Journal Notes

5.0 out of 5 stars A great addition for your bookshelf By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) – See all my reviews

There’s gold in them thar hills, and the women came to get it out! Chris Enss presents some of the finest snapshots of women prospectors of the old west and how they made their mark in history. When reading these marvelous tales of rough and tumble characters it is impossible not to get a feeling how our western states were developed.

There are many illustrations and actual photographs which depict how hard life actually had been for these women. Through the years they not only prospected, they found gold and had the mines to show for it. Side line businesses were started so as to fund their ventures in the hills. We learn about their restaurants, boarding houses, and managing skills. Yet, they gave charity to miners on the skids by giving them free food, bathing, and often staking to search for a new claim. Compassion was really the second name for many of these tough broads, but never cross them like Jamieson did when he shot and killed Charley (Charlotte) Hatfield’s husband. She did a lot of searching for many years until she caught up with him by chance and shot him three times!

Author Chris Enss brings to this compilation of true stories, a keen eye for interesting anecdotes about each of these women of the old west. In 1905 Lillian Malcolm said “The grandest and healthiest life known is this rough pioneer life. And I don’t see why more women are not in the hills.” Early photographs are from many historical societies in the western states and you have to see them to really get this wonderful flavor of seeing a woman swinging a pick or sifting a pan for gold.

Chris has written for television, short subject films, live performances, and the movies. Her professionalism shines and you are easily transported to yesteryear in an old western motif. Past books have included The Doctor Wore Petticoats, The Lady Was a Gambler, Pistol Packin’ Madams, and Outlaw Tales of California. A Beautiful Mine is a recommended exceptional read and a great addition for your bookshelf.

Clark Isaacs
Reviewer

It’s one of those days where the cold, rainy weather mirrors that gloom that permeates your heart and soul. I face this day with hope that things will get better soon. Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge on someone, on God if they can’t find anyone else. But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered or taken from you by a false accusation, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that they call the Drowning Man Trial. There’s an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. She or he is taken out on the water and they are dropped. They are bound so that can’t swim. The family of the dead or wrong person then has to make a choice. They can let them drown or they can swim out and save them. The Ku believe that if the family lets the person drown, they’ll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save them, if they admit that life isn’t always just… that very act can take away their sorrow.

In my never ending quest to increase book sales I’m going to attempt a move into a frightening area – I’m going to move from text e-mail newsletters to video. A camera crew will be at my office on Friday to shoot a series of on-line commercials. Ten years ago I couldn’t have imagine that there would come a day when millions of ordinary people would be creating and uploading homemade videos onto sites like YouTube each month, and this is just the tip of the iceberg! This is not some flash-in-the-pan fad; it is a symbol of the growing clout of online users who expect to get information delivered the way they want it – in video. Much of my day is spent doing the actual marketing of the books I’ve written. The ads that will be produced will be funny and catchy – at least that’s the plan. If all goes well I’ll be sending out video emails by mid-March. I spend the bulk of my day working on promotions and sales for the books I’ve already written. It’s that distasteful part of the business that my authors don’t care to participate. I was naïve enough when I started writing to think that the publisher did the promotions. Not a chance. Little did I know. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to arrange book signings at some incredible Old West sites. Last year I was in Dodge City at the Long Branch Saloon. In the coming months I’ll be in Cody, Wyoming at the Irma Hotel. As and Old West junkie it doesn’t get any better than that. Keep your eye out for the video email – coming soon to a computer near you.

There are days when I am keenly aware that even if my brother lives to be released from federal prison he will never be the same again. A fire has swept through his life and there is nothing left now but the shell of the man that once was. It’s a hurt from which I believe I will never fully recover. I ask God everyday to help. I want to forgive. I cannot understand why it is so impossible for so many to have glossed over the true bad guy in this scenario. John Steinbeck said it best in East of Eden “Just as there are physical monsters,” Steinbeck asks, “can there not be mental monsters born with face and body perfect? If a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce a physical monster, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?” There were a lot of malformed souls in the Old West – for example: On this day in 1878 the Murphy-Dolan faction murdered the benevolent John Tunstall outside of Lincoln New Mexico. A bloody power struggle called the “Lincoln County War: broke out following his death. It’s easy to hear about this crime and instantly think of Billy the Kid’s role in the war…glossing right over the ones that started the mess in the first place.

