November 7, 1908: The Deaths (?) of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

The 1899 "Fort Worth Five" photo.

Top row, left to right: William Carver and Harvey Logan.

Bottom row, left to right: Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid),

Ben Kilpatrick, and Robert Parker (Butch Cassidy).

November 7, 1908: In San Vicente, Bolivia, soldiers engage in a shootout with 2 men who had robbed the payroll of a silver mine. The robbers were found dead: Apparently, with both men wounded, one shot the other to put him out of his misery, and then used his last bullet on himself.

The local authorities confirmed that these men were the robbers, but they did not know the men's names. The widely-accepted story is that the men were Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh -- a.k.a. the American outlaws known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, respectively.

Butch and Sundance were the last of the major Wild West outlaws. From 1889 to 1901, with their Wild Bunch gang, they robbed banks and trains throughout the Rocky Mountain States, especially Parker's native Utah (which gained Statehood in 1896). In 1901, along with Longabaugh's girlfriend Etta Place, they escaped to New York, and then took a ship to South America: First to Argentina, then to Chile, and finally to Bolivia, in the hopes of becoming respectable ranchers.

But they couldn't make an honest living, so they turned back to robbery, which is why they had to leave Argentina and then Chile. Finally, in 1906, Place got tired of living on the run, and went back to America. History loses track of her after that.

Attempts to determine whether Butch and Sundance actually were the men killed in the San Vicente shootout have thus far failed. It has been alleged, including by Cassidy's sister, that Butch left Bolivia and was still alive as late as 1937. (He would have been 72.) A suggestion that Sundance was still alive as late as 1936 has been proven by DNA testing to be false, but, so far, that's as close as DNA testing has come to proving anything. Among the stories, it has been suggested that Etta may have been alive as late as 1966.

For all we know, the old Utah and Wyoming bank and train robbers of the 1890s may well have had a good laugh about it all for a long time thereafter.

Among the depictions of Butch and Sundance: The 1951 film The Texas Rangers (played by John Doucette and Ian MacDonald, respectively), the 1956 film The Three Outlaws (Neville Brand and Alan Hale Jr.), a 1958 episode of Tales of Wells Fargo (only Butch appears, played by a young Charles Bronson), the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Paul Newman and Robert Redford, with Katharine Ross as Etta), the 1979 film Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (Tom Berenger and William Katt), the 1994 TV-movie The Gambler V: Playing for Keeps (Scott Paulin and Brett Cullen, with Mariska Hargitay as Etta), and the 2004 TV-movie The Legend of Butch & Sundance (David Clayton Rogers and Ryan Browning, with Rachelle Lefevre as Etta).

*

November 7, 1908 was a Saturday. Baseball was out of season. Basketball and hockey were not yet professional. But there was college football to be played. Among the games:

* The Polo Grounds in New York hosted a crowd of 10,000, as undefeated Dartmouth (5-0-1) beat previously undefeated Princeton (5-0-3), 10-6.

* Harvard and the Carlisle Indian School (with Jim Thorpe not yet playing) were both 6-0-1 when facing each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harvard won, 17-0.

* Yale, undefeated, blew a 10-0 lead at home in New Haven, Connecticut, and escaped with a 10-10 with Brown.

* The University of Pennsylvania beat Lafayette, 34-4 at the original Franklin Field (built in 1895, replaced in 1922) in Philadelphia. They finished 11-0-1, and were recognized as the National Champions. A 6-6 tie with Carlisle was the only blemish on their record, though it should be noted that they didn't play either Harvard, Yale or Princeton. They did go on to beat Michigan, though.

* The University of Pittsburgh undefeated, stayed that way, beating the school that would become their arch-rivals, West Virginia, 11-0 at Exposition Park, home of baseball's Pirates. In their 1st 7 games, Pitt had outscored their opponents 128-4. But they lost 3 of their last 4 games, all at home.

* Army beat Springfield, 6-5 at West Point, New York.

* Navy beat Villanova, 30-6 at Annapolis, Maryland.

* Michigan beat Kentucky, 62-0 at Ann Arbor, Michigan.

* Notre Dame beat Indiana, 11-0 at Washington Park in Indianapolis.

* New York University lost to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI beat NYU, 11-0 in Troy, New York.

* And Rutgers could only manage a 6-6 tie with Delaware.

October 26, 1881: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

October 26, 1881: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is fought in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.

While the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday were no angels -- by the standards of the time, the Earps were a lot like a Mob family (just as Henry McCarty, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, killed in the New Mexico Territory earlier that year, was essentially a hitman) -- the Clanton Gang, a.k.a. "The Cowboys," was worse. So if there were any "good guys" in this fight, it was the Earps.

The participants:

First, on the side of the law:

* Virgil Earp, 38, from Pella, Iowa, Town Marshal of Tombstone.

* Wyatt Earp, 33, appointed a Special Policeman by his brother.

* Morgan Earp, 30, also appointed a Special Policeman by brother Virgil.

* Dr. John Henry Holliday, 30, from Griffin, Georgia, a dentist, so "Doc" wasn't just a nickname. Also appointed a Special Policeman.

Doc Holliday

And, on the side of "The Cowboys":

* Joseph Isaac "Ike" Clanton, 34, from Fulton, Missouri.

* Billy Clanton, 19, Ike's brother.

* Frank McLaury, 32, from Belle Plaine, Iowa.

* Tom McLaury, 28, Frank's brother.

* Billy Claiborne, 21, from somewhere in Texas.

All of the Cowboys had tried other professions, but, by 1881, were ranchers outside Tombstone. And they were rustlers, stealing livestock on both sides of the border: Tombstone is 184 miles southeast of Phoenix, 70 miles southeast of Tucson, and 35 miles north of the Mexican border.

What's more, they had no problem taking guns inside the city limits of Tombstone. That was illegal: Contrary to the image of the "Wild West," many Western towns had strict control laws. And the Earps were determined to enforce them, against all comers.

(On the TV show Gunsmoke, Marshal Matt Dillon, played by James Arness, forced all men coming into the Longbranch Saloon to turned their firearms over to him. And since Arness, and therefore Dillon, was 6-foot-6, nobody refused. This reflected the reality in the show's setting, the real-life town of Dodge City, Kansas, where there was, on the average, one or two street gunfights a year.)

Virgil Earp got this law passed:

To Provide against Carrying of Deadly Weapons

Section 1. It is hereby declared unlawful to carry in the hand or upon the person or otherwise any deadly weapon within the limits of said city of Tombstone, without first obtaining a permit in writing.

Section 2: This prohibition does not extend to persons immediately leaving or entering the city, who, with good faith, and within reasonable time are proceeding to deposit, or take from the place of deposit such deadly weapon.

Section 3: All fire-arms of every description, and bowie knives and dirks, are included within the prohibition of this ordinance.

— Tombstone City Ordinance Number 9 Effective April 19, 1881.

A "dirk" is "a long-bladed thrusting dagger." It was often used by pirates, and was popular in Scottish Highlander units of the British Army.

The Earps and Holliday were ready to enforce the Ordinance. The Clanton Gang were ready to disobey it. And so, at 3:00 PM -- not 5:00, as seen in "Spectre of the Gun" -- on October 26, 1881, they convened on Fremont Street, a couple of blocks from the O.K. Corral (the initials stood for "Old Kindersley"), in front of the C.S. Fly photography studio.

Virgil yelled out, "Throw up your hands! I want your guns!" But Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury drew their revolvers, and Virgil yelled, "Hold! I don't mean that!" And then, 30 shots were fired in 30 seconds.

For the record:

* Wyatt Earp was not hit.

* Morgan Earp was hit in the shoulder, but recovered quickly.

* Virgil Earp was shot through the calf, and also recovered quickly.

* Doc Holliday was saved when a bullet, fired by Frank McLaury, hit his holster, allowing him to survive with only a bruise.

* Ike Clanton, despite months of threats that he was going to kill the Earps, was unarmed, and ran away from the scene, without being hit.

* Billy Claiborne was also unarmed, and ran away from the scene, without being hit.

* Frank McLaury was shot in the stomach, by Wyatt, struggled to keep firing, and was shot in the head, and was killed. It's not clear which lawman fired the fatal shot, but an investigation narrowed it down to Wyatt or Morgan.

