On Sunday I woke up
to normal temperatures in my apartment. I’d made sure to close the back door
before going to bed just in case the night air would creep in and trigger the
thermostat. It was nice to breathe unheated air again.
I finished memorizing Serge Gainsbourg’s
“Les petits ballons”.
I had a toasted cheese, cucumber and
lettuce sandwich for lunch.
I worked on my journal for a lot of
the day and got caught up in the late afternoon.
I took a short bike ride around the
neighbourhood and did some exercises when I got home. My butt muscles felt a
bit better today.
I heated some thin slices of roast
beef, toasted a piece of bread sliced in half and had a roast beef sandwich
with mustard, cheese, cucumber and lettuce while watching the last two episodes
of Stories of the Century.
The penultimate story was about Jack
Slade, who is a way station agent who decides to intercept the mail in order to
get information about stage shipments in order to plan which stages to rob. His
men are half-breeds posing as indigenous raiders. But when a Pony Express rider
is shot on the trail and his mail stolen, Slade's wife Virginia lets it slip
while she is shopping in town that her husband couldn’t come because he is
sorting the mail. She later catches him going through a carrier’s saddlebag.
When he and his men try to rob another stage they are stopped by a posse and
the cavalry. But when the posse is bringing Slade in they turn vigilante and
lynch Slade.
Virginia was played by Elaine Riley,
who started out as a beauty contestant and then a model. She got mostly
supporting roles in movies but she was a leading lady in the Hopalong Cassidy
film The Devils Playground and she supported Ray Milland in The Big Clock.
The real Joseph Alfred Slade was not
an outlaw at all. He was a stagecoach and Pony Express superintendent. He was
one of the first western gunslingers and he helped open up the west. He was
born in Illinois in 1831. His father was a politician and after his father’s death
his mother married a Civil War general. Slade joined the US Army during the
Mexican War. Slade married Maria Virginia (surname unknown) in 1857. He helped
launch and operate The Pony Express in 1860. When he shot one of his men for
interfering with the mail he started getting a reputation as a gunfighter. He
was ambushed and left for dead by a corrupt station keeper but he survived.
Mark Twain exaggerated his ferocious reputation and claimed that he’d killed 26
men but there is only evidence for one killing. Slade was an alcoholic fired
because of it. He was lynched in 1864 for disturbing the peace while drunk in
Montana.
The final story of the series was
about L. H. Musgrove, who was a horse thief that gets a loan to buy a ranch and
kills a telegraph clerk in order to send a false message of reference from a
bank in another town. It’s discovered that his ranch is selling stolen horses
and the telegraph signatures also incriminate him. While he is trying to escape
a hooded lynch mob arrests and then hangs him.
The real L. H. Musgrove was born in
Mississippi and went to California for the gold rush. After several murders he
was arrested in 1863 but got off on a technicality. He then became the leader
of a network of horse and cattle thieves raiding government posts and wagon
trains from Colorado to Wyoming. He sometimes disguised himself as a Native
American to avoid capture and set up his headquarters in an abandoned
stagecoach station in the mountains of Colorado. In 1868 he was arrested but his
guards did not resist when a vigilance committee entered the jail, took him out
and lynched him.
The problem with this series was
that it was not very often historically accurate. Many of the so-called outlaws
were not criminals and many of the lawmen were. The fictional detectives might
as well have been time travellers from the 20th Century since they
didn’t show any signs of having aged over the range of fifty years that the
stories jumped around in.
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