Hanging on the wall across from my desk are three pictures of the ghost town known as Bodie. I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to Bodie a few times. It’s a magnificent state park in a state of arrested decay. When you’re there you can’t help but imagine what it must have been like more than 150 years ago. You can almost hear the sound of a piano playing and laughter bursting through the swinging doors of the wooden buildings that used to be busy saloons. I always dreamed of being a part of a film that recaptured that time period. I’ve come close, but nothing yet. I guess a lot of people hope to be part of a film – western or otherwise. Everyone wants to write a book, screenplay, or act. With all the tedious, humiliating, stupid ways there are to make a living in this world, why do so many of us choose that. Maybe we didn’t get enough attention as a child, maybe we watched too much television, or maybe someone read one of my books and said, “Come on, she writes books, how hard can it be?” It seems like acting would be a constant exercise in humiliation. A “how low can you go” limbo game where it helps to have a double-jointed ego because it’s going to be bent, stretched, and forced into positions a lanky yoga instructor on Ambien couldn’t manage. You go to Hollywood to ply your craft and you get a job waiting tables at Der Wienerschnitzel in Culver City so you can network with Sony interns as they ask you to refill the relish tub. I should be content with just being able to write about people from the Old West because it seems to make it as a screenwriter or a motion picture actor you have to want it more than you want anything else in life and I just don’t want anything like that. Not true?I want my brother to live and come home, but outside of that?. Actors are always talking about their motivation, that is, what makes their character do the things he does. I think at this point and time in my life any plum role I would get I would use a special acting technique for my motivation that I call the check method. See, in every one of my movies, my “character” would know that when filming was done, I would get a big check. I know it’s so much more than that. It’s a craft, an art. You can’t watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman or read anything Larry McMurtry writes and not know that. If nothing else, most aspiring entertainers live in the “now.” For most aspiring entertainers, it goes something like this: “Now I’m broke. Now I’m still broke. Now I’m going to sell my blood so I can buy some ramen noodles.”

I had the pleasure of doing another interview today with Mike Thomas at KWRE in Warrenton, MO. His program is entitled Livewire and I always enjoy being a phone-in guest on the broadcast. He’s read the book before we start and can ask pointed questions. I like that in an interviewer. Valentine’s Day is Sunday and one of my happier childhood memories is selecting just the right v-day card for the boy in class I liked. The card had to convey my true feelings without being too forward. In 2nd grade I selected a card with a little girl shaking hands with her puppy. The message read, “I paws to tell you Happy Valentine’s Day.” Oh, I wish Dale Thoeni knew how I agonized over that card. Romance wasn’t blooming in downtown El Paso, Texas on this day in 1882 when two local characters got into an arguement over an actress. Doc Cummings was drunk and mouthing off to Jim Manning at a variety show. It came to a shoot out and Doc was killed. I received some information from one of the doctors who has been helping with the research of the book I’m working on about my brother. It’s interesting and very sad. In Montana v. Harts (State of Montana v. Harts, 1993), the State’s child protective services workers had performed the first several evaluations of two children, ages 3 and 5, who had alleged sexual abuse by their great-grandparents, ages 78 and 81, who had no documented history of previous criminal behavior or of sexually inappropriate behavior. Child protective services workers and police rewarded the children with praise when they provided affirmative responses to their questions. When one child reported something that the other could not at first remember, pressure applied until the child could remember it. No effort was made to verify the physical possibility or impossibility of the allegations. The children were sent to a therapist who insisted that the children elaborate on this abuse by asking them to “draw a picture of your rectum” and “draw a picture of how you feel about Pa’s genitals.” These drawings were submitted to the county attorney over the next two years as evidence of abuse. Other grossly inappropriate “therapeutic techniques” were also used to extract confirmation from the children that bizarre and violent sexual abuse had been perpetrated against them. The 5-year-old boy was put into treatment sessions with a 9-year-old boy who was a confirmed sexual abuse victim. The therapist typically saw the children in her home for up to 6 hours at a time. The therapist forbade anyone to talk to the children, including their grandparents, unless they promised not to express any doubt as to the children’s allegations, or unless the therapist was present. When the children tried to say that their reports were “just dreams” or had never been true, these statements were discounted. The therapist asked the children to draw something and when they did not, she produced the drawing, labeled it as the child’s, and sent it to the county attorney. The therapist collected crime victim’s compensation funds for the children’s treatment, long before an unbiased investigation was performed, reinforcing the necessity from the therapist’s perspective that the crime be confirmed even if it had not occurred. Through disorderly and biased procedures, these children were induced, albeit unintentionally, to report ever more heinous acts of sexual abuse against them. Deposition testimony indicated that upon re-evaluation the children’s statements did not meet credibility criteria when the procedure, “Statement Validity Analysis” (Raskin & Esplin, 1991) was applied. Re-evaluation also indicated that initial evaluation procedures had been faulty. The county attorney filed a brief to quash this challenging testimony at trial, maintaining that SVA and the other procedures described above were inadmissible as expert testimony due to major disagreements and lack of consensus among experts in the field. A review and analysis of the literature identified eight core similarities among the major approaches to such evaluations. Expert testimony was offered that these eight similarities, used as the foundation for the investigation of the sex abuse allegations, do meet evidence admissibility requirements. The judge allowed the challenged testimony, ruling that investigative procedures utilizing these eight core similarities were scientifically acceptable and admissible as evidence. Prior to trial a Statement Validity Analysis was performed enabling further expert testimony to the effect that the children probably had not been abused, but had been led to believe that they were, based on suggestive, coercive, and biased investigative and therapeutic conduct. The Judge ultimately ruled that the alleged sexual offenders were “not guilty.”

