He was a sheriff, newspaper editor, miner, politician,Georgist, gambler and lawyer, mainly in Arizona. His nickname came from his tendency to “buck the tiger” (play contrary to the odds) at faro or other card games. He later became a captain in Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and died in battle.
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Hi and welcome to Thursday’s 38th Episode in Season 4 of “Our Disruptively Resilient Year” on this 12th day of May in the spring of 2022.
What’s Going On …
Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll
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- @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines, according to my analytics, grew from 12880 this week to 12943 organically grown followers.
- Orange County Beach Towns 220 viewers stopped by the week before.
Foresight
Quality-of-Life
Context
As we strolled around, waiting for the cycling race to slow down so we could safely cross Whiskey Row without altering the race results, I wondered who that statue represented — somebody like Wyatt Earp?
It would makes sense, because Prescott tourism definitely played up the Old West Themes.
“No,” Jay said as we entered the dark wood old west bordello and saloon-themed restaurant “he’s a Rough Rider named Buckey somebody who was a mayor.“
Turns out a little later on Wikipedia I discovered Bucky O’Neill was a man of his time like Wyatt Earp — a Permanently Temporary.
He was a sheriff, newspaper editor, miner, politician, Geologist, gambler and lawyer, mainly in Arizona. His nickname came from his tendency to “buck the tiger” (play contrary to the odds) at faro or other card games. He later became a captain in Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and died in battle.
But, a Georgist, WTF? Not a typo? I never heard of that and it can’t be a version of his name like Esquire, right?
Single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society.
He believed in what today’s Representative to Congress from his district, Paul Gosar, would openly consider as socialism.
But, I couldn’t contain myself once my eyes grew accustomed to the dark interior having passed the famous western bar — brown wood walls with dark wood trim — and pictures and paintings and drawing on every wall. I browsed one wall after another.
After we ordered some appetizers to share and I took pull on a long neck bottle of Corona I excused myself to visit more history on both sides of the hallway to the lavatory. Once in the head standing at the urinal I couldn’t help but laugh.
Not everyone remembers William Boyd aka Hopalong Cassidy a stable of cowboy westerns filmed around WWII and later shown on television in the ‘50s, but there he was with his white hair in black hat and black shirt and pants looking down at me in what seemed like a 4-foot poster astride his trademark white horse.
“Anybody remember the name of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse,” I teased Jay, Elle and Emma. Jay had it on the tip of his tongue. I then said, “Champion and I’m pretty sure I peed on his feet.” They laughed and Jay announced he wanted to see for himself.
Anyone driving towards Mammoth Mountain for a ski holiday slows down to 35 mph while passing through three small towns before accelerating back to 70 on Hwy 395.
Is it Independence? Or Lone Pine? I should look it up, right?
Each time we pass we tell ourselves we should stop one time and explore the museum dedicated to all those western movies filmed in the Alabama Hills, including those staring William Boyd.
As Betsy, our dyed blonde server sauntered over in her corseted costume with a knife in a sheath fastened over the small of her back, you know like you’d expect for sex workers here at the faux brothel upstairs, I noticed a little history on the menu.
The Palace is the oldest frontier saloon in Arizona, and the most well-known and historic restaurant and bar in the state. Past patrons include Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate. Virgil was Prescott’s Town Constable. Originally built in 1877, The Palace was destroyed in the Whiskey Row fire in 1900. Patrons moved the bar and lower back bar across the street and drank and watched Whiskey Row burn to the ground. It was rebuilt in 1901. Today, The Palace maintains its history, grandeur and old west atmosphere, is a favorite for locals, and attracts visitors from all over the world.
Sitting at our round wood table I glanced at the wall almost directly behind Jay’s shoulder. A glass display of mining tools used back in the day caught my eye.
But immediately to the left of the display I saw a small brown framed black and white picture with a brass black below the photo,
“Yavapai County, Burro Man Circa 1890s.”
Two seemingly unrelated factoids tumbled in my mind and came together like a conspiracy theory.
Could it be?
In the photo a gold seeker in a broad-brimmed hat kneels next to a small makeshift wooden sifting structure. To his right you can see two pails and a home made scooper — a short wooden handle attached somehow to a metal can.
I vaguely recall pieces of a family story about someone my father’s aunts wrote about in a newsletter which told the story of our extended family ancestors.
And something I discovered about O’Neill.
O’Neill arrived in Prescott in the spring of 1882. There he rapidly progressed in his journalistic career. Starting as a court reporter, he soon founded his own newspaper, Hoof and Horn, a paper for the livestock industry. He became the editor of the Arizona Miner weekly newspaper in 1884 to February 1885.
That’s it. Uncle Billy ended up in two Prescott articles and with a little research I discovered one story appeared in the Arizona Miner. Is it possible Bucky interviewed Billy?
Roughly five years apart Uncle Billy made both the Arizona Miner and the Prescott Enterprise. Seems as though my great, great uncle’s letter got published in the Prescott Enterprise in 1871.
In the summer of 2005 here’s what I wrote about him in, Uncle Billy, the Earl of Dunraven, Pearl Street & Emaciated Mountain Goats”
He wrote it to the Honorable S.C. Miller telling him he is living in Castle Rock in Douglas County, Colorado. Uncle Billy wandered from Osage County, Missouri sometime after the 1850 census listed him – as it had Confederate War casualty Nathan – my great, great grandfather.
