Ranger Jim's Ramblings for April

After too long away, I've returned.

Today, with tomorrow being Good Friday, followed by Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, the Easter Triduum as the Roman Catholic Church calls it, I thought I'd give a very bried, hardly in dpeth overview of religion in the frontier West.

Of course, religion is one of the main reasons the so-called New World was settled. While the native peoples had their own forms of worship, bringing Christianity to new lands was a mission for many faiths. The Spanish wanted to bring Catholicism to the so-called New World. Others fled England, the Netherlands, and France to flee religious persecution. The Spanish missionaries brought their beliefs to the West first, followed by others, one notable group being the Mormons.

Unfortunately, like so many other professions and callings of the West, clergy have also been much stereotyped in Western movies, books, and television shows. Too often, a clergyman will be portrayed as a pistol packing preacher, a hellfire and brimstone Bible thumper, a zealous reformer, or a sissy who gets trampled by the outlaws and ingrained powers of a town. Clergy women are treated no better, if nuns portrayed as heroic, too good to be true,or else sadistic knuckle-rappers, female preachers radical anti-liquor and gambling zealots, who are always ugly, and always frowning.

The truth is, of course, that religion was very important to the people of the West, just like to the rest of the world, and most clergy were merely good people doing their job. And unlike in the typical portrayals, every faith was represented, not just the Protestant preacher trying to reform the town nor the Mexican priest ministering to the peons. Jews were well represented in the West, particularly in Texas. Many early Texas Rangers were Jewish, and several counties in Texas are named after an early Jewish settler who joined the Rangers. Corsicana, Texas was a center of Jewish society. An historic synagogue still stands in the town, now used as a recreation center.

So, when you think of, or write about, religion and clergy in the West, yes, you can have your character anything you want. Just keep in mind that most of them went about their daily business just like the other settlers of the land west of the Mississippi.

Until next month, 
"Ranger" Jim

Notorious Schoolmarms of the Old West

Blog #3  One-room Schoolhouse Teachers

            By Julie Hanks, Ph.D.  aka Jesse J Elliot

         Okay, I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any “notorious” schoolmarms or schoolmasters west of the Mississippi. Due to the strict rules educators (especially female educators) had to follow in order to maintain their employment, any scandalous behavior would have been met with immediate expulsion. Teachers could administer the birch to a student and still be in the right, but if the teachers were out after eight or missed church or flirted, they were fired.

            After Catharine Beecher lauded women’s ability to be natural teachers (and cheaper ones at that) in the classrooms, the amount of female teachers increased greatly. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era (Enss.) By 1890, approximately seventy five percent of school teachers were female, and though none were notorious, many were notable. Here are four of them.

        

Sister Blandina-Builder of schools & hospitals; Friend to Billy the Kid and Happy Jack; passionate teacher and caregiver to SW Native Americans & Mexicanos

              In Trinidad, CO, Sister Blandina brought communities together to build schools and hospitals. Money was never available for schools, so when Sister Blandina arrived and saw the shack used for educating the children, she decided to draw attention to the need for a newer building. She took a crowbar and got on the roof and began to rip it apart. When a local rancher rode by, he asked what she was doing. She told him she was rebuilding the schoolhouse since this one was unacceptable. Shocked by this intrepid nun who spoke to him in his own language (Spanish) and realizing she was right, he asked her what she needed. Before the day was done, she had six men with supplies helping her. Apparently, few if any of her ventures were funded originally, but she refused to accept defeat and accomplished her goal each time one way or another with the help of the community.

            One day she was called to save the life of a youth. When Sister Blandina found him, he was slowly dying from gunshot wounds. None of the doctors would help him as he was an outlaw. Ironically his name was Lucky Jack. She took care of him for nine months until he died. For her kindness, Jack’s gang leader, another youth at the time, Billy the Kid, asked how he could return a favor.  The sister asked him not to harm the doctors who had refused to help Jack after she heard his plan to go back and scalp them. Billy the Kid promised her and never got his revenge, but as we all know, he did continue to rob stages, etc.