I’m losing another loved one and there’s nothing I can do but watch them fade away. There’s a golden hawk outside my window this morning, screeching as she scans the ground below. The screeching mirrors the hurt I’m feeling over the impending loss. I pray and I believe in the power of prayer, but I’m also very stubborn. I’ve never been able to “let go and let God” as the saying goes. I always have to see how I can fix it first. I’ve tried, but years of hurt and struggle have broken the heart and spirit of this person and now their heart is physically giving out on them. And just like watching my brother slowly die, I have a front row seat to this ending as well. Every morning before I beginning writing I spend some time in a Bible study and prayer. I don’t want to be like the character in the Ox-Bow Incident, that great western film about an angry mob that rushed to judgment. I want to be forgiving because I’ve been forgiven, but some days that’s a tall order. The Bible study generally leaves out how difficult it is to live up to that. I’ve reached out to someone I have been struggling with forgiving and we’ve spoken a couple of times. Healing is going to take a while for me, but it’s a start. I would like to have a permanent place in someone’s heart. A place that could not be removed no matter what tragedy or hardship occurs. In recent months I’ve been told by my biological father and my aunt to never bother contacting them again. I don’t like being so disposable. That ability to consistently live the love you declare you have for someone is what I admire in Elizabeth Custer and why it’s a joy to write about her everyday. I’m at the part in the book I’m writing where Elizabeth faces Monahseetah for the first time. Monahseetah is an Indian woman George is rumored to be romantically involved. Elizabeth doesn’t rush to judgment after she hears the rumor. She spends time with George and the other woman before she forms her opinion. And even when the rumors seem to have a glimmer of truth, she stays with her husband. She stays with him because she made a promise that she would and Elizabeth Custer is as good as her word. So here I sit. The work day has begun the hawk continues to screech. With all that’s going on it’s what I would do right now if it were socially acceptable.

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating history of 15 women gamblers of the American Wild West., February 4, 2010
By Cathy G. Cole (Phoenix, AZ USA) – First Line: An attractive, statuesque woman with golden blonde curls piled high on top of her head sat behind a large table in the back of the Pacific Club Gambling Parlor in San Francisco, California.

There’s something about the ching of spurs, the slap of the bat-wing doors of a saloon, and the alluring smile of a beautiful faro dealer. They are some of the most common sounds and sights that come to mind when people think of the Wild West. Author Chris Enss provides names and histories to fifteen of these pretty gambling faces, and it’s a pleasure to get to know them all.

Alice Ivers (“Poker Alice”) was in the gambling profession for more than sixty years. She died broke at the age of seventy-nine. “I gambled away fortunes,” she once told a friend, “but I had a ball doing it.” She also never sat down at the table without her gun.

The right face, the right name, and the right personality meant added business for gambling houses, and the very best of these ladies could rake in thousands of dollars. (Just ask Doc Holliday who once lost $30,000 to Lottie Deno.)

Speaking of Lottie Deno, many historians claim that the character of Laura Denbo in the movie Gunfight at the OK Corral and the character of Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke are based on her.

Although there are many instances in these ladies’ lives that provoke laughter, it wasn’t all fun and games. When large sums of money, alcohol, quick-tempered men and pretty women are all in one place, abuse, death and tragedy are frequent visitors.

