Why would anyone want to write westerns?

Yeah, why?

Since my original ancestor Captain John Whipple landed in what is now Massachusetts, his descendents have pushed westward. Even Commodore Abraham Whipple, the ship captain who fired the first shot in anger by the Continental Navy, moved westward into Ohio.

My own grandfather, Willard, born some 200 years after Captain John, arrived in Arizona as a young man. He worked making charcoal for silver refineries in Nevada until he had enough money to get a place in Arizona. The homestead he filed on near the current Fool’s Hollow Lake is a golf course, but when I was a boy, it grew corn.

All my dad ever wanted to be was a cowboy. But of eleven children, my grandparents chose Dad as the one child they would send to college. So his day job was educator; his regular job was ranching. And that’s where I grew up.

Show Low, Arizona, is still a small town as such communities go in Arizona. But when I was a boy, it was a little mountain community of some 350 families. I knew them all by name.

My uncle Howard was a full-time rancher. My uncle Orson was the local game warden. And my Dad was the principal of the local elementary school. There was no high school.

I listened to the stories of those who’d come into the country in the 1880s. Clyde Merrill regularly drove by our house with team and wagon. He never did buy a car. Aunt Sarah Mills, as we all called her, always said Geronimo tried to buy her from her father with four prime Apache ponies. And Bushrod Ellsworth (his real name was LaMell, but what man would want to go by that name?) found the burial cave of the old Apache chief P’Tone. Bushrod was our hero. He rode a sawmill carriage during the day, carrying 3-foot-thick Ponderosa logs into a whirling 4-foot saw that stripped the logs into 2-inch boards. Early in the morning and late in the evening, he pranced past our house on the hill riding a golden palomino horse with white mane and tail. Bushrod wore his curly hair long and held it back with a rolled red bandana tied in a headband. His shoulders were an axe handle and a handspan wide, and the fringed buckskin jacket he wore was made from mule deer hide he’d tanned himself. To us, he seemed like the last of the mountain men.

Growing up in Show Low, I had more cousins than one child has a right to expect. Sam was a year older. Wayne J six months older. Earl six months younger. Jay a year behind. Couldn’t we get into trouble? But that has nothing to do with writing westerns . . . or does it?

Together, we rode horses from before we could even walk. Together we held down calves while fathers and older cousins made the ear marks, branded them, and castrated the bull calves with freshly whetted pocket knives. Together we dug postholes and hoed corn and baled hay and chopped silage. Together we played and worked and grew. Our west wasn’t the wild west of our grandfather, but it was feet on the ground, head in the clouds west. The same kind of west that hardy pioneers carved into a place where their descendents could have a good life.

Many of the stereotypes of western stories lived in Show Low. Charlie Johnson owned the feed store. Lamar and Leland Nicklaus ran the grocery store, long before there was such a thing as a supermarket. Bill Huso had a Shell station on the corner, but in times past, it would have been a livery stable. The church house stood on the hill, actually an ancient Indian burial ground, in the same spot as Corydon Cooley had his White House, a ranch headquarters and bed-and-breakfast rolled into one.

Cordon Cooley and Marion Clark built a ranch in a valley where a good-sized creek flowed from a malpais canyon and meandered through nearly ten miles of meadows before dropping into another canyon to the north. Cooley had been a scout for the army at Fort Apache, some 20 miles away. Clark was a teamster. Less than three years from the start of their partnership, Cooley and Clark found it impossible to work together. One had to leave. In a Western novel, the standoff might have been a shootout, but in real life, Cordon Cooley suggested they cut a deck of cards to decide who left and who remained. “Show low and win the ranch,” Cooley said. History does not record the card that Marion Clark showed. But Corydon Cooley showed a deuce of clubs, winning the ranch and the right to stay. From then on, it was the Show Low Ranch, which grew into the town of Show Low.

The cabins the pioneers lived in still existed back then, though they were falling apart. Corrals built half a century before still held cattle. Fields first plowed by hardy pioneers still produced corn and alfalfa and wheat and oats and vegetables for the table. The orchard my grandfather planted gave us plums, pears, apples, and currents. The applesauce my mother made turned into apple pie and apple cobbler and a dish she called Brown Betty.