After building schools and hospitals and helping bring education and medical care to the Mexicanos and the Native Americans of the South West, Sister Blanini died at the ripe old age of 94 (Enss).

Hannah Clapp: A teacher named Hannah Clapp arrived in Salt Lake City wearing “a calico blouse and bloomers made of thick, canvas-type material and carrying a pistol.”

         Hannah Clapp made the trip out west with her brother and his family. Her only desire was to bring education to the west. Her attire reflected her philosophy. She supported women’s rights, the Temperance movement, and the [then] Republican party. “She was armed and ready to take on anyone who might physically challenge her style or dream of going to California to teach.”  Finding that there was no school between the Sierras and Salt Lake City, she petitioned the territorial leaders to approve a modest facility. They gave her $12,000. Though larger than a one-room schoolhouse, she opened the doors of the Sierra Seminary.  She shared teaching duties with two other teachers, and her school was so renown, that a young reporter was sent over to cover some of the special events of the school. His name was Mark Twain (Enss).

Anna Webber:  Prairie teacher, taught sixteen + students in a classroom made for about six students with no furniture, blackboards, or books.

         At twenty-one years of age, Anna Webber received her teaching certificate in Mitchell County. She went on to teach in Blue Hill, Kansas, in a sod schoolroom. Eleven boys and five girls made up her classroom. Their ages ranged from six to thirteen years. In her journal, she explains that she waits in vain for any classroom furniture. No desks, no chairs, and no tables. About half way through the three-month session, six new students arrived, and Glory Be, they brought a table with them. Webber was ecstatic. 

         Also in her journal, Webber described the constant inclement weather of the prairie, high winds and storms that often kept her students away from class. “My Land! The wind blows hard enough to take a persons heard off.” Forced to keep the students inside, she allows them to play, but their play shakes the sod schoolhouse so much that she can’t even write straight.  Sadly on the last day of school, it rained so hard that only nine students were able to show up.

         In spite of the lack of furniture, equipment, books, and blackboards, Webber continued to teach in Blue Hills and two additional Kansas counties in the state. She later joined the Kansas Industrial School in June 1890 and was the head of the sewing department. She married, and her daughter became a respected teacher of American history at Lincoln High School in Nebraska (Enss).

Lucinda Lee Dalton:       Tenacious and intellectual

         Another notable female teacher was from Beaver, Utah. Dalton illustrates the intellectual depth of the teachers found in the West. Forced to quit her own education at twelve, she left behind her mentor, a male teacher who recognized her for her intellect, and she went to work for her father in his newly opened private school. Though younger than many of the students by up to four years, she was their intellectual superior in all subjects. At sixteen she began teaching in an infant school.

         Though born a Mormon, she was an independent thinker and a suffragette. After a failed marriage and the death of her husband, she went back to teaching to support her four children. There she gained her independence and an opportunity to continue to learn with her students (Kinkead, 1996).

         This is just four of the many notable teachers. I’m having difficulty finding any schoolmasters of the Old West, let alone notable ones.  If any of you out there know of some journals or anecdotes about male teachers in the Old West, don’t be shy. Please pass them on.

Bibliography

Czajka, Christopher. (2000)   Homestead History       

          http://www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay10.

Enss, Chris. (2008) Frontier Teachers: Stories Of Heroic Women Of The Old West.

            Globe Pequot: Guilford, CT.

Kinkead, Joyce.(1996). A Schoolmarm All My Life: Personal Narratives from Frontier

            Utah. Signature Books: Salt Lake City, Utah.

Chewing the Cud - Tips for a First Draft ... Meg Mims

The terror of the blank page… ah, yes. All that white space.

Who else has heard advice like, "just vomit it out," or "get it down fast, you can fix it later," or what have you. Uh huh. If that works for you. Doesn't for me. I get stuck. Often. And I'm not a "pantser" anyway, never have been. I need at the very least Michael Hauge's 5-point outline, with the inciting incident, first and second turning points, point of no return, and climax. After writing ten plus books and novellas, I need more before I sit down to write something new.

