Cow-Boys and Colonels

Reading, reading, reading. The weather and our colds have prompted reading overly much. We used to interrupt our busy days to stop and read a while. It has almost gotten to the point where we interrupt our reading to do a few household chores.

Our reading Black Hills of South Dakota history has been enriched from the standpoint of Lakota women, Josephine Waggoner and Susan Bettelyoun; from that of a distant shirt tail relative, Ed Lemmon, who had a government contract to deliver beeves to a couple of Indian Reservations in the 1800's; and from notes, diaries, letters and stories from the miners, immigrants, and ranchers who lived there in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

Most of it has been written with utter seriousness. Presently, we are reading it from the angle of a French Baron, Edmond de Mandat-Gracey who had been schooled by Jesuit Fathers in Paris. The Baron was writing it to excite readers all over France with his one month day-by-day adventures throughout the Black Hills with his traveling companions, Monsieur de Bouverie; in Rapid City they joined Gifford Parker who acted as their guide for the visit.

Parker took them to a hoped for spa that he intended to create out of a piece of land at Cascade which is South of Hot Springs. He described how excited Parker was at showing him his intended layout, "making us galop (sic) over the plain in every direction, for to please him, we must see everything. The Americans in speculation have a kind of blind, habitual enthusiasm which becomes contagious, and in the long run, one no longer has a very clear conscience with regard to what is actually a fact, or what is merely in the inchoate stage of a project." "Here is the stage station, here is the depot, the bank will be here and the hotel there."

I myself, have seen that very enthusiasm for some cockamamie idea from the men in the family that I have married into.

He explains "a special malady of the American brain, developed particularly in the West, where there are few men who do not manifest these symptoms. It's diagnosed in an irresistible desire to take in the left hand a piece of wood, and to reduce it to morsels the size of a match by a gentle and regular movement of the right hand armed with a pocket knife, a razor or a bowie-knife."

His telling that the proprietors of hotels provide their guests a block of wood to whittle or they whittle up the benches on their porches. This is a wonderful humourous history as seen through the eyes of a French Baron.