A town named after Kit Carson should have a story.

 

A couple Steve Dancy Tales take place in Carson City. I like the town. I like it today and I like historic Carson City. Since statehood, it has always been the capital of Nevada which made it a political town with pretensions of civility. Virginia City, however, was twenty miles away and it rightly deserves its reputation as one of the rowdiest mining towns of the Old West. Until the mines played out in the 1880s, the Comstock Lode made Virginia City and Carson City very wealthy.

Carson City acted as a freight center and supply depot for the mines. Extensive flumes carried pine logs down the eastern slope of the Sierras to Carson City. Sawmills to finish these raw logs were a major city industry and the finished lumber shored up mine tunnels and provided boards for building above ground. The short run Virginia & Truckee Railroad transported timber, people, and foodstuffs from Carson City to Virginia City. At its peak, thirty-six trains a day passed between the two cities. The pair of towns were bustling, with the best housing, food, liquor, and entertainment that money could buy.

Here’s a description of Carson City excepted from The Shopkeeper. Steve Dancy and Jeff Sharp are just riding into town.

Carson City had been settled as a trading post less than thirty years earlier, so I should not have expected the sophistication of Denver or St. Louis. I had visited both cities, and neither was the primitive hinterland a New Yorker might expect. Carson City, on the other hand, lived up to the image of a new-made town populated by people who had nothing but wanted everything.

After we passed the railroad station and approached the statehouse, the town began to look a bit more established. The main thoroughfare was crowded with wagons, horses, and people bustling about with purpose. Although the commercial district had the same disheveled look as most of the other towns in the West, the residences along the side avenues set Carson City apart. Radiating off the central artery were numerous tree-lined lanes with houses substantial enough to indicate that people intended to stay awhile. In fact, some of these homes were large and well designed.

I glanced up another side lane with nice homes set back from the street. “Looks like there’s some money in Carson City. Settled money.”

“For a mine to prosper, you need two things: lumber to shore up the shafts an’ a way to transport your bullion to market. Trees an’ trains. Carson City has a lock on both. Sometimes I think we miners just toil for a bunch of shysters in starched collars.”

“Which reminds me, I want to buy some clothes while we’re here.”

Sharp pointed ahead. “That’s the new state capitol building. Wherever ya find politicians, ya’ll find haberdasheries.”

The stately capitol building looked sturdy and permanent, as befitted the only pretense to law and order in a society struggling against anarchy. The structure sat in the center of a city block, surrounded by a pleasant park with footpaths, trees, and neatly groomed grass. A white cupola with a silver roof capped the two-story sandstone building, giving it a Federal-style appearance that I had seldom seen west of the Continental Divide.

“Looks impressive.”

“Looks deceive.” Sharp spit. “A more corrupt state government you will not find.”

Honest westerns filled with dishonest characters.

Thomas Edison Created the Movie Industry and Produced the First Western

When people talk about the film industry, they seldom mention Thomas Edison, yet he filmed the first western at his studio in New York City. In 1903, the Edison Manufacturing Company distributed The Great Train Robbery. The nine minute film set many of the constructs for the genre. Stay till the end to see one of the motion picture industry's most iconic visuals.

I believe this makes Mr. Edison a cowboy at heart, which gives him the right to cavort in a Steve Dancy Tale. In The Return, Steve travels to New York to acquire rights to sell Edison's inventions in the Western states. Needless to say, he runs into trouble. I suppose The Return could be called a mash-up. The Old West conquers another world, one where a cosmopolitan refinement barely disguises a violent underworld run by gangs and overlords.

The Edison and gangland history is accurate. Steve Dancy's participation, not so much.

Honest Westerns filled with dishonest characters
The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale
143 Amazon Ratings for 4.6 stars

James D. Best is arguably one of the best writers of westerns, but his newest novel, The Return, is set in the East. --Alan Caruba, Bookviews

It's the summer of 1880, and Thomas Edison's incandescent bulb is poised to put the gaslight industry out of business. Knowing a good business opportunity, former New York shopkeeper Steve Dancy sets out to obtain a license for Edison's electric lamp. Edison agrees, under one condition: Dancy and his friends must stop the saboteurs who are disrupting his electrification of Wall Street. More worrisome, he has also unknowingly dragged along a feud that began out West. The feud could cost him Edison's backing ... and possibly his life.