I got a bicycle for Christmas when I was in the third grade, but my preferred method of transportation was Old Spot. Spot was a three-color paint that was three years older than I and somewhat wiser. No matter what direction we travelled in, he always knew the way home, and for some reason, his pace toward home was at least twice as fast as when going away. Spot took me to my first paying job, watering the plants at the Paint Pony Lodge. We’d arrive at 6 a.m. and work until nine, for 25 cents an hour. Good pay in those days.

The route to the Paint Pony took me past Bill’s Bar, where the cowboys drank and by the Malapai Inn, where the gentlemen imbibed. Those, along with the Blue Moon dance hall, were the social centers for many adults. I never got to go inside, but I looked in the doors many times. It looked like fun. And sometimes fun turned into fights.

In time, Spot retired and a little roan mare named Pocahontas took his place. She and I rode together. Chased girls together. Caught them together. But when I turned 18 and Pocahontas was six, I went away to college. I never really returned, though I went back home for summer break. When I did get back, Pocahontas and I would ride to the east section to the promontory overlooking Long Lake, and drink the clean Arizona air while we watched the prairie dogs that dotted the slope leading down to the lake. I wrote a piece about that once. Maybe you can read it some time.

I’m a Whipple, and our DNA sends us west. Mine took me all the way to Japan by way of Hawaii. While in college and since, I devoured western novels. Zane Grey. Owen Wister. Gordon Shirreffs. Clair Huffaker. Max Brand. Ray Hogan. Louis L’Amour. And the classics, of course. The Ox Bow Incident. The Big Sky. Shane. The Searchers. I first listened to Gunsmoke on radio (no TV in Show Low) with William Conrad as Matt Dillon. I still remember the line, “I’m the first man they look for and the last they want to see.” Apparently Conrad didn’t fit the image so James Arness became Matt Dillon on Television. Watched lots of those programs. Bonanza. Alias Smith and Jones. Branded. The Rebel. High Chaparral. Wanted Dead or Alive. Paladin. Of course there are more.

People often ask me why I live in Japan. My answer is, “I like to live with my wife.” I also like to write novels that I hope bring back some of the lives my grandfather and other Arizonans of his generation lived. So far, my novels are mostly set in Arizona, on purpose. I know that land. I’ve ridden the hills and valleys, climbed the cliffs and canyons, and hunted in the mammoth Ponderosa forest that covers the great Mogollon Rim. I hope my readers catch the authenticity of Arizona and the West from my writing. I hope to make my home state live. And I hope I show all its people, black, white, red, and yellow, as they should be portrayed.

That’s why I write westerns.

One last piece of trivia. The first capital of Arizona in 1863 was Fort Whipple.

Sheriff's Pay in 1853

Luke Willford Simms left New Mills, Derbyshire, England, emigrated to America, crossed the plains, settled in the desert, and set out to practice the profession he had apprenticed: a cooper.


Luke did well enough to ensure Brigham Young disrupted his life by calling him to help establish the Summit Mission. “The Summit Mission needs a cooper.” Within months the Walker War brought Brigham Young to ask him to be his constable. “I want someone I can trust.”

Trust was one thing, but Luke Willford knew Brigham thought tithing a sacred duty and paying people a minor inconvenience.  It fell to Luke’s shoulders alone to worry about how much he was to be paid for serving as constable.

Synchronicity in the service of the blog. Once Luke had to worry about how much he was to be paid, I had to worry about it.

No sweat. Search the Google string: “salary of a sheriff in Utah Territory in 1853.” As usual,  195,000 results came back. The first ten pages, about one hundred-fifty of the search results, neither turned up (nor very much discussed) direct, original evidence to answer the question. Perhaps no one had directly studied it? There remains hope that on page 11,666, the 175,000th search result will show a ledger that documents the sheriff’s pay. My patience as a researcher gave out before that. 