Sure, we’ve seen quotes from famous authors about first drafts. “The first draft of anything is sh**.” (Ernest Hemingway) “I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build sand castles.” (Shannon Hale) “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” (Terry Pratchett)

I like the last one best, but even in telling myself the story, I falter. Um… hmm. Hoo boy. I know A-B-C-D, but what about the points in between? The gaps in my outline. The little details about my characters that never made it into my sketches when I first started preparations. And I spend a good month preparing before every book, especially now that I’m writing a series. Ever hear of a "book bible"? Yeah, you need one. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or you'll find characters with the same first or last name, or switching identities faster than models on a runway. If you don't know your characters, readers will get confused. So will you. "Uh, who's Bill? Oh, wait... he's Jim."

You also need to know your characters' backgrounds, from birthdate to family to home life to education to friends, married or single, kids or not wanting them, attitudes toward parents, religion, morals, etc., etc., etc. There are lots of charts you can fill out, or make up your own. Protagonists, minor characters, and don't forget your villains. They need motives for what they do. If you don’t know your characters well enough, they may end up worse than flat soda.

They’ll also stop talking to you. Like wayward, snotty kids holding back secrets. Yeah. They’re brutal that way. You're typing along, feeling smug, pushing to the halfway point, and then WHAM. Your hero or heroine does something stupid. And you're sitting there, wondering why.

Ooooh, man.

Or like a bad actor, they go hide in their trailer and refuse to come out. Until you beg them, bribe them, or figure out what is going on. And you'd better, or that deadline's gonna hit you right in the nose.

That's why I stop, take stock of who these people are and why they do what they do instead of what I want them to do - and what's odd, sometimes they're right.

SO I'm finally getting around to the point. What does work (for me) is a process I call “chewing the cud.” Sounds gross, doesn’t it. The humble cow, or goat, alpaca, sheep, and antelope, cannot digest one time through, so they repeat the process. Rumination: “chewing the cud.” Also, “a deep or considered thought about something.”

So when I sit with my laptop, taking snippets of my outline and pasting them into the next chapter, pushing out the words, halting every so often until they run out... Sound familiar? I take a break. Get up, walk around, do the dishes (Agatha Christie swore by such chores), vacuum (you'd be surprised how the noise helps your brain ponder, almost as good as listening to music), take a shower, a walk, a box of cookies out of the fridge – er, no, I can’t do that anymore. Dang. Who can stop at one anyway...

Maybe those cattle ponder things while chewing. They do look fairly peaceful out in the pastures.

I’m flummoxed by writers who can churn out thousands of words day after day. Yeah, everyone has a different process. Mine is more of an “ocean wave” where the tide comes in and goes out, a little farther each time… but dang. Some days the tide stops. So I give my brain (and subconscious) a little break, time to ruminate, swallow, chew again. Taking a break (like right now, writing this blog post) can refresh the well, fill the cistern, drink from the stream of ... well, you get the idea. Every writer needs a few breaks to prevent burnout. Take a nap. Do yoga. READ A BOOK.

Reading is especially good, especially if it's something outside of the genre you're writing. Anything but, in fact, as far from normal as possible, like a zombie horror, or a biography (I'm tackling the one about Alexander Hamilton), a classic, whatever strikes your fancy. And read like a writer while you're at it. Nuances of character, a fresh descriptive phrase, or a vocabulary word the author uses in a unique way. File it in the back of your mind.

Thibodeau Photography

I almost always come up with something to plug in that works earlier in the draft, or where I stopped. Often what comes is something important that I’d never planned on – a happy accident, as the painter Bob Ross would call it. Sometimes it’s just a small detail. Whatever, I welcome it.

Chew on that. It might help your first draft.

Meg Mims is currently writing the "Shamelessly Adorable" teddy bear cozy mystery series - Bearly Departed will debut in June for Kensington, and she's working on Bear Witness to Murder now. Meg won a 2012 Best First Novel Spur Award for Double Crossing, a western mystery, and is also one half of the writing team D.E. Ireland for the Eliza Doolittle & Henry Higgins mysteries - with two finalist berths in 2014 and 2016 for the Agatha Award Best Historical Mystery. Meg is chafing to write another western, if she can squeeze more calendar days into the year.