Should the Dallas Cowboys Change Their Name?

It’s all the rage to change sport team names, especially if they’re based on Native American culture. But, hey, what about the Cowboys? I know the Dallas Cowboys reside in Texas but should football appropriate the name of a common laborer? I mean, is that culturally acceptable? Remember, cowboy has been used historically as a derogatory slur. Reagan’s enemies called him a cowboy, and they didn’t mean it in a good way. A rodeo clown got vilified for wearing an Obama mask. It was criticized as disrespectful. Then you have Wyatt Earp’s bitter enemies. They were a street gang called the cowboys, or sometimes cow-boys. In Britain, a cowboy is someone who sells shoddy goods or services. In popular culture, a cowboy is almost always portrayed as a young white male who flaunts his independence and may even embrace lawlessness. Snobs with self-described good taste disdain cowboy fiction, film, music, and even poetry. Historians, of late, have made them out as the villains in the country’s push westward.

In truth, cowboys were mostly migrant seasonal labor. They might have been hired hands, but they deserve to have their culture preserved intact and not mocked by throwing around a piece of cow skin. (They call it pig, but we know better.)

These hardy men kept the nation fed, cow towns profitable, and were so in tune with nature that they knew in which direction the sun set. Granted, they were rowdy, smelly, and profane, but they were also honorable and hardworking. It’s ludicrous to assert that their image is honored by a bunch of multi-millionaire play-boys in tight pants? 

 Let’s face it, the Dallas team-name offends the sensitivities of twenty-first century Americans. 

It must be changed for the sake of diversity and inclusiveness. 

But leave the girls alone. We like them just as they are.

P.S. Out of respect for this noble profession, there are few cowboys or cows in The Steve Dancy Tales. Instead, I appropriated the culture of miners because I liked their square toed boots.

A Cowboy Explains 4th of July

Modern Americans are hazy about our history. With the Fourth of July on the horizon, I thought a cowboy could bring clarity to the origins of this popular holiday.

Nevada Highway Just Outside Pickhandle Gulch

See anyone?
Okay, get out of the car, but if anyone comes along, remember social distancing.

Happy Memorial Day -- Sorta

My tribute to our forefathers who fought to protect our nation.

My father never met me. He died in WWII in the cockpit of his P-51. I wouldn't be here, except for a brief leave between flight school and his assignment to Iwo Jima. He provided escort service to the B-29s that bombed Japan daily.

I don't have many pictures of him, but this one was posted to a website honoring the 506th Fighter Group. My father is the furthest out on the wing.

My father and many soldiers throughout our history fought to preserve our freedom. Now in a matter of weeks, it has all been taken away. Sometimes it's hard to believe this is still the United States of America. I believe it's time to once again become the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

I'd like to wish him and all of his compatriots that helped keep us safe and free, Happy Memorial Day ... and thank you.

Story Behind the March 1882 Poster Warning “Billy, the Kid”

Ran across this paper by Robert J. “Bob” Stahl at Arizona State University. Fun Old West trivia. Highlight mine.

Since the 1920s, professional and lay historians as well as supporters of the various Billy, the Kid impostors have differed widely in the purposes or meanings of the March 24, 1882 poster that read:

NOTICE!

