History repeats itself.

Not long ago, while visiting the Long Barracks Museum at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, we came across this statue. It’s not a big statue, only 18 inches high or so, and displayed in a clear plastic box. There are other statues of a similar size throughout the short tour of the Long Barracks. This one depicts a padre—a priest or clergyman of some sort (we didn’t get his name) from the long-ago days before the Alamo became the Alamo and was known as the Mission San Antonio de Valero.

What intrigues me about the statue is that it proves beyond doubt that history repeats itself; that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Because what the statue clearly depicts is a padre with his handheld digital device. And he is doing, way back then, the same kind of thing you see happening everywhere, all the time, today.

Maybe he is engaged in a phone call on speaker. Perhaps he is sending (or reading) a text message. It could be that he is using the camera function to take a photograph—maybe even a selfie.

Could he have gotten an alert on one of his social media platforms? Is he responding to something on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or the wreck formerly known as Twitter?

Since he is some kind of Catholic clergyman, it is probably a safe bet that he is not perusing a dating site or matchmaking service. I suppose he could be checking the weather forecast. Or he might be watching cute cat videos on YouTube.

By way of full disclosure, I don’t have any kind of handheld digital device myself, so this is only totally ignorant, wholly uninformed speculation on my part.

Speed of sound.

A writer friend and I were talking a while back. He mentioned a book he had read in which a character under fire heard a bullet strike a tree, then heard the report of the rifle. My friend suggested this was unlikely, as the speed of sound is much greater than that of the bullets of the era—the Old West.

I disagreed, and we left it at that.

However, curiosity got the best of me, so I thought I’d do what they tell you to do on Sesame Street: “Look it up.” It took a few hours and lots of mouse clicks to reach a number of relevant web sites. Here’s what I learned about the speed of sound and the velocity of bullets fired from a few rifles in common use at the time in question.

Sound travels through the air at 1,125 feet per second. That varies somewhat, affected by temperature, humidity, and wind. And, of course, sound waves dissipate and the noise fades with distance. The velocity of bullets varies as well, depending on wind and distance, and the bullet loses speed the farther it travels.

But, all things being equal, a bullet fired from a .52 caliber Spencer repeating rifle would lose the race, lumbering along at a paltry 931 to 1,033 feet per second.

The race with a .44 caliber round from a Henry rifle would be a dead heat, the bullet leaving the barrel at 1,125 feet per second.

A bullet from a Winchester .44-40 Golden Boy outruns sound at 1,433 feet per second.

The old-time Hawken rifle, .50 caliber model, spit out lead at 1,600 feet per second.

Winning it all is the Sharps .50 caliber, which, depending on grains of powder in the cartridge, fires bullets that fly 1,448 to 1,814 feet per second.

None of which matters. But how else is an old man with no gainful employment supposed to spend his time?

 

Where I’m Going—Part 7

 

One of the most famous high-speed roads in Western history passes a few miles from where I live: the Pony Express Trail.

The trail passed through the middle of Salt Lake Valley from roughly north to south, then headed west across the desert until reaching what is now Nevada, leaving a string of swing stations and home stations in its wake. Monuments mark most, if not all, their locations and there are traces of some still standing.

Sad to say, I have yet to venture out into the sagebrush, shadscale, and greasewood to visit them. Not that I haven’t wanted to. It’s just that I haven’t made a definite plan to do so and carried out that plan. Thank goodness the pony riders weren’t as remiss in their travels on that road.

Still, I am determined to do it. I will see what there is to see at places like Simpson’s Springs, Fish Springs, Boyd’s Station, Willow Springs, Deep Creek, and places in between and beyond. I will see sights and sites that are much the same as those seen by the brave boys of days gone by.

One of these days. For certain sure. You can count on it.

A book reborn.

Years ago, an author friend asked me to write a novel for a new publisher he was trying to help get established. The result was Cold as the Clay. That publisher, unfortunately, never gained a foothold and has long since folded its tent and pulled its picket pin. So, Cold as the Clay has been out of print for years.

