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;void(0)) . . . WEST (THE OLD/WILD) see: "AMERICA" see: "AMERICAN INDIANS" see: "COWBOYS" see: "PRAIRIE" see: "STAGE COACH" Out where the handclasp's a little stronger, Out where the smile dwells a little longer, That's where the West begins. --Arthur Chapman (1874—1935) American writer and editor. "Out Where the West Begins" [1917] - Where the West begins depends on when you asked the question. In the nineteenth century Charles Dickens got no farther than St. Louis, nine hundred miles short even of the Rockies. He went home convinced he had seen the West, and he declared it to be a fraud. --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908—2004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] The country might take to the railroad as a novelty and a tourist fashion, but the companies saw it as a chain of missing links between the Great Plains and the people who would want, or could be urged, to settle it. Following the success at Promontory Point the railroads were spurred to spread branch lines out south of the central line. And the first community they attracted was not a community at all but the land pirates known as cowboys. The line that started this was the one that ended at Abilene, Kansas. Here in the spring of 1867, while the continental line was creeping across the plains, there came a twenty-nine-year-old livestock trader from Chicago named Joseph McCoy. He looked at a railroad and he looked at a map, and he got an idea. He knew there was lush grassland all the way to southern Texas. What would be simpler than to connect a cow with a railhead and make a fortune and, incidentally, add beef to the diet of million in the East? A methodical man, he decided first to buy the town, which was no more than a few cabins and a saloon on four hundred and fifty acres. Luckily, they were owned by another man from Illinois, Tim Hersey, and he sold the lot to McCoy for five dollars an acre. (Mrs. Hersey, a God-fearing pioneer, had one day opened the Bible at the book of Luke and she read there, in chapter 3, verse 1, "The Tetrarch of Abilene in the province of Judea." She liked it and so she christened a town.) McCoy now spent the considerable sum of $5,000 getting out advertising circulars and sending riders down to Texas to promise the cowboys a safe trail and a fair price at the railhead. The result was the Chisholm Trail. It started not far from the Gulf of Mexico, in southern Texas, with a breed of rawboned, half-wide cattle with long horns, whose ancestors had come over on Columbus's second voyage. By the end of the civil war there were about three million of these longhorns, and they roamed no farther than the grass and the water they needed. Their normal fate was to be slaughtered for tallow and hides, and on their home ground they could be sold for no more than four dollars a head. But at the end of the thousand-mile trail was Mr. McCoy's bait of forty dollars a head, so feeder lines began converging on San Antonio and then joined to run directly north through largely unsettled country and Indian territory. The trail was blazed by horses and oxen pulling plows, which together cut a wide furrow in the land. The herds moved, two or three thousand at a time, in loose order, with a few picked bulls or steers in the lead — at about a mile an hour. With luck, a herd took three months to arrive at Mr. McCoy's stockyard in central Kansas. It was never a monotonous journey. Resentful settlers squatting along the trail passed their own laws to forbid the cowboys' passage or, failing that, pestered the herds with planted ticks or alarmed them with fires set in the long grass. Equally resentful Indian guides exacted heavy tolls for crossing their lands, at worst led the herds off into quicksands and vanished. The longhorns were tempermentally as nervous as cats, which was why the cowboys' plaintive lullabies and night herding songs came into being, not as a romantic bit of minstrelsy. The loghorns were apt to stampede at the first crack of a thunderstorm or the first high wail of a coyote. And a serious stampede could mean a per capita loss of ten pounds in weight, or a loss of $10,000 to $20,000 on the herd at the railhead. A hundred days after McCoy had posted his offer, the village of Abilene heard a thunderstorm of hooves coming up from the south. It was the start of the cowboy legend, and of McCoy's reign as emperor of the cattle kingdom. He had boasted that he could deliver two hundred thousand cattle in his first decade. He was wrong. In the first four years he shipped over two million out of his stockyards. He was one of the rare American promoters whose production exceeded his propaganda. He was, they liked to say, "the real