Showing posts with label Wild West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wild West. Show all posts

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Wild Bill or Buffalo Bill by Katherine Pym






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From L-R: Wild Bill, Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill

I get these two mixed up. Even as they are different, they look sort of alike, maybe because of their long hair and similar beards. They both lived life to extreme, and they were friends.

Nine years difference in their ages, their lives paralleled in many ways. The two Bills were born in the same neck of the woods; James Butler Hickok (Wild Bill) in Illinois in 1837, and William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill) in Iowa in 1846.

Both came from religious families, Wild Bill-Baptist; Buffalo Bill-Quaker. Both families disagreed with slavery. Wild Bill’s parents worked in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape from the South. Buffalo Bill’s father was stabbed to death during an anti-slavery rally.

Both Bills rode for the Pony Express (at different times), and fought on the same side during the Civil War, where Wild Bill and Custer became fast friends. During the Indian Wars, Buffalo Bill guided a wagon train with Custer.

Both worked for the same stagecoach company in Fort Leavenworth, KS. During one trip, the stagecoach broke down, and Wild Bill, waiting for the repair crew, slept in the bushes while the passengers remained in the coach. During the night, Wild Bill was attacked by a bear. The passengers found him the next morning critically wounded, the bear dead with a stab wound.  

Our daring Bills performed in the same stage play where they showed their prowess shooting at targets, thrilling the audience. 

After the Civil War his life and Wild Bill's found separate paths, although they were lifelong friends.

Wild Bill Hickok

Captain Jack Crawford summed up Wild Bill as one fraught with faults but carried a gentleness about him until riled by insults. He was a good friend and generous to a flaw, but he had no qualms killing a man who did him an injustice. Toward the end of his life, Wild Bill spent most of his time wandering saloons, & playing cards.

He usually sat in a far corner with his back to the wall, but on one particular day, someone sat in his usual seat. Wild Bill reluctantly found a chair at the corner table, and sat with his back to the door.  That’s where Jack McCall found him, and shot him point blank in the back of the head.

Buried in Deadwood SD, everyone who knew Wild Bill mourned his death. He was only 39 years of age.





Buffalo Bill Cody

Charismatic Buffalo Bill’s moniker came when he worked for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, hired to provide buffalo meat for the workers. Over a period of 18 months, he killed more than 4000 buffalo.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill):

"Cody and another hunter, Bill Comstock, competed in an eight-hour buffalo-shooting match over the exclusive right to use the name [Buffalo Bill], which Cody won by killing 68 animals to Comstock's 48."

Buffalo Bill was a restless man and entrepreneur. He went on to tour with his Wild West Show in Europe and America, where most of the audience knew the names of his headliners, both American Indians and gunslingers. They showed the world how crazy was the wild west. It ran successfully until its final show in 1906. 

Buffalo Bill died in 1917 while visiting his sister in Denver, CO. He requested to be buried on a mountain overlooking the Great Plains, but rumor has it his body was spirited away and now rests in the hills above Cody, WY. He was 70 years old.



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Many thanks to:
Wikipedia, & Wiki Commons, Public Domain


Sunday, February 28, 2016

Cowboys and the Wild Wild West by Connie Vines

I love my tech toys but I am also a history buff.

I thought I’d share some interesting findings.  Since I spent summers in Texas as a child, I had inside information on several facts.  The other snippets came from watching the History channel and reading a multitude of historical documents.  The information is in parentheses are my personal discoveries.


Feral camels once roamed the plains of Texas.




The U.S. Camel Corps was established in 1856 at Camp Verde, Texas. Reasoning that the arid southwest was a lot like the deserts of Egypt, the Army imported 66 camels from the Middle East. Despite the animals’ more objectionable qualities—they spat, regurgitated and defied orders—the experiment was generally deemed a success. (Camels can kick side-ways with all four feet.)  The Civil War curtailed the experiment and Confederates captured Camp Verde. After the war, most of the camels were sold (some to Ringling Brothers’ circus) and others escaped into the wild. The last reported sighting of a feral camel came out of Texas in 1941. Presumably, no lingering descendants of the Camel Corps’ members remain alive today.


Billy the Kid wasn’t left-handed.

A famous tintype photograph of Billy the Kid shows him with a gun belt on his left side. For years, the portrait fueled assumptions that the outlaw, born William Bonney, was left-handed. However, most tintype cameras produced a negative image that appeared positive once it was developed, meaning the  result was the reverse of reality. There’s another reason we know Billy the Kid was thus a right handed. His Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle--Winchester only made 1873s that load on the right.


The famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral wasn’t much of a shootout and didn’t take place at the O.K. Corral.



One of the most famous gunfights in history—the shootout between the three Earp brothers (Morgan, Virgil and Wyatt), Doc Holliday, Billy Claireborne, the two Clanton brothers (Billy and Ike) and the two McLaury brothers (Frank and Tom)—didn’t amount to time-frame often depicted on the Silver Screen. Despite the involvement of eight people, the gunfight only lasted about 30 seconds. Furthermore, the shootout didn’t take place within the O.K. Corral at all. Instead, all the shooting occurred near the current intersection of Third Street and Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, which is behind the corral itself. (I have visited the area.  Tombstone is brutally hot in the summer. The incest large. ) Bloodshed made up for the brevity.  Three of the lawmen were injured and three of the cowboys killed.


The Long Branch Saloon of “Gunsmoke” fame really did exist in Dodge City




Anyone who watched the television show “Gunsmoke” is well acquainted with Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon of Dodge City, Kansas. What viewers may not have realized is that the Long Branch really did exist. No one knows exactly what year it was established, but the original saloon burned down in the great Front Street fire of 1885. The saloon was later resurrected and now serves as a tourist attraction featuring a reproduction bar with live entertainment. According to the Boot Hill Museum, the original Long Branch Saloon served milk, tea, lemonade, sarsaparilla, alcohol and beer.

What did Cowboy really eat?




Cowboy food used a limited number of ingredients, partly because imported foods were expensive and partly because they needed food that kept well on the cattle trail. Coffee was an essential part of breakfast, which was large and high in fats and protein. Lunch was commonly beans, and dinner generally included something sweet like vinegar pie or apple dumplings. Because a large percentage of cowboys were of Mexican origin, spices and flavorings of that cuisine were popular.
Cowboys loved "mountain oysters," sliced and fried calf testicles. These were harvested in the spring when preadolescent bulls were castrated so they would be steers. (Served with horseradish sauce and are very tasty).

The Wild West was Wild.

But when it comes to Western Romance--it's all about the booths, Stetson, and the cowboy who wears them.

Happy Reading,

Connie Vines







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