June 24th, 2010

LeeAnne Sharpe with the Spirit of the West organization contacted me Wednesday night to let me know that I’m being honored with the Spirit of the West Alive award in October. The award recognizes those individuals who have continued to keep the idea of the Old West in the public eye. Past recipients have been Buck Taylor, Bruce Dern, Bob Boze Bell, and Peter Brown. I’m very honored and thank the folks at the organization for considering me at all. I don’t remember when the last time was I received such happy news. I must admit, however, that I’m a lot like Robert Duvall’s character from the movie Tender Mercies. “I don’t trust happiness,” Duvall’s character says to his. “I never have and I never will.” I continue to work away at getting the Libbie Custer book complete. Soon. Very soon. I will have it all done. I’m including a few of the best things ever said by and about some famous western legends and locations in today’s post. Enjoy. “For my handling of the situation at Tombstone, I have no regrets. Were it to be done again, I would do it exactly as I did it at the time.” — Wyatt Earp, lawman. “We are rough men and used to rough ways.” – Bob Younger to a newspaper reporter following the 1876 Northfield, Minnesota raid. “Cimarron is in the hands of a mob.” — The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper commenting on Cimarron, New Mexico during the Colfax County War. November 9, 1875. “Can’t you hurry this up a bit? I hear they eat dinner in Hades at twelve sharp and I don’t aim to be late.” – Black Jack Ketchum, just before he was hanged at Clayton, New Mexico on April 26, 1901. “They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. It ain’t true. I only killed one man for snoring.” — John Wesley Hardin. “I love it. It is wild with adventure.” – Henry Starr describing the bandit life in the Old West shortly before he was shot to death in a gunfight in Arkansas. “Dodge City is a wicked little town. Indeed, its character is so clearly and egregiously bad that one might conclude, were the evidence in these later times positive of its possibility, that it was marked for special Providential punishment.” — a letter that appeared in the Washington D.C. Evening Star, January 1, 1878. “There is no law, no restraint in this seething cauldron of vice and depravity.” – The New York Tribune describing Abilene, Kansas. I do believe that particular quote applies to the country as a whole these days.