Uncle Thor's Lessons, Anecdotes and Humor

Audrey and I recently watched an exciting movie “3:10 to Yuma.” It was a classic Western shoot-em-up. They do not make many Westerns any more. You can find horror and mystery and every kind of chick flick, but few Cowboy movies.

Years ago, there were plenty of Westerns. They had them on television and in the movies. Most were mediocre, but a few stood out. The Western genre was a fine milieu for telling many kinds of stories: adventures, love stories, conflicts, etc. It had all the right elements.

Granted, Westerns were prone to glamorize the West. The American West from 1865 to 1890 was not glamorous. It was dusty, dirty and downright dangerous. There were few social amenities and fewer women. Most of the women out there were either married or were prostitutes. Of course, most of the men out there were unwashed ugly fellows. Many were Civil War veterans who headed West for a variety of reasons. Some had lost everything in the War and some were just sickened by it. Some of the greatest heroes and greatest villains were Civil War veterans.

Indian fights were common, especially when there were wars and uprisings. Texas had many years of trouble with the Comanche. The Sioux and Cheyenne were a problem in the plains, and Apaches caused their share of mischief in the Southwest. It has been a trend since 1970 to treat Indians as innocent victims, but usually the truth is somewhere else. Indians were not perfectly innocent and Whites were not perfectly villainous. Sadly, the politically correct thing killed out a big part of a very entertaining genre.

We used to have heroes from the West. Buffalo Bill Cody and Bill Hickock come to mind. There was a string of names we knew, be they hero or otherwise: George Custer, Sitting Bull, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Johnny Ringo, Geronimo, Cochise, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid (Harry Longbaugh), Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, Doc Holiday, to name a few.

The real West was not as exciting as its cinematic counterpart, but it is just as interesting.

We need to look at the West for what it was. It happened, whether we like some events or not. This is history. By shutting the door on this era, we close ourselves off from a rich and colorful part of our American heritage. The West needs a comeback.

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Did you know that there is a statue of Hermann the Cheruscan in Minnesota? It is at New Ulm. How did it come to be there?

In the 1850s, there was an Indian uprising. The Indians attacked New Ulm, which at the time was populated by immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany. The Nordmen, Danes, Swedes and German fended off the Indians. A few years later, they built a copy of the statue in Germany to commemorate their victory.
(Hermann was a great man who saved the Northern world from the evil of the Roman Empire.)

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There is evidence that Butch Cassidy and Harry Longbaugh (The Sundance Kid) did not die in a shoot-out in Bolivia. They came back to America under assumed names and lived well into the 1930s.
The incident in the movie, where they blew up the express car with the reluctant agent inside, was true. In fact, it is almost verbatim from the historical account. And yes, the story of using too much dynamite is also true.
The success of their robberies was in planning. They had fresh horses waiting at different points along their escape route. The posse chasing them ran out after a couple of hours, and by then the Hole in the Wall gang had made a clean get-away.