Nothing Plain About Her

So, I was all involved in a poem I was writing, a book I was illustrating, my car needing a new wheel put on, thanks to whoever's in charge of maintaining the streets of Kansas City and cut a large hole in one of them, neglecting to mark it, much less spike a steel plate over it. Watch where you're going & drive AROUND such manmade chasms: That's my advice.

Forgot that yesterday was Jesse James' deathday [courtesy "that dirty little coward"). Didn't occur to me that it was the anniversary of the beginning of the Pony Express. Anyway, I figure that if I hadn't made something of a morning ritual of checking to see what interesting someone had been born on this day in history, I'd never have come across THIS dame. Do, if you've happened to come across this post, peek into the life of Jane Digby, b. 3 April, 1807. Golly.

jesse

‎".... my life was threatened daily, and I was forced to go heavily armed. The whole country was then full of militia, robbing, plundering and killing."

Jesse Woodson James, whose lively life began this day, 1847

So, September 4, was the 208th anniversary of the birth of doctor/missionary/Oregon Trail pioneer Marcus Whitman and I neglected to write about him yesterday. Boy oh boy, I once spent several satisfactory months writing and illustrating a book about him and his wife Narcissa. It graced no bestseller lists & sits on too few bookshelves, but the Whitmans lived lives worth knowing if only because their stories tell us so much about the larger story, the Westward Movement, ethnic misunderstandings, cultural hubris, & all. Were I not so dispirited and impatient right this very minute, busting to go out and take a walk on this lovely September Sunday, and needing to get back indoors to write some more about another 19th century American (Dr. Mary Walker, eccentric reformer, Medal of Honor winner, Civil War personality, a bit of a crackpot in her later years), I'd wax on a bit about Marcus & Narcissa & the deadly culture clash at the end of the Oregon Trail. I'll content myself with pointing out that Jesse James was not quite two months into his storied life when the Whitmans and a bunch of other folks at their mission were murdered way off to hell&gone west, in what would be the state of Washington, on 29 November, 1847. Who killed them? Men of the Cayuse, whose tribe was dying of measles, brought in by white settlers pouring into their land, one of the tribes they'd traveled clear across the country to convert to Christianity.

I'll say what Grandma used to say, when confronted with a little too much to handle: Horrors.

They're Off!

So, you all probably know that cheerful, far-traveling Washington Irving (future author of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, future dancer with lovely Dolley Madison, future U.S. Ambassador > Spain, + subject of a swell book I wrote and illustrated, published by the Nat'l Geographic: The Literary Adventures of Washington Irving: American Storyteller. Join the tiny throng of those who bought a copy of it! You won't be sorry!)

And if you don't know, let me remind you that it was on this day in 1882 that the real-life-legendary outlaw Jesse James, 34, was killed on this day in 1882, snuck up upon from behind by glory- & bounty-seeking coward, Robt. Ford. This happened up in St. Joseph, Missouri, exactly 22 years after the first horse and rider galloped past a cheering crowd, down the path and onto the ferry that would carry them over the Missouri River to Kansas. Nearly 2,000 miles away, another pony, another rider, was doing the same, heading NE out of San Francisco. The Pony Express was off and running!

Here's my poem. You can sing it if you're a mind to (I surely hope you will!) to the tune of the old cowboy song: I Ride an Old Paint.

The Ballad of the Pony Express

Come eighteen and sixty

The country had a test:

How'll we get our letters

To folks from east to west?

Three Missouri fellers

Say try this on for size:

We'll get us some ponies

And some tough little guys.

From the edge of Missouri,

From the town of St. Joe

They galloped the prairies

Just as fast as they could go,

And over the mountains

Down to San Francisco Bay

Ten days of hard riding the lightning relay.

Think on those horsemen

With their bold, careless smiles...

One thousand, nine hundred

And sixty-six miles!

'Twixt Missouri and the ocean,

Far off in the West,

Went the horses and the riders

of the Pony Express.

Chorus: Ride on, ye young travelers!

Ye bravest and the best,

Go follow your fortunes

Out there in the West!

p.s. If your travels should take you to the Land of the Show-Me, do visit the swell Pony Express Museum in St. Joseph, MO. www.ponyexpress.org Big doings up there today!