Deadwood, South Dakota
Oh, the Deadwood stage is a-rolling on over the plains
With the curtains flappin' and the driver a-snappin' the reins
A beautiful sky, a wonderful day
Whip-crack-away, whip-crack-away, whip-crack-away.
With the curtains flappin' and the driver a-snappin' the reins
A beautiful sky, a wonderful day
Whip-crack-away, whip-crack-away, whip-crack-away.
The house on Hargrave Street
My cousin Terry continued to communicate with me by letter from England and in one of them he chaffed me with ‘pouring
out words of philosophical wisdom’, adding that he failed to
understand for the most part why my mind ‘ticks the way it does’, though he
confessed that the odd sentence did make some sense to him. Then he said he’d
recently seen ‘Alfie’, a film ‘all about a fella with a similar outlook on life
to you, who just wanders through life getting through as many birds as
possible’.
Alfi, film, 1966
Now it happened that I’d seen that film too,
though I should say I found little reflection of my own life in it. My cousin’s
comparison of my attitude with that of an inveterate rake showed that he
lacked the faintest notion of how I ticked. The Alfie of the film, who left a
trail of broken-hearts in his wake, was after all successful with women, while my experience, on the contrary,
was stained with failure. It seemed the only feeling that this celluloid
seducer showed in regard to his victims was contempt, while my error lay in
quite a different direction, for I was rather inclined to idealise women, and I
was, I think, a little afraid of them. Consequently my aim was not ‘to get
through as many birds as possible’. It was to find a girl who was compatible
with me – sexually, emotionally and intellectually.
To find a girl that was compatible with me… Now,
how would I go about doing that?
Trial and error, I guess.
There’d been a fair few errors already in the
belated launch of my romantic campaign, and there were bound to be more. That thesis
was endorsed one night when my old high school friend, Leonard Bahry, who was
now studying English at the University of Manitoba
I speculate that as a stranger – and one
that had visited Europe , too – I might have been a modest object of curiosity there, for I
looked a little unusual. My hair was longer than Canadians generally wore it at that
time, and my black leather jacket and tie I’d bought in England Winnipeg
In fact they spoke so
eloquently that I revelled, for a time, in the company of two girls at once,
one on each knee. The one on the right was rather pretty, I recall, and quite
tall, though something of an onus on my femur, while the girl to the left was
slight but plain. Since I honoured the latter with rather less attention than her friend, she vanished rapidly and I applied 100 percent of my attention to the one that
remained.
Her name was Marie and she was a
Ukrainian Canadian, like most of Leonard’s friends. We chatted happily for a time, and then I asked the girl if she would like to go out with me the
following weekend.
No, she couldn’t, she said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, because I’m going out with the
white Cougar,” she replied casually.
Pardon?
A Cougar was in fact a rather expensive
model of car. The remark was intended to convey that her company came at a cost,
and that she would never waste time with someone like me, who owned no car at
all, never mind a Cougar. It looked like I’d have to revise my ideas about
prostitution. Some women, it seems, though in no way driven to it, were ready
nevertheless to sell themselves to a fellow simply on the basis of the chattels he possessed.
I record the incident only because it
tells of my first brush with a bona fide gold-digger, a type I’d seen previously only
portrayed in films. Some months later I met Marie again quite by chance
at Grand Beach Lake Winnipeg . Attracted by a tempting feminine form in a swimsuit, I recall
repeatedly trying to kiss her while wading in the water there, but she fought
me off as if I’d been a Piranha.
“You’re just like a criminal,” she told
me. “The only difference is that you stay inside the law.”
What? The definition of a criminal is… – And this irrational female was studying to become
a lawyer!
I wonder what species of rabbit she mated with at last anyway.
Grand Beach, Manitoba
In May or June of that year, Ian told me I was invited to a party at the house of his girlfriend, Alda, and her sister, Margaret, in the absence of their parents. This would be a chance to see what Margaret looked like. On that Saturday evening, the door was opened by a sturdy girl with a pleasant smile and laughing eyes. That was Alda. Inside, I made the acquaintance of a slighter girl in a flared skirt with light-brown hair, wide-open eyes and loosely-parted lips.
This was Margaret. Her legs, I noticed,
were shapely enough, but softly mottled in pink and white, as though she’d been
in the habit of sitting too near a fire. Was she pretty? Well, yes, maybe
she was in a way, but those staring eyes of hers were sensibly repellent, and
her manner and movements were markedly artificial.
Still, I was drawn to her as the sole free
female that bloomed in the room. However, she paid not the slightest heed of me.