Enss provides just enough biography, history and photography to make readers want to do their own research and learn more. I’ve walked down Allen Street. I’ve walked past the OK Corral, and I’ve seen the gallows at the Courthouse in Tombstone, Arizona. I’ve heard the rustle of skirts, the ching of spurs, the shouts of laughter, and the slap of those bat-wing doors when I strolled past Big Nose Kate’s Saloon. But it’s only now that books like Chris Enss’ The Lady Was a Gambler are being written that I’m getting a real feel for the people who lived in these legendary towns.

If you like to read books about the history of the Old West and about women’s history, you’ll want to read The Lady Was a Gambler. The only real problem I had with this book was that I would’ve enjoyed an extra 200 pages!

From MidWest Book Reviewer – Clark Isaacs

The Many Loves of Buffalo Bill
Author: Chris Enss
ISBN: 978-0-7627-4815-0, Pages: 168, $16.95 Publication Date: January 19, 2010, Paperback, Biography, Published by: TwoDot Press, an Imprint of Globe Pequot Press

Over 100 books and articles have been written about the man who made the Wild West come alive, “The Many Loves of Buffalo Bill” by Chris Enss adds another dimension to the stories about the life of William F. Cody. He was a showman extraordinaire, a scout for the United States Government, a soldier in the Civil War, an Indian fighter, and above all, he loved the ladies.
Chris Enss, who has written many books about western culture, its people, and the lives of many interesting personages of the old west, has assembled a succinctly remarkable characterization of who ?Buffalo Bill’ really was. He was a family man, a showman, and a person who was able to take care of business. According to Annie Oakley, who was a star performer for 17 years in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, “His words were better than most written contracts.”
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show traveled around the world and gave audiences in Europe and the United States a taste of the ?Wild West’. This all took place in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. His troupe had several hundred members who roped, rode horses, and demonstrated shooting acuity. His people were extremely loyal to him and stayed with the show for years.

One of the most interesting facts about his life is that in the span of 50 years of marriage, he attempted to divorce his wife Louisa twice. The contested divorce trial ended with the Judge not granting the parties what they had sought. In later years they reconciled their differences, but the jealousy of his philandering in many dalliances with young ladies kept his wife on a suspicious crusade to catch him by hiring a private detective.

Quoting from the trial transcripts and other documentation, we are made privy to many of Louisa Cody’s witnesses’ statements about some of the women he dallied with. With an almost puritanical recitation of facts, we are told of his affairs with Indian maidens, theatrical ingénues, and some pretty interesting ladies of the evening.

Buffalo Bill Cody outlived his children and died at the age of 70 in 1917. He lived an exciting life that took him through an untamed land in the old west as a pioneer in a developing civilization.

He was instrumental in the settling of the ?Wild West’ and was one of its last glamorous heroes of a by-gone generation. He became well known across the world as he mingled with Kings, Queens, and other royalty of Europe. His life as depicted in this non-fiction account was about bravery, honesty, and courage that made him a righteous man even though he had an eye for the ladies. His love of this land was more important than his indiscretions.
The legendary career of Buffalo Bill Cody, the only Western Hero mentioned in Who’s Who in America, makes this book a must read.

No matter how many books I’m currently contracted to do I can’t resist looking for the next manuscript to write. I’ve started to dive into the life of pioneer architect Julia Morgan. She designed and oversaw the construction of more than 800 buildings in the Old West. With the exception of her friendship with William Randolph Hearst (the to built Heart’s castle) little is known about her personal life. That alone is fascinating. Surely there must be something out there that would tell her story. A journal, letters?I’m determined to find it at this point and begin writing the proposal for the book I want to write about her. I’ll use my P.I. license that I now have to venture into areas that are off limits to anyone who isn’t a private detective. Perhaps that’s where I’ll uncover Julia’s story. A good portion of my afternoon yesterday was spent dealing with the person who stole my credit card number and was charging several musical instruments to the account. I recently booked my airline tickets to Billings on-line and the thief got the information from there. It’s been a nightmare. Many of my days are filled with these irritating situations. Whether it’s dealing with prison officials about my brother’s ever failing health or trying to convince a pet shop store owner in Cleveland who barely speaks English that my credit card number was stolen and it wasn’t me who purchased 70 pounds of monkey-chow, life can be a irritating. There’s been too much irritation and work and not enough play. I’m not having any fun in life and I’m lonely. Of course you can’t tell that from my recent credit card use. Evidently I ordered enough music equipment to start my own band. So apparently I’m rich and at least hang out with a drummer and a xylophone player.