* Tom McLaury was shot in the chest, by Holliday, and was killed.

* Billy Clanton was shot in the wrist, by Morgan. Billy switched to his uninjured left hand, and kept firing. He was shot in the chest and abdomen, and was killed. It's not clear which lawman fired the fatal shot, but both bullets he took after the wound to his wrist would likely have killed him. Nevertheless, of those who were shot, he was the only one who lived longest to give any kind of account of the fight.

As was the case in the major cities of the East in those days, there was a partisan divide reflected in competing newspapers. The Tombstone Nugget took the Cowboys' side, saying, "Blood flowed as water, and human life was held as a shuttle cock." The Tombstone Epitaph (one of the best newspaper names ever) took the Earps' side, saying, "The feeling among the best class of our citizens is that the Marshal was entirely justified in his efforts to disarm these men, and that being fired upon they had to defend themselves which they did most bravely."

Since the Epitaph had gotten the sanction of the Associated Press, that's the version that the public outside Arizona would come to accept as the truth. The coroner's report backed it up, essentially proving that Billy Clanton did not have his hands raised, thus making Ike Clanton a liar when he said Billy was trying to surrender, thus vindicating the Earps from the charge that it was murder instead of self-defense.

It didn't help the Cowboys' case that none of them lived past 1887. Ike was shot that year, while resisting arrest for stealing a horse, age 40. Billy Claiborne was killed by Frank Leslie in 1882, just 22). In contrast, both Wyatt and Virgil Earp lived into the 20th Century, with Wyatt spreading tall tales about his deeds all the way up to his death in 1929, 48 years after the shootout. He was 80. Virgil died in 1905, age 62.

And while there would be setbacks -- in the next year, Morgan would be killed (30) and Virgil badly wounded -- today, the Clantons would be forgotten if things had been settled peacefully. Then again, so might the Earps and Doc Holliday.

The Doc was already suffering from tuberculosis, and died in 1887, age 36. His last words were a comment on the fact that he was dying in bed, with bare feet, rather than in a gunfight with his boots on: "This is funny."

The incident inspired the films My Darling Clementine in 1946, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957, and both Wyatt Earp and Tombstone in 1994. It also inspired, ironically, TV science fiction, first with an episode of Doctor Who in 1966; and, from 2016 to 2021, with Wynonna Earp, with a supernaturally-immortal Holliday helping Wyatt's great-great-granddaughters fight monsters -- and having a baby with the titular Wynonna, a choice forced on the scriptwriters by star Melanie Scrofano's real-life pregnancy.

In the 1983-84 TV season, NBC aired a series titled The Rousters, starring Chad Everett as Wyatt Earp III, who ran both a carnival and a bounty-hunting business. In spite of that show and the later Wynonna Earp, in real life, Wyatt is not known to have had any children, and thus has no descendants. The only child born to any of the Earp brothers is a daughter born to Virgil. There are living descendants of Earp siblings not involved in the gunfight.

DeForest Kelley played Ike Clanton in a TV version of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on a 1955 episode of You Are There, played Morgan Earp in the 1957 film adaptation, and in the Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun," his Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy was forced by an alien to stand in for Tom McLaury.

From the 1957 film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Left to right:

Kirk Douglas as Holliday, Burt Lancaster as Wyatt,

John Hudson as Virgil, and DeForest Kelley as Morgan.

That episode nearly aired on the anniversary: October 25, 1968. Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) was forced to stand in for Ike Clanton, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) as the considerably younger Billy Clanton, Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) as Frank McLaury, and Ensign Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) as Billy Claiborne.

From "Spectre of the Gun." Left to right:

Charles Maxwell as Virgil, Rex Holman as Morgan,

Ron Soble as Wyatt, and Sam Gilman as Holliday.

Tombstone, founded in 1879, was a frontier boomtown, due to nearby silver mines, with a population of about 14,000 by the time of the gunfight -- a huge amount for a town in the West in that era. An 1886 fire ended the boomtown status, but its status as a County Seat saved it from being completely abandoned by the time Arizona gained Statehood in 1912.

From the 1994 film Tombstone, probably the most accurate

pop-culture version of the story. Left to right:
Val Kilmer as Holliday, Sam Elliott as Virgil,

Kurt Russell as Wyatt, and Bill Paxton as Morgan.

In 1964, Detroit-based investors bought the Corral and several other historic buildings, and turned Tombstone into a "living history museum," a Wild West counterpart to Colonial Williamsburg. They also bought The Tombstone Epitaph. In 1975, the daily paper was converted into a weekly. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Arizona.

Today, the population of "The Town Too Tough to Die" is listed as 1,308 -- and they may get that population doubled in tourists.

*

October 26, 1881 was a Wednesday. Baseball season was over. No college football games were played that day. Hockey barely existed. And basketball wouldn't be invented for another 10 years. So there were no scores on that historic day. There was, however, a notable birth on this date: British actress Margaret Wycherly.

September 23, 1969: "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid" Premieres

September 23, 1969: Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid premieres, with Paul Newman as Robert Leroy Parker, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy; Robert Redford as Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, a.k.a. the Sundance Kid; and Katharine Ross as Etta Place, a.k.a. "The Sundance Woman." It was one of the earliest "revisionist Westerns," telling the story of the Wild West more like how it actually was, than the traditional, far simpler story.

Scriptwriter William Goldman and director George Roy Hill knew that the 1960s were changing things, so they made a Western for the times. They had the vision. Or, as Goldman had Newman/Cassidy say, "I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals."

The real Butch and Sundance were active in the Rocky Mountains, especially Utah and Wyoming, in the 1890s. Targeted by local sheriffs and -- "Who are those guys?" As it turned out, the Pinkerton detective agency -- in 1901, they fled to South America, and became farmers in Bolivia. In 1908, when that stopped panning out, they went back to robbery.

The story that we've all heard is that, on November 3, 1908, the Bolivian Army cornered them in a piazza, and beat them in a shootout. It's been said that Butch was an expert robber, but never killed anyone in his life, until the end, when he used his last 2 bullets on an already-wounded Sundance, and then on himself.

But it's also been said that the army caught someone else, and that Butch and Sundance survived, got away, and went back to America, and lived a while longer. Director George Roy Hill finished the last scene with them frozen and still fighting, with the sound of gunfire all around them, giving the illusion that, maybe, just maybe, they pulled off the million-to-one escape.

Lessons to be learned from this movie:

1. Nothing lasts forever, not even the Wild West.
2. Use enough dynamite, no more.
3. There are no rules in a knife fight.
4. The man who is the best at something might not be the best man at it for you.

5. Don't worry about being unable to swim when the fall will probably kill you.

6. Life, especially a life of crime, is harder in a foreign country, especially when the dominant language is not your first language.

7. If you got a woman who looks like a young Katharine Ross, and she says we should go home because it's too dangerous to stay where we are, go home.

8. Western movies rarely tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

*

September 23, 1969 was a Tuesday. These Major League Baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox, 8-3 at Fenway Park in Boston. Carl Yastrzemski hit 2 home runs, and American League Comeback Player of the Year Tony Conigliaro hit 1, knocking Mel Stottlemyre out of the box after 4 innings.

* The New York Mets beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-2 at Shea Stadium. Bud Harrelson singled home the winning run against Bob Gibson in the bottom of the 11th inning. Tug McGraw was the winning pitcher, with 4 innings of relief of Jim McAndrew. Lou Brock went 2-for-6 in defeat. The next night, the Mets beat the Cards, 6-0, and clinched the National League Eastern Division title.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Roberto Clemente went 1-for-3 with 2 walks. Willie Stargell went 0-for-5.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Baltimore Orioles, 3-1 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The Orioles' only run came on a homer by Frank Robinson. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-3. But the O's, already having clinched the AL Eastern Division title, were doomed in this game by back-to-back bases-loaded walks of Ken Harrelson and Tony Horton by Tom Phoebus in the 3rd inning. Sam McDowell went the distance for the win.

* The Cincinnati Reds swept a doubleheader from the Los Angeles Dodgers, 6-3 and 5-2. Over the 2 games, Pete Rose went 6-for-10 with a home run and 2 RBIs, and Johnny Bench went 1-for-6 with a walk and 2 RBIs.

* The Montreal Expos beat the Chicago Cubs, 7-3 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Ernie Banks went 0-for-4.