TO THIEVES, THUGS, FAKIRS AND BUNKO-STEERERS,

Among Whom Are

J. J. Harlan alias “Off Wheeler;” Saw Dust Charlie, Wm. Hedges, Billy, the Kid, Billy  Mullin,  Little  Jack,  The  Cuter, Pockmarked  Kid  and  about  Twenty  Others:

If Found within the Limits of this City after TEN O’CLOCK P.M. this Night, you will be Invited to attend a GRAND NECKTIE PARTY,

The Expense of which will be borne by

100 Substantial Citizens.

Las Vegas, March 24^th, 1882

Those who believe that Billy, the Kid, Bonney was not killed by Pat Garrett at about 12:20 a.m. on Friday, July 15, 1881 in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom use this poster as evidence that Billy Bonney was still alive, lest why would 100 “substantial citizens” of Las Vegas, NM, a town where Billy was well known, want him out of town before 10 p.m. the evening of March 24, 1882. This poster as dated is often one of their primary pieces of ‘hard’ evidence that Billy was alive and known by prominent people to be alive eight months after his reported death in Fort Sumner. Meanwhile, individuals convinced Billy Bonney was killed by Garrett have had difficulty coming up with a convincing reason why this poster would even mention a “Billy, the Kid,” as it made no sense to state that a man, eight months dead and buried 125 miles away, would be ordered to leave the town. Consequently, they searched for a plausible other ‘Billy, the Kid,’ who was or who might have been in and around Las Vegas in March 1882. 

Some contend it was Billy, “the Kid” Wilson, a former member of Bonney’s cow-boy outlaw group. However, this is a stretch because Wilson had been in a Santa Fe jail since late December 1880 ... Others suggest the Billy referred to was “Billy, the Kid,” Claiborne, of Tombstone fame. However, Tombstone and Cochise County newspapers report Claiborne as being in and around the county the entire spring of 1882. So there is no evidence that Claiborne was the “Billy” referred to in the poster. A few have even suggested that the creators of the poster referred to the remains of Billy Bonney that had allegedly been snatched from Billy’s original Fort Sumner grave in late July 1881 and brought to Las Vegas to be assembled as a skeleton in one or more doctors’ offices. The most desperate interpreters of this poster have either printed up a version of the poster with the “1882” replaced by “1881” or argued that the “1882” date on the poster was a misprint, because Billy, the Kid was alive in 1881 but not in 1882. However, this made no sense because Billy Bonney was in a Mesilla jail through March 1881. The one thing that these people have in common is the conviction that a particular “Billy, the Kid” had indeed been in and around Las Vegas for at least a few days or weeks as well as on the day the poster was nailed on street posts and displayed in Las Vegas businesses.

            Actually, none of these explanations is accurate.

In July 1926, James A. Carruth, owner of a printing business in Las Vegas from the mid-1870s on past 1900; owner and editor of the short-lived Las Vegas Free Press; and, after a short time in California, owner of a highly successful printing business in Santa Fe, responded to recent rumors about Billy, the Kid being alive in Texas. He wrote the following undated letter to the Editor printed under the title, “Several Billy The Kids,” in the July 7^th issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican:¹

Editor New Mexican:

            I notice in an article the other day you state that the date given in the poster printed at Las Vegas and now in the rooms of the First National bank, mentioned “Billy the Kid,” though he had been dead a year or so. I printed that poster, and the Billy the Kid mentioned was an imitation of the genuine one. There were several in different towns in New Mexico, and probably the one mentioned by the El Paso writer was one of these.

            The poster was written by Col. J. A. Lockhart, who had not long previously “presided” at a meeting which disposed of a tough, who died on a telegraph pole, and the parties mentioned in the poster did not care to argue any point with the colonel. A party who was going down-town, along Railroad avenue, that night, was stopped by a couple of men with six-shooters on, who asked what he wanted on that street that night, and told him he had better go back up-town. He did so, and went into a restaurant just as a party came in the back door with a suspicious red line around his neck, and said: “Charlie, give me something to eat quick.” Charlie asked him what was the matter with his neck, and he said a crowd of fellows had put a rope around him and hauled him up on a telegraph pole, let him down, and gave him 10 minutes to get out of town, but “I had nothing to eat since breakfast and cannot go without eating.” So Charlie gave him a lunch to go on.