Much more fun came from the discovery that the first and very colorful sheriff of Salt Lake City, also personally appointed by Brigham Young, deposited $640 into Brigham’s tithing account.  Original evidence of how much someone made. But, alas, Sheriff Ferguson earned that money from his successful foray into the California gold fields. (Sheriff James Ferguson’s tithing payment amounted to about $20,224 in today’s dollars, meaning his gold discovery was probably worth about $202,240 in today’s dollars.) (For a good discussion of why to use and why not to believe $31.60 in today’s dollars for an 1853 dollar, see https://www.measuringworth.com.)

Triangulation suggested working with a few facts about pay that I knew to be true. For example, a cohab in Utah (if the judge convicted him and arrest alone was almost always tantamount to conviction) was worth a $300 fine.  Those pay rates came a little bit later because public acknowledgement of polygamy by the LDS Church came in 1852, but the the Federal Government law creating fines for cohabitation did not attive until the 1880s.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of 165 years, if the closest I can get is 25 years, I’ll take it.

The arresting officer, usually a Deputy U.S. Marshal collected half this fine. (Yes, your observation that our Federal Government financed law enforcement with bounty is correct. Whistleblower incentive payments, today, are in the same tradition.) Deputy U.S. Marshalls had the power to appoint Special Deputy U.S. Marshals. If the Special Deputy made the arrest, he generally split the fine collected by the U.S. Marshal. Truly enterprising U.S. Marshals created teams and the teams worked for a split of the split. So, a Deputy U.S. Marshal earned $75 and each of his two team members earned $37.50.  (Roughly $2,370 and $1,185 in today’s dollars.)

All they had to do to earn this fine income was arrest a man who had a family and children. Oops, excuse me, two families and children.

The second point in my triangulation came from the only real data I could collect: today’s Sheriff’s salaries.  “Utah Right to Know” provides the sheriff’s compensation for every county.  The sheriff  in Summit County is not paid as much as in other Counties, but he is paid $157,398 in total compensation (2015).  Whittle away the 35.3% benefits and the vacation portion of his salary reported as a benefit, not a salary, and work back to $101,142 in today’s dollars.

Only the question of what is a day in today remains. My constable worked every day of the week, no vacation, no holidays, no health care, no pension, (and, very often, no pay.) So, $277.10 per day, today, for 365 days, amounted to $8.77 per day in 1853. Now, we’re getting close. My Fugitive Sheriff took a second job, driving the silver freight, at fifteen dollars a week, to make ends meet.  In 1883, $2 a day was something like an acceptable wage. Thirty years earlier, perhaps generous. 

I’m going to pay my constable fifty cents a day and fifty percent of the fees he collects (but not the fines.) He might get a raise in the future, after Summit Mission becomes Summit County. I welcome any thoughts or suggestions from my fellow Western Fictioneers.  It will take more than a year for Sheriff Luke Willford to sees the light of day--plenty of time to come up with a better pay rate, if there is one. 


E-mail Edward Massey with comments, author of 2014 Gold Quill winner, Every Soul Is Free and Amazon ABNA 2009 Quarter-finalist, Telluride Promise.

 Education in the One-room Schoolhouse #1 February 1, 2017
An Overview
Jesse J Elliot        

        Some of the students of America’s one-room schoolhouse include such famous and scholarly notables as Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, Joyce Carol Oates, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

         In an era that still promoted child labor, the concept of universal education seemed contradictory.  However, when the people of America moved west to fulfill their dream of land ownership, they also carried the desire to educate their children. When the Homesteaders Act of 1862 promised 160 acres of free land to anyone willing to work it, men and women flocked to the west in a steady flow. On the Oregon Trail alone, over 400,000 hopeful pioneers crossed the United States for the land giveaway. Some had never farmed, and the first five years sometimes proved successful for some, while they proved disastrous for others. However, most of these intrepid men and women shared two common goals: the desire to own land and the desire to educate their children. While much has been written about the Homesteaders Act and farming and ranching, little has been written on the main institute of education, the one-room schoolhouse.