* The Minnesota Twins beat the Kansas City Royals, 6-2 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. Harmon Killebrew went 1-for-3 with a walk. Rod Carew went 2-for-5.

* The Atlanta Braves beat the Houston Astros, 10-2 at the Astrodome in Houston. Hank Aaron went 2-for-5 with 2 RBIs.

* The San Diego Padres beat the San Francisco Giants, 5-4 at San Diego Stadium (later renamed Jack Murphy Stadium and Qualcomm Stadium). Willie Mays went 0-for-3 with a walk. The night before, he hit his 600th career home run against Mike Corkins of the Padres.

* The California Angels beat the Seattle Pilots, 5-4 at Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim). Following a home run by Don Mincher in the 4th inning, the Pilots took a 4-2 lead in the top of the 6th, but, if you read Ball Four by the since-traded Jim Bouton, you can probably guess what happened: The bullpen blew it in the bottom of the 6th.

* The Oakland Athletics swept a doubleheader from the Chicago White Sox at the Oakland Coliseum, 4-3 and 5-3. Reggie Jackson went 0-for-4 in the opener, but in the nightcap, he went 1-for-2 with 3 walks, his hit being his 47th home run of the season. In spite of his illustrious career, 47 would remain his career high.

* And the Detroit Tigers and the Washington Senators were rained out at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. It was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The Senators swept, 8-4 and 7-4. Jim Hannan outpitched Denny McLain, and then the Senators beat Mickey Lolich. Al Kaline did not play in the 1st game, and went 1-for-5 in the 2nd game.

September 12, 1959: "Bonanza" Premieres

House Cartwright: Left to right: Pernell Roberts as Adam,

Michael Landon as Joe, Lorne Greene as Ben and Dan Blocker as Hoss

September 12, 1959: Bonanza premieres on NBC. For 20 years, CBS had Gunsmoke, a candidate for the title of the greatest Western show in TV history. For 14 years, NBC had Bonanza, the other candidate -- and, in my opinion, the better candidate.

The series is set in Virginia City, Nevada, which really was one of the leading cities in the American West in the 19th Century, though it didn't last long as such in the 20th Century. A tombstone showing a death date of 1868 in a 1967 episode shows that the series takes place 99 years in the past.

Lorne Greene plays Ben Cartwright, a former ship captain and Army scout who went west and made a fortune in silver mining -- the titular bonanza -- which he parlayed into the Ponderosa, a huge cattle ranch and logging operation on the shore of Lake Tahoe. This made him possibly the richest man in the Nevada Territory, and, eventually, within the show's continuity, one of the founding fathers of the State of Nevada.

He married 3 times, to 3 different women, who gave him 3 different sons, and all 3 marriages ended in tragedy. His 1st wife, Elizabeth Stoddard (Geraldine Brooks), was the daughter of a sea captain under whom young Ben served. Given the state of medicine at the time, giving birth to Adam was too much for her, and she died.

His 2nd wife, Inger Stevenson, was a Swedish shopkeeper (played by Swedish actress Inga Swenson), who followed Ben west, giving birth to Hoss in the middle of a wagon train's journey. She was killed in an Indian attack. His 3rd wife, Marie De Marigny (Felicia Farr), was a New Orleans belle with a checkered past. Ben met her on a visit to the Crescent City, they fell for each other, and he married her and took her west. Some time after giving birth to Joe, she fell from a horse and died.

The show has the best opening in the history of TV, and I will knock anyone who wants to try it off this hill. With a stirring theme song, it shows a map of the Ponderosa, with a fire burning through it, and then Ben and his 3 sons come charging across the prairie on their horses. Then each is shown in turn, although not always in the same order: Sometimes it's by age, sometimes in alphabetical order, sometimes no discernable order. The opening closes with showing one or two guest stars for that episode. (The song did have words, and a cast album was made, with Greene, an Ottawa native and once a radio announcer known as The Voice of Canada, singing it.)

The eldest son, Adam, was the smartest and the most sensible, but also a bit moody. He was the only one of the Cartwrights who was mentioned as having attended college, studying architecture and engineering "back east," and designed the house on the Ponderosa. (Greene liked the house's exterior and its studio set so much that he had an exact replica built on his own land.)

By 1964, his portrayer, Pernell Roberts, wanted out, and so he was written out, having been said to have gone to Australia to make his own fortune as a sheep rancher.

The middle son was born with the name Eric, but was given the nickname "Hoss," a Scandinavian term for, as Inger put it, "a big, friendly fellow." And he was big: His portrayer, Dan Blocker, was 6-foot-4 and 320 pounds. Hoss wasn't very smart, and some men took advantage of his gullibility. But he was kindhearted, and usually figured out what the right thing to do was.

The youngest son was Joseph, and since he was so much younger and, at least at first, smaller than his brothers, especially Hoss, he was nicknamed Little Joe. Michael Landon played him, and he inherited his mother's Southern, Louisiana, New Orleans tempestuous nature.

In one early episode, taking place on the eve of the American Civil War, Joe took the secessionist side, and Adam, born in New England, took the Union side. Hoss, born in the Midwest, tried to make peace between them, and it didn't work. They came to blows, but Ben separated them before there could be a winner, and said, "Brother against brother? How dare you? Both of you?"

Ben, always called "Pa" by his sons, was strict. He frequently had to tell his sons, especially Joe, "Take your feet off the table." On the Ponderosa, and on missions like cattle drives and posses, his word was law. Still, he was a believer in American democracy, to the point that -- unusual for TV shows of that period, but then, this wasn't taking place in the present day, making it easier for the censors -- he stood up for black people, Mexicans, Asians and Native Americans. (The fact that a Native's arrow had killed his 2nd wife didn't matter: He built friendships with some nearby tribesmen.)

Despite already having white hair, Greene was just 44 years old when the show began. Roberts and Blocker were 31, too old to play his sons. Landon was almost 23, young enough to be Ben's son, but too old to be a teenager. By the time the show ended, Landon was 36, and already writing and directing episodes of the show.

Adam was effectively replaced by Candy Canaday, played by David Canary, a ranch hand who rose to the rank of Ben's foreman. Ben Johnson, noted for his Western roles, joined the cast as ranch hand Bronc Evans. By 1970, in order to keep the attention of younger viewers, who could no longer take Landon seriously as the youngest son, 14-year-old Mitch Vogel was brought in to play Jamie Hunter, an orphan that Ben soon adopts. The character, who predated The Brady Bunch's Cousin Oliver by 4 years, never caught on.

(Ironically, when Battlestar Galactica, in which Greene later starred, was canceled by ABC, it was brought back as Galactica 1980, and the child genius character of Dr. Zee was played in the pilot by Robbie Rist, who had played Cousin Oliver. After the pilot, he was replaced by a British actor named Patrick Stuart. Not "Stewart.")

The show kept going and going. But on May 13, 1972, after the end of the 13th season, Blocker died from complications from gallbladder surgery. He was only 43 years old. When the 14th season began, it was mentioned, without specifics, that Hoss had died -- the 1st time in TV history that this had been said onscreen.

Another acknowledgement of this was an episode in which Joe marries a woman named Alice Harper, but she is murdered shortly thereafter. At the end of the episode, Joe stands over her grave, and says, "I love you." This wasn't just Joe saying it to Alice: It was also Landon saying it to Blocker.

This gave rise to the impression that, every time one of the Cartwright sons got married, the bride soon died. In fact, Joe was the only one ever shown to get married. This impression may have been confused by the fact that all of Ben's wives had died young, thus making the next wife possible. But although Ben did date after the show's opening, he never remarried.

But without Hoss, the show just wasn't the same, and the last episode aired on January 16, 1973. Just 20 months later, Landon began starring on Little House on the Prairie, also on NBC, also in the Wild West period, but not nearly as far west: The prairie was in Minnesota. He played Charles Ingalls, father of Laura Ingalls Wilder, on whose books the show was based. At long last, Landon was the one being called "Pa."

For a time, a Bonanza theme park opened outside the real Virginia City, but, as memories of the show at its peak (from the 1959 pilot until Roberts' 1965 departure) faded, the park lost money, and closed. This was also the case with the Bonanza and Ponderosa chains of casual-dining steakhouses, in which Blocker was an early investor.