Or rather, I felt she pretended to
pay no heed of me and bestowed her notice instead on a friend of Ian’s called Bob
Beriault. Now Bob was the best of fellows, with enviable dark curly hair, in
contrast to my own duck down, that I could pull out practically in handfuls,
but he was on the short side and somewhat plump. And he was ‘as bashful as a
young woman peeping through a veil’ as some writer once picturesquely put it.
What Bob made of Margaret’s forwardness, I'd be curios to know.
As for me, I was nettled, for I suspected Margaret
of exploiting Bob just to make me jealous. Okay, two could play at that game. I
began to bestow not only my notice but my great good spirits too on everyone
and anyone but her. Late in the evening, bloated with beer and saturated with
badinage I floated out the back door and threw myself prone on the back lawn,
rolled over, and raised my eyes to the stars speckling the night sky. That
great sparkling tapestry up there carried me back to Spain New Zealand
These reflections were arrested by the sound of
the back door opening against its spring and then clapping back again. A figure
stole into the panorama of stars and then straddled my abdomen. It was
Margaret. With no word she bent her head and impressed my lips with a kiss. But
it was a kiss without passion, without substance, without tenderness – or
without even any real intent, I felt. It was the empty husk of a kiss, just a
rite, a ritual, nothing really desired, a mere pressing of flesh together.
Still, it was the mouth of a woman with an engaging face seeking mine, and I was aroused. I enfolded her in my arms and rolled her body sideways onto the grass beside, foraging her lips, her face, her neck for the love that had eluded me for so long. Perhaps my hands got into the act as well and explored elsewhere, but these regions were swiftly signposted verboten. All that was on offer here was an extended session of indifferent kissing, accompanied by an unremitting hush that suggested her head was empty of any reflection, and soon she slipped silently back to the house.
Still, it was the mouth of a woman with an engaging face seeking mine, and I was aroused. I enfolded her in my arms and rolled her body sideways onto the grass beside, foraging her lips, her face, her neck for the love that had eluded me for so long. Perhaps my hands got into the act as well and explored elsewhere, but these regions were swiftly signposted verboten. All that was on offer here was an extended session of indifferent kissing, accompanied by an unremitting hush that suggested her head was empty of any reflection, and soon she slipped silently back to the house.
------------------------------------------
Whose idea it was to undertake a trip to the
Black Hills of South Dakota , I don’t recall, but – yes! –
anything to escape Winnipeg Broadway Avenue
Badlands, North Dakota
Somewhere on the journey south, Larry let me
take a turn at the wheel. Already I’d been smitten by this little bug. I liked
its ‘sporty’ feel and I liked the reassuring whirr of its air-cooled engine, but
now, in the driver’s seat, I felt the gears engage without complaint and heard
that comforting whirr rise or fall in pitch as I changed among them. But more,
owing to the closeness of the controls, I felt a kind of intimacy with this little vehicle that I’d never ever felt with any car before.
I recall that we stopped in some small town for the night, I
can’t remember where. We ate a hamburger each and drank a beer somewhere and
then after dark we found a vacant patch of land far from the houses and
nestled in our seats for the night. At about one o’clock in the morning we glimpsed the
figure of a man prowling about outside. At last he came up and a head wearing
an official cap of some kind looked in at Larry’s window. Were we going to be
charged with vagrancy or something? But all he said was:
“I don’t think you should park here.”
“Why not?” Larry asked.
“Because you’re on the railroad tracks.”
On the tracks
We leapt into life then and hastened to change the neighbourhood of our sleeping quarters.
Four fellows jammed together in a car engendered
a lot of laughing about something or nothing. As well as jeering at signs we
saw along the way, like ‘Wall Drug’ - signed repeatedly hundreds of miles
beyond its actual location and offering not a word more - we broke now and then
into:
“Oh, the Deadwood stage is a-comin’ on over the hi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ill!”
I didn’t know what song that line came from at first. Most probablyWayne Oklahoma
“Oh, the Deadwood stage is a-comin’ on over the hi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ill!”
I didn’t know what song that line came from at first. Most probably
Neither did I know there was a town called
Deadwood, but, yes, it was in South Dakota
Deadwood, South Dakota
Much of what we saw and did there is lost to memory now, but I do recall being in a bar boasting a big grainy portrait of Wild Bill Hickock, dashingly moustachioed and arrayed in buckskin jacket with dangling fringes. Also there was a giant likeness of Calamity Jane, but God what a gorgon she was! Not remotely like Doris Day, who’d starred in the 1953 film.
And
there was a wooden chair too, roped off from the rest, with a neat hole in the
back of it. A notice nearby informed the astonished visitor that this was the
very chair that Wild Bill Hickock had been sitting in when he’d been shot.
Later, we stepped across the road to visit another bar where there was another chair
that Wild Bill Hickock had been sitting in when he was shot.
