This Plane Went Down in the Pacific…

And someone you know was on board.

Douglas A-1 Skyraider (AD-4NA, 126965)

 

You may wonder at first why this post is included on a Western-themed blog. But bear with me. All will be made clear by the time you finish this story.

Sampson wasn’t his real name. It was a nickname affectionately given to him by the nurses at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital where he was born in 1930. Weighing over eleven pounds when he was born, the name seemed appropriate. By the time he was eighteen years old, Sampson stood an imposing six-feet, four-inches tall.

As a young boy, he was a bit of a disciplinary problem. He was held back in middle school because of his poor academic performance, and it’s not even known if he graduated from high school.

Sampson had just turned twenty, a couple of months earlier, when the Korean War started in June of 1950, and it wasn’t long before he was called up in the draft and on his way to Fort Ord east of Monterey, California for basic training. However, after basic training, rather than being shipped overseas as part of a combat unit, Sampson was assigned lifeguard duties at the base pool in Fort Ord where he remained throughout his time in the military. Sampson was a good swimmer and enjoyed his duties as a lifeguard. He would spend his days at the base pool, then he would work as a bouncer in a local bar at night to make some extra cash.

After about a year at Fort Ord, Sampson took some leave to visit his girlfriend in Seattle. Military personnel could travel on any military flight free of charge if they could find one that was headed where they were going. So, finding a plane leaving Fort Ord and heading to Seattle, Sampson secured a seat as a passenger.

After spending a few days with his girlfriend, he had to start making arrangements to get back to Fort Ord, but the only military flight that was leaving the Seattle airport for Fort Ord was a WWII model Douglas AD Skyraider. The Skyraider was a fighter-bomber that was in popular use at the time. The only problem was that it was a single-seat aircraft that was only meant to be occupied by the pilot.

Sampson begged and pleaded with the pilot, a man named Anderson, to let him stow away in the radar compartment of the plane, saying that he didn’t have enough money for a commercial flight and that if he didn’t return to Fort Ord by morning, he would be AWOL. The pilot took pity on him and agreed to let him ride in the radar compartment – if he could fit. It was a small space that wasn’t meant to be occupied by anyone, especially someone as tall as Sampson.

The only opening to the radar compartment was through a hatch on the outside of the plane, so Anderson opened the hatch to let Sampson crawl inside. The pilot closed the hatch while Sampson settled in. It was a tight fit and it would be an uncomfortable ride, especially if they ran into any turbulence along the way, but Sampson said he would be fine and thanked Anderson for the ride back to Fort Ord.

It was during take-off that things started going wrong. Just as the plane was gaining speed to lift off the runway, the hatch to the radar compartment flew open. Sampson tried to reach out of the plane to get a good enough grip on the door to pull it closed, but the wind was so strong, that it pinned the door against the fuselage. Try as he might, he was unable to get the door closed, so he retreated as far back as he could into the little compartment, away from the door. Sampson wasn’t really worried about falling out of the plane, although that was a distinct possibility. There was a much greater concern that had his attention. Because the radar compartment wasn’t meant to carry any people, there was no radio and therefore, no way to contact the pilot. Sampson knew that at their cruising altitude the oxygen would be thin and not able to support him. Normally, when they reach their cruising altitude, the pilot switches on the oxygen pumps which supply oxygen to the rest of the plane, including the radar compartment where Sampson was. But with the hatch stuck open, all of the oxygen would be sucked right out of the plane and he would suffocate.

At some point during the trip, the pilot, Anderson made a chilling discovery. An error had been made during refueling and they didn’t have enough fuel to make it to Fort Ord. Nor did they have enough fuel to return to Seattle. To make matters even worse, Anderson discovered that the oxygen supply had failed. He immediately dropped the plane to a lower altitude so there was sufficient oxygen. At least that problem was solved. He then attempted to radio any nearby airports where he could make an emergency landing. But things had gone from bad to worse because he discovered that the radio wasn’t working. As the plane’s engines started to sputter out of fuel, he knew that they were going to crash into the Pacific.

In the meantime, Sampson had passed out in the radar compartment when he ran out of oxygen, but he regained consciousness moments later when Anderson dropped the plane to a lower altitude. He woke up in time to hear the plane’s engines go silent and realized that they were going down. He braced himself for impact.

As the plane hit the water, it jerked to a sudden stop. The icy waters of the Pacific started pouring into the open hatch of the compartment where Sampson was tucked away. He tried making his way out of the hatch, but the water rushing in had too much force to fight against, so he had to wait until the compartment had filled with water before he could make his way out and then up to the surface.

As Sampson’s head pushed above the surface, he looked toward the front of the plane and saw Anderson crawling out of the cockpit. Together, the two men were able to pull two life rafts out of the plane before it sunk out of sight. Although the water was very choppy, both men were able to make it into their life raft.

They took stock of their situation. Anderson believed that they had gone down no more than two miles off the coast of Point Reyes, California. There was a thick fog that obstructed their vision so that they couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the life rafts, and it had gotten dark out, which made it even worse. Fortunately, Anderson had a compass, so he got their bearings, pointed toward the east, and the two men began paddling their rafts toward where they hopped the shore would be.