McCoy." --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (1908—2004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] - ^^ By the late nineteenth century, there was a feeling in the country that the frontier was at an end. The tide of settlement had long since reached the Pacific. This was the climax of what seemed like a natural development, although the native tribes (and perhaps Mexico) might have filed a dissenting opinion. In many ways, the closing of the frontier was more a metaphor than a statement of fact. For one thing, oceans were no barrier to American expansion - Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines attested to that. Nor was there any shortage of empty land. The Territory of Alaska, as of 1900 a bleak, austerely beautiful domain, twice the size of Texas, had a tiny population (sixty-four thousand) - about one human being for every ten square miles. Nevada had a population of forty-two thousand. (This was before the boom in Las Vegas.) Not a single mountain, desert, or Pacific state had more than a million people, except California, which had a million and a half; most western states did not even come close. Much of the West, in short, was still big sky and open spaces. The population center moved steadily west (and south) in the twentieth century; but this was, in 1900, only a hope or a dream. Millions and millions of acres were left in the public domain in 1900. But they were not, on the whole, the rich, well-watered land of Iowa or Indiana. They were dry, barren, and uninviting - at least for settlers. They were an obstacle, a challenge, a wilderness to be "tamed." This was the nineteenth- century attitude, and it persisted long into the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, people believed (or acted as if) resources were infinite. Nature was in fact the enemy. It was something to be fought, something to be conquered. The destiny of a forest was to be chopped down and turned into timber or farmland. The destiny of a swamp was to be drained and planted and plowed. Many states paid money to people who killed wolves; there was no endangered-species act, no earth day, no talk about ecosystems. Even standards of beauty reflected the culture of boom, plow, and build. "Wilderness" was not a compliment; quite to the contrary. Deserts were ugly - and dangerous; they stood in the way of progress. Bedraggled armies of settlers, crawling slowly across the country in covered wagons, facing death from thirst, starvation, exhaustion, hostile tribes, could hardly be expected to admire the scenery - or wish to preserve it from "civilization." People in New Orleans, wracked with yellow fever and other miasmic visitations, had no appreciation of swamps. It took a century of wealth, vaccines, and antibiotics to turn swamps into "valuable wetlands." It took air-conditioning, a national highway system, and changes in consciousness to make the desert into a thing of beauty and a tourist attraction: to make Death Valley a place for vacations instead of a valley of death. --Lawrence M. Friedman (1930— ) _American Law in the 20th Century_ [2002] Ch. 13 "The Law of Property" pp. 420-421 ^^ - This little fleet although not so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs ... we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine. --Meriwether Lewis (1774—1809) American explorer. _Journal_ v. 1 p. 285, in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 578. Cohan & Major add: President Thomas Jefferson bought the huge tract of Louisiana from France, doubling the size of the United States. The following year he commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore a passage through the territory and beyond it to the Pacific. The central purpose was to discover 'a North American route to India' for the trade of the United States. The expedition set off in the spring of 1804 and reached the Pacific coast on 7 Nov. 1805. - We went over a great hye mountain as strait as stair steps in snow up to our knees ... the Bears took the provision the men had cashed and we had but very little to eat ... Some of the compana was eating them that died ... 