NBC would produce sequel movies, after Greene died in 1987 and Landon followed in 1991. Taking place in 1905 and shortly thereafter, Michael Landon Jr. directed and starred as "Benj" Cartwright, the son of Little Joe and his 2nd wife, who was apparently also dead. Emily Warfield played Joe's sister, Sara. Alistair MacDougal, an Australian actor, played Adam's Australian-born son, Adam Cartwright Jr., a.k.a. A.C.

Brian Leckner, who bore a bit of resemblance to Blocker, played Joshua Overton, the son that Hoss never knew he had. Thereafter, the character was called Josh Cartwright. Dirk Blocker, Dan's son and (naturally) an even closer lookalike, appeared, but not as a Cartwright: He played Walter Fenster, a newspaper reporter. Ben Johnson returned as Bronc, now the ranch foreman, along with Shaft actor Richard Roundtree as his assistant, Jacob Briscoe.

The fates of the original Cartwrights were revealed: Hoss died in 1872, drowning while saving another man from the that fate, having no idea that his romance on a recent visit to St. Louis had produced a son; Little Joe, who would have been in his 50s at the time, died riding up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt in 1898; Ben died of old age the next year; and Adam was still alive and ranching in Australia, matching the fact that Roberts was the only one of the original four then still alive. Having gone on to star in Trapper John, M.D. from 1979 to 1986, Roberts died in 2010.

*

September 12, 1959 was a Saturday. It was the opening week of the college football season -- sort of. Only 2 games were played that day, both in a minor conference -- appropriately, out west. New Mexico State beat Northern Arizona, 35-0 at Aggie Memorial Stadium in Las Cruces, New Mexico. And North Dakota beat Montana, 27-19 at Dornblaser Field in Missoula, Montana.

These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 4-0 at Yankee Stadium. Don Mossi pitched a 4-hit shutout to beat Whitey Ford. Al Kaline went 2-for-3 with 2 walks. Mickey Mantle went 0-for-4, and Yogi Berra did not play.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Kansas City Athletics, 4-3 at Fenway Park in Boston. Ted Williams did not play. Roger Maris appeared as a pinch-hitter for the A's, but did not reach base.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Baltimore Orioles, 6-1 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Brooks Robinson went 0-for-3 and was hit by a pitch.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Washington Senators, 7-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Cubs, 6-4 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Bob Gibson got the win. Ken Boyer hit a home run. Stan Musial did not play. Walt "Moose" Moryn hit a home run for the Cubs, but Ernie Banks did not play.

* The Milwaukee Braves beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Eddie Mathews hit a home run, and Hank Aaron went 2-for-4 with 2 RBIs. Frank Robinson went 0-for-4.

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-1 at Seals Stadium in San Francisco. Orlando Cepeda hit a home run, and Willie Mays went 2-for-3 with 2 walks and 2 RBIs.

* Despite it being a Saturday, with a doubleheader between them at the Los Angeles Coliseum the day before and another game the following day, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Los Angeles Dodgers were not scheduled for this day.

Also, in English soccer, Arsenal beat Manchester City, 3-1 at Highbury in North London.

September 7, 1876: The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid

The James Brothers: Jesse (left) and Frank

September 7, 1876: Jesse James, his brother, and his friends decide to rob a bank. It doesn't go so well.

Jesse James and his brother Frank were from Missouri, and, during the American Civil War, when Missouri remained in the Union but had Southern sympathies, joined William Quantrill and his group, Quantrill's Raiders. They called themselves "bushwhackers," but, in modern terms, they were terrorists. Shortly after the war ended, Union troops shot Quantrill, who took nearly a month to die as a result of his wound.

The James brothers made it back to Missouri, and joined with Cole Younger. He brought in his brothers, Bob and Jim. They robbed banks and trains all over what would now be called the Midwest. In modern terms, they were an organized crime family. Not Italian, but a Missouri Mafia, a Confederate Cosa Nostra.

The Younger Brothers

Bob Younger wanted to go well outside the James-Younger Gang's usual territory, to the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, about 40 miles south of Minneapolis. His explanation was its connection to 2 Union Generals who had become Republican politicians: Benjamin Franklin Butler, a Congressman from Massachusetts (and later its Governor), who had famously insulted the women of New Orleans during the war; and Governor Adelbert Ames of Mississippi, who supported civil rights for black people, including freed slaves.

Ames had married Butler's daughter, and his father owned the Ames Mill in Northfield. There was a rumored that the elder Mills had deposited $50,000 in cash in that bank. (About $1.36 million in 2022 dollars, a very tempting sum.)

The bank building, preserved

Cole tried to talk his brother out of the plan, but Bob refused to back down. Reluctantly, Cole agreed to go, writing to their brother Jim, then in California, to come home. Jim had never wanted anything to do with Cole's outlaw activities, but he agreed to go out of family loyalty.

Hardware store merchant J.S. Allen saw the outlaws, figured out what was happening, and yelled, "Get your guns boys, they're robbing the bank!" That spurred Northfield men into action, arming themselves with long guns in a street shootout that lasted around 7 minutes, leaving 2 gang members dead in the street: Clell Miller and Bill Caldwell. Bob Younger's horse was killed, and Frank James assassinated First National Bank acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood. Swedish immigrant Nicolaus Gustafson was shot in the head by Cole Younger, and died of his injuries four days later. Bank teller Alonzo Bunker was shot in the shoulder as he tried to escape, but survived.

The James brothers escaped west into the Dakota Territory, while the remaining gang members were killed or taken into custody. The Younger brothers pleaded guilty on November 20, 1876, and were sentenced to life terms in prison.

Jesse James was killed by a supposed ally in 1882. Bob Younger died in prison of tuberculosis in 1889. Cole and Jim Younger were paroled in 1901. Jim committed suicide in 1902. Cole traveled to Missouri, where he joined a "Wild West" show with Frank James. Frank died in 1915, and Cole the following year.

The raid has been portrayed, with varying levels of accuracy, in 3 films: The True Story of Jesse James in 1957, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid in 1972, and The Long Riders in 1980.

*

September 7, 1876 was a Thursday. The only major sports league in North American was baseball's National League, but no games were played on this day.

August 2, 1876: The Death of Wild Bill Hickok

August 2, 1876: James Butler Hickok is shot and killed in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, now in the State of South Dakota. He was 39 years old.

He grew up on the Illinois plains, in what's now the Chicago suburb of Troy Grove. At age 18, he thought he'd killed a man in a fight, and fled, taking his father's name, William Hickok. Knowing that his father had used the family house as part the Underground Railroad, assisting fleeing slaves, he joined the Union Army, and later served as a U.S. Army scout. "Wild Bill" served several towns as a lawman, but his chief means of income appears to have been gambling, especially cardplaying.

There are so many legends about the Wild West, including the belief that any saloon you could walk into would have a poker game going on. Poker was Hickok's favored game, but the most common card game in the Wild -- or "Old" -- West was a different game played with a standard deck of cards, faro.

To play bridge in the Wild West was to risk ridicule, as that was considered a game for gentlemen -- and gentlemen were considered more "gentle" than "men," in the West, and had to work harder to prove themselves to the men, as Theodore Roosevelt would eventually find out. Faro, a game dating to 17th Century France, was popularly with manly men, but poker overtook it as such in the early 20th Century, around the time that "the frontier closed," and "dime novels" telling tales of the Wild West began to surpass reality.

Hickok was good at poker, better than he was at enforcing the law. Fortunately for him, he was also a good marksman. Nevertheless, the English writer Joseph G. Rosa (1932-2015), who published They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok in 1974, and is considered the foremost authority on him, has been able to document "only" 6 kills. (Among Rosa's other books are The Gunfighter: Man Or Myth?, and books about the guns such men used.)

On August 1, 1876, having had a run of bad luck, Hickok went to Deadwood, home of Nuttal & Mann's saloon. There, he had a good game, taking a gambler named Jack McCall for all he had. As McCall turned to leave, Hickok gave him back the money, and suggested that McCall get something to eat.

Instead of comforting McCall, as it could have, it infuriated him, and he had Hickok set up. Knowing how many enemies he had made, Hickok always sat with his back to the wall when he played cards. But on his visit to Nuttal & Mann's for another poker game the next day, every chair with a back to the wall was taken. So he couldn't see who was coming in.