But the book is too good to die. Now it is available in a handsome new e-book and paperback edition (that’s the cover above), published by Speaking Volumes. The links will take you to the publisher’s site, but you will also find it wherever you buy books online.

The story follows a cowboy named Wilson Hayes, whose life more or less follows the pattern of King David’s story in the Bible—plenty of heroics, violence, treachery, greed, and romance. All, of course, in an Old West frontier setting.

I’m happy to see Cold as the Clay live again. It deserves a second chance.

 

 

Where I’m going, Part Four.

   

 Way out in the far northeastern corners of Utah and northwestern Colorado, just south of the Wyoming border, a lonely valley stretches along the Green River: Brown’s Park, or Brown’s Hole if you prefer. Nowadays, it is a far piece from anywhere and not all that easy to get to. But it was a well-traveled place in the Old West.
    For time out of mind, it was frequented by the Shoshoni, Ute, and Comanche. Blackfoot, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Navajo also visited. Fur trappers set up shop there in the 1830s, and Fort Davy Crockett opened up to supply and defend them in 1837. Ranchers followed the mountain men, wintering cattle there as well as establishing ranches.
    One of those ranches spawned Ann and Josie Bassett, who collaborated with cattle rustlers, horse thieves, robbers, and other bandits who made Brown’s Hole an outpost on the Outlaw Trail that ran from Robber’s Roost to the south and Hole in the Wall to the north. Among the most renowned outlaws who hid out there were Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch and, later, the fugitive Tom Horn.
    Despite an enduring desire to go there, I have yet to set foot in Brown’s Park. One of these days…

A look into the future.

Five Star, publisher of several of my books, just sent the cover design for my forthcoming novel, Pinebox Collins.

It’s about a one-legged itinerant undertaker in the Old West.

From the battlefields of the Civil War, Jonathon “Pinebox” Collins wanders the West seeking his place in the world. Cow towns, mining towns, boomtowns, small towns, growing cities—he tries them all.

Along the way, he witnesses what, where, and how the West changes America and the world. And he sees who makes it happen, crossing paths with pivotal people of the times. Among them, “Wild Bill” Hickok, whose trail repeatedly intersects with Pinebox’s.

Pinebox Collins offers a unique view of the Old West, through the eyes of a man who looks death in the eye every day.

The book is due for release in March 2020. Put it on your “to-do” list.

Coverage for a Forthcoming Book.

Come August, Five Star will release a new novel by yours truly: Father unto Many Sons. As you see above, the cover has been designed and is quite handsome.

The book is set around about 1840 and tells the story of a father who uproots his Tennessee family to escape the evils of slavery by settling in Mexico. His wife and two of his three sons aren’t too keen on the idea, resulting in a number of difficulties. The third and youngest son supports his father and follows his lead, adding to the troubles with the other brothers. All this is made even more difficult by trials and tribulations along the trail.

The book retells an older story, setting it in the American West’s challenging landscapes and violent, tumultuous times.

Western Writers Hall of Fame author Lucia St. Clair Robson read the book and said, "The riveting prologue of Father Unto Many Sons makes it well-nigh impossible to resist reading to the last page of the book. Author Rod Miller has combined vivid period detail with memorable characters to create a story that gives the sensation of visiting another time and place."

I can hardly wait for August and the release of Father unto Many Sons. How about you?

Were people in the Old West better than now?

Many people I know—writers and readers and viewers alike—are of the opinion that people living in the Old West were somehow “better” than those of us walking the earth today.

Back then, people didn’t use profanity. Honesty and square dealing ruled the day. Men placed women on a pedestal. Women were content in the kitchen and keeping house. Children were obedient, save occasional innocent hijinks. And while those were violent times, it was mostly good guys in white hats killing bad guys in black hats who needed killing. Truth, justice, and the American way ruled the day.

Studying history—rather than reading novels and watching movies and TV shows based on celebratory mythology—will soon disabuse you of any notion that human nature was any different then than now. Or at any other time in the history of people, for that matter. Certainly social conventions change, but that only affects times and places of misbehavior rather than behavior itself.