THE ANSWER IS BLOWING IN THE WIND

Much has been written about the Range Wars of the American West. The premise of cattlemen and farmers in conflict, sometimes violently, over grazing and water rights found its way into iconic books and movies such as To the Last Man (Z.Grey), The Virginian (O. Wister), Shane, Oklahoma!, and Chisum.

The invention of barbed wire served only to exacerbate the range wars for the next several years. Farmers built fences to keep open range cattle out of their crops, but that meant they also cut off access to water sources for the roaming herds. Not until the late 1880’s were laws passed that required, among other things, the addition of gates for every three miles of fencing.

To complicate matters, the western states and territories employed prior appropriation water rights, described as “first in time, first in rights.” The earliest landowner in the region held superior rights to waterways running through his property. Throw in a few irrigation ditches or a dam, and he could have some very disgruntled neighbors.

There were few water wells in the Old West, and for good reason. They had to be hand dug or drilled and the water table in those arid regions could be several hundred feet below grade.

Even as the fur and bullets flew over the right to water access, the solution to the problem was being devised in a New England machine shop. In the small town of Ellington, Connecticut, a mechanic named Daniel Halladay was tinkering with water pumps. His pump relied on steam engine power, which most everything did in those days.

Daniel Halladay

John Burnham, Jr.

He crossed paths with a visionary named John Burnham, Jr., who was fascinated with the use of wind power to run hydraulic machines. Halladay hired Burnham and, together, they invented the first wind engine that could pivot with directional wind changes by use of a tail vane. (Old European windmills were fixed, with enormous sails that required considerable winds to operate.)

Halladay’s first wind engine design, The Halladay Standard, utilized four paddle-like blades made of wood or sailcloth. This evolved into the self-regulating wind engine, which featured sections of narrow blades that could fold back in high winds, much like the action of an umbrella.

The Halladay Standard
(Original Patent)

Self-regulating Wind Engine
(shown with sections folded

The biggest problem facing Halladay and Burnham was that their wonderful invention was just not selling…at least not in Connecticut. Burnham suggested that they expand to the Midwest. While most of the manufacturing operations remained in Connecticut, they opened a shop in Batavia, Illinois. The move was a fortuitous one. Sales took off in America’s breadbasket and Halladay moved the rest of his company to Batavia.

Salesmen traversed the western states by train and wagons, carrying samples of windmills to farmers and ranchers on the parched plains. To say that the wind-powered water pumps all but ended the range wars would not be an exaggeration. More manufacturers entered the market and Batavia, Illinois, would become known as “Windmill City.”

Thomas O. Perry, an engineer who worked for Daniel Halladay, experimented with new, more efficient blade designs and lighter assemblies. He needed to test his new ideas and outfitted one of the factory’s buildings into a primitive wind tunnel, effectively producing two inventions that would revolutionize American industry.

Aermotor Windmill

Curiously, Halladay was not interested in the new design and Thomas Perry went on to work for the Aermotor Windmill Company. Perry’s cupped steel blade design became the standard for windmills. Ironically, the Aermotor Company is the only U.S. manufacturer of windmills still in business. They are based in San Angelo, Texas.

Great engineering marvels always come down to simplicity, elegance and functionality. Certainly, the humble windmill qualifies. Day after day, year after year, they catch the wind and turn it into power. They work when it’s raining, snowing…when the sun is high or the moon is dim…when it’s Christmas or just another Tuesday. What would the American West be without them?

For you road trippers, there are a number of windmill museums located across the U.S. (Indiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and New Mexico) The state of Texas is especially known for its ubiquitous windmills. Here's a little story from the early Panhandle days:

"When one of the first windmills in the Texas Panhandle was installed and put into operation, the owner took his crew of riders out to see how it worked before acceptin' it from the contractor. When he saw the little trickle of water flowin' out he was as tickled as a cub bear with a honeycomb, and declared that the windmill would revolutionize the cow business. One skeptical cowhand eyed the small stream, and said, "Hell, Boss, I could get behind a bush and do a better job than that." ---- Ramon F. Adams, THE OLD-TIME COWHAND, 1948.