McCall came in. He shot Hickok in the back of the head, killing him instantly, and freezing his face in a smile. Hickok was holding two pairs: The aces and eights of spades and clubs, all black. This became known as "The Dead Man's Hand."

(In my hometown in New Jersey, I once saw a car with a personalized license plate: "ACESN8S.")

Hickok was a friend of Martha Jane Canary, the frontierswoman and scout known as Calamity Jane. Those who love the legends of the Wild West like to imagine that they were lovers, and that Wild Bill was the father of at least one of Jane's children. Certainly, she cared enough about him to try to avenge him, going after McCall with a meat cleaver, later claiming it was because she had left her guns at her rooming house and it was the only weapon available.

Calamity Jane at Wild Bill's grave, sometime in the 1890s

A native of Kentucky, McCall was hanged for the crime on March 1, 1877. He was 24 years old. Calamity Jane, a native of Missouri, and also 24 at the time of Wild Bill's death, later joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, and died from the effects of her drinking in 1903, at 51.

In 1941, a woman named Jean Hickok Burkhardt McCormick came forward, claiming to be the daughter of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. The documentation she came up with -- which gave September 25, 1873 as both the date of their marriage and the date of her birth, making her almost 68 years old at the time of her claim -- have been disputed ever since, and she got no government benefits from it.

James Butler Hickok, a.k.a. Wild Bill, has been played by William S. Hart in the 1923 silent film Wild Bill Hickok, Wild Bill Elliott in the 1940 film Prairie Schooners, Guy Madison and later Andy Devine in the 1951-58 CBS series The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Lloyd Bridges on a 1964 episode of The Great Adventure, Jeff Corey in the 1970 film Little Big Man, Charles Bronson in the 1977 film The White Buffalo, Josh Brolin in the 1989-92 ABC series The Young Riders, William Russ in a 1995 episode of Legend, Sam Shepard in the 1999 TNT film Purgatory, and Luke Hemsworth in the 2017 film Hickok.

Martha Jane Canary, a.k.a. Calamity Jane, has been played by Jane Russell in the 1948 film The Paleface, Norma Crane on an 1961 episode of Have Gun -- Will Travel, Stefanie Powers on a 1963 episode of Bonanza (which pairs her up with not Wild Bill but John "Doc" Holliday, whom she appears never to have met in real life), and Catherine O'Hara in the 1995 Disney film Tall Tale: The Unbelievable Adventures of Pecos Bill. (Pecos Bill was a fictional cowboy and folk hero, something of a Wild West version of Paul Bunyan.)

And, together, they were portrayed in the 1936 film The Plainsman by Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, in the 1940 film Young Bill Hickok by Roy Rogers and Sally Payne, in the 1953 film Calamity Jane by Howard Keel and Doris Day, on a 1966 episode of Death Valley Days by Rhodes Reasons and Fay Spain, in the 1984 CBS movie Calamity Jane by Frederic Forrest and Jane Alexander, in the 1995 film Wild Bill by Jeff Bridges (Lloyd's son) and Ellen Barkin, in the 1995 CBS movie Buffalo Girls by Sam Elliott and Anjelica Huston, and by Keith Carradine and Robin Weigert in the 2004-06 HBO series Deadwood (and Jane by Weigert again in its 2019 film sequel).

UPDATE: Stephen Amell, who played Oliver Queen, a.k.a. the superhero Green Arrow, and Emily Bett Rickards, who played his crimefighting associate and later wife Felicity Smoak, on the TV show Arrow, played Hickok and Canary in the 2024 film Calamity Jane.

*

August 2, 1876 was a Wednesday. Only one game was played that day, in the National League. The Hartford Dark Blues beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 15-5 at the Hartford Ball Club Grounds in the Connecticut capital. Neither of these teams would survive the 1877 season, and the A's founded in Philadelphia in 1901, who have been in Oakland since 1968, have no connection to them besides name.

But, thus far, "Wild Bill" has been a nickname for 14 Major League Baseball players, most notably William Edward Donovan, who won 185 games, pitching mostly for the 1900s and 1910s Detroit Tigers; and William Anthony Hallahan, who won 102 games, and was with the St. Louis Cardinals when they won the World Series in 1926, 1931 and 1934.

July 25, 1890: Annie Oakley, Little Sure Shot -- This Time, Too Sure

July 25, 1890: Annie Oakley was, and remains, America's most famous trick-shot artist with a rifle. The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull gave her the Native American name "Little Sure Shot." This time, she was a little too sure.

Phoebe Ann Mosey was born on August 13, 1860 in a log cabin near Willowdell, Ohio. Her father died when she was only 6 years old. To feed her family, she hunted wild animals, and became an expert with a rifle.

Legend has it that, on Thanksgiving Day 1875, only 15 years old, she defeated one of the top marksmen of the time, Frank Butler, a 28-year-old Irish immigrant, in a shooting contest in North Star, Ohio: Each of them made 24 straight shots, but Annie made her 25th, and Frank didn't make his. The legend is true, except for the year: It was 1881, so Annie was 21, and Frank 34. So it wasn't an egregious age difference when they got married the next year, and Annie began using the surname Oakley. They never had children.

In 1885, they joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. William F. Cody, then 39, was a Pony Express rider and then a U.S. Army scout during the American Civil War, rising to the rank of Colonel -- hence, in the musical Annie Get Your Gun, the song "Colonel Buffalo Bill." Nicknamed for his skill at hunting buffalo -- he was among those who had nearly rendered the once-plentiful species extinct -- he had been running a traveling show depicting stories from "The Wild West" since 1872, at a time when the Western U.S. was still at its wildest.

Among the people who participated in his show were James B. "Wild Bill" Hickock (until his death in 1876) and (until his assassination by the U.S. government in 1890) the Hunkpapa Lakota leader known to the white man as Sitting Bull . Being only 5 feet tall, Sitting Bull called Annie "Little Sure Shot."

Cody took his Wild West Show all over the world, and performed before Queen Victoria of Britain in 1887, as part of the celebration of her Golden Jubilee, the 50th Anniversary of her ascension to the throne.

In 1890, the Show toured Europe. A crowd of 20,000 cheered her in Paris, and President Sadi Carnot of France offered her a commission in his Army. On March 3, they performed in Rome, before a crowd that included Pope Leo XIII.

On July 25, they performed in Berlin. Among the 10,000 people in attendance were the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II; and Princes Rupprecht of Bavaria, Maximilian of Baden and Leopold of Prussia. William W. Phelps, the U.S. Minister to Germany, and his family were also on hand. At one point, a bucking bull broke loose, and rushed toward the crowd. Cody handled it himself, lassoing the bull and bringing it to a halt, and got a standing ovation.

One of Annie's tricks was to have Frank stand absolutely still, smoking a cigarette, and she would shoot the ash off it. Having seen her accomplish this, despite the legend saying that she was hungover, the Kaiser stood up, and volunteered to be her next "target."

A grandson of Victoria, his mother was the British Queen's eldest daughter, Princess Victoria. Like his cousins, who eventually became King George V of Britain and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, he adored his grandmother. But he always resented his mother, who, as other witnesses were ready to report, mistreated him. Apparently, even to this day, it is a tradition for British royals to treat their grandchildren wonderfully; their own children, not so much.

Just 31 years old at the time, Wilhelm had ascended to the throne only 2 years earlier, as his grandfather, Wilhelm I, had died of old age, and then his father, Friedrich III, had died of cancer only 3 months later. A difficult birth left Wilhelm with a withered left arm and, it has been speculated, brain damage, which led to his later erratic behavior.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, circa 1890

Just 4 months before this show, he had fired Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire, the man who made his grandfather the last King of Prussia and the 1st Emperor of Germany. Bismarck was 75, and had frittered away much of his popularity with anti-worker policies, so it was far from unwarranted.

Now, Wilhelm was essentially Germany's dictator. But even if he had still been a mere constitutional monarch, Annie did not dare refuse his volunteering. Regardless of whether she was hungover, she wasn't stupid: She told the Kaiser to hold the lit cigarette in his hand, rather than his mouth. That's the part of the story that everybody forgets. He had enough sense to understand, and the stunt worked: She shot the ash off, and nobody got hurt, not even their pride.