Back then, while men pretended to put “the fairer sex” on a pedestal, wives were little more than chattel, and could be beaten with little or no consequence. Ladies of the evening were routinely mistreated, with abusers considering violence included in the price. Alcoholism was rampant, drug abuse widespread. Child labor routine. Mistreatment of minorities acceptable, even encouraged. And so on.

The only real difference between then and now is that bad behavior often occurred behind closed doors in those days, and was little noted. Unseen, but there all the same. Now, it fills our TV screens and newspapers day and night.

Our blind spot concerning the evil in days gone by reminds me of the poem “Antigonish” by William Hughes Mearns. It begins this way:

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away.

My Favorite Book, Part 6

John McPhee is a name you will see here again. He is, without doubt, one of my favorite writers. Some of his books are collections of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, others address a single subject.

No matter the subject, if McPhee writes it I will read it.

Witness the fact that I have read his books (and many others) on raising oranges, building birch-bark canoes, Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Swiss Army, cargo ships, and the geology of North America—subjects I have no particular interest in but enjoyed immensely reading about.

Among my favorite McPhee books is Rising from the Plains, one of five volumes that make up his Pulitzer Prize-winning compilation, Annals of the Former World.

The book is about the geology of Wyoming, as seen through McPhee’s travels with geologist David Love. You’ll find that reading about rocks can be fascinating.  But Love is also a Wyoming boy who grew up on an isolated ranch when the West was still wild, and those stories are just as engaging as the tales about traces of the Triassic on the landscape.

This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.

So begins Rising from the Plains by John McPhee. How can you not read on?

A magazine article with a point. Lots of them.

The most recent issue of RANGE magazine includes an article about the Frying Pan Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. The place is significant because it played an important role in making the American West what it is today.

Joseph Glidden and his partner established the ranch back in 1881 for the sole purpose of demonstrating the usefulness of Glidden’s invention—barbwire—on a large scale. They built and strung 120 miles of fence to make the point.

“Wiring the Frying Pan” in the summer issue of RANGE magazine is a reprint of a chapter from my new book, The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed. The book is filled with unheralded historic events and people as interesting and important—but, perhaps, none so influential in the big picture—as the pointy, prickly devil’s rope that reinvented the West.

Find out more about (and subscribe to) RANGE magazine at www.rangemagazine.com. Find the book online or at bookstores.

A night that will go down in history.

If you’re anywhere near Salt Lake City on May 28, mark your calendar for a historic evening at The King’s English Bookshop. They’ve invited me to show up at 7:00 to read from, talk about, and sign my new book, The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed.

The King’s English is located at the corner of 1500 East and 1500 South.

There may well be a no-pressure, no-grade quiz on Western history, so bone up and be prepared. Be warned, however—the history we’ll talk about from The Lost Frontier won’t be the same stuff they taught you in school or that you read about in your average history book.

See you at The King’s English, May 28 at 7:00 p.m. Bring your friends and neighbors along.

Find The Lost Frontier.

My new history book, The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed, is now available. The Lost Frontier will be found at the usual online booksellers, and any bookstore can get you a copy if it’s not on the shelf.

Some fine writers and historians enjoyed the book. Matt Mayo says, “No dry history here…the subjects are fully fleshed, clothed, and howling for attention.” Chris Enss says it’s “the way history should be written: riveting, involving, and filled with verified facts that make the era of the Old West come alive.” Will Bagley says, “I need to add biographer and historian to the long list of Rod’s astonishing talents.”

I wouldn’t go so far as all that, but I do believe that in the pages of The Lost Frontier you’ll find plenty of interesting history—most of it strange and surprising stuff you didn’t learn about in school.

Advance Coverage.

The artwork above is the cover design for The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed. I think it’s quite handsome.

Behind the cover are nearly thirty nonfiction accounts from Western history about events and incidents on the frontier that haven’t received the notice they deserve from serious historians. They’re interesting, important, informative, and entertaining and I hope fans of the Old West learn something new.

The folks at TwoDot/Globe-Pequot, publisher of the book, are really on the ball, for while The Lost Frontier won’t hit the shelves until May, it has been listed with online booksellers for quite some time—so, if you’re a long-term planner, you can log on and pre-order a copy.