         As communities sprung up, so did the one-room schoolhouses. Some more prosperous communities were able to build one school every 2-4 miles apart as the population of the community grew. Morgan County, Colorado, as an example, boasted over 100 one-room schoolhouses in its county alone. Other one-room schoolhouses built throughout the West survived well into the 1960s and 1970s and some are still being used. The architectural design of the schoolhouse reflected the community and the available resources.

         Teachers received a salary based on their education and merits (the number of students remaining at the end of the year). Their students ranged from kindergarten or 1^st through 8^th Grade. The “Three Rs: Readin’, Ritin’, and Rithmatic” were the foundation of the curriculum. These teachers represented every level of education. Some were the brightest and the best students of their own schools, teaching at age 16 or younger while other teachers were graduates of teaching colleges or Normal Schools. Communities preferred men over women even though pay for men was higher (what else is new?).

         However, the 3Rs weren’t always taught in the ways most readers remember from their own school days. Some of the earliest one-room school houses were wood, with dirt floors, and few if any windows. They were called ABC or “blab houses.” Often these schools had no paper, no blackboards, and no books. Therefore, all teaching and learning were done orally. The teacher would read a line, and the students would repeat it loudly. If students weren’t loud enough, the teacher encouraged their educational enthusiasm with a switch or paddle. The qualification for “blab teachers,” was the ability to read. The above picture is the 1822 blab house school in New Salem, IL, that Lincoln attended.

         The story of Abraham Lincoln reciting his homework as he walked home from school or work was no tall tale. This was how students in the New Salem “blab school” learned. As for actually learning to read, according to Angle (1990), “Lincoln learned first from spelling books. It was customary to learn first to spell all the words of the spelling books and recite several times before advancing to read other books. Lincoln studied Dillworth's Speller and Webster's Old Blueback. Later he advanced to reading Murray's ‘English Reader.’” At that time, many educators felt if you could spell it, you could read it.

         Since most schools had few books if any, sometimes the teachers would resort to reading lines out of the New Testament. Though we often hear of the McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader, many of the early or isolated schools had neither the awareness nor resources to purchase these books. Many schools made do with whatever they could.

         Due to lack of money and transportation, change came slowly to the one-room schoolhouse. Children continued using writing slates instead of paper since paper was costly, and only the very wealthy could purchase paper and pencils, let alone manufactured pencils. One of the problems from the use of slate was that teachers had to go around and write the assignment on each of the students’ slates. This proved inefficient and time consuming. Eventually, because of the railroad and improvements in travel and shipping, other “luxuries” became available. The classroom blackboard became affordable and accessible to all schools, replacing painted walls, and the instruction in classrooms improved. If a school had the resources, it often purchased a map for the front of the schoolroom, creating the classroom we most often see in Westerns.       

 One-room schoolhouses are rare these days (though not extinct), but they served their students well. They educated the majority of Americans for almost two hundred years, providing enough of an education in the 3 Rs that generations would be able to run farms, ranches, and businesses in the agrarian United States. These one-room schoolhouses also provided work and opportunities for intrepid men and women willing to leave their homes and travel to new and distant places.

         Sadly, like today, not all of the students graduated. Some of the factors that contributed to student drop-out included distance from home, learning issues, lack of support by family, need to work, etc. However, the vast majority of rural Americans received enough education from these one-room classrooms and their teachers to enable them to be successful in their communities and lives.

Angle, Paul, ed. (1990). The Lincoln Reader. Da Capo Press:NYC, NY.

Greer, Warren. “Abraham Lincoln's First School,” ExploreKYHistory, accessed January

            24, 2017, http://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/113.

Mack, Brian, Ed. (2016). The One Room Schoolhouse: Morgan County, Colorado, The Fort

Morgan Heritage Foundation: Morgan County, CO.

Rocheleau, Paul, and Klinkenborg, Verlyn. (2003). The One-Room Schoolhouse: A Tribute to a

Beloved National Icon.

THE SYMBOLS OF MEDICINE

THE DOCTOR'S BAG

the blog about the medicine and surgery of yesteryear

Dr Keith Souter  aka Clay More

It is almost a year since I last wrote a post in The Doctor's Bag. I thought that after Cheryl and Livia  published my book over at Sundown Press that I had said all that I needed to about past practices in medicine and surgery. My recent research activities, however, have convinced me otherwise, so I've packed the bag once again to tell you about other aspects of the medical art. 