Before long, the fog got thicker and the waves grew higher. Suddenly, a huge wave capsized the raft that Sampson was in, throwing him into the icy waters. He tried to grab for the raft, but the current quickly carried it out of his reach. When Anderson saw what happened, he tried frantically to paddle his raft to aid Sampson, but the waves easily tossed his raft around and carried him away until Sampson was lost in the fog and darkness.

When Sampson saw Anderson disappear in the fog, he felt a moment of helplessness and despair. But he wasn’t about to give up. He knew that he was a good swimmer and that the shore was somewhere between one and two miles to the east. But which direction was east? He couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction, and Anderson was the one with the compass. Sampson was also aware that these waters were known breeding grounds for Great White Sharks. Finally, Sampson picked a direction and began to swim, knowing that he could die of hypothermia, be pulled under and drown, or be attacked by sharks before he reached shore – IF he was even headed in the right direction.

After what seemed like at least an hour of swimming, Sampson’s arms ached and his chest hurt from the exertion of swimming through such choppy waters. He had been pulled under several times and had fought to regain the surface, gagging on the saltwater he swallowed in the process.

Then the fog began to lift. Off in the distance, Sampson saw what appeared to be lights. With renewed vigor, he made his way towards the lights. His arms and legs were like rubber, and by the time he felt sand underneath him and crawled out of the ocean onto the shore, he was completely exhausted. He lay there, face down in the sand with the waves washing over him for some time. He was too weak to walk, so he crawled toward the nearest light, vomiting up seawater several times as he got closer.

It had taken Sampson forty-five minutes to crawl from the beech to the source of the light, which turned out to be coming through the window of a building that happened to be a radio station on Point Reyes. With the last of his strength, Sampson crawled up the stairs and banged on the door.

The employee of the radio station opened the door to find the body of a man dressed in a soldier’s uniform, soaking wet and passed out on the stairs. He dragged the man inside to find that he was only half-conscious. He was hypothermic and shivering uncontrollably. The man wasn’t able to talk, but it was obvious to the station employee that he had gone through something terrible and that he needed medical attention. There was a coast guard station only a couple of miles away, so the employee gave them a call and within a few minutes, the coast guard arrived to take Sampson back to their station where medical treatment was available.

At the coast guard station, Sampson was also eventually reunited with Anderson, who had made it to shore in his raft.

A lot of things went wrong on that flight for Sampson; the mistake with the fuel, the radio going out, the oxygen quitting and eventually having to ditch the plane in the Pacific, being capsized, and losing his raft with no directions and in shark-infested waters. But there were a lot of things that went in his favor as well. If the hatch had not been stuck open, he may not have been able to open it by himself once the plane had crashed into the frigid ocean. After all of the directions that he could have chosen to swim toward, he chose the one direction that brought him safely to shore. He could have drowned or been eaten by sharks before he made it to shore, or he could have made it to a deserted section of the beech where he would have died of exposure before being found.

We don’t know if Sampson ever counted his blessings when considering that night. We don’t know if he ever felt some sense of purpose or destiny that wouldn’t allow him to be taken before his work was done. But it’s for certain that he still had much to accomplish.

He completed his military service at Fort Ord, remaining the lifeguard at the base pool until the end of the war. Then, he wound up in Hollywood. Over the next sixty-five years, Sampson would have one of the most successful careers in show business, winning multiple awards as an actor, director, and producer. He contributed, in those capacities, to over fifty films, including over twenty Westerns. His films have won a total of thirteen Academy Awards and eight Golden Globes.

Because he still had work to do; because he wasn’t destined to sink to the bottom of the Pacific back in 1951, we all have been able to enjoy the brilliant talents of Clint “Sampson” Eastwood.

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600-square-foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist three years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It was a Peacemaker Award Finalist in two categories and won the Will Rogers Gold Medallion for Western Fiction. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at MichaelRRittAuthor, or on his website at MichaelRRitt.com.

My 12 Favorite Western Movies - Part Two

Last month, I gave you the bottom six in the list of my 12 favorite Western movies (click here to read that post). This month, we continue the countdown to my number one favorite. Remember, this is not meant to be a list of the best Western movies, but a list of my personal favorites. I'd love to hear in the comments below what some of your favorites are.

 

#6 – The Shootist

The Shootist was released in August of 1976, and of the four films on this “12 Favorite” list in which John Wayne appears, this one is my favorite. Staring along with Wayne are James Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, Richard Boone, and Harry Morgan.

In this film, Wayne plays an aging gunfighter by the name of John Bernard Books. Barely ten minutes into the film, we find out that Books is dying when the town doctor, played by Stewart, informs him, "You have a cancer." He describes in detail the painful death that Books has in store for him. Over the next couple of months, Books develops a relationship with the woman who runs the boarding house where he is staying (Lauren Bacall) and with her son (Ron Howard) who idolizes Books. As his time draws near, Books has no plans to die a slow and painful death. He plans to go out the way a gunfighter should.