On November 1, 1894, Annie demonstrated her skill in one of Thomas Edison's earliest films. In 1898, at the start of the Spanish-American War, she wrote to President William McKinley, "offering the government the services of a company of 50 'lady sharpshooters' who would provide their own arms and ammunition should the U.S. go to war with Spain." McKinley declined her offer. She was badly injured in a train accident in 1901, and scaled back her touring.

Buffalo Bill Cody died in 1917. By that point, World War I was raging, and nearly everyone outside Germany blamed the Kaiser for starting it, and for the bloodshed and turmoil that resulted. Annie claimed to have written him a letter offering him a rematch on the lit-cigarette trick, but said he never responded. The following year, the Kaiser abdicated, and Germany surrendered, ending the war.

Annie Oakley was badly injured again in 1922, this time in a car crash, but recovered, and was still performing as late as 1924. She died of pernicious anemia on November 3, 1926. She was 66 years old. Frank Butler was so distraught that he refused to eat, and died only 18 days later.

Exiled to the Netherlands, Kaiser Wilhelm II died in 1941. If Annie Oakley had been less sure of a shot, she might have killed him in 1890. Most likely, due to the Kaiser's volunteering, it would have been considered an accident, and she wouldn't have been prosecuted. His brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, would have been regent to Wilhelm's son, Kronprinz Wilhelm, until he turned 18 in 1900, making this prospective Kaiser Wilhelm III 34 years old in 1914.

Would World War I have been avoided? Or was there enough "war fever" in the Imperial German military that a war with Britain, or France, or Russia, causing the other alliances to kick in, was inevitable? We'll never know.

*

July 25, 1890 was a Friday. Baseball was the only professional team sport in America, and it was the year of the Players' League, so there were 3 major leagues.

In the National League:

* The New York Giants lost to the Cincinnati Reds, 10-6 at League Park in Cincinnati.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Cleveland Spiders, 8-5 at an early version of League Park in Cleveland.

* The Boston Beaneaters beat the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, 7-3 at Recreation Park in Pittsburgh.

* The Chicago Colts beat the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, 5-3 at West Side Park in Chicago. The Colts became the Cubs, and the Bridegrooms became the Dodgers.

In the Players' League:

* The New York Giants beat the Cleveland Infants, 11-8 at Brotherhood Park in Cleveland. Although these Giants had several of the defecting Giants of the NL, they went back, so the PL Giants folded with the PL.

* The Brooklyn Ward's Wonders beat the Buffalo Bisons, 8-3 at Olympic Park in Buffalo.

* The Boston Reds beat the Pittsburgh Burghers, 10-2 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Stockings, 7-3 at South Side Park in Chicago. Both teams folded with the PL, and were not connected to the later A's and White Sox.

And 1 game was played in the American Association: The Toledo Maumees beat the Rochester Broncos, 7-6 at Culver Field in Rochester, New York.

July 14, 1881: The Death of Billy the Kid

July 14, 1881: Billy Bonney dies. Billy the Kid, however, lives on. And no one seems to get his story right.

On the 1973 album that launched him to stardom, Piano Man, Billy Joel included a song titled "The Ballad of Billy the Kid." He made the mistake of writing the lyrics first and doing the research second. He continued to play the song live through his tour for his album 52nd Street in 1978-79, saying, "Every word in this song is a lie," and has occasionally played it since.

BJ got the details really wrong. He said the Kid was from Wheeling, West Virginia. No source about him had said that before. He said the Kid started his criminal career by robbing a bank in Colorado, and eventually "robbed his way from Utah to Oklahoma." There is no evidence that he ever robbed a bank, or committed any crime in any of those 3 States. (BJ may have been confused by the fact that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid operated out of Utah. But the Indian Territory wasn't even opened to white settlement, as the Oklahoma Territory, until 1889, 8 years after the Kid died.)

BJ said the Kid "soon put many older guns to shame." There is no evidence that he ever engaged in a classic Wild West gunfight. He said the Kid was hanged in front of a large crowd. He was caught, and he was sentenced to be hanged... but he escaped.

BJ also said, "He never had a sweetheart." Far from the truth: He thought his girlfriend was in the room with him when he was killed.

One thing BJ got absolutely right: "The cowboy and the rancher knew his name."

*

Or, at least, his nickname. He was born on September 17, 1859 in... New York. The same city as Billy Joel, a Bronx native. Apparently, the Kid was born in Manhattan, although Brooklyn was also claimed. At birth, his name was Henry McCarty, so it wasn't William. Or Bill, or Billy, or Mac, or Buddy. (Sorry for drifting into a Sheryl Crow song there.)

After his father died, his mother Catherine moved the family to Indianapolis, where she met William Antrim. They moved to Wichita, Kansas, where Catherine married William. But when she died, William left Henry and his brother Joseph. Desperate, Henry started robbing -- not banks, but groceries, clothing, and, finally, guns. He moved to Arizona and stole horses, and was first mentioned in a newspaper, listed as "Kid Antrim." Because of his stepfather, he began to be listed as "William Antrim." Soon, these were combined into "Billy the Kid."

He reached the New Mexico Territory (it became a State in 1912), and began using the name William H. Bonney. He began working for ranchers, including stealing horses. Those ranch owners were rich, the men working for them were not. The owners were like Mob bosses, and, in what became known as the Lincoln County War, they hired what would now be called hitmen. And Billy the Kid was one of them.

The photograph shown above is the only one of him known to exist. (There is one other alleged to show him and another man, but it hasn't been authenticated.) Usually, this photo shows him holding the rifle with his right hand, and a Colt revolver on his left hip. (The brand of firearm he used was pretty much the only detail the Billy Joel song got right.) This gave rise to the belief that he was lefthanded. In 1958, Paul Newman starred in a movie about him, titled The Left Handed Gun. Except the photo process meant that the image was reversed. The image shown above is how he would have appeared to the photographer. The Kid was righthanded, as were most of the men now remembered as Wild West gunfighters. (In the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles, Gene Wilder played Jim, "The Waco Kid," and he was a lefty.)

But myths about Billy abounded. He was already the subject of "dime novels," telling stories involving him that simply weren't true, or were exaggerations of what he actually did. People who knew him later told interviewers that he didn't like that, but he never killed anybody over it.

He was captured by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1880, and was sentenced to be hanged. According to records, Judge Warren Bristol said, "You are going to hang until you are dead, dead, dead." Billy responded by saying, "You can go to Hell, Hell, Hell."

His execution was set for May 13, 1881, in Lincoln. But on April 28, he escaped. He is only known, for sure, to have killed 4 men in his life, and 2 of them were in his escape. And that was while his legs were still shackled, before he found an axe and cut the shackles. Whatever else he may have been in real life, Billy the Kid was no dummy, and he was no coward.

The Governor of the Territory was Lew Wallace, who had just published the novel Ben-Hur. He placed a $500 bounty on the Kid's head. Garrett, embarrassed by the Kid having escaped his custody, was determined to get him, as a matter of pride as much as money. He had heard that the Kid was in Fort Sumner, and took 2 deputies with him.

On July 14, 1881, Garrett found Pete Maxwell, son of a land baron and known to be a friend of the Kid. They talked for hours, until midnight. Then Billy walked in. This was less than 2 years after Thomas Edison made the first practical electric light bulb, so the light was poor, and Billy couldn't recognize Garrett. He had a Mexican girlfriend, and thought she might be there, so he asked, in Spanish, "¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?" ("Who is it?")

Garrett couldn't see Billy's face, but he recognized Billy's voice. Garrett fired 2 shots. The 2nd missed. The 1st hit Billy right in the chest, above the heart. He was dead, at age 21.

It took a year for the Territory to grant Garrett the $500 bounty. In the meantime, people glad to be rid of the Kid had contributed over $7,000 to Garrett. In 1882, he published The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, and that's where we learned most of what we thought we knew about him. A lot of it was lies, designed to make Billy look more evil and dangerous than he was (including the claim that he'd killed 21 men, one for every year of his life), thus making Garrett look more heroic for taking him down than he really was.