The practice of medicine is something that every culture has developed. When people are unwell they inevitably try to do whatever they can to regain their health. It is not that we have an innate knowledge of how to regain our health, but we will seek out individuals who have knowledge of things that will help and we will put our trust in them and in their ability to heal.

            

These two things, knowledge and trust underpin the practice of medicine. Although no single culture can truly claim to have discovered medicine, yet the appearance of a recognised healing art seems to have gone hand in hand with the development of societies. At first in tribal communities the shaman, medicine man or woman would provide a proto-medicine which would be mainly based upon magic and a communication with the deities who were perceived to control the world. Then as civilisations developed and the organised worship of state gods was introduced, so would we see the rise of the priesthoods. It was natural that they would provide a rudimentary practice of medicine and the priest-physician or doctor would appear.

            

Although the origins of these priesthoods are buried back in the mists of antiquity, yet thanks to the development of writing, on stone, clay and papyrus, archaeologists and historians have been able to piece together a substantial body of evidence which shows that even in the earliest of cultures doctors were developing principles and practices that had some validity as medicines. We know also that bone-setting, assisted births and surgical practices such as trephination, the boring of holes in the skull, were practiced in even earlier times.

The symbols of medicine

If you look at the symbols that are used to depict medicine today, you will see that they form a direct link to antiquity. In the west the caduceus is generally thought to be the symbol of the medical and related professions. There is confusion about this, however, since there are in fact two symbols used by different medical organisations, and other health-related organisations have made adaptations of their own to indicate a particular feature of their calling.

                                              

                                                                

The caduceus

The Latin word caduceus refers to the wand of the Greek god Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Caduceus was also an old name for epilepsy. This is interesting, since in ancient days it was considered to be a sacred disease. 

Mercury's wand

The caduceus is represented by a staff with two wings and two snakes coiled round it. In Roman days a white caduceus was used as a symbol of peace. From the sixteenth century it has been used as a symbol of the medical profession and it is now the adopted symbol of the US Army Medical Corps.  It is also used by the Catholic Medical Association and the Royal College of Radiologists. 

US Army Medical Corps

The Catholic Medical Association

The Rod of Asclepius is the other symbol and consists of a forked staff or rod with a single snake entwined about it. Asclepius was the Greek god of healing, whom the Romans adopted and called Aesculapius. The snake seems to have been a symbol of wisdom, fertility, regeneration and healing in Middle and far Eastern countries dating back to at least 2,600 BCE. 

The rod of Aesculapius

The snake associated with Asclepius is a species of rat-snake, Elaphe longissima, which is native to south-east Europe and Asia Minor. It is also found in areas of Germany and Switzerland, where it is thought the Romans introduced it at various health resorts.

The Royal Society of Medicine, The British Medical Association and the American Medical Association use the rod of Aesculapius and a single snake as their logos, as does the World Health Organisation and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. 

The Royal Society of Medicine

American Medical Association

World Health Organisation

The British Society of Medical Acupuncture have modified the rod of Aesculapius to show a needle with a single snake, on the background of the Yin and Yang symbol. 

The British Society of Medical Acupuncture

Talking of the Yin and Yang symbol, medical practice in ancient China, of course developed differently over the centuries, possibly owing to its isolation from the rest of the ancient world. Their medical practice was very much based upon a philosophical model, in which everything in nature was associated with polarity, the two opposites of Yin and Yang. Health was a state of balance between those opposites. The great polarity is the symbol of traditional Chinese medicine.

                                   

            There are many ways of looking at history. With this initial look at the symbols used by the medical, surgical and allied professions we can see that there are links or threads that we can follow across the centuries to the days of antiquity itself, and even to the symbolism of mythology.

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THE DOCTOR'S BAG - MEDICINE AND SURGERY OF YESTERYEAR has been published by Sundown Press, available on ebook or paperback.

THE DOCTOR'S BAG