All the best,

Vonn

(Please forgive me for reposting a blog post from the archives. I've been out of town with no reliable WiFi. The horror! This post was originally published in November, 2014.)
VM

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2015 WWA Spur Finalist (Short Fiction)
2015 Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Finalist (Short Fiction)

GET THE CUPS OUT

THE DOCTOR'S BAG

the blog about the medicine and surgery of yesteryear

Keith Souter aka Clay More

CUPPING- A USEFUL TREATMENT FOR THE FRONTIER DOCTOR

Bleed, blister, vomit and purge! Those were basically the components of Heroic medicine, the name given to the aggressive medical practice used right up to the mid-19th century. They were therapeutic techniques that had their origins back in the days of Hippocrates, the father of medicine in the fifth century BC. 

In England in the 18th century Dr John Lettsom (1744-1815), founded of the London Medical Society, which is the oldest medical society in the UK. He was a Quaker and an abolitionist, who became one of the most eminent physicians of his day. He was a staunch advocate of Heroic medicine and wrote humorously about himself:

When people's ill they come to I

I, blisters, bleeds and sweats 'em.

Sometimes they live, sometimes they die.

What's that to I?

I let's 'em.

Sadly, that may not have been far from the truth.

On the other side of the Pond, Heroic medicine,'s greatest advocate was Dr Benjamin Rush (1746-1813). He was a signatory of there Declaration of Independence and was a physician, politician and social reformer.

He was famous for providing the Lewis and Clark expedition with "Dr Rush's Bilious Pills," essentially calomel, a drug containing mercurous chloride, which they used liberally throughout their two year journey.

Blistering

Doctors used blistering, the deliberate production of blisters on the skin to produce a powerful confer-irritation. Effectively, the pain of the blister would over-ride the painful condition being treated.  They were used in pneumonia, rheumatic conditions, sciatica and neuralgia. They also were advocated in heart disease, diabetes and liver disease.

Mustard plasters were used for mildly painful conditions. Mustard paste would be applied to the body and bandaged on. Sprains and chills were treated with these.

More extreme conditions were treated with 'blistering fluids' called vesicants. Capsicum, made from chilli peppers was commonly used. Capsicum could be applied as a tincture, liniment or ointment. It would produce redness and a raised area, but not quite a blister. This could be used over arthritic joints.

The most powerful vesicant was the famous Spanish Fly. This was actually a pulverised beetle, one of the so-called 'blistering beetles.' Doctors had supplies of it labelled Cantharis vesicatorium.

When an area was to be blistered it would be surrounded by vaseline to limit the area.. Then it would be painted with the blistering fluid. As soon as the blister arose, the area would be cleaned and a dry dressing applied.

Cupping

Cups were extensively used by 19th century doctors, both as an adjunct to  bleeding or as a method on its own. 

In fact, cupping is a technique that was used by the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chinese. The Greek traveller and historian describes cupping used by Egyptian physicians. 

A frieze from the temple of Sobek at Kom Ombo depicts a case of surgical instruments, with  cups used for cupping in the bottom left corner. 

Doctors used both wet and dry cupping. Wet cupping was used for the treatment of local areas of inflammation. Wet cupping meant that it was used together with scarification to draw off blood. A scarificator consisted of a brass box containing a series of spring loaded blades that could be triggered to cut through skin.

Cups

Scarificator

After the scarification site was selected, usually an area of localised inflammation, the cups were warmed in water. With a small lit torch or spill in one hand and the cup in the other, an edge of the cup would be placed against the skin. The lighted torch would then be placed inside the cup for two seconds, then withdrawn and the cup placed immediately down. The vacuum produced would suck the skin up to a third of the volume of the cup. It would be left on for one minute and then removed and the scarification applied to produce a series of cuts. The cup would again be applied with the same method. About four ounces of blood would be produce per cup applied. 

