July 8th, 2010

Several items from the Roy Rogers/Dale Evans Museum are being auctioned off next week. The museum closed in December of last year. I hope the memorabilia make it to a good home. The auction will be held at Christy’s in New York next week and in conjunction with that event I will be giving away 5 copies of the book Happy Trails to visitors to my site. All you need to do is drop me a line and let me know why Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are among your favorite cowboys and cowgirls and the winners will be select from there. Happy Trails is a coffee table book about the couple and the art director at Globe did a fabulous job laying the manuscript out. Every fan of the western duo needs to have a copy of this book. I’m working on a book about lawmen Sam Sixkiller now. I hope to speak with Sam’s great, great grandson later on today. I’m looking forward to diving into this next western. The setting is Oklahoma – Bill Tilghman territory. Now the Custer book has been turned into the my editor, I’ll be planning the book’s launch at various locations. One spot is going to be Fort Dodge. That will give me a great reason to visit Dodge City again. Hopefully, everything will be moving swiftly with the film Thunder Over the Prairie by then and I’ll have good news to share with the townsfolk there. Dodge City is one of my favorite places in the world. I’ve never met such wonderful people in my life. More than 110 years ago on this day Tom Horn and Matt Rash were the local gossip in Cold Springs, Colorado. After his supper, Matt Rash, a well known cow thief in Cold Springs, stepped out on the porch of his ranch house to have a smoke. Stock detective, Tom Horn, was in hiding nearby and shot Rash three times with a rifle. Rash went back inside and died on his bed while trying to write a note in his own blood. I?ve said it before, but I think there are some situations that call for such frontier justice. Of course, Tom Horn’s story wasn’t a happy one, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that there are some people that are evil to the core and need to be put down and not propped up. The law says otherwise of course. I think Paul Newman’s character in Hud responded to that fact best in the film of the same title. “I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. And that’s what I try to do. Sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.”