Based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout, whose son, Miles, worked on the screenplay, the life and death of J.B. Books parallel the passing of the American west and the advent of the twentieth century. Wayne’s performance is made all the more poignant by the fact that he had cancer at the time of filming, and in less than three years, he would succumb to stomach cancer at the age of 72.

The movie was directed by Don Siegel, who directed Dirty Harry and Escape from Alcatraz. It was nominated for five awards, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.

 

#5 – Broken Trail

Broken Trail is based on the novel by Alan Geoffrion. It first aired as a two-part miniseries in June of 2006 and stars Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church.

The story takes place in 1898. An aging horseman named Prent Ritter, played by Duvall, and his estranged nephew, Tom Harte, played by Thomas Haden Church, hook up to drive a herd of horses from Oregon to Wyoming to sell to the British Army. Along the way, they rescue five young Chinese girls from a slave trader and reluctantly take on the responsibility of caring for and protecting the girls. Duvall develops a fatherly bond towards the girls, teaching them to ride and speak English. Thomas Haden Church – who played the dim-witted mechanic, Lowell Mather, on Wings, is a downright bad-ass as Tom Harte. The two men and the girls are being pursued by a gang of vicious killers who were hired by the madame who originally purchased the girls to work for her as prostitutes.

Broken Trail garnered 56 award nominations, winning 19 of them, including four Primetime Emmys.

  

#4 – Windwalker

Windwalker was released in 1980 and is probably one of the best, little-known films depicting Native American life in the late 18^th century. Windwalker is the name of the main character, an elderly Cheyenne warrior who remains behind to die when his family and tribe move south for the winter in what would become the state of Utah. Windwalker passes into the afterlife, but after having a vision of his wife, Tashina, who had been murdered by the Crow Indians, he is sent back by the Great Spirit to help his family survive another Crow attack and to search for his son who was kidnapped by the Crow as a baby.

The film stars several Native American actors, including Nick Ramus, Serene Hedin, and Chief Tug Smith, but the leading role of Windwalker was played (very convincingly) by British actor Trevor Howard. Native American actor Chief Dan George was supposed to star in the leading role but became ill before filming and had to be replaced.

Here’s an interesting piece of trivia about this film; It was the debut film for Bart the Bear—a Kodiak Brown Bear that would go on to star in several movies and TV shows, including The Great Outdoors, The Bear, White Fang, Legends of the Fall, and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, to name a few.

Windwalker only received one award nomination, winning a Special Jury Prize at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in 1991. But don’t judge it by its lack of award recognition. This is a wonderful film with themes of family identity and perseverance. It was filmed on location in Utah in the Wasatch Mountains, and the outdoor cinematography is stunning.

One of the reasons that Windwalker is near the top end of my 12-Favorite list is that the story is entirely about Native Americans. There are no cowboys, no mountain men, and no fur trappers; only Native Americans.

 

#3 - The Revenant

The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, was released in 2015 and was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu who also directed Birdman. It’s based on the 2002 novel by Michael Punke which, itself, is loosely based on the life of legendary mountain man Hugh Glass.

The film was shot on location in Italy, Argentina, and Montana. The cinematography for The Revenant is stunning and earned the film one of its three Academy Awards. All told, The Revenant was nominated for an astounding 276 awards and won 90 of them, including three Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, and one Screen Actors Guild Award.

DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a mountain man who, in 1823, suffered a brutal attack by a grizzly bear. Badly injured but still alive, he is abandoned by his companions in the wilderness and left to die. Instead, Glass rallies all of his strength and survival instincts to stay alive and embarks on a wintry trek to track down John Fitzgerald (played brilliantly by Tom Hardy), the man who killed his son and left him to die in the wilderness.

Note: The word “Revenant” comes from the French word for “ghost” and means someone who has come back from the dead.

#2 - Dances With Wolves

Dances with Wolves is an epic Western first released in 1990. It stars Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Green, and Tantoo Cardinal. Three prominent directors were offered the project, but each one turned it down. Finally, Costner decided to direct the film himself in his directorial debut.

Costner plays Army lieutenant John Dunbar, who, through a heroic act during the Civil War, is offered his choice of a duty post, and surprises his superiors by choosing a remote post on the Western frontier. Through an unusual set of circumstances, Dunbar finds himself the sole member of the detachment to the remote outpost of Fort Sedgwick. He enjoys the solitude and goes about repairing and restocking the outpost. During his time there, he gets to know his neighbors—a tribe of Lakota Sioux—and grows to appreciate and respect their lives and culture. Eventually, Dunbar leaves his old life behind and joins the Lakota. This will cause problems for Dunbar when the army learns about him.

The film was based on a novel by Michael Blake, who was a friend of Costner’s. Blake wrote Dances with Wolves as a novel after Kevin Costner convinced him to do so. Blake originally tried to sell the idea as a screenplay, but Costner believed that it would generate more studio interest as a novel.

The cinematography and the musical score for the film were both outstanding and accounted for two of the seven Academy Awards that the film won in 1991. It also won the Oscar for Best Picture, becoming only the second Western film to earn that honor—the first being Cimarron (1931). In total, the film was nominated for 88 awards, winning 51, including seven Academy Awards and three Golden Globes.

