Archive for July, 2008
One of the fun ‘Westernisms’: Let’s storm the puncheons
If you heard an “old-timer” back in the days of the Old West speak about “storming the puncheons,” would you guess it sounded like a battle — or perhaps some Saturday night fun in town? (Of course, old-time cowboys might have thought “battle” and “Saturday night fun in town” synonymous.)
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Get Henry M. Stanley’s account of his 1867 trip across the Plains
You may have to look around to find it, but I urge you to get Henry M. Stanley’s account of his 1867 trip across the Plains.
I absolutely love reading the diaries, journals, and other firsthand accounts of people who traveled to and through the Old West. My copy of Stanley’s fascinating account of his travels with U.S. Army troops and the early Indian Wars is an old paperback edition published in 1982 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of their Bison Books history series. The title of the book is “My Early Travels and Adventures in America.”
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Wonder why American traffic passes on the right? Blame it on Conestoga
I was reading about the early wagons and wagon trains which shaped America’s Western expansion and ran onto an interesting tidbit: Habits of early freighters and their freight wagons, such as the huge Conestoga wagons, are responsible for American traffic traveling along the right side of the road.
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Horses built and shaped life in the Old West
When it comes to the single biggest influence in shaping life in the Old West, it would be hard to get past that four-legged critter made famous in books and movies — the horse.
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It was impossible not to love and enjoy ‘The Lone Ranger’
I would bet there’s never been a television or radio Western LESS like life in the real Old West than “The Lone Ranger,” but that was perfectly okay to a generation of us growing up back in the 1940s and ’50s and carefully, breathlessly following actor Clayton Moore’s every masked move.
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Not so long ago, people on the more remote Plains still lived in sod houses
When I was a small boy, we made a few trips to visit my paternal grandparents in southeastern Colorado and went out of town about 20-25 miles to the original family homestead and were shown the remains of the house my father grew up in — a genuine sod house. The house (completely gone except for parts of one wall by 1970) was built sometime just after 1900 and my grandparents continued to live in it until sometime around 1940-45.
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Longhorn cattle added danger, source of meat to life in the Old West
Longhorn cattle, identified early in the history of the Old West with Texas, New Mexico, and the region of the American Southwest, were earlier “settlers” in this land than the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower — and had a reputation for being dangerous critters.
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