterness wells up to the point you think you’ll explode. The misery is that this pain doesn’t kill you like a shot to the heart or a head on collision would. You keep going so you can continue watching the misery play out before you. I haven’t slept through the night since Rick was beaten and raped. It plays over and over in my head. And when I see him I see the result of the assault and know nothing short of dying will make me rest easy again. I’ve got to lose myself in the job today. So I better get on with it.

I’ve been so busy finishing the Sam Sixkiller book, publicizing the next book signing, and compiling photos for the completed manuscript I’ve neglected other areas of the job, namely updating sections of the website. Finding photographs for the Sixkiller book has been the most time consuming. Most of the pictures I need are at the University Oklahoma Historical Center. To give you an example of how difficult it is to locate the photos from the digital collection at the center, the directors there have published a book that’s all about how to find the picture you need from their archives. I feel like Grocho Marx’s character in A Day at the Races. When he arrives at the track to place a bet on a horse Chico stops him from doing so and tells him that in order to make an informed decision about which horse to bet on he needs to purchase a “breeder’s guide.” Groucho buys the book from Chico, but he can’t read it because it’s in code. He’s forced to buy another book to teach him to read the one he just purchased. The bit goes on and on and believe me – it’s ten times funnier than I’ve made it out to be! The point being, the average writer has to participate in the Marx Brother’s routine the University of Oklahoma has employed in order to gain access to the historical archives. And you can forget about calling because the intellects that work there make you feel like a moron for not knowing how to find your way through the collection. I already feel like a moron most of the time. I don’t need any help on that front. Why is it that going somewhere, buying something, calling someone, doing historical research – just about any transaction you can name is as nerve-racking as a Bosnian grocery run? With few exceptions, it seems everyone with a job along the great service highway is an uninterested sociopath with the interpersonal skills of a wolverine? I can’t seem to go through the simplest procedures without a major hassle. For example, (as though I need to list another one after the U of O experience) I recently subscribed to a magazine, and after paying for it they sent me another bill. So I called them to rectify the situation, and they assured me they’d correct the problem. I then started receiving two copies of the magazine each week, one addressed to “Chris Enss” and the other addressed to “Christopher Enss.” Now, I want to know two things: One, how can they not know they’re sending two magazines to the same address, and two, how did they find out about my cross-dressing? It’s not like I don’t sympathize. I’ve been in the vast service gulag. After I got out of college, one of my first jobs was working at a radio station in Tucson. Part of my duties was to clean the bathrooms at night. Got that? I didn’t even rate cleaning the toilets during the day. My bosses actually thought to themselves, “Yeah, Enss is good. She’s real good. She’s just not ready for The Show yet.” I know all jobs can be unrewarding, but I’d like to go on vacation for a week, and call the paper boy, and ask him to suspend delivery during that time and not come back to nine newspapers sitting outside my doorstep, screaming to every lowlife in the area, “Yoo-Hoo! Over here! Nobody home!” Maybe the folks that run and work at major corporations, radio stations, historical centers need a refresher course in how to act in a way that would increase business. Forget the “moment of silence” everyone is always screaming for in the morning. Let’s shoot for a moment of science! Okay. I’ve put off calling the University of Oklahoma again long enough….

Review by Ken Crocker

I was a history buff in school. But in hindsight, I realize that the thinning out of history was well under way by the time my interest piqued. For example, history of frontier exploration was very watered down. Topics in this area were very limited and abbreviated.

I must say that based on the teaching of U.S. History I received, I only knew two things about Gen. Geo. Custer. One was that he fought the Battle of Little Bighorn as a general in the U.S.Army, and the other was that he was dead because of it. I was taught he made a stupid decision that cost the lives of himself and his officers/soldiers.

I certainly did not know he was married, or that he was a rather big deal during the civil war. I didn’t even know Libbie existed. Very patient, but impatient woman. Very devoted. And very, well, forgiving?

Excellent read, Chris. May the nay-sayers of your writing be in the same place in history as Benteen.