 

#1 - Lonesome Dove

Number one on my “12 Favorite” list is the epic miniseries, Lonesome Dove, based on the book by Larry McMurtry. It stars Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Ricky Schroder, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, and a host of others. Lonesome Dove was released as a four-part miniseries in February of 1989. McMurtry based the book on a screenplay that he had written with Peter Bogdanovich. The original plan was to make a movie starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart, but the project never panned out.

Duvall and Jones play a pair of aging Texas Rangers, Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call, who operate a livery in the town of Lonesome Dove. The two men decide to go into the cattle business. They plan to drive a herd of Longhorns from Texas to Montana to start a ranch. All of the expected dangers are there along the way; Indians, bandits, weather, prairie fires, treacherous river crossings, horse thieves, and cattle rustling. The film is a pleasant mix of drama, humor, action, and romance. Duvall in particular gives the performance of a lifetime. His character, Gus McCrae, is tough as they come when dealing with enemies like the half-breed Indian bandit, Blue Duck (Frederic Forrest), or surly bartenders, but he is tender-hearted toward the prostitute (Diane Lane) that wants desperately to get to San Francisco. He often waxes philosophical with his partner, Captain Call, and the other members of the Hat-Creek outfit.

Lonesome Dove was nominated for 35 awards, winning 18, including seven Emmys and two Golden Globes.

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600 square foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist three years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelRRittAuthor, or at his website https://michaelrritt.com.

My 12 Favorite Western Movies - Part One

Admittedly, any list of anyone’s favorite of anything is going to be subjective and this list is no exception. There will be people who will be convinced that I have lost my mind to include a particular movie on this list, and others who are just as convinced of my mental defects because I didn’t include a particular movie. So, right out of the gate, I’m expecting disagreement, controversy, name-calling, and maybe even some shootouts in the street at high noon.

I have included one film which is not technically a Western. Westerns are generally considered as taking place during the last half of the 19^th century. This film is loosely based on an incident in the life of someone that took place in 1823. The movie, however, contains elements and themes that are common stock in the Western genre of film and literature. I’ve also included several titles that were each aired as a mini-series, not as individual films, but I saw no reason to discriminate based on length.

So, here you have it. My list of the twelve Western movies that I like the best. I’ve listed them in order from my least favorite to my most favorite. If you have a favorite that you think should be in everyone’s top twelve, but didn’t make the cut in my list, make your case for it in the comments below.

This post will cover the bottom six movies. My post for the month of October will cover the top six on my list.

 

#12 – The Searchers

Released in 1956, directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, and Vera Miles. I struggled with where to include this film in the twelve. It could have easily been much closer to the top of the list. This is arguably both John Ford’s best picture and John Wayne’s best performance. Based on the 1954 book of the same name by Alan Le May, the story is based on the true-life account of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker who was abducted from her home on the Texas frontier in 1836 by Comanche Indians.

John Wayne plays anti-hero Ethan Edwards, a bitter Civil War veteran, who returns home to Texas after the war. When his brother’s family is killed or abducted by the Comanche, Ethan sets out on a journey to find the surviving family members and bring them home.

This film was nominated for six awards and won three, including a Golden Globe in 1958.

 

#11 – Centennial

A twelve-part mini-series that aired between October 1, 1978, and February 4, 1979. Based on the 1974 epic novel by James A. Michener, the movie featured a cast of dozens of Hollywood’s biggest stars including Robert Conrad, Barbara Carrera, Richard Chamberlain, Brian Keith, Andy Griffith, Lynn Redgrave, Raymond Burr, and on and on…

The series tells the story of the founding of the American West by looking at the fictional town of Centennial, Colorado, from its settlement in the late 18^th century to the present. At the time it was made, it was the longest, the most expensive, and the most complicated film project of its time. It ran for a total of 26 hours, cost 25 million dollars, had a cast of over 100 speaking parts, four directors, five producers, and several hundred extras.

Several of the episodes were nominated for various awards, including two Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes.

  

#10 – Open Range

Released in 2003, Produced and directed by Kevin Costner, starring Kevin Costner, Robert Duvall, Annette Benning, and Michael Jeter (who passed away before the movie was released).

Open Range is an old-fashioned Western with cowboys, cattle drives, a ruthless land baron, gunfights in the street, and a love interest for Costner’s character. The plot is simple, the characters are well developed and genuine, and the chemistry between Costner and Duvall is apparent.

The movie is based on the 1990 book, The Open Range Men, by Lauran Paine. Paine was a prolific writer who wrote under numerous pen names, publishing over 1,000 books in different genres. Only two of his books were ever made into movies and both of them were Westerns.

Costner and Duvall play two cattlemen driving a herd across the open range. They stop for supplies in a small Montana town where they discover the local land baron has laid claim to all of the open rangeland and is determined to steal the herd and kill the cattlemen. Costner’s character, Charley Waite is tortured by his past as a Confederate sharpshooter and all of the killings that he had done. He and Boss Spearman (Duvall) are not the kinds to stand by and watch their men and cattle be killed and taken from them.

