Happy Holidays everybody. We are finally nearing the end of the year and still in lockdown. I am still obeying the rules, and I hope you are too. Anyway, I wish all of you a very happy holiday season. Take the extra time to draw close to family and friends while remaining safe and protected (it is a careful balancing act to be sure).
Thanks to our friend, Bret Hampton, we are now aware of a Western Art exhibit online at Heritage Auctions. You might want to check it out.
P.S. To those of you who have attended previous Silver Spur Awards shows, you may be familiar with a man that Robert introduces every year. Mike LaVere passed away on Saturday, November 7th, 2020. Click here to read about this wonderful friend of the Reel Cowboys.
~Charles P. Scott
FEATURED ARTICLE
Giligan's Island Star Says She is Proud to be American
"Gilligan’s Island" star Dawn Wells is a proud American. This year has seen its share of negativity, but the 82-year-old is staying positive despite it all. In an interview with Fox News published Wednesday, Wells shared all the things she is grateful for in 2020. High on that list is her country.
"I am grateful and proud to be an American. When I see...
Stagecoach drivers and guards saw and experienced everything while carrying out their duties. But, on August 10, 1883, one stagecoach guard saw something that just might have caused him to do something rash resulting in his being killed.
Long before heading to the White House, Teddy Roosevelt hung out with the wildest badge-wearers of the Old West.
In an era populated with colorful characters—the gunfighter and the gambler, the outlaw and the prospector—no one loomed larger than the lawman. Some of the most notorious figures of the day, including Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson, wore a badge. Not that this stopped them from pursuing other endeavors, not all of them strictly legal. Lawmen of the Old West were gunslingers, gamblers, prospectors, prize fighters, buffalo hunters, and even outlaws. Small wonder they so captured...
German Wild West Museum
~ by Staff of DW.com
Germany's Karl May museum has agreed to "re-humanize" a Native American scalp from its collection, six years after initial pleas by the Chippewa tribe. It took a sea-change in attitude for the museum to accept the plea.
A museum in eastern Germany dedicated to the work of legendary German "Wild West" writer Karl May has agreed to repatriate a Native American scalp after a six-year struggle.
The diplomatic struggle began with a complaint by the Chippewa tribe in Michigan, which led to a specially-commissioned study, a new ethnographic specialist at the...
Forgotten Founding Father
~ by Paul Andrew Hutton
Early in the spring of 1774, a solitary figure rides westward over Kane’s Gap into Powell’s Valley, far beyond the fragile line of frontier settlements to the east. Daniel Boone, his hair plaited and clubbed up in Indian fashion, garbed in black-dyed deerskin, has come in search of the rude grave of his eldest son. James Boone and six companions had been slaughtered by Delaware, Shawnee and Cherokee Indians in October 1773 while hurrying forward with pack animals to rejoin Boone’s party of Kentucky-bound emigrants. James had called pitifully for his family in his death agony as a Cherokee called Big Jim delighted in torturing him. The massacre had...
Following the fatal shootout with the Tewksbury’s and Jim Roberts at the Middleton Ranch, John Blevins had some second thoughts about security at the ranch on Canyon Creek. The ranch had been a lair for horse thieves but with the killing of his brother Hamp and mysterious disappearance of his father Mart, he decided to relocate the family to a little cottage in Holbrook until things cooled off a bit. It would turn out to be a fateful decision.
Graham partisans struck again in the early dawn of August 17th, 1887. While on their way back from Holbrook, several of the Tewksbury fighters including Ed, Jim and Jim Roberts were camped near the...
Maureen O'Hara
~ by Niall O'Dowd
Although they were never married, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara had their own version of a love affair, keeping up a strong friendship throughout their careers.
In "The Quiet Man," their on-screen chemistry was so strong it made the film an instant classic. They were just as passionate friends off-screen though it never strayed into an affair as some claimed.
It all ended in 1978 when John Wayne, a heavy smoker, contracted lung cancer for the second time at age 71.
This time there was no way he would "lick the Big C" as he called it the...
Wyatt Earp & John Wayne
~ by Douglas Brode
Once upon a time (circa 1928), in a Hollywood of our mythic imagination rather than historic reality, a 21-year-old aspiring actor named Marion Michael Morrison (later to become more well known as John Wayne) met 80-year-old former marshal Wyatt Earp. The aged gunfighter had been hired to appear in one of those newly invented “oaters" that had become a part of popular culture following the cinematic success of The Great Train Robbery (1903).
The two met on the set of a Western being directed by genius-in-embryo John Ford and the living legend of the Old West hit it off with the youngster who would come to...
I ain't much good at prayin', and You may not know me, Lord--
I ain't much seen in churches where they preach Thy Holy Word,
But You may have observed me out here on the lonely plains,
A-lookin' after cattle, feelin' thankful when it rains,
Admirin' Thy great handiwork, the miracle of grass,
Aware of Thy kind Spirit in the way it comes to pass
That hired men on horseback and the livestock that we tend
Can look up at the stars at night and know we've got a Friend.