Dry cupping was called vesication, for it is another method to produce a blister. This would be used for pneumonia and other chest infections, rheumatic conditions, liver disease and other internal organs. The theory as that the cupping would draw blood to the surface, as a bruise, but also other disease causing humours or fluids. 

Dry cupping is still used in sports medicine and in Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture. Indeed, in my own practice I have used acupuncture and cupping for over 35 years in pain management. 

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

THE DOCTOR'S BAG - MEDICINE & SURGERY OF YESTERYEAR

Clay More's novel about Dr George Goodfellow is published in the West of the Big River series by Western Fictioneers. 

Available at Amazon.com:

THE DOCTOR BY CLAY MORE

The Cider Stand by Gordon L. Rottman

Hi guys, this piece has nothing to do with the Old West. It is just a nostalgia piece I had originally wrote for my kids and grand-kids about my own youth.

When I was growing up we “pilgrimaged” to Missouri every summer for the family reunion. The trips in the late 1950s and early 1960s I remembered the best. Our family endured a hot two or three days of driving depending on stops to visit friends en route. While the visit with all my cousins was much looked forward to, the drive was not exactly the trip’s high point. My younger brother and sister and I quickly grew bored regardless of the games we played. The games did serve to keep us occupied for a spell.

Mom would buy a set of “car games,” in a box. There was one game played on cards divided into squares and you had to spell specified words finding letters seen on roadside signs. You could only use the first letter of a sign’s word if it was horizontal. But we could use any letter in a word if it was displayed vertically or diagonally. Needless to say there were certain letters that you just could not find. “Q”, “X”, and “Z” were challenges. It kept us quiet and we didn’t make a peep to alert the others when we spied a sign with a rare letter.

There were other cards with different states’ license tags that we searched for to check off. Of course driving through northeast Texas we did not see many out-of-state plates. We also argued about what breed each road-killed critter was. Of course there was Twenty Questions and Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? I don’t think kids play these games today. They were “educational” in that it forced us to think and be creative.

The high point of the road-part of the trip, both to and from Missouri, came too early on the outbound leg and way too late on the return trip. I looked forward to it thinking that it wasn’t soon enough, but it would probably have been better if it had been somewhat later. The anticipation was great.

As we drove north from Houston toward Texarkana on US Route 59, we passed through Cleveland (not Ohio’s) and a few miles further on was Shepherd, not even a wide spot in the road. Shepard’s population didn’t number a hundred I believe. We were only some 60 miles north of Houston, but it seemed to take forever to get there.

On the right side of the four-lane highway was Ward’s Cider Stand. It was a tiny roofed, open-front stand like fresh fruit was sold from. Built of corrugated tin and plywood, it had a large plywood sign proclaiming its name in bold red hand-painted letters—WARD’S CIDER.

We’d park on the shoulder and there was usually a car or two already there. I’d just about be out the door before the car stopped on the red gravel shoulder worrying that they may have taken the last bottle, but there were always plenty.

The stand had a narrow board counter and was open-backed. A man was behind the counter, I assumed Mr. Ward himself, and a young girl or two. A top-opening red Coke-Cola chest held the cider bottles. Raising the lid revealed a water-filled chest with big chunks of ice and dozens of upright floating bottles. It was about 98 degrees temperature with matching humidity being an East Texas summer. There was nothing that looked colder. The clear bottles had a large round body with a long neck closed by white or black screw caps. I don’t know what their capacity was, maybe a quart and a half. No label marred their contour.

Mr. Ward offered three flavors: apple, cherry, and grape. The apple looked like liquid gold and was our favorite. The cherry was deep red and the grape so dark it looked like NuGrape soda as sold at James Coney Island hotdog stand in Houston. This being the 1950s and early 1960s, they were expensive at a dollar a bottle. Dad would buy two or three bottles of apple and one of cherry—usually. We never did buy a bottle of grape.