Although there are some authenticity issues with the film (the magic six-shooter that never has to be reloaded), the inevitable shootout with the bad guys at the end is probably the best in any Western film. Open Range would have made it into my top twelve for the final shootout alone—it’s that good.

 

#9 – How the West was Won

How the West was Won is the story of three generations of the Rawlings/Prescott family as they make their way from New York to California between the years 1839 and 1889. This story of westward expansion includes Indians, river pirates, the civil war, the building of the railroads, outlaws, and lawmen. The cast of stars that were assembled for this film is phenomenal and includes James Stewart, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Walter Brennan, Gregory Peck, and Debbie Reynolds, to name just a few. The film is also narrated by Spencer Tracy.

The film was directed by three veteran directors, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall. Oddly enough, it was first released in London, in the UK, in November of 1962, and then released in the US in February of 1963. Produced at a budget of fewer than 15 million dollars. It grossed over 50 million at the box office, making it a huge success for MGM, and one of the studio’s last great “epic” films.

The music for the film was composed and conducted by Alfred Newman. The score was nominated for an Academy Award. It lost out but was later selected to fill the #25 spot in the American Film Institute’s “100 Years of Film Scores” list.

How the West Was Won was the winner of ten different awards, including three of the eight Academy Awards that it was nominated for.

 

#8 – Into the West

Into the West is a 2005 mini-series composed of six two-hour episodes. It chronicles the westward expansion of the United States, beginning in the early 1820s. It’s told through the eyes of two different families, one white, one native, as the family’s fates become intertwined.

Jacob Wheeler (Matthew Settle) leaves his parent’s home in Virginia and heads west to seek adventure. He is taken under the wing of the legendary mountain man, Jedediah Smith, who teaches him how to survive in the wilderness. Loved by the Buffalo (George Leach) is a Lakota holy man, who’s calling it is to try to understand a prophesy that has his people being wiped out by the encroaching white settlers. Jacob marries Loved by the Buffalo’s sister, Thunder Heart Woman, thus tying the destiny of both families together throughout the rest of the story.

Its scope covers six generations of the two families and depicts both fictionalized and historical events and people.

Into the West has an impressive cast, with over 250 speaking parts. Each of the six episodes had a different director, and the project had eight different producers – most noticeably were Steven Spielberg and Kirk Ellis, who was also one of the writers for the mini-series.

Into the West received 16 Emmy nominations in 2006, picking up two wins. It was also nominated for an award by the Screen Acts Guild.

 

#7 – The Cowboys

The Cowboys, released in 1972, directed by Mark Rydell, is based on the book by the same name, published in January of 1971 and written by William Dale Jennings, who also wrote “The Ronin.”

This is one of John Wayne’s later films, and also stars Roscoe Lee Browne, Bruce Dern, Colleen Dewhurst, and a handful of young cowboys, notably Robert Carradine and A. Martinez.

The Duke plays an aging cattleman by the name of Will Anderson, who needs to drive a herd of cattle from Butte, Montana to Belle Fourche, South Dakota - four hundred miles away. However, just before the drive begins, his cattle hands get the gold bug and run off to the Montana gold fields leaving him stranded and desperate for help. With no other able-bodied men available to help him move his cattle, he reluctantly enlists the aid of eleven school boys, ages nine to thirteen.

Roscoe Lee Brown does an outstanding job of portraying Jebediah Nightlinger, the camp cook. Probably the best performance by any of the cast comes from Bruce Dern as Asa “Long Hair” Watts, an ex-con who tried signing on as a drover but was turned away by Will Anderson who caught him in a lie. Watts and his gang follow the herd seeking an opportunity to steal it away from the inexperienced cowboys, but the young boys do a lot of growing up throughout the cattle drive, and taking the herd from them is not as easy as Watts and his gang thinks it will be.

The Cowboys was the recipient, in 1972, of the Bronze Wrangler Award (best theatrical motion picture of the year) from the Western Heritage Awards.

(Next month, the top six on my 12 Favorite Western Movies list.)

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600 square foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist three years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelRRittAuthor, or at his website https://michaelrritt.com.

Who’s Really Buried in Buffalo Bill’s Grave?

 

The Author at Buffalo Bill's Grave on Lookout Mountain
(Photo Credit: Tami Ritt)

A few years ago, during a trip to Colorado, I took the opportunity to visit the gravesite of that iconic western figure, William Fredrick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. The grave is prominently placed on top of Lookout Mountain outside of Golden, Colorado.

Rising 7,377 feet, Lookout Mountain is part of the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains and is located about two miles southwest of Golden, Colorado. Aptly named, from its summit you have an imposing view of a large part of Colorado’s eastern plains, including an impressive view of the city of Denver twelve miles to the east.

Buffalo Bill passed away from kidney failure on January 10th, 1917, while visiting his sister in Denver. The first draft of his will indicated that he wanted to be buried on Cedar Mountain near the town that he founded – Cody, Wyoming. However, in the final draft of his will, Cody had changed the choice of his eternal resting place to Lookout Mountain.