A SANDY MARSHAL

            Colonel Lockhart was a small, wiry man, and full of grit. A party here tells me that he used to be marshal right after the war at Fort Smith, and one time the judge told him to take a posse of 25 men and go out and bring in a man who had been indicted on a very serious charge. He was an ex-Confederate, and Lockhart had to go right into a big settlement of 1,400 or more Confederates, and he went and got his man.²

            The gentleman who told me this says that he once “aided and abetted” the James brothers in their nefarious work to the extent of $75 and a $200 gold watch. This contribution was not voluntary on his part, but at the request of the James brothers, who had Colt & Co. as attorneys, and Colt & Co. under those conditions were powerful attorneys.

            Speaking of hanging bees, another one took place in Las Vegas after wards when a crowd went and took a party out of the east side lockup and went over and started to hang him on a pole right under the window of the office of the district attorney, who came up and said: “For God’s sake, boys, don’t hang him here. There’s a much better pole in the next block. So the boys very kindly took the “candidate” to the better pole, where he was duly hanged.

J. A. CARRUTH.

Carruth made it clear that (a) Col. Lockhart created the wording for the poster, (b) Carruth and his print shop designed, type-set and printed the poster; (c) Lockhart and Carruth were convinced that the ‘real’ Billy, the Kid, Bonney had been dead for about a year; (d) the poster in no way referred to the Billy Bonney who was dead; and (e) the Billy mentioned referred to any and all of the living Williams and Billys in New Mexico who had picked up or who were thinking of picking up the nickname “the Kid.” His letter comes as close to stating the actual purposes and meanings of the poster as we are likely to get.

Westerns in Literature

Western fiction has been hugely popular for almost two hundred years. Not only were Westerns popular in the United States, but the whole world devoured them. For decades, the Western was a staple of fiction, Hollywood, television, and daydreams. Today, many think Western fiction is moribund. They’re wrong. Authors like Johnny Boggs continue to carry on the tradition, and my own novels sell well. The popularity of Westerns is often measured against the impossible yardstick of the 1950s.

Some say we’ve become too sophisticated to swallow the traditional Western mythology. Those are people who have not taken a thoughtful look at Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, or even the glut of superheroes that plague theaters, bookshelves, and toy boxes. The stories are the same, only the venue has changed. The Western in its traditional garb will come roaring back when audiences tire of yet another iteration of CSI or men in tights.

Western fiction is frequently dismissed as not being serious literature. This misconception is perpetuated by classifying literary stories that occur in the Old West as something other than a Western. Many of the smart set believe Westerns can only be dime novels, pulp fiction, or straight-to-paperback formula bunkum. But the Western has a long and valid history in literature.

James Fenimore Cooper may have been the first Western author of note. The Last of the Mohicans and the rest of the Leatherstocking Tales were told in the Western tradition. Written in 1826 about events that supposedly occurred nearly seventy-five years prior, The Last of the Mohicans incorporates all the characteristics of a modern Western.

Mark Twain is universally acknowledged as one of the great American literary figures, but is seldom referred to as a Western writer. Yet, Roughing It is a first-hand description of the Wild West of Virginia City during the heyday of the Comstock Lode. Granted, Roughing It is Twain-enriched non-fiction, but The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are coming-of-age novels set in the American frontier. (By the way, Mark Twain hated James Fenimore Cooper's writing. You can read all about it here. Pretty funny.)

When Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902, the novel received critical acclaim and was a huge bestseller, eventually spawning five films, a successful play, and a television series. An instant success, it sold over 20 thousand copies in the first month, an astonishing number for the time. It went on to sell over 200,000 thousand copies in the first year, and over a million and a half copies prior to Wister's death. This classic has never been out of print.

Max Brand, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Jack Schaefer, Elmer Kelton, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy continued the Western tradition and all of them have been highly successful. Recently Nancy E. Turner (These is my Words) and Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers) have penned praiseworthy Westerns that are popular with readers.

Western literature has a grand heritage and will continue to appeal to readers all over the world.   Good writing, plots that move with assurance, and great characterization will elevate the genre back the top of the bestseller charts.

Honest westerns filled with dishonest characters.