In 1880, when the cattle kings of the West reigned like, well, royalty, their wealth and desire for comradeship led to the formation of the only male-dominated social club west of Denver.  Formed by members of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, the club was initially named The Cactus Club, then later changed to The Cheyenne Club.  The founding members claimed degrees from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Columbia, and all were frequently seen on the Riviera, in London, Paris and Mexico City.

I have to tell you.  I had no idea.  I stumbled upon The Cheyenne Club while researching WYOMING WILDFLOWER, my first book with Dorchester, now re-released as an ebook and currently my best-selling self-published title.  Once I discovered this fascinating piece of Western history, I fell in love with the place.  I centered my storyline around the historic icon and the men that once walked upon its thick carpets. 

The Cheyenne Club shattered my illusion of weather-bitten cattlemen who lived on remote ranches and lived simple lives, enduring each day only for the precious cattle that grazed across acres as far as the eye could see.  These men knew what comforts their money could bring, and they didn’t hesitate to spend whatever it took to wallow in that comfort.

Let me tell you a bit about it.

The three story brick building was built on the corner of what is now 17th and Warren in Cheyenne.   A skylight towered over the main hall.  The Main Floor boasted rooms for smoking, billiards, reading, games, as well as the prominent dining room.  All had hardwood floors.   Copies of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the Boston Sunday Herald, and the New York Graphic laid on the library’s tables, alongside the Drover’s Journal of Chicago.

The kitchen and wine cellar were located in the basement, and three elevators hoisted hot cuisine prepared by a Canadian chef up to the dining room.  Champagne was served at breakfast, lunch and dinner.   Rugs graced fireplaces with attractives grates and marble-topped mantels.  Shakespearan quotations were inscribed in the blue-and-white, and brown-and-white tiles to “supply cheerfulness” to the guests.  

Six sleeping rooms comprised the upper level.  Each room had thick carpets and were furnished with ceiling-high walnut wardrobes and hand-carved walnut beds.  Marbled covered the dressers and commodes.  Brocade satin and velvet drapes hung at the tall windows.  A lavish bath added to the guests’ comforts.

Another opulent feature of The Cheyenne Club was the piazza, flanked by Victorian French Windows.  Up to 26 arm rockers lined the area, large enough to be used as a dance floor.  Often on sunny days, chess tables were set-up for those wishing to enjoy an afternoon’s game.  Photographs of members’ horses and racing trophies adorned the walls of the Club.  A tennis court was located to the west of the club house, and a brick servants cottage was located to the north of it. 

Club functions required dress suits and evening gowns.  Perfectly trained staff served liquors and delicacies shipped from New York City and San Francisco, as well as providing cigars and cheroots for those with a discriminating taste for fine tobacco.   All this opulence from a club house that towered on a corner lined with dirt streets. 

Alas, the blizzards of 1886 and 1887 wiped out the herds of many of these cattle kings, and The Cheyenne Club slumped, never again to regain its glory.  In 1936, the club house was razed, and in its place, the present Chamber of Commerce and Frontier Days Committee building stands.  

Just makes you want to sigh, doesn’t it? 

You can read more about The Cheyenne Club in WYOMING WILDFLOWER.  Here’s a little blurb about the book:

One of her father’s daughters . . .

All Sonnie Mancuso wants is to be needed by her father. Unfortunately, he already has a daughter–six, to be exact–and all he needs is a son.

One of her father’s men . . .

Orphaned in the slums of New York, fifteen-year-old Lance Harmon needs a home. Sonnie’s father gives him one, on the cattle-rich Rocking M ranch. Through the years, Lance learns to love the land, the work . . . and Sonnie.

And their legacy . . .

But Vince Mancuso’s health is failing, and there’s trouble on the Wyoming range. Sonnie returns home to claim the legacy that’s rightfully hers . . . but learns Lance has already claimed it.

Buy Wyoming Wildflower for your Kindle!

 Although wives and female guests were allowed at The Cheyenne Club, membership was strictly male.  Do you know of any female-only clubs?  How do you feel about allowing women onto a male-dominated turf?  Or vice-versa? 

Interestingly, the acronym isn’t any military jargon at all. “D” indicates a vehicle designed in 1942. “U” means utility, “K” indicates all-wheel drive, and “W” stands for two powered rear axles.  Since we’ve already taken road/water rides around Boston and into the Charles River, and throughout the hills of San Francisco with a drive straight into the bay, we couldn’t wait.

Well, Lake Tahoe fascinates just about everybody, from Ponderosa fans to skiers, hikers, boaters, photographers, residents and tourists of all ages. It’s one of my favorite places on earth. But the first folks to love this place were the Washoe Indians.

The tribe lent its term “tahlah-act” meaning “great mountain” to the tallest peak at the lake, today’s Mt. Tallac at 9,735 feet. Some say the pronunciation is “tayak.”

