Monthly Archives: June 2012

A KANSAS COW TOWN

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Behind these rustic facades lurked a world of sin and temptation for cowboys just paid off after a long drive from Texas.

Longhorn cattle were so plentiful in south Texas that they weren’t worth a plug nickel locally. If you could get them up to the railheads in Kansas, where they could be shipped north and east, they were worth a small fortune. And so the trail driver, the classic cowboy, was born.

He was the guy who drove the longhorns north, took his wages and usually blew them in the notorious cow towns. His rowdy ways led also to the emergence of the legendary marshals who worked the cow towns, men like Wyatt Earp, who gained his reputation as a shootist, a gunslinger, wrangling high-spirited trail drivers in Kansas.

The era of the epic trail drives was brief, lasting less than 20 years — it ended when the railroads finally pushed their lines south into Texas cattle country — but it gave rise to an American mythology that is still with us today.

Click on the first two images to enlarge.

SHAKESPEARE, NEW MEXICO

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It might not look like much but it had everything you really needed in a town — a restaurant, The Grant House, serving antelope steak every Sunday, and a saloon, but those establishments have long since closed down.

Shakespeare is a ghost town now.

Click on the image to enlarge.

BELLE McKEEVER

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This painting by Frederic Remington was done for Harper’s Weekly in 1899, illustrating a story called “The Military Search For Belle McKeever”. The title of the painting is Belle McKeever and Lt. Edgar Wheelock.

I don’t know if the Harper’s story was a work of history or of historical fiction. Belle McKeever was a real person, abducted as a child by Apaches in Arizona in 1869. She and her brother were helping their father pan for gold in a creek on his claim when the father was killed and the girl taken. The boy escaped and alerted the authorities and the military did conduct a search for Belle but I can find no record that she was ever found — yet she appears in the painting as a grown woman, back in civilization.

She became famous because the troopers sent to look for her claimed to have discovered a rich though apparently abandoned gold mine in the mountains where they were searching.  It came to be known as The Belle McKeever Mine, but no one was ever able to locate it again.

I’m guessing that F. McCarthy, the author of the story, supplied a fanciful and fictional happy ending to the story, involving a romance between Belle and a cavalry officer.  The two horses getting set to nuzzle each other would tend to suggest some sort of budding affection between the riders.

It is, in any case, a wonderful and evocative painting.  Note the McClellan saddle that the officer is riding — standard issue for the cavalry from soon after the Civil War to the dismantling of the arm in 1942.

Click on the image to enlarge.

ELLA MAE MORSE

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From Mansfield, Texas.  When he met her, Sammy Davis, Jr. was startled to discover that she was white.  “I thought you were one of us,” he said.  “I am!” she said.

What a doll.

Click on the photo to enlarge.