But what is the truth? What are the facts?
On August 2, 1876 , Wild Bill Hickok was playing poker
with a group of men in Nuttall
& Mann's Saloon in Deadwood, when Jack McCall entered the place, walked up
behind Hickok and shot him in the back of the head.
Now, if the
victim had been shot in the back of the head, how could there be a bullet hole
in the back of his chair? He must have been a midget! But in 1965, when we
visited the town, there was no convenient way of learning the truth. Nowadays, of
course, anyone can learn the truth by reading Wikipedia.
So… chairs with
holes in them have disappeared from the story. Instead, a gullible public is hoodwinked
with chairs with no holes.
The chair in the photo above, claimed to be
the very chair Wild Bill Hickok was supposedly shot in, sits in an alcove in a
glass frame above the front door of a bar called Saloon #10, which is NOT the
saloon where Hickok was shot. That saloon was built of wood and burned down in 1879.
You’d have to be irretrievably gullible to believe that anyone in 1879 would have
saved from the fire and preserved a chair – any chair – for the purposes
of tourism!
Facts? In our age, people have little interest
in facts, because facts require them to exercise their minds. They want history
to be made easy for them, by having it fashioned into simple drama that can be
consumed passively. Quite frankly, they don’t want history at all, because history is
useless to them. What they want is a show, a fantasy, a carnival!
This show runs 4 times a day, 6 times a week in Deadwood
But facts are so much more interesting! For example: Hickock was killed by a man called Jack McCall. Now, McCall (who had shot Hickok in the back of the head at point-blank range) was tried by a ‘Miner’s Jury’ and acquitted of the murder. How is that possible?
Quite possible, in fact, when you know
something about Miners’ Courts, which were generally convened to settle disputes
over claims to land. Here is a little background on Miner's Juries.
The
Court Room
There was no court room. One trial in Montana
Punishments
Because no jails had been built, there were only three punishments
available: whipping, banishment, and hanging.
The
Jury
Punishments were voted on by the jury. Two types of jury were possible,
the formal twelve-man jury, and the "jury of the whole." The jury of
the whole was, in effect, the crowd. Drunk or sober, whether they had heard all
the evidence or not, anyone who happened to be passing by when the vote was
taken could contribute his vote, too.
And vote again. When John Dillingham was murdered in early July 1863,
three men were convicted and sentenced to be hanged. While on their way to
execution, some tender-hearted women and the defence attorneys excited the
crowd to such a pitch that vote after vote was taken, until the men were
banished instead of being hanged. One man came back three days later and was
rehired as a deputy, despite having been seen to shoot the victim by a hundred
people. He and a second man were hanged for the crime six months later, while
the third man travelled far out of the area and was himself murdered.
Information from Carol Bucanan
James Butler “Wild Bill”
Hickok
Eyewitnesses have remarked that Hickok’s hair
was red, but that’s just another inconvenient fact that has had to give way to
the fantasy.
Reading the Wikipedia account of Hickok’s life,
you get the impression of a man who was an inveterate liar and self-publicist, whose
professional methods were often exceptionally questionable. I cite an example
of the latter from his time as Marshall of Hays, Kansas
One Samuel Strawhun was causing a disturbance
at 1.00 am in a saloon when Hickok and his deputy, Peter Lanihan, arrived on the
scene. Strawhun “made remarks against Hickok,” and Hickok killed him with a
shot through the head. At the coroner’s
inquest into Strawhun’s death, Hickok said he had “tried to restore order”. But
despite “very contradictory” evidence from witnesses, the jury found the shooting
justifiable.
I finish this digression with a word on the fate
of Jack McCall, the man who killed Hickok. After bragging about the deed, he
was re-arrested and tried again for the killing by a court with a proper jury. This
time, he was found guilty and sentenced to death, despite his claim that he had
killed Hickok because Hickok had killed his brother. Actually, a man named Lew
McCall had been killed in Abeline , Kansas
Whatever the truth or falsehood about McCall,
he cannot legitimately be called an ‘assassin’. It seems likely that the term
was chosen to demonise McCall and to canonise Hickok. Again, this is less
history than it is fantasy.
But I return to my story, where my friends and I
were left pondering that second chair with a hole in it, and wondering what the
relationship might have been between Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane that
caused their pictures to be exhibited side by side.
Naturally
we had a fancy to see the final resting places of this great American hero and
heroine of the Wild West, but how to find them? Very easily as it turned out. A
sign at the end of the main street read: ‘To the graves’.
