November 2011 Blog Posts (65)

I was watching a 1957 Audie Murphy movie "Guns of Fort Petticoat" this AM. In one scene a woman was working her garden which was mostly many rows of cabbage. Did the settlers really raise a lot of cabbage or was this just for the movie? If so, what would they do with it, make sauerkraut?

November 30, 2011

Excellent design meeting this morning with Dan The Man Harshberger, Robert Ray, Abbby Goodrich, Meghan Saar and Allison Carlton. Solved a bunch of problems on a variety of fronts and dealt with some that are still kicking our patooties, but we'll get there. Here's a posed shot of us pretending to work on the wall, after lunch, and after Dan had gone back into the Beast to work on the layouts from his studio. The only person not faking it is Abby,…

November 30, 2011

Here's a period piece, literally. For our centennial issue I want to illustrate how tiny the period of Arizona statehood is, vs. the forming of the Grand Canyon. I woke up this morning and whipped out these little Anasazi-Hohokam type figures pointing at the puny, insignificant part of the timeline where human inhabitants in this region began.

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                                ‘Sons of the Pioneers’ Came Visiting

I was discussing guitars with a lady friend from the Tacoma, Wa.  area when the conversation got around to country music. She said that a few years ago, on a Friday, she was extremely busy with her children’s school activities when she heard a knock on her front door. She opened it and there stood her favorite uncle Luther Smallie and all of his fellow members of the Sons of the Pioneers. She had visited with Uncle…

November 29, 2011

One of the enduring, outrageous legends in Arizona is that a demonic, rogue camel with a skeleton on its back, killed and terrorized the country side for a decade in the 1880s. The "Red Ghost" was allegedly finally killed in a rancher's garden in eastern Arizona.

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Western states report comeback of cattle rustling

(News story link)

Excerpt:

Cattle rustlers, casting aside saddle and spurs for modern horsepower, are roaming the West with four-wheel drive and GPS technology in a resurgence of livestock thievery considered a hanging offense on the old frontier

State livestock officials said…

Many books were written about what to take as the wagon trains headed out West. A very important consideration was the enjoyable food which could make the long dismal trip more palatable. There obviously was no refrigeration so pork had to be  salt cured, coffee beans coated with sugar and egg whites, fruits dried, and vegetables pickled. Saleratus (like baking soda) was needed to make biscuits rise. Sugar was needed for cakes, drinks, and jams and jellies made from wild berries. Next to…

November 28, 2011

Our art director, Dan The Man Harshberger rejected the cover I posted this morning, saying it didn't show any emotion and there is no blood on the cowboy. So I went home for lunch and tweaked it.…

November 28, 2011

Had a very nice weekend with family. On Saturday morning, Tommy's girlfriend Pattarapan made Thai huevos rancheros for all of us and they were spectacular. Great talk afterwards about all things to be thankful for. Love this quote from a new book I read about over the weekend:

"An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating and not to be taken for an animal."

—Adam Gopnik, in his new book, "The…

 In all the pictures I’ve seen of pioneers traveling west, even in the hot sun, I have never seen a man wearing a short sleeve shirt which would be cooler, or a woman wearing some light clothing other than those petticoat dresses, long sleeves blouses, aprons, and bonnets. Didn’t they ever figure out how to dress cooler?

This was a 1950s gas station in Seattle.The hat was the attendants office. The boots were the bathrooms. They are now on display in this park. It was the "Hat N Boots" service station.…

What were the differences between a marshal, deputy marshal, town marshal, U S marshal, sheriff, etc. Who paid their salaries and generally how much money? I mean was the lawman a good paying, respectable…

I see a lot of comments on steel lined holsters. I make fast draw holsters and i use a very stiff leather in two layers and its just as stiff as having metal lined. I sell most of my gear at gun shows and people seem satisified with it I  sell a lot to sass members in il.

                                                  Fort Borst

When most folks think of forts they think of the ones with the area enclosed inside a tall pole fence or enclosure. In 1855 the settlers were coming to the Pacific Northwest in such numbers that the local Indians began raising hell with them. The U S Army built Fort Borst or ‘Borst Blockhouse’ along the Chehalis River near the present Centralia, Wa. It offered refuge to settlers, protect the river crossing for them, and act…

The average cowboy had a slight build. According to the book ‘Changing Body and Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700’,  in 1850  the average cowboy was only 5’7” tall, 145 lbs, and lived to be 45 yrs old. By the way, cowboy Bob Steele was 5’5” tall and Gene Autry was 5’8” tall.

In 1980 the average cowboy was 5’10” tall, weighed 170 lbs, and lived to be 75 yrs. old. This improvement was partially attributed to vaccines, antibiotics, better nutrition…

November 23, 2011

Went home for lunch and actually got my lunch on the sketches I was working on (yes, that's bar-b-q sauce stains in the sky).

This is a poach from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel creation scene. Only here we have the birth of the O.K. Corral…

                                                     Me and Sea Biscuits

I was touring Ft. Vancouver last year. It was a fur trading post during the early 1800s and  located on the Washington side of the Mighty Columbia River across from Portland, Oregon.  We were offered samples of  ‘sea biscuits’ made of unleavened wheat flour, salt and water,  then baked until complete dry. They were horrible tasting.  These biscuits were made exactly like the ones that were the staple food for…

November 23, 2011

Big pow wow at the True West World Headquarters yesterday. Arizona's most awarded journalist, Jana Bommersbach was here; and Arizona's Official State Historian Marshall Trimble was here; and Dan The Man Harshberger (former treasurer of the Wickenburg Clown Club), Editor in Chief Meghan Saar, True West Publisher Ken Amorosano and me (former president of the Wickenburg Clown Club).

Jana did some editing and pruning of our massive…

For those of you interested, Warner Brothers has just released a new collection of "Saturday Cowboy Movies" on DVD.  The reason I recommend these is that WB Studio takes some care in releasing these movies in getting a quality print and providing a quality transfer to digital. 

Wanrer Brothers Cowboy…

Some years ago my aunt from Beverly Hills, Ca. was asking me about locating, dissembling, and shipping to her an authentic ‘outhouse’. I thought she had lost her mind because there were still many around our coastal Washington area. Now original ones are seldom seen. Two hole ones were designed so a small seat was for children and a big seat was for adults. There is an unconfirmed explanation that the crescent hole in the door indicated it was a woman’s outhouse and a star shaped door hole…