3 died and the rest eat them. Thay was 11 day without any thing to eat but the Dead ... O Mary I have not rote you half of the truble we have had but I have rote you anuf to let you now that you don't now what truble is but thank god we have all got throw and the only family that did not eat human flesh. --Virginia Reed, aged 12, to Mary Keyes [16 May 1847], in George R. Street _Ordeal by Hunger_ [1960 ed.] pp.360-61. In M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p.578. Cohan & Major note: The child describes the ordeal of the Donner Party in its westward crossing of the Rocky Mountains between Nov. 1846 and April 1847. Go West, young man, go West! --John L.B. Soule (1815—1891) American journalist. In "Terra Haute {Indiana} Express" [1851]. We cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free! --John Greenleaf Whittier (1807—1892) American poet. "The Kansas Emigrants" [1854] My baggage was lost; it had not come on my train; it was adrift somewhere back in the two thousand miles that lay behind me. And by way of comfort, the baggage-man remarked that passengers often got astray from their trunks, but the trunks mostly found them after a while. Having offered me this encouragement, he turned whistling to his affairs and left me planted in the baggage- room at Medicine Bow. I stood deserted among crates and boxes, blankly holding my check, fungus and forlorn. I stared out through the door at the sky and the plains; but I did not see the antelope shining among the sage-brush, nor the great sunset light of Wyoming. Annoyance blinded my eyes to all things save my grievance: I saw only a lost trunk. --Owen Wister (1860—1938) American writer of western novels. _The Virginian_ [1902] Please do not Shoot the Pianist He is doing His Best --Sign seen in a Leadville, Colorado, saloon by Oscar Wilde during his U.S. tour [1882]. - [D]isappointments were many on the frontier. Fires, for instance, were a routine disaster, as the citizens of Alliance, Nebraska, came to know all too well. In the 11 months between August 1892 and July 1893, prairie fires savaged their tiny farming community three times. Cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, and other scourges also beset the Westerners, partly because of a lack of qualified doctors, but also because of terrible sanitation. Drinking water was commonly drawn from sloughs and streams that did double duty as town dumps. Sewage ran in the streets and mingled with the droppings of horses and other animals to produce an unsavory curbside stew. Not everyone took the matter as a life-and-death issue. Patrons at a saloon in Dodge City, Kansas, are said to have looked on gleefully as one unlucky cowpoke stepped into a puddle and sank up to his belt buckle. Despite such unpleasantness, even the most godforsaken frontier communities stood at least a fighting chance of making it, provided that they started out with certain essential characters. Next to the blacksmith, the most important of these was the newspaper editor, who was often one of the town's first citizens. The editor's job (at least in the beginning) was not so much to gather news as to attract new townspeople, and there was never a moment to lose: The first issue of many a paper was published even before a roof could be built over the press that printed it. A hotelier and a saloon keeper, partners in accommodating and entertaining wayfarers and prospective settlers, were also vital. More often than not, however, the proprietor of the general store became the town's most popular figure. He sold not only guns and chaps, bootjacks and baby carriages, but also Bibles for the devout and whiskey for the sinners. [ . . . ] Named after a nearby army fort, Dodge City became known as the wildest of all Western towns during its heyday from 1872 to 1885. Called the "Bibulous Babylon of the Plains" by the editor of the Kinsley, Kansas, Graphic, it was said to be a place where liquor ran like water, music played from dusk till dawn, and disputes were settled on the spot, in a hail of bullets. Most of this was reputation rather than reality. The saloons, for example, never numbered more than 14. Disputes were usually settled with fists, not six-shooters, and were rarely fatal: Dodge's homicide rate, about 1.5 deaths a year, was no higher than in other cow towns. And not one person was ever hanged in the city - legally or otherwise. --_The Wild West_ Time-Life Books [1993] pp. 178-179. The wildest jurist in the Wild West was Judge Roy Bean. A saloon keeper in the remote Texas burg of Langtry, Bean was also a justice of the peace who issued verdicts from a combination courthouse-bar where he sold beer during recesses. Bean's sense of justice often sprang from his pocketbook. He levied fines capriciously - once fining a corpse $40 - and usually kept the money for himself. And for those found guilty there was no appeal; as the sign over his doorway declared. Bean was literally the "law west of the Pecos." --_The Wild West_ Time-Life Books [1993] p. 145. - Ain't no law west of St. Louis, ain't no God west of Fort Smith [Arkansas]. --Saying of 19th century trappers and settlers. Home, home on the range, Where the deer and the antelope play; Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, And the skies are not cloudy all day. --Cowboy song, "Home on the Range" [1873]. Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie, Where the wild coyote will howl over me, In a narrow grave just six by three, Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie! --Cowboy song [c.1875]. Weak and weary as I am, I would rather go a thousand miles farther than remain in such a desolate and forsaken place as this. --anon. pioneer woman in Death Valley, CA. [1847]. Mammoth Lager Beer Saloon, in the basement, corner Main and Virginia Streets, Austin, Nevada. Choice liquors, wines, lager beer and cigars, served by pretty girls, who understand their business and attend to it. Votaries of Bacchus, Gambrinus, Venus or Cupid can spend an evening agreeably at the Mammoth Saloon. --Advertisement in the Austin, Nevada daily paper, in Samuel Bowles _Our New West_ [1869] p. 279. - "Gunslinger" An old prospector walks his tired old mule into a western town one day. He'd been out in the desert for about six months without a drop of whiskey. He walked up to the first saloon he came to and tied his old mule to the hitch rail. As he stood there brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a gunslinger walked out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. The gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying, "Hey old man, have you ever danced?" The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said, "No, I never did dance. I just never wanted to. " A crowd had gathered by then and the gunslinger said, "Well you old fool, you're gonna' dance now," and started shooting at the old man's feet. The old prospector was hopping around and everybody was laughing. When the gunslinger fired his last bullet he holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon. The old man reached up on the mule, drew his shotgun, and pulled both hammers back making a double clicking sound. The gunslinger heard the sound and everything got quiet. The crowd watched as the gunslinger slowly turned around looking down both barrels of the shotgun. The old man asked, "Did you ever kiss a mule square on the ass? The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, "No. But I've always wanted to." - --- MORE ON THE OLD WEST AT: http://www.tombstone1880.com/archives/  ;void(0)) WEST VIRGINIA . . see "PLACES" for related links Country roads, take me home To the place I belong, West Virginia, mountain momma Take me home, country roads. --John Denver, Bill Danoff, and Taffy Nivert "Take Me Home, Country Roads" [1971 song] . . see "ANIMALS" for related links see: "SEA (THE)" Save the whales! Collect the whole set! --bumpersticker . . see "ALCOHOL" for related links It [corn whisky] smells like gangrene starting in a mildewed silo, it tastes like the wrath to come, and when you absorb a deep swig of it you have all the sensations of having swallowed a lighted kerosene lamp. A sudden, violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victim's watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across. --attributed to Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944) American journalist and author - [ . . . ] Rye was the original American whiskey, made from a crop abundant in the mid-Atlantic colonies. In the 18th century, Maryland and Pennsylvania even used the whiskey as currency. "What a bank-bill was at Philadelphia or a shilling-piece at Lancaster, that was whiskey in the towns and villages that lay along the banks of the Monongahela river," John Bach McMaster wrote in his "History of the People of the United States." And that whiskey was all rye whiskey. [ . . . ] Until World War II, rye was the predominant whiskey in the Northeast. And yet it also came to have a rugged reputation. Bourbon is smooth, even sweet. Rye has a raw-boned zip to it. With its rather more assertive personality, rye is the stuff of cowboys and tough guys, and folk-song legend. Tex Ritter was hardly the first cowboy to sing "Rye Whiskey," but he made a hit of it in 1948. [ . . . ] just sing along with Tex: "If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck/I'd dive to the bottom and never come up." --Eric Felten "Rye Makes a Comeback" _The Wall Street Journal_ [October 28, 2006] - The advantages of whisky over dogs are legion. Whisky does not need to be periodically wormed, it does not need to be fed, it never requires a special kennel, it has no toenails to be clipped or coat to be stripped. Whisky sits quietly in its special nook until you want it. True, whisky has a nasty habit of running out, but then so does a dog. --W. C. Fields [William Claude Dukenfield] (1880-1946) American vaudeville star and film actor. Quoted in Ronald J. Fields _W.C. Fields by Himself_ [1973]. I like it: I always did, and that is the reason I never use it. --attributed to Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) American Confederate general, when advised by his physician to drink whisky c.1850 Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whisky polishes the copper and is the saving of him. --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot, _Life on the Mississippi_ [1883] - From ashes to ashes And from dust to dust; If de whiskey don't kill me De morphine must. --Alabaman folk song [c. 1915] . . see "COMMUNICATION" for related links susurrous (adjective) [sê-'su-rês] Pertaining to a susurrus (whispering sound), having or similar to whispering or rustling sounds.  