What happened to Garrett? He chose not to run for another term as Sheriff of Lincoln County, and returned to Texas, where he ran for the State legislature, and lost. He went into several businesses, all of which failed. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him Collector of Customs for the border city of El Paso, Texas. He was so bad at that office that people kept writing to TR, telling him to fire Garrett. In 1906, even the Rough Rider had had enough of him, and fired him.

On February 29, 1908, Garrett was shot and killed in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in a dispute over ownership of livestock. He was 57. While not the killer and thief that Billy the Kid was, he was no hero, either.

As is so often the case with teenagers and young adults, TV and movie portrayals of him tend to use actors much too old to play him. Newman was 33, as was Michael J. Pollard in the 1972 film Dirty Little Billy. Jack Beutel was 27 in the 1943 film The Outlaw. Emilio Estevez was 25 in the 1988 film Young Guns. And Kris Kristofferson was 36 in the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

And, as with Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, well into the 20th Century, and the rise of Westerns in films and even on TV, there were old men claiming to be Billy the Kid. One, Ollie P. Roberts, even asked Thomas J. Mabry, Governor of New Mexico in 1948, to fulfill his predecessor Lew Wallace's promise of a pardon if he'd turned himself in. Since the promise was only rumored, never confirmed, Mabry turned him down.

*

July 14, 1881 was a Thursday. There was one game played in the National League that day: The Boston Red Stockings beat the Detroit Wolverines, 3-2 at Recreation Park in Detroit.

The Red Stockings became the Boston Beaneaters in 1883, and went through other names before adopting Braves in 1912, moving to Milwaukee in 1953 and Atlanta in 1966. The Wolverines won the Pennant in 1887, but, with team owner Frederick Stearns unable to meet the new salary demands of championship-winning players, went out of business only a year later.

April 3, 1882: The Death of Jesse James

April 3, 1882: Jesse James is killed at his home in St. Joseph, Missouri. He was 34 years old.

Although Missouri never seceded from the Union, it was a slave State, and there was a lot of Southern sympathy there. Jesse and his older brother Frank James were Confederate guerillas during the American Civil War, riding with traitorous murderers like William Quantrill and "Bloody" Bill Anderson. The brothers participated in the Centralia Massacre in Centralia, Missouri on September 27, 1864, led by Anderson, where 123 people were murdered, military and civilian alike.

On February 13, 1866, in Liberty, Missouri, the James brothers robbed the Clay County Savings Association. It was the 1st daylight armed bank robbery in America during peacetime. In their attempt to escape, 17-year-old George Wymore was shot and killed, to eliminate him as a witness.

On May 23, 1867, they robbed a bank in Richmond, Missouri. This time, they killed 3 people, including the Mayor. In 1869, the brothers joined with Cole Younger and his brothers, forming the James-Younger Gang. In 1873, they began robbing trains, although they were not the 1st peacetime train robbers in America.

Jesse James was a Southerner and a redneck. How rednecky was he? He was so rednecky, he married his cousin. No joke: His father and his wife's mother were siblings. Her name was Zerelda Amanda Mimms, and she became known as Zee James. They married in 1874, and had 3 sons, including twins who died in infancy, and a daughter.

The James-Younger Gang went north, and on September 7, 1876, they tried to rob the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. But, hearing gunshots -- the Gang killed the cashier and a bystander -- the locals decided to fight back. Gang members Clell Miller and Bill Stiles were killed; while brothers Cole, Bob and Jim Younger were all shot, but survived, and were captured. The James brothers managed to escape unhurt. To this day, the City of Northfield has as its slogan, "Jesse James Slipped Here." (As opposed to "slept here.")

After that, despite being only 28 years old, Jesse's days as a top-flight crook were over. Recruiting new gang members was hard. He and Frank headed south, where they figured they would have a more sympathetic audience. But the South's recovery from the economic hardships of the Civil War was still woefully incomplete, and so their robberies there weren't as lucrative.

They found another pair of brothers, Robert and Charles Ford. (Contrary to one of the legends about Jesse, the Fords were not his cousins.) By 1881, it was pretty much over. Frank settled in Virginia, and Jesse and the Fords, now the entirety of Jesse's gang, went back to western Missouri from whence they came.

But, as we would say today, there was a mole in the organization. Robert Ford was negotiating with the Governor of Missouri, Thomas T. Crittenden, and made a deal. Crittenden was prohibited by law from offering a reward for killing either of the James brothers, but he talked the railroad companies into offering a $5,000 bounty (about $136,000 in 2022 money) for bringing them in, dead or alive; and, if alive, an additional $5,000 after they were convicted.

On April 3, 1882 -- a little over 5 months after the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Arizona, and 9 months after the killing of Billy the Kid in New Mexico -- Jesse and Zee James, and Robert and Charles Ford had breakfast together at the James home. According to Robert's account, Jesse went into the living room, and saw a picture above the mantle. It was dusty, and he decided to clean it. As he stood on a chair, his back turned toward the brothers, Robert took out his gun, and shot Jesse in the back of the head.

Robert Ford

The Ford brothers turned themselves in. Not only did they not get their reward, but they were charged with first-degree murder. Within one day, they were indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced to be hanged... and pardoned by Governor Crittenden. They got their pardon, but never their reward. The Fords might have been the most honorable people involved in the whole sordid affair.

After his death, the legend of Jesse James grew. Many of the movies about him were sympathetic, treating Robert Ford as the villain of the story. Southerners saw Jesse as a Robin Hood figure, robbing from the rich (banks and railroads) and giving to the poor. Like so many postbellum Southern legends, this was a lie: He never shared his ill-gotten gains with anyone other than the members of his gang.

As with Billy the Kid, and the later outlaw Butch Cassidy, for decades thereafter, men came forward claiming to be a still-living Jesse James, hoping to cash in on his fame. All such claims were debunked.

Charles Ford died of tuberculosis in 1884. Robert was himself shot and killed in 1892. Jesse's widow Zee lived until 1900; his brother Frank, until 1915; his daughter Mary, until 1935; and his son Tim until 1951. Tim had 4 daughters, and in 1898, was accused of getting into the family business. He was arrested for train robbery -- and acquitted. He and Mary later served as consultants on movies made about their father. Like her father, Mary had 3 sons and a daughter, and the James family line continues.

Over the years, a wide range of actors have played Jesse James, including such legendary good guys as Roy Rogers, future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore, and future Superman George Reeves. Others include Tyrone Power, Dale Robertson, Audie Murphy (twice), Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson, Rob Lowe, Colin Farrell, and, most recently, in 2007, Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with Ford played by Casey Affleck.

On February 2, 1973, 89 years after the death of Jesse James, and with the possibility that some people who knew him were still alive, the ABC sitcom The Brady Bunch aired the episode "Bobby's Hero." Bobby Brady (played by Mike Lookinland), then age 12, tells his father Mike (Robert Reed) and stepmother Carol (Florence Henderson) that his hero is Jesse James. The Brady couple discover that he's been reading books and seeing movies about Jesse, and discovering that those sources treat him as a hero.

They find Jethroe Collins (played by Burt Mustin, born in 1884, just 2 years after Jesse's death), an old man who tells Bobby, "Jesse James killed my father." That night, Bobby has a nightmare where he, Mike and Carol are on a train, wearing Wild West clothes, and the train is robbed by Jesse. Since this was the 1970s and a sitcom, and a kid was in the room, the censors wouldn't let them show actual guns, let alone gunshots. So Gordon DeVol, playing Jesse, points his finger and Mike and Carol, and says, "Bang! Bang!" And they play dead. Bobby wakes up, and realizes that Jesse James was no hero.

However, since it was only a dream, and his parents weren't actually killed, Bobby Brady did not become Batman. Nor has Mike Lookinland ever played Batman.

*

April 3, 1882 was a Monday. The baseball season wouldn't start until May 1. Football was out of season. Basketball didn't exist yet. And hockey barely did. So there were no games on this historic day.

February 7, 1974: "Blazing Saddles" Premieres

February 7, 1974: Blazing Saddles premieres, director Mel Brooks' tribute to, and parody of, classic Western movies.

Hedley Lamarr (played by Harvey Korman) is a railroad executive, and the Attorney General of an unidentified Western territory of the United States. His name always gets turned into that of Hedy Lamarr, a popular actress of the 1930s and '40s. The Territorial Governor, William J. Le Petomane (Brooks), tells him, "This is 1874: You can sue her!" Hedley wants to build his railroad through the town of Rock Ridge, but the residents (who all seemed to have the surname Johnson) won't leave.

