Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Suponski
Steve, Sounds like you have a plan! What will your book be about may I ask?
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I thought you'd never ask! Now, prepare yourself; my story is strange. As a preface one must understand that I was raised not far from Dodge City, Kansas where in my youth the bird hunting was out of this world. The sky was black with bob white quail, pheasants, dove and ducks gallore. I hunted with my dad and his dad and about a dozen uncles. We knew everyone in town and in the "country" and could hunt about any place that we wanted to. In short, it was a little slice of Heaven. A corner in the living room was always stacked with shotguns. Around the dinner table the topic of conversation was the wheat, cattle and hog prices, hunting and tales of the Old West. My family you see were there.
My imagination took off as I walked the streets of Dodge, or Mead or Bucklin and in the hollows alongside stream beds where a dugout had been. One could find rusted tin cans with soldered seams, lengths of flattened stove pipe, a half buried potbelly stove, the head of a rake. There was always a long dead but towering silver trunked cottonwood, it's twisted limbs casting ghostly shadows over where the dugout and its human contents had lived.
After college I went to the Marine Corps, after that I became a history teacher. I became a fan and avid student of the Old West, but I always had been. I traveled to all of the places where Wyatt Earp and George Custer had traveled. I studied Billy the Kid, whose last name is the same as mine. I went to Lincoln where the kid escaped from jail and murdered his jailors, the building still looms over the one main street in town and is little changed, neither is the town. I read the books on the subject and studied the illustrations.
Just after Christmas, 2006 my wife gave me a direct order to get a haircut. I drove to town, but the barbershop was full with no seats. I backed outside. To avoid an artic wind I stepped into to a little antique shop. I saw a display of tintypes. I picked one up and was introduced to a young man who looked just like my grandfather when he was of a similar age. The boy was Billy the Kid. I found sixty pictures that included some of his fellow "Regulators", a few of his enemies, and Sallie Chisum's entire family. Sallie Chisum, who must have gathered the collection, of course danced with the kid. Her uncle was the wealthiest man about. The pictures have never been seen before and are mostly like new. Eventually I found Sallie's living relatives who live not far from me. They had sold the pictures after an attic scouring event, not knowing who they were of. I do.
That is my story.
I'll post a few of them. If anyone out there is a student of the Lincoln County War or has an interest in Billy the Kid or his pals and would like to see a picture of a specific person just ask and if I have it, I'll put it up. I have many photos of people who do not have other pictures of them to match mine to, but never mind, there is other evidence to their identities and often written descriptions that show that my tintype is authentic.
Steve