The view from Lookout Mountain. The city of Golden is in the foreground and Denver can be seen on the horizon.

(Photo Credit: Michael R. Ritt)

In January of 1917, the road to Lookout Mountain was impassible because of the snow, so the undertaker at Olinger’s Mortuary in Denver kept Cody’s body on ice until June when the roads could clear and the summit to Lookout Mountain could be reached. During those six months, Olinger’s embalmed Cody’s body six times to prevent decomposition and keep it looking “fresh” until they could hold the funeral service.

Here’s an interesting side note about the Olinger Mortuary. It is now “Linger Eatuaries.” That’s right. If you are up for a little macabre dining experience, you can visit Linger’s and dine in the same building where Buffalo Bill was embalmed. (It actually looks like a beautiful restaurant).

There has been some ill-will, and not a little controversy, between Colorado and their neighbor to the north over the burial of Buffalo Bill Cody. There were rumors that some fearless Wyoming patriots stole Cody’s body from the mortuary and replaced it with the body of a vagrant who looked like Buffalo Bill. This is highly unlikely and these rumors were never taken very seriously. During his funeral in June of 1917, Cody’s family and friends, as well as thousands of mourners, viewed his open casket. Someone surely would have recognized if there had been an imposter in the casket instead of the famous scout and showman.

Buffalo Bill Cody circa 1875

In 1921, Cody’s wife, Louisa, died and was buried next to her husband on Lookout Mountain. Shortly thereafter, Cody’s niece, Mary Jester Allen accused Denver officials of conspiring to bury Cody on Lookout Mountain rather than sending his body to Cody, Wyoming. People on both sides of the Colorado-Wyoming border were enraged by the new allegations. As a result, John Baker, Cody’s foster son, had Buffalo Bill and Louisa reburied under tons of concrete to ward off any attempts to steal the bodies.

The controversy continued in 1948 when members of the American Foreign Legion in Cody, Wyoming offered a $10,000.00 reward to anyone who could steal Cody’s body and return it to Wyoming. This prompted the state of Colorado to call out the National Guard to be stationed around the gravesite to protect it from being pilfered.

As recently as 2006, Wyoming state legislators were still “joking” about retrieving Cody’s body through covert means.

Always the showman and consummate entertainer, I think that Cody would have enjoyed the hullabaloo and the attention that he is still drawing, more than 100 years after his death.

Buffalo Bill's Casket

About the Author:

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600 square foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist three years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelRRittAuthor, or at his website https://michaelrritt.com.

After The Cattle Drives

 

Cattle Drive by Charles M. Russell

Cattle drives are iconic to the old west, and a staple of both Western literature and film. Books such as We Pointed Them North, by E. C. (Teddy Blue) Abbott, as told to Helena Huntington Smith, 1939; and The Trail Drivers of Texas, compiled and edited by J. Marvin Hunter, 1925, are a wealth of first-hand accounts of life on the cattle drives. Some of our best Western entertainment also centered around cowboys pushing cattle north along the cattle trails; movies such as Lonesome Dove, Red River, and The Cowboys come to mind.

But what happened after the cattle drives? What happened after the cattle went to the slaughterhouses and meat-packers in Chicago, Omaha, and Kansas City? To find out what happened after the cowboys pushed the last of the longhorns into the holding pens in Dodge City or Abilene, we need to look at another great piece of literature, and an early example of investigative journalism – The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair.

The Jungle is a fictitious account of a Lithuanian immigrant who went to work in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. It first appeared in serialized form in the Socialist magazine Appeal to Reason in 1905 and was afterward collected into a book and published in 1906. It was an immediate and an international best-seller, eventually being published in dozens of languages and selling millions of copies. Probably not since Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin has a work of fiction had such a profound impact on a nation.  Upton Sinclair’s work brought about legislation that vastly improved food safety and consumer confidence in America’s food supply and the food industry which feeds not only our own people but millions of people around the world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the meatpacking industry in the United States was controlled by four major companies known as the “Big Four:” Amour, Swift, Morris, and National Packing. Chicago was one of the largest meatpacking centers in the country, with feedlots, stockyards, slaughterhouses, and packing plants all clustered together in an area known as Packingtown, on the south side of the city on former swampland.

In 1904, the union representing the meatpackers in Chicago went on strike to protest the working conditions and poor pay being received by the mostly immigrant workers who worked in Packingtown. The Big Four broke the strike by bringing in strike-breakers who kept the plants in operation.

Upton Sinclair, who was working as a writer for Appeal to Reason was sent to Chicago to do a story on the strike and its impact on the workers. He spent seven weeks investigating the meatpacking plants and interviewing workers. He witnessed first-hand the grossly unsanitary and unsafe conditions that the workers had to endure. He reported on the horrendous suffering of the workers, who were paid only pennies per hour and worked ten-hour days. He also wrote about the sick and diseased animals that were slaughtered and turned into food; and about the unsanitary practices that took place. In one section of The Jungle, he writes:

“The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it, and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast.” 