So Lamarr sends his flunky Taggart (Slim Pickens) and his goons there, to, as Taggart, says, "go ridin' into town, whompin' and a-whompin'," until the terrified citizens leave. But the move backfires: They are willing to fight for their town, and demand that Governor Le Petomane appoint a Sheriff to protect them.

Lamarr figures out a way around this: Since Le Petomane is an idiot, and Lamarr is clearly the power behind the throne, he convinces Le Petomane to appoint a Sheriff that the people of Rock Ridge will never accept: A black man. This turns out to be a railroad worker named Bart (Cleavon Little). The character's last name is never mentioned. Brooks gave him a badge, but not a surname. I wonder if that was an intentional commentary on racism.

Sure enough, at first, the Rock Ridgers are repulsed, treating Bart badly, and calling him "the N-word." As Jim (Gene Wilder), a former hired gun known as the Waco Kid, who has become his deputy, explains: "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know: Morons." The ending was an ad-lib by Wilder. Little cracked up, and Brooks left it in, because it was funny. As Brooks has said, "The only true sin is not being funny.")

In a flashback, where Bart tells Jim his backstory, he mentions his family being the only black family in a wagon train, and thus at the back of it, as if it was a segregation-era bus. When they're attacked by Indians, the chief, also played by Brooks, tells his braves to give them a break: "They're even darker than we are!"

Jim helps Bart win the town over. So Lamarr sends in his version of a "doomsday weapon": Mongo (former football star Alex Karras), a gigantic man of limited intelligence and words. Lamarr figures Bart wouldn't be able to handle him. As Jim says, when Bart suggests shooting him, "Don't do that. It'll only make him mad!" Well, not only does Bart find a way to handle Mongo, but Mongo defects to Bart's side, respecting him as the only man ever to stand up to him.

Sending Mongo in not having worked, Lamarr sends in another secret weapon: Lili von Shtupp, an overtly sexy German singer (Madeline Kahn, in an obvious homage to Marlene Dietrich), who is meant to seduce Bart. But Bart is a lover as well as a fighter, so she defects to his side, too.

So Lamarr decides he needs total war, telling Taggart, "I want you to round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west. Take this down. I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados! Mugs, pugs, thugs! Nitwits, halfwits, dimwits! Vipers, snipers! Con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits! Muggers, buggerers! Bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes! Train robbers, bank robbers! Asskickers, shitkickers! And Methodists!"

The final brawl breaks the fourth wall. Well, it breaks a wall, as the fighting Wild Westerners crash through the set of a movie musical in the 1930s style of director Busby Berkeley, directed here by Buddy Bizarre (Dom DeLuise). Then it breaks into the commissary at Warner Brothers' studio, resulting in a food fight, a parody of pie fights in old-time slapstick movies. (Blazing Saddles is now older than most of what it was parodying.) Finally, it spills out onto the streets of Hollywood, where Bart shoots Lamarr in front of the famous Chinese Theatre. In perhaps the most meta moment in movie history, Bart and Jim then go inside to watch the rest of the movie that's telling their story.

Back in 1874, the townspeople thank Bart for his service, and he and Jim start to ride off into the sunset, as Western heroes tend to do. (Although neither gets the girl: Lili stays in Rock Ridge.) Then they get off their horses and into a limousine, and are driven off into the desert -- possibly to Las Vegas.

Brooks wrote the screenplay with black comedy legend Richard Pryor, who was supposed to play Sheriff Bart. But Pryor's cocaine habit was out of control at the time, and he became unreliable: The insurance company for the film wouldn't insure him. So it became a starmaking role for Little.

Brooks also wrote the songs for the film, including the title song. Thinking of Frankie Laine's singing of the theme to the TV show Rawhide, and his big Western-themed hit song "Mule Train," both having the sound effect of a cracking whip, Brooks placed an ad in the trade paper Variety, calling for "a Frankie Laine type." Laine himself answered the ad. Brooks didn't tell him the film was a comedy, and he sang it absolutely straight, and it's a great performance.

(There was precedent for this: Ten years earlier, Stanley Kubrick directed Dr. Strangelove, and told half the cast that the film was a comedy, and the other half that it was a drama, with equally stunning results.)

The studio had a lot of problems with the film. There was a lot of usage of "The N-word." In a 2012 interview, Brooks said, "If they did a remake of Blazing Saddles today, they would leave out the N-word. And then, you've got no movie." The purpose was to satirize racism, to show how rotten it is, and how stupid it is. And Brooks got support on it from both Pryor and Little.

There were also objections to Karras punching a horse. And to the beans scene. Brooks pointed out that, in pretty much every movie with cowboys in it, they're eating beans, but nobody hears the sounds that result. But Brooks' contract gave him final content control, and he refused to make any substantive changes.

Times change. When the film is shown on TV today, the N-word is blanked out. And there's a scene near the beginning where Taggart accuses some of the rail workers of "jumping around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!" That word is often called the gay version of the N-word, but the TV version could have used a better rewrite than "a bunch of Kansas City dummies!"

And Kahn's German singer? Her name is Lili von Shtupp. "Schtup" is, basically, "fuck" in Yiddish. So the TV version blanks it out, so it sounds like her name is "Lili von Sh." And yet, her name can be seen on the poster for the concert. But they left in the Indian chief's reaction upon seeing Bart's family, the single word "Schwarzes!" (German, or in Brooks' case, Yiddish, for "Blacks!" In the 1979 vampire parody Love at First Bite, George Hamilton's Dracula said it, but, for the TV version, it was replaced with, "Good evening!")

Wilder, who had previously worked with Brooks in The Producers, agreed to be in Blazing Saddles on one condition: He had a special project he wanted to do, and he asked Brooks to direct it. So they made that movie next: Young Frankenstein. Brooks has said that Blazing Saddles is his funniest movie, but Young Frankenstein is his best.

In 1995, I had a terrible cold, a cough that lasted for weeks, and kept me up nights. One night, I saw that Blazing Saddles was going to be on TV. I'd never seen it before, so I figured, it's a classic that's still being talked about, so, what the heck. Big mistake: Every time I laughed, I started coughing again. I began to wonder who would die first, me or Hedley Lamarr. (I didn't see Young Frankenstein until 2021. At least I didn't have a cold at the time. Shame on me for waiting until then to get over the hump.)

Slim Pickens died in 1983, Jack Starrett (Gabby Johnson, a parody of Western actor Gabby Hayes) in 1989, Cleavon Little in 1992, Madeline Kahn in 1999, Richard Pryor in 2005, Frankie Laine in 2007, Harvey Korman in 2008, Dom DeLuise in 2009, Alex Karras in 2012, Gene Wilder and David Huddleston (Olson Johnson) in 2016, and John Hillerman (Howard Johnson) in 2017.

Amazingly, as of February 7, 2022, Mel Brooks is still alive, at age 95. Also of note in the film and still alive on that date are Robyn Hilton, who played Miss Stein, the Governor's top-heavy secretary; and Rodney Allen Rippy, the former hamburger spokeskid who played young Bart, who grew up and left acting for a successful career in marketing.

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February 7, 1974 was a Thursday. Basketball Hall-of-Famer Steve Nash was born.

Baseball and football were out of season. There was only 1 game played in the NBA that night: The Detroit Pistons beat the Golden State Warriors, 110-86 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena. But there were 3 games played in the American Basketball Association:

* The Virginia Squires beat the Carolina Cougars, 120-97 at the Greensboro Coliseum.

* The Utah Stars beat the San Antonio Spurs, 86-83 at the HemisFair Arena in San Antonio.

* And the Denver Rockets beat the Memphis Tams, 105-94 at the Denver Auditorium Arena. The Tams were not among the ABA teams brought into the NBA. Correctly anticipating that they would be, and that there was already a Houston Rockets, the Denver team changed its name to the Nuggets after this season.

There were 2 games in the NHL. The Boston Bruins beat the St. Louis Blues, 5-3 at the Boston Garden. And the Philadelphia Flyers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 5-4 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. And there was 1 game in the World Hockey Association: The Jersey Knights, based in the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, beat the Los Angeles Sharks, 7-4 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.