In the Wild West, where law was often non-existent, vigilantes often took “enforcement of the law,” as well as moral codes into their own hands. The term vigilante stems from the Spanish equivalent, meaning private security agents. Vigilantes were most common in mining communities, but were also known to exist in cow towns and in farming settlements. Most often, these groups formed before any law and order existed in a new settlement. Justice included whipping and banishment from the town, but more often – offenders were lynched. Sometimes; however, vigilante groups formed in places where “authority” did exist, but where the “law” was deemed weak, intimidated by criminal elements, corrupt, or insufficient.
Many times the vigilantes were seen as heroes and supported by the law-abiding citizens, seen as a necessary step to fill a much needed gap. In 1869, vigilantes ordered a couple of ruffians, Sam Strawhim and Joe Weiss out of Hays City, Kansas. The two toughs later accosted a vigilante leader, A.B. Webster, in the post office and bullied him and threatened him and when Weiss finally pulled a gun on him Webster fired back. Weiss was killed and Strawhim fled town. There’s something to be said for vigilante justice. At the very least it gave people something to do on a Friday night. I’m considering actually treating myself to a meal inside a restaurant this evening rather than hitting the drive-through at McDonalds. I think I’ve had my last Happy Meal for a while. The last time I had dinner out I took a book to read so it didn’t seem so obvious I was by myself. The book was hardly necessary as I found myself staring out the window of the establishment at the colorful characters passing by on a regular basis. I was astonished at how many of them were carrying their pets with them. Some had birds perched on their shoulders, others had snakes draped around their necks. I suppose I spend too much time inside writing because I missed the fashion news about live animals being accessories. I couldn’t help noticing how unhappy these pets seemed. I wondered if it even occurred to these odd trend setters that perhaps their pets didn’t want to go with them on their jack-ass errands. Maybe the bird just wants to be home in its cage ringing his little bell or staring at his reflection in his little mirror. Maybe the snake would prefer to be lounging on a heated rock than spending a night out on the town posing as a necklace. I suppose I’ll be pondering that question again tonight along with the relevance of a vigilante group in today’s society. Personally I’m all for it. The group could start by dealing with the shirtless skateboarder wearing a pair of ferrets as a belt.

American cowboy Will James once said, “Whenever there is (trouble), we’ll depend on ourselves. We’ll take care of it – when it comes, not after it’s too late. I think that’s what Mysterious Dave Mather was thinking on this day in 1884, when he got a few shots at Tom Nixon inside the Opera House Bar in Dodge City, Kansas. The first shot dropped Nixon passing right through him and wounding a bystander. Nixon was hit three times more. No offense to Mysterious Dave, but that’s pretty easy to do when no one is shooting back at you. It’s a common misnomer to think gunfighters that shot it out in a saloon or on the street hit one another with a bullet the first time out. Several shots would be exchanged before a bullet made contact, unless of course you were Wild Bill Hickok. He was the best shot in the west and on this day in 1865, he proved just how good he was. In a romantic duel over the affections of Susanna Moore Wild Bill Hickok shot Dave Tutt through the heart at 75 yards in the town square in Springfield, Missouri. Tutt fired first and missed. Now that’s some shooting. I’m doing a couple of radio interviews this week for stations on either side of the country. I’ll be speaking with the folks at NEWD Magazine and radio in New York and LA Theatre Works radio in Los Angeles. I wrote a book some time back called Hearts West: True Stories of Mail Order Brides on the Frontier and that will be the subject matter for both interviews. The second edition of Hearts West will be available next year – if I ever get it done. Things seem to be going better for my brother. I look for big changes to come spring 2012. What’s on the way reminds me of the creed the Texas Rangers had. “No man in the wrong can stand up to a man in the right who just keeps on a-comin.” And that’s just what’s going to happen.

It’s so easy to romanticize what it would have been like to live in the Old West. I do it daily. I mostly contemplate enacting a bit of frontier justice on today’s lawbreakers, but even that wasn’t as I good as I dream it was. Let’s take a look a rural life in the wild new land. Country life in the post-Civil War era was an unremitting hardship. The farmer and his family toiled fourteen hours a day merely to sustain themselves, primarily on a landscape that lacked the picturesque inspiration of Currier & Ives’ prints. Nor did their endless drudgery reward the farmers with prosperity; during the economic distress of 1870-1900 few small and middle-sized farms produced anything beyond bare subsistence, and many were foreclosed. In place of a neat rose garden, an expanse of muck and manure surrounded the farmhouse, sucking at boots and exuding a pestilential stench that attracted swarms of flies, ticks and worms to amplify the miseries of men, women, children and beasts. Cooking, the kitchen’s major activity, was done in an open hearth fireplace with crooks and arms or, more likely, on an iron stove. Many received severe burns reaching into the hearth to remove their food. People needed a well to get water. For practical purposes the well was dug close to the farmhouse, which itself was close to the barnyard, stable, pigsty, coop and cesspool. With not even a pretense of drainage, the well was thus exposed to all sorts of noxious matter seeping through the ground. Slush from the kitchen, festering matter from privies, and seepage from animal wastes posed a growing danger to the water supply and filled the air with a vile odor. Given all that, I think the good old days were really quite terrible. When I wasn’t crying this weekend over unanswered prayer for my brother, I was taking a more critical look at the time period I so love. I’d trade all the hardship one had to endure back then to see my brother home alive.