The Washoe considered the mountain to be sacred, and their legends live on today. Particularly about the cross.

The cross on Mt. Tallac’s northeastern face is visible when the snow begins to melt in the spring. Well, it was a warm summer day when we saw it, but the mountains were still clumped with snow. Folks skied at the surrounding resorts on the Fourth of July. That’s because the winter just past was Tahoe’s fourth-snowiest on record.

The minute I saw the cross on August 9, I knew I needed to post here about it. But the subject mirrors the topic of my filly sister Winnie Griggs’s post of August 22. I didn’t want her to think I was “biting off her” (This was a term my kids always used when one of them copied the other LOL). Should I wait and post my cross blog later on? Then I realized: it’s sacred, marvelous, symbolic, magnificent to know that there are two such hallowed crosses in the West. I decided not to postpone this post.

So. When you check out the cross, it’s actually a “couloir” or series of deep gorges just to the left of the summit.

This beautiful watercolor is by artist Lois Wooldridge.

Many legends abound about the cross. One Washoe belief held that if all the snow melted away, the world would end. Others forecast a season of drought. Still another said the cross disappearing meant the lake would dry up. The tale our DUCK guide shared was if the cross melted, Tahoe would experience a record winter of snow. And was he ever right! After the “cross” melted last year, the winter of 2010-2011 saw 643 inches of  snow. Annual expectation is 300-500. The deepest June snowpack on record was this year’s 71.25 inches on the 13^th.

As a tribute to Mt. Tallac and the cross, the opening sequence of the seventh through eleventh and final season of the classic Western TV show Bonanza was filmed from the north section of Nevada Beach (across the lake on the east shore) so that Mount Tallac and its snow cross appeared prominently in the background. As the Ponderosa map burned, you could see the Cartwright men riding up to the cameras with the mountain and cross in the back ground.

This beautiful site draws you in no matter where you are in the area. The next day after the DUCK tour, we rode the Heavenly Valley ski gondola and saw Tallac’s breathtaking beauty from the observation deck at an elevation of 9,123. The 360 degree views, of the Lake, the mountains, Desolation Wilderness and Carson Valley are beyond breathtaking.

Has anybody else seen Mt. Tallac and the snow cross?

Fellow Filly, Linda Broday, and I just finished up a month’s booksigning tour for our newest anthology, “Give Me a Texas Outlaw”.  We spent a lot of time up in the Liberal, Kansas area. We were the hottest act in town. Thanks Liberal!

One of our visits was to the famous Dalton Gang Hideout in Meade, Kansas, where we were met and welcomed by none other than the charming Doc Holliday.  I’m adding a picture as proof of our adventure which was very interesting. Seeing Doc Holliday through the eyes of the curator Marc Ferguson was most mesmerizing, but I’ll save the Doc and the Dalton Gang Hideout for another blog.

A few months ago, I blogged on the Code of the West, using a fairly common interpretation of the code.

One of the most interesting things Doc Holliday showed us was the best known cowboy in America John Wayne’s eulogy spoken at his funeral by his son, Patrick Wayne.  One thing that most people recognize about the heroic cowboy was that no matter how famous he became, he lived by his own Code of the West.

It’s  my pleasure to share the eulogy and John Wayne’s Code of the American Cowboy.

1. A cowboy does not judge color of skin, but by character within.
2. A cowboy always respects a lady and tips his hat to all that pass him.
3. A cowboy stands strong for what the American Frontier is all about.  Freedom, truth, justice and the American way.
4. A cowboy will not be wronged, nor wrong another. The justice he deems out depends on that.
5. A cowboy is loyal and hard working and maintains a high ethic.
6. A cowboy loves his country, and will fight for its principals and sovereignty.
7. A cowboy respects his animals and the earth they roam upon.
8. A cowboy is faithful to what is entrusted to him.
9. A cowboy is bound by duty, honor and gratitude for what God has given him, which includes his family and friends.

10.  A cowboy maintains a hidden code in his heart, for all to see.

I found a few facts on John Wayne that I didn’t know.

His birth name was Marion Morrison. Although his father was a pharmacist Wayne’s parents moved from Iowa to the Mojave Desert and tried their hand at ranching. That’s where he and his little brother, Robert swam in irrigation ditches and rode horses to school.  After failure at ranching, his family moved to Glendale, California, where Wayne delivered medicines for his father, sold newspapers and had an Airedale dog named “Duke” … where he got his nickname.

John Wayne was bright, did well in school both academically and in football.  He narrowly missed acceptance to Annapolis, so he went to USC on a football scholarship from 1925-27.  Tom Mix got him a summer job as a prop man in exchange for football tickets. (Bet, he couldn’t get by with that today.) On the set he became friends with director John Ford for whom, among others, he began doing bit parts, thus the birth of John Wayne.  His first featured film was in 1930 “Men Without Women”, where he went on to make about 70 low-budget westerns while his career basically bogged down in the mud.  In 1939, Ford cast Wayne in “Stagecoach” the movie that made him a star.  He appeared in over 250 movies, many of epic proportion.