WICKED . . see: "EVIL" see: "IMMORALITY" No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly. --Juvenal (c. 55—130) Roman satirist. _Satires_ [c. 100] I's wicked, I is. --Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811—1896) American writer and philanthropist. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ [1852] ----- flagitious [fluh-JISH-uhs], adjective: 1. Disgracefully or shamefully criminal; grossly wicked; scandalous; -- said of acts, crimes, etc. 2. Guilty of enormous crimes; corrupt; profligate; -- said of persons. 3. Characterized by enormous crimes or scandalous vices; as, "flagitious times." nefarious uh-FAIR-ee-uhs, adjective: Wicked in the extreme; iniquitous. obdurate [OB-duh-rit; -dyuh], adjective: 1. Hardened in wrongdoing; stubbornly wicked. Hardened in feelings; hard-hearted. 2. Resistant to persuasion; unyielding. 3. Hard; harsh; rugged; rough. . . see "DEATH" for related links see: "LOVE & MARRIAGE (OR NOT)" for related links If a wife loses her husband by death, she cannot marry another man. She has only to choose between two things — either to remain a widow as long as she lives or to burn herself; and the latter eventuality is considered the preferable, because as a widow she is ill-treated as long as she lives. As regards the wives of kings, they [Hindus] are in the habit of burning them, whether they wish it or not, by which they desire to prevent any of them by chance committing something unworthy of the illustrious husband. They make an exception only for women of advanced years and for those who have children; for the son is the responsible protector of his mother. --Alberuni (973—1048) _Kitab-al-Hind_ (Book on India) [1030]. I'm not upset about my divorce. I'm only upset I'm not a widow. --Roseanne [Roseanne Barr] (1952— ) American actress. The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits. --John Gay (1685—1732) English poet and dramatist. Most widows want their loss acknowledged, not glossed over, and the name of their dead husband spoken, not avoided. They would like to tell callers not to bother if they are going to talk about the weather or how terribly funny their new poodle puppy is. --Genevieve Davis Ginsburg, _To Live Again: Rebuilding Your Life After You've Become a Widow_ [1987] . . Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Anglo-Irish dramatist and poet see "PEOPLE" for related links see "AUTHORS" see "WRITING" I suppose there are now few survivors among the people who had the delight of hearing Oscar Wilde talk. Of these I am one. I have had the privilege of listening also to many other masters of table-talk-- Meredith and Swinburne, Edmund Gosse and Henry James, Augustine Birrell and Arthur Balfour, Gilbert Chesterton and Desmond MacCarthy and Hilaire Belloc-- all of them splendid in their own way. But assuredly Oscar in his way was the greatest of them all--the most spontaneous and yet the most polished, the most soothing and yet the most surprising. That his talk was mostly monologue was not his own fault. His manners were very good; he was careful to give his guests or his fellow-guests many a conversational opening; but seldom did anyone respond with more than a very few words. Nobody was willing to interrupt the music of so magnificent a virtuoso. To have heard him consoles me for not having heard Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke. --Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) English satirist and caricaturist end page | UGLY - UNICORNS | UNHAPPINESS | UNIONS - USELESS | VACATION - VENGENCE | VENICE - VICTORY | VIGILANCE - VIRGINITY | VIRTUE - VULGARITY | WAGES - WAR & PEACE | WAR (THE CIVIL) - WAR (THE REVOLUTIONARY) | WAR (THOUGHTS ABOUT) - PAGE 1 (A-M) | WAR (THOUGHTS ABOUT) - PAGE 2 (N-Z) | WAR (VIETNAM) | WAR (WORLD WAR I) | WAR (WORLD WAR II) PAGE 1 (A-M) | WAR (WORLD WAR II) PAGE 2 (N-Z) | WASHINGTON (D.C.) - WEAK/WEAKNESS | WEALTH - WEASELS | WEATHER - WELLS (H.G.) | WEST (THE OLD/WILD) - WILDE (OSCAR) | WILL - WINNING | WINTER - WISDOM | WISHING - WIVES | WOMEN - WOMEN'S LIB | WOMEN'S RIGHTS - WORDS | WORK - WORLD | WORLD TRADE CENTER & PENTAGON DISASTER, 11 SEPTEMB | WORRY - WRONG | WRITING | YESTERDAY - ZOOS | | R | S | T | U - END | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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