It always bugged me that I wasn’t naturally talented at anything. I always wanted to be a natural athlete. To throw farther, run faster, jump higher – the first time out at whatever the sport might be. It would have been nice to have the instant skill to be a great chef or seamstress. Or to have the innate ability to paint like Monet, sing like Adele, dance like Ginger Rogers. The skills that were quickly identifiable in me was the grace in which I could fall UP a flight of stairs, my talent for growing a head of hair that resembles a Chia-Pet, and of course, my knack for being able to select the correct vowel on Wheel of Fortune. Things changed in the area of natural ability for me yesterday when I went to the range to take my first firearms lesson. I handled a six-shooter like I’d been doing it all my life or at least writing about it for several years. I consistently hit the center of the target and was told by my instructor that I was a “natural” at firing the weapon. What a comfort it is to know the one thing I can do with little effort is shoot. Why it’s what every mother dreams for her little girl. You know, guns are part of this country’s DNA, they’re inextricably woven into the fiber of our psyche. American was founded by rebels, liberated by guerrillas, and settled in no small part by outlaws. I have a healthy respect for guns and as controversial as the idea is, I believe in a person’s Constitutional right to own bear arms. I won’t ever own one myself because as I mentioned, I fall UP stairs. With that kind of grace I can be expected to shoot my own leg off if I were carrying a gun…and going up stairs. I think some guns should be banned however. We can’t obviously do though because many of them are used for the recreational sport of hunting. And people have to hunt because it’s a simple fact that deer have to die. They have to be taken out, because if they aren’t, they’re just going to keep dashing through the forest, frolicking in the fields, and nibbling the leaves and berries off the trees and bushes. I mean, come on, Bambi is begging for it. Maybe if we just make guns harder to get. They should at least be harder to get than a reservation at Chevys.

This is a big day in the history of the American Old West – beginning with a major happening that occurred in 1881. Sheriff Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. A year later, Johnny Ringo was found dead of a gunshot wound to his head up on west Turkey Creek in Cochise County, Arizona. It was ruled a suicide, but he may have been murdered by Buckskin Frank Leslie. Leslie was treacherous and prone to jealousy when drunk. The two men had been drinking together since the Fourth of July. I’ll be taking a break from writing tomorrow evening to learn how to shoot. I’ve always wanted to learn how to load and fire a revolver so I’ll be heading to the range to have my first lesson with a Colt six-shooter. One of my favorite Old West slogans is about the man who designed and made the famous six-shooter. “God made some men big and some men small, but Sam Colt even things up.” I guess no one knew that better than Billy the Kid and Johnny Ringo. Both were shot with a Colt revolver.

Another day working on the second edition of Hearts West: Mail Order Brides of the Frontier. I sincerely do not know how mail-order brides were able to marry a man they never physically met until an hour before their wedding. They had no idea if the description the man gave of himself was accurate. And vice-versa. I suppose in many respects the system hasn’t changed much from the mid-1860s. Today people agree to marry using nothing more than their home computer. Couples supposedly meet their soul mate on-line. Again, with no idea the description of one another is accurate. Many times I think it’s not. I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble here, but all those succulent Hawaiian Tropic beauties men think they’re trading secrets with are probably fifty-year-old fat guys who make Abe Vigoda look like Ashton Kutcher. The same goes for women too. I think it’s rare that anyone actually handwrites letters (love letters or otherwise) anymore. And if you do get one in the mail you might automatically assume it’s a ransom note. Maybe I’m a little rebellious when it comes to the whole technological blitzkrieg. Okay. I AM rebellious when it comes to the whole technological blitzkrieg. Nothing serious I don’t suppose. I’m not going to stop bathing and live in a dirt-floored Fotomat, but there is such a thing as a dependence on synthetic forms of communication. Whatever happened to the good old-fashion face-to-face insincerity? Part of the problem for me with the computer is that I really don’t know how to use it well. I can do the basic stuff, but nothing fancy. I can’t attach or send a JPEG (whatever that is) or download anything. I have all the technical proficiency of Bullwinkle of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Oh, how I miss them. I’m at the complete mercy of the good people at the House of Print and Copy (in Grass Valley on Nevada City Highway – for all your copying and shredding needs). They never take that condescending tone the neighbor kid does when I ask him for help. He talks to me like Alex Trebek talks to contestants when they get the wrong answer on Jeopardy. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Chris. The correct answer was ‘the on-off switch.’ Like the mail-order brides of old, I’ll be writing all my correspondence by hand. The drawback with that is no spell check.