One of the girls would pluck the bottles from the ice water, hand it to Mr. Ward and he rolled it in a sheet of newspaper laid on the counter and twisted the paper’s end at the bottle’s mouth. I’d carry the bottles back to the car and Mom would peel off the damp newsprint and stick them in our Igloo ice chest. Igloos were metal in those days, not plastic as introduced in 1962. The Igloo plant was outside of Houston by the way.

We drank the cider from paper cups when we stopped at a roadside park and made baloney or pimento loaf sandwiches on a concrete picnic table. On the sandwiches were Kraft sandwich spread and American sliced processed cheese. Sometimes we sliced up a big dill pickle. There were virtually no fast food places found on highways.

I don’t know if Mr. Ward actually made the cider—doubtful—or if it was from bulk batches he bought or maybe from a concentrate. I don’t think it was the latter. It was too rich, too flavorful. And sweet too. Those paper cups were just too small. I’ve since tried many brands of apple cider and juice. None approach that remembered taste on those hot summer days. By the time we got to Missouri the cider was a fondly remembered thing. But on the way home we had another chance to stop and had the rationed treat for another week once home.

A couple of years we took a roundabout way home to spend a few days at Panama City, Florida. That regrettably meant we returned home from the east on US Route 90—there was no Interstate 10 in those days. Ward’s was far to the north.

In 1970, the summer after I returned from Vietnam, I climbed onto my new British Triumph 650 motorcycle and headed to the family farm in Missouri to decompress. A couple of months working on the farm, sweating it out shoveling sheep poop, chopping silage, filling different farmers’ silos for the coming winter with my cousin, and consorting with healthy German-Missouri farm girls, was just what I needed.

Tearing north on Route 59, I saw the city limits sign for Shepherd. I no doubt smiled. There was Ward’s, like a roadside oasis. I purchased a single bottle for $1.50 and Mr. Ward wrapped it extra thick with newspaper as it would be carried in an army rucksack strapped on the motorcycle. I nursed that bottle to make it last for through three-day trip. Sounds like I have a case of cider-dependency….

Almost three months later I stopped again at that oasis. Mr. Ward wasn’t there, but I told his daughter—kinda cute—how much that stand had met to me and my family over the years. I asked her to tell that to her dad. I bought two bottles of apple.

The next time I went up Route 59 in the summer time was maybe two years later. I spotted the lonely stand there on the roadside. Still standing, leaning a little, but the sign was gone. There was no house nearby to make inquiries. Over forty-five years later I still think of Ward’s Cider when I drive through Shepherd. I’ve now no idea where the stand had stood. I’ve still not found a cider to compare.

Western Comics Focus on: INDEH

Troy D. Smith

Ethan Hawke starred in not one, but TWO western films last year: The Magnificent Seven and, to less fanfare, In a Valley of Violence (opposite John Travolta). But did you know that he also authored a graphic novel about Geronimo, called Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars?

He had originally written it many years ago as a screenplay, inspired by the 1990s Geronimo film which featured Wes Studi as the title character -but gave him fourth billing, after three white actors who played guys who met Geronimo. He recalls thinking that no one would do that with a movie about, for example, Malcolm X -but that it seemed perfectly acceptable to Hollywood to do it to a Native character.

Once he had finished, however, he realized it would cost in excess of 200 million dollars to make -and that he would never be able to get anyone in Hollywood to spring that much cash for a movie that didn't have a white person as the main character. So instead of a film, he decided to go the route of a graphic novel (where there is no special effects or location budget.) He teamed with artist Greg Ruth, whose work had appeared in comics such as Star Wars and Conan, to produce a story centered on Cochise and Geronimo, set in 1872. When it came out last summer (2016) it immediately became a New York Times bestseller.

Hawke and Ruth strive to put the Apaches back at the center of their own story, and tells it from the Apache characters' point of view. The foreword is by Douglas Miles, owner of the company Apache Skateboards (and an Apache). The book, in a rarity for a graphic novel, includes a bibliography so that readers who want to learn more about Apache history will know where to look.

I heard about this book when it came out, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. I plan to remedy that soon.

It certainly looks good! Anyone out there want to tell us if it was?