Chicago Meatpackers circa 1900

Another section of the book tells about how cattle in the stockyards were being fed “whiskey-malt” which was a waste-product of the breweries. This caused the cattle to become covered in boils and abscesses which would burst open when a worker cut into them with his knife, spreading foul-smelling puss all over the workers and the carcasses. There were no facilities provided for the workers to wash up, so people and carcasses alike would become contaminated.

Within a month of the book’s publication, the White House was receiving one hundred letters a day, demanding that the government do something to clean up the meat industry. After inviting Sinclair to the White House to discuss his book, President Roosevelt appointed a special commission to investigate Chicago’s slaughterhouses.

In May of 1906, the commission issued its report which confirmed the horrible conditions that Sinclair had written about, and criticized the existing meat inspection laws that only required inspection of animals up to the time of slaughter. Many of these inspectors took bribes to look the other way, and if the inspector was honest, the meatpackers would wait until after hours, when the inspectors were not present, to slaughter the sick and dead cattle. In a letter to Congress, President Roosevelt urged that a law was needed that would, “…enable the inspectors of the [Federal] Government to inspect and supervise from the hoof to the can the preparation of the meat food product.”

Congress went to work, and the following month, Roosevelt signed into law two pieces of legislation that would guide food inspection to this present day: the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The irony connected with The Jungle, and the thing that vexed Upton Sinclair at first, was that he had written it to bring to light the horrible condition of the workers at the meatpacking plants. His goal was to effect social change that would lead to higher pay, shorter hours, and a safer working environment. But what outraged the nation so much were the unsanitary conditions and the mislabeling of food, and not the plight of the workers. Sinclair quipped in frustration, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach.”

Upton Sinclair died in 1968 at the age of 90, one year after attending a White House ceremony to witness President Lyndon Johnson sign into law the Wholesome Meat Act, which amended the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The new legislation required states to have inspection programs “equal to” that of the federal government. He authored close to one hundred books and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943

About the Author

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600 square foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist three years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelRRittAuthor, or at his website https://michaelrritt.com.

 

The Day Texas Bombed Oklahoma

 

Did you hear about the border war between Texas and Oklahoma? The Oklahomans were throwing dynamite across the border at the Texans. The Texans were lighting it and throwing it back!”

And not to show favoritism, here’s this one…

Q: How many University of Texas freshmen does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None, it’s a sophomore course.

Like many states that border each other, Texas and Oklahoma have developed an interesting relationship that some have described as a sibling rivalry. They will prod and poke each other and get on each other’s nerves, but mess with one and the other comes running. This was the case in 2013 when tornadoes destroyed homes in southern Oklahoma. Hundreds of Texans poured across the border to help out.

When you talk about Texas/Oklahoma rivalry, it usually has something to do with the friendly football rivalry between the Sooners of The University of Oklahoma in Norman and the Longhorns of the University of Texas at Austin. But the friction between the two neighbors hasn’t always been friendly, such as the time in 1930 when Oklahoma and Texas came close to shooting it out with each other in the Red River Bridge War.

And then there was the time just past midnight on July 5, 1943, when Texas bombed Oklahoma…

In the late evening hours of July 4, 1943, a B-17 Flying Fortress and her ten-man crew took off from the U.S. Army Airforce base in Dalhart, Texas, located in the northwest corner of the Texas panhandle. The Dalhart base was a major training facility for Air Force bomber crews, and this crew was on a training mission. Its objective was a bombing range located twenty miles northeast of Dalhart near Conlen, Texas. This was a night-time bombing mission so the crew was told that they could spot their target by looking for a square area illuminated on each of its four corners with lights.

A B-17E Flying Fortress like the one that bombed Boice City

What happened within the next hour was described by Major C. E. Lancaster, commanding officer of the Dalhart base, as an accident caused by “a mistake of navigation.” Somehow, the B-17 crew flew straight north rather than northeast, and no one seemed to notice that they had flown twice as long as they were supposed to.

Shortly past midnight on July 5^th, the crew spotted what they believed was their target – a square area illuminated on its corners with lights. What they were really seeing was not their target on the bombing range in Conlen, Texas, but the lights in the courthouse square in Boise City, Oklahoma.

The crew of the B-17 that bombed Boice City

The B-17 circled to begin the first of six passes over their target – dropping one bomb with each pass. Fortunately, the one-hundred-pound bombs were practice bombs that were filled with sand and only contained three pounds of gun powder.

The first bomb blew the door off of an empty garage and left a 20-by-40-inch crater. The second bomb blew the door off of the First Baptist Church and busted some of the stained-glass windows. It also left a three-foot deep crater which became quite an attraction, prompting the pastor of the church to remark that if even a quarter of the people who came to see the crater would attend church, he would be a success. The rest of the bombs hit near a downtown shop, a boarding house missing a parked tanker truck full of fuel, a private residence, and the railroad tracks on the edge of town. The crew would have made yet another pass over their target, had not Frank Garrett, an employee of the city’s power company, pulled the master switch for the town’s power. The crew saw the lights go out and interpreted it to mean that their exercise was over, so they headed back to Dalhart. No one was injured during the attack and the total cost of the damage was around twenty-five dollars.

