Sad. Disappointed. Embarrassed.
Those are the feelings I had after reading Larry McMurtry’s new book about George Armstrong Custer. I’m a huge fan of Lonesome Dove and anticipated a similar caliber work on Custer but it was a great disappointment. Besides that, I was sad and embarrassed that McMurtry’s name was on this book.
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“One of the greatest fallacies concerning Indian resistance to white advancement across the Great Plains involves the methods of Indian warfare. Hollywood and television have always depicted wagon trains or dismounted cavalry with Indians riding around them in circles. There is not a single recorded instance in Western American History where Indians maintained their attack using such tactics.”
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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the distinguished Supreme Court justice, served in the Union Army during the Civil War and was wounded in three battles: Ball’s Bluff; Antietam and Chancellorsville. I marveled that he managed to survive three gunshot wounds, especially when one considers the primitive, inept medical practices of that era.
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This past summer my wife visited some kin in Missouri and came home with a violin, or fiddle. Violins have been an interest to me since I tried to find my mother’s violin after returning home following a few years’ absence. I don’t do music but I was interested in the construction of a violin which I consider to be one of the two top arts of woodworking. The other being a sailing vessel.
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Mr. Wells seems to have held a different life philosophy than my mother who always countered my argument to be allowed to do something “because all my friends were doing it” with “If everybody else jumped off the Smoky Hill River bridge, would you?”
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I just finished reading Deb Goodrich Bisel‘s latest book The Civil War in Kansas: Ten Years of Turmoil. I’m a native Kansan and a student of history, but I can honestly say I learned some things about Kansas that I didn’t previously know.
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I’ve heard it called hooch, white lightning, moonshine, mountain dew, corn squeezings, but never “wet groceries” until I read it in Hoig’s Fort Reno, 138.
Can anyone add other names to the list?
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Nineteenth-century prairie fires were awesome and awful. They were one of Mother Nature’s events that completely mesmerized me during my research for The Deadliest Woman in the West. Before settlers broke the prairie, there was an immense carpet of grass from Canada to the Rio Grande and bordered on the east by the Mississippi River and on the west by the Rocky Mountains.
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Dad has completed the manuscript for his new book about George Armstrong Custer and is now wrapping up the editing process. Soon it will be off to publication. He has done extensive research for this project which will be readily apparent in the text.
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