We set off along the way indicated by the arrow,
and soon came to a second sign printed with the same words. In fact we followed
a series of similar signs that led to the cemetery. The exact locality of what
we were in quest of was clear at a glance, for we found the two graves inside
a little pen of railings. As well as the protection of the dead, I noted, the
local authorities had kindly considered the comfort of the living, who might wish
to commune with the spirit of the great American past, for three tiers of seats
overlooked the little pen.
Only in researching for this post did I discover
that these two emblems of the American West were buried together as a gag!
Four of the men on the self-appointed committee that planned Calamity’s funeral
later stated that, since Hickok had "absolutely no use" for Jane in
this life, they decided to play a posthumous joke on him by laying her to rest
by his side.
After Deadwood, we visited one or two bars in Rapid City Mount Rushmore . This was new to me too, since I
hadn’t yet seen the Hollywood spectacle of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint – she immaculately clad and
elegantly coiffured – edging down an enormous nose, or clinging to a titanic
lip.
Mount Rushmore
--------------------------------------
High summer in Winnipeg Manitoba
I’d attended this extravaganza a couple of
times before, but decided at last that I didn’t like fairs. They seemed to me
embodiments of the adage ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’. But a great
many young people did like fairs, so
that they seemed promising places to meet girls. With that idea in mind, I presented
myself at the ‘Ex’ in the company of Jim Smith, who was by then a good friend
of mine. As not a solitary girl fell instantly into our embrace, we went in
quest of alternative enchantments. First, we scared ourselves silly on the
Ferris wheel, and then we thought we’d try to win some money with the help of ‘Oscar,
the Mouse’.
I’d never gambled in my life before, but the
game looked simple enough. It was based on a rough wood-built horizontal wheel, with a receptacle underneath, and marked with diagonal lines on top, so that the surface was
divided into coloured triangles like a roulette wheel. At the centre of each triangle
there was a hole in the wood, marked with a number. What you did was pay a
quarter, and bet on a number. Then the attraction manager, setting the wheel in
a whirl, took a live mouse from his pocket and dropped it on top. The panic-stricken
creature dashed this way and that way on the spinning disc, before quickly disappearing
down a hole. If it was the one you’d bet on, you won a couple of dollars. I
don’t recall how many quarters I wasted on that game.
After that, we were enticed by a lurid scene on
a colossal canvas sheet picturing several scantily-clad dancing girls. It was
just a clumsy and colourless sketch intended to suggest steamy and seductive frolicking.
There, we paid more money to enter a big tent, where several people were already
seated on benches before a stage, where a long box was propped on a pair of
sawhorses. We took seats and awaited the start of the show. There was a pause while
more voyeurs slithered in, and then there appeared before the assembly a fellow
and a solitary girl – who, disappointingly, was not at all scantily-clad, but dressed
in everyday duds, displaying not a hint of scantiness. They were not even
feminine-looking clothes. Work clothes, more like.
The fellow now announced that the girl would
lie inside the box while he thrust some swords through it. At that, the girl laid
herself inside, and then the fellow lowered the lid. Now he picked up a handful
of swords and thrust one noisily into the back of the box so that the point
emerged through the front. Choosing another sword, he thrust that one through
the box. He chose one sword after another, and thrust it in until the box front
fairly bristled with sword points.
Now the fellow opens the lid, steps back and
announces: “If you would like to see how she does it, for the price of a
quarter you can come up on the stage and look in the box and see.”
Not worth a quarter, I said, and got up to
leave. Then he says, “We don’t want to offend anybody, but she’s had to take
her clothes off to do this.”
Jim and I paid our quarters and got in the line
leading to the stage. Filing past the box, we looked inside to find that the
girl was lying on her side, avoiding the swords all right, but – fully clothed!
Everyone, including Jim and I, descended from the stage without a word. Well,
you couldn’t complain, could you? For if you did it would look like you’d paid
a quarter just to see a naked girl!
As I said, a fool and his money are soon
parted.
Finding our way amongst the crowd, and observing
the ‘attractions’ of the place, we came upon the one where you paid a quarter
to strike a device with a big hammer, which set a metal object rushing up a
column, graduated to show the force of the blow. If it was forceful enough, the
object struck a gong at the top, and you won a prise. Now the ‘Ex’ was a source
of short-term employment for many Winnipeggers, managing ‘attractions’. As it
happened, I knew the manager of this one. It was Judy Taylor.
As she was constantly occupied with her job,
there was little chance for chat, but I did establish that she was now married.
“Married!” I repeated in disbelief. After all,
it was just two and a half years since she’d been sitting primly by my side at
a drive-in movie!
“Why?” I asked stupidly.
“Well, you weren’t around, were you?” she said with the barest sense of bitterness.
So… she wouldn't let me put my arms around
her, but she may have let me marry her!
Red River Exhibition
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