His conservative stance was reflected in his producing, directing and staring in “The Alamo” in 1960; while his patriotic stand was enshrined in “The Green Berets” in 1968, which he co-directed and also stared in.

John Wayne won an Oscar for his role as one-eyed Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit” in 1969; and in 1979 he received a Congressional Gold Medal  But, he is best remember for his parts in Ford’s cavalry trilogy, “Fort Apache”, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”, and “Rio Grande”.

A true cowboy spirit, won’t back up for nothing.

What is your favorite John Wayne movie?

The Outlaw Josey Wales is my favorite western movie classic, and certainly a favorite western read. A gritty western with touches of humor and a slight splash of romance, what I like most about this story is the detail to history and the stark portrayal of good and bad in EVERYONE. At the start Josey Wales is a peaceful Missouri farmer. He’s driven to revenge by the brutal murder of his wife and son by a band of pro-Union Jayhawkers — Senator James H. Lane’s Redlegs from Kansas.

Wales joins a group of pro-Confederate Missouri guerrillas/bushwhackers led by William T. Anderson. At the conclusion of the war, Captain Fletcher persuades the guerrillas to surrender, saying they have been granted amnesty. Josey Wales, still holding a grudge, refuses to surrender. As a result, he survives the massacre of the men by Captain Terrill’s Redlegs, who’ve now joined the Union Army. Wales intervenes and guns down several Redlegs with a Gatling gun.

Senator Lane puts up a $5,000 bounty on Wales. Wales begins a life on the run from Union militia and bounty hunters while still seeking vengeance and a chance for a new beginning in Texas. Along the way, he unwillingly accumulates a diverse group of traveling companions despite all indications that he would rather be left alone. His companions include a wily old Cherokee named Lone Watie, a young Navajo woman, and an elderly Yankee woman from Kansas and her granddaughter rescued from a band of Comancheros.

In the final showdown, Josey and his companions are cornered in a ranch house which is fortified to withstand Indian raids.

The film  was inspired by a 1972 novel by Forrest Carter, originally titled Gone to Texas and later retitled The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales.  I’m much more inclined to curl up with a book than turn on the tube–but as far as movies go, this is one that can hold me captive from the first scene to the last. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it! I watched it again last summer on the History Channel.

The script was worked on by Sonia Chernus and producer Bob Daley, and Eastwood himself paid some of the money to obtain the screen rights. Michael Cimino and Philip Kaufman later oversaw the writing of the script. Kaufman wanted the film to stay as close to the novel as possible and retained many of the mannerisms in Wales’s character which Eastwood would display on screen, such as his distinctive lingo with words like “reckon”, “hoss” (instead of “horse”) and “ye” (instead of “you”) and spitting tobacco juice on animals and victims. The characters of Wales, the Cherokee chief, Navajo squaw and the old settler woman and her daughter all appeared in the novel In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Here’s an original movie trailer:

I found a site with favorite quotes from the movie. Here’s a few of my favorite:

Josey Wales: Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.

**

Laura Lee: Kansas was all golden and smelled like sunshine.
Josey Wales: Yeah, well, I always heard there were three kinds of suns in Kansas, sunshine, sunflowers, and sons-of-bitches.

**

Josey Wales: When I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around long.
Lone Watie: I notice when you get to DISlikin’ someone they ain’t around for long neither.

**

Carpetbagger: Your young friend could use some help.
[holds up a bottle of patent medicine]  This is it… one dollar a bottle. It works wonders on wounds.
Josey Wales: Works wonders on just about everything, eh?
Carpetbagger: It can do most anything.
Josey Wales: [spits tobacco juice on the carpetbagger's coat] How is it with stains?

***

Josie Wales: You be Ten Bears?
Ten Bears: I am Ten Bears.
Josie Wales: I’m Josey Wales.
Ten Bears: I have heard. You are the grey rider. You would not make peace with the Bluecoats. You may go in peace.
Josie Wales: I reckon not. I got no place else to go.
Ten Bears: Then you will die.
Josie Wales: I came here to die with you. Or to live with you…I ain’t promising you nothing extra. I’m just giving you life and you’re giving me life. And I’m saying that men can live together without butchering one another.
Ten Bears: It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life… or death. It shall be life.

Eastwood has called The Outlaw Josey Wales an anti-war film. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said:

“As for Josey Wales, I saw the parallels to the modern day at that time. Everybody gets tired of it, but it never ends. A war is a horrible thing, but it’s also a unifier of countries. . . . Man becomes his most creative during war. Look at the amount of weaponry that was made in four short years of World War II—the amount of ships and guns and tanks and inventions and planes and P-38s and P-51s, and just the urgency and the camaraderie, and the unifying. But that’s kind of a sad statement on mankind, if that’s what it takes.”