The B-17 crew, which was extremely embarrassed by the incident, was given a choice of either disciplinary action or immediate transfer to the European theater of war. They chose the latter, and eventually became one of the top B-17 bombing crews in the Eighth Air Force. They served with distinction and only one year after bombing Boise City, the same crew led an eight-hundred plane bombing mission over Berlin, Germany.

After learning the truth about the attack, the citizens of Boise City soon got over any bad feelings. It became a source of pride for the citizens of Boise because it focused national attention on their little burg. Time and Newsweek both printed stories about the attack. Time magazine joked that the citizens of Boise did what any other citizen would do when being bombed; “Most of them ran like hell, in no particular direction.” The proud citizens of Boise even held the distinction of being the only city in the continental United States to be bombed during WWII.

Boice City Memorial to the Bombing

Fifty years after the attack, Boise City erected a bronze plaque near a bomb crater with a replica bomb protruding out of it as a memorial to the night that they were bombed by Texas.

Watch a short (less than two minutes) video about the bombing of Boice City

About the Author

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600 square foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist two years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelRRittAuthor, or at his website https://michaelrritt.com.

Sitting Bull’s Last Stand…

September 8, 1883, was a milestone for the people of The United States. It was the day that the growing nation was joined east-to-west with the completion of the northern transcontinental railroad. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads had accomplished this task in 1869 by linking New York City with Sacramento, California, but a northern route was deemed necessary, joining the Great Lakes at Duluth, Minnesota to Puget Sound in Washington.

 

The Northern Pacific Railroad was given a charter by Congress in 1864 and the work began in 1870, one year after the Union Pacific and Central Pacific route had been completed with the golden spike ceremony at Promontory Point in Utah. Following the example of the Union and Central Pacific, the northern route was constructed with two crews, one working east to west and the other working west to east.

 

Fourteen years and 6,800 miles of railroad track later, the two crews met near Gold Creek, Montana (where the first gold in the state was discovered in 1852), about forty miles west of Helena. A lavish celebration was planned for the occasion. Five trains carried dignitaries from the east and the west coasts, with over 300 people there to witness the symbolic driving-in of the golden spike. Those in attendance included railroad officials, former U.S. President, Ulysses S. Grant, governors from all of the states that the railroad crossed; bankers and investors, and foreign diplomats from Europe. One of the most notable dignitaries, however, was Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader who had guided his people in their efforts to resist the U.S. government and the expansion of white settlers into Lakota territory.

 

Route of the Northern Pacific

After Sitting Bull’s victory at the Little Bighorn in June of 1876, the backlash from the U.S. Army was so intense, that life for the Lakota became almost impossible. In May of 1877, Sitting Bull led his band of Lakota north across the border into Canada where they remained for four years. The lack of buffalo herds led to near starvation for Sitting Bull and his people and prompted a return to the United States. On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull surrendered to Major David H. Brotherton, commanding officer of Fort Buford in the Dakota Territory. 

 

Having been asked to participate in the golden spike ceremony for the Northern Pacific Railroad, Sitting Bull saw his chance for one last act of defiance, so he agreed to give a speech.

 

The Golden Spike Ceremony, September 8, 1883.

The time came for the proud Lakota Chief to make his speech, and he rose to his feet. His speech had been previously submitted for “approval” and had been heavily edited by a young army officer who happened to be the only other person present who understood the Lakota language. As he started to speak, the audience was shocked to hear him speaking in Lakota, even though he was fluent in English; however, the young army officer was even more shocked to discover that Sitting Bull was NOT delivering the speech that had been approved.

 

Sitting Bull began,

 

“I hate all white people. You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.”

 

He continued to describe all of the atrocities that his people had endured at the hands of the whites. He gave a scathing rebuke of white corruption and greed. The only person there who understood what Sitting Bull was saying was the young army officer, who wisely remained quiet. The rest of the crowd assumed that Sitting Bull was praising their great accomplishment, so they would cheer and applaud whenever Sitting Bull would pause in his speech. When he finished speaking, Sitting Bull received a standing ovation from the crowd that he had just contemptuously chided.

 

Although he had been forced to surrender in order to feed his starving people, Sitting Bull still had plenty of animosity and fight left in him.

 

During the next few years, Sitting Bull toured the country with various Wild West shows, and met both Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley. He was so impressed with Annie Oakley that he symbolically “adopted” her as a daughter in 1884. He named her “Little Sure Shot” – a name that Oakley used throughout her career.

 

Sitting Bull was shot to death on December 15, 1890, at the Standing Rock Indian Agency. Ironically, he was shot, not by white men, but by Lakota Reservation Police trying to arrest him. 

About the Author

Mike is an award-winning Western author currently living in a 600 square foot cabin in the mountains of Western Montana. He has been married to his redheaded sweetheart, Tami, since 1989. He is a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist two years in a row and his short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as well as brick and mortar bookstores. His first Western novel, The Sons of Philo Gaines, was released in November of 2020. It is available everywhere books are sold. Mike is a member of Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelRRittAuthor, or at his website https://michaelrritt.com.