 

 Born Myra Belle Shirley, February 5, 1848, on a farm outside of Carthage, MO, the legendary Belle Starr came into the world a farm girl and left it as a famous–or infamous–outlaw. Her father was a slaveholder who sympathized with the south, her mother was of the Hatfield clan, and Belle grew up with Cole Younger and several of Quantrill’s Raiders.

By 1864, after Carthage was burned by Union troops, the family moved to Scyene, Texas, a small town near Dallas. There, in July of 1866, the Younger brothers and Jesse James, all Missouri outlaws who rode with Quantrill, used her family’s home to hideout from the law.

That same year her older brother John “Bud” Shirley, who fought for the Confederacy with William C. Quantrill’s guerillas, was killed by Union troops in Sarcoxie, Mo. Some say this is the reason Belle took to crime – she went hunting for the Union officer who shot her brother and, though she never found him, she seems to have liked carrying a gun and stirring up trouble.

In 1866, Belle married James C. “Jim” Reed, a former guerilla whom she had known since her childhood in Carthage and had two children: Rosie Lee “Pearl” (who was later rumored to be Cole Younger’s child) in 1868; and James Edwin “Ed” in 1871. While Jim initially tried his hand at farming, he soon grew restless and fell in with the Starr clan, a Cherokee Indian family notorious for whiskey, cattle, and horse thievery, as well as his wife’s old friends the James and Younger gangs.

When her husband and cohorts robbed Watt Grayson, a wealthy Creek Indian farmer of $30,000 in gold, Belle was accused as an accomplice. Though there was no proof, she fled back to her family in Scyene. Stories are told that she would ride into Dallas wearing buckskins and moccasins or tight black jackets, black velvet skirts, high-topped boots, a man’s Stetson hat with an ostrich plume, and twin holstered pistols, and spend her time in saloons, drinking and gambling at dice, cards, and roulette. At times she would ride her horse through the streets shooting off her pistols

On Aug. 6, 1874, the law caught up with Jim Reed near Paris, Texas. He was shot to death trying to escape from custody.

The young widow of an outlaw, Belle left her children with relatives and returned to Oklahoma Indian Territory and the Starr clan. Belle proved herself good at organizing, planning and fencing for the rustlers, horse thieves and bootleggers. Belle’s enterprises provided her with more than enough money to use bribery to free her cohorts from the law whenever they were caught. And, if she couldn’t buy off the lawmen, she was known to seduce them into looking the other way.

“Next to a fine horse, I admire a fine pistol.”

 Judge Isaac C. Parker, a.k.a., “The Hanging Judge,” of Fort Smith, Arkansas, became obsessed with bringing Belle Starr to justice, but she eluded him at every turn. Charges never seemed to stick, and if he managed to get her into his courtroom, she would appeal to friends in high places and receive a full pardon.

In 1880, at the age of 32, Belle fell in love with Sam Starr, the handsome 20-year-old son of the clan leader, and asked him to marry her. Old Tom disapproved, but Belle out-talked him and ended up with young Sam as her husband.

“After a more adventurous life than generally falls to the lot of woman, I settled permanently in the Indian Territory, selecting a place of picturesque beauty on the Canadian River. There, far from society, I hoped to pass the remainder of my life in peace and quietude. So long had I been estranged from the society of women, whom I thoroughly detest, that I thought I would find it irksome to live in their midst. So, I selected a place that but few have ever had the gratification of gossiping around…” Belle Starr  
(June 7, 1886, Dallas Morning News, p. 4, col. 5-6)

Belle Starr’s ride came to a violent end on February 3, 1889, two days short of her forty-first birthday, when she was shot in the back while riding from the general store to her ranch near Eufaula, Oklahoma. Suspects included Edgar Watson, a fugitive with whom Belle had been feuding over the land he was renting from her, Jim July, her Cherokee lover, with whom she had recently had a quarrel, and her son Ed, with whom she had a rather strained relationship. The murderer of Belle Starr was never caught. 

Belle was buried on her ranch. A marble headstone was erected over her grave on which was engraved a bell, her horse, a star and this epitaph written by her daughter Pearl:

“Shed not for her the bitter tear,
Nor give the heart to vain regret;
‘Tis but the casket that lies here,
The gem that filled it sparkles yet.”

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/star-bel.htm
http://www.frontiertimes.com/outlaws/belle_starr.html
Leon C. Metz, “STARR, MYRA MAYBELLE SHIRLEY,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fstbl), accessed May 30, 2011. Published by the Texas State Historical Association
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-bellestarr2.html
Wild West Magazine 
http://www.stateoftheozarks.net/Cultural/History/BorderWars/BelleStarr_Chick.html