That got me thinking about Samuel Clemons who began his writing career by sending letters to newspapers signing them “Mark Twain”. Like Mark Twain, he was drawn to the West to find his fortune working mining claims.
Twain roamed California and Nevada, while Billy mined his 400 feet lode on Lynx Creek in what is today a quaint vacation spot near Prescott, Arizona – north of Phoenix and south of Flagstaff.
Did he strike it rich?
Like almost everybody else, he made and lost a fortune in the Gilpin County gold leads.
In an 1871 report on mining, he’s described as “… a fine specimen of a Western Pioneer, one of the men who have always kept in advance of railroads, and who doesn’t feel well unless separated from civilization by hundreds of miles of Indian country.”
Indian country before trains, huh?
Continuing in the 1871 Arizona Miner interview he describes an incident while going from Prescott to Walker’s Camp, at the head of Lynx Creek.
Near Yellow Jacket Gulch, he sees a huge fire and rising smoke. He says parties recently from Skull and Kirkland valleys “report Indians aplenty down that way. They are around, sure, and there is no telling when or where they will strike the first blow.”
So, I’m not saying that photo on the wall next to the glass display is Uncle Billy, but I do know we passed through Skull and Kirkland valleys on the way to Jay and Elle’s Prescott home.
And, the timing is off by a decade or more for Bucky O’Neill to have interviewed Billy, like it sometimes is when you do any ancestry research.
In letters he wrote back home to Missouri he describes the struggle between guarding against Indian attacks, robbers and the long distance he has to travel for supplies.
Before Bucky sauntered into Prescott, I’m fairly certain Billy had pulled up stakes already.
Forced to move on due to bad luck, he tries his hand mining in the Black Hills and tries settling for a short time in Castle Rock, before finally returning to his family farm in Missouri.
“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”
“5” Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Everyone is not on the same page. Some around you are not even in the same book. For this story to go right you must establish common ground and build from there.” Taurus
We concluded the three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed — during the “normal” pre-pandemic year compared to the pandemic year, and more recently to the paradoxically normal year.
Season Four continues now within domestic and global chaos.
Previously in Season Four, The Disruptively Resilient Year
S4 E37 — Racing a Little Wobbly on Whiskey Row; S4 E36 — Big Rigs, Skull Valley and Yarnell Hotshots ; S4 E35 — Prescott Pitstop Knocks Me Off Balance
Related from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year
S3 E38 — Sliding on a Super Slippery Slope to 2nd or 3rd Cousins; S3 E37 — Tell Me More Lies I Can Believe In; S3 E36 — Placebo, Meaningful Coincidence or Just Feeling Lucky; S3 E35 — This Ain’t No Zemblanity
Related from Season Two, the Pandemic Year
S2 E38 — What Should You Do If You Stumble Across Loaded Information?; S2 E37 — How Deep is the Chasm? What Do We Do?; S2 E36 — Turning Lemons into Margaritas; S2 E35 — Was this Pandemic Year a 1-Off or New Way of Life?
Related from Season One, the Normal Year
S1 E38 — Day 38 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E37 — Day 37 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E36 — Day 36 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E35 — Day 35 of My 1-Year Experiment;
Evidence
Random ones that make me want change my sign.
Today’s Holiday Birthday:
Your victories will be satisfying and numerous. Through the next 10 weeks you work unwaveringly, with unshakeable focus and resilient intelligence. A complicated relationship irons out. As a result of your efforts to broaden your intellectual horizons, your earning potential will increase.
Ten weeks you say? That’s ending sometime after the middle or the end of July, but I shouldn’t get my hopes up because this is probably your birthday and not mine.
“5” Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “Everyone is not on the same page. Some around you are not even in the same book. For this story to go right you must establish common ground and build from there.” Taurus
Well, so far so good. Elle and Jay have been long-time friends even having traveled to Italy for our anniversary vacation. But, in terms of politics I don’t hold out any hope that we’d be in the same chapter. Common ground, yeah that’s the ticket. Fingers crossed.
“3” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “You may decide to do things differently from how your predecessors did because new tools are available. Experimentation takes time and the risk doesn’t always pay off, but you’d be remiss not to try. The future is for the brave!” Virgo
So my predecessors wrote long-hand letters, but my mother typed all of hers and posted them by mail. She included clipped articles from her newspapers or magazine subscriptions. Me? I didn’t want all the clutter from paper and files, so I always looked for digital alternatives. But, even now I feel I can’t keep up.
“4” Steve Kerr, 54: “As for the one who doesn’t understand what you’re doing… it could be a perceptual limitation of theirs, but it could also be that you’ve yet to effectively impart the vision. How can you explain it differently?” Libra
So true, I’m in the weeds on most of my passion projects. And, because I’m one of those endangered introverts, at least by percentage of similar temperaments, I get how most (95 to 97%) won’t understand what I’m doing until I can simplify and simplify some more. Am I getting closer?
“5” Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “Here’s an argument for keeping it simple: If the issue at hand grows more complex, and the stakes are raised too, the analysis of choices will consume more energy, which may lead to decision fatigue and delays.” Pisces
WTF have you been eavesdropping? I couldn’t put it any better than that. Nailed it!
Long-Form
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- “Here, Right Matters: An American Story” by Alexander Vindman. “We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement of Russia, the United States’ most pressing major adversary. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, from the capital, Kyiv. By 2019, little had changed, Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. The biggest change was to Ukraine’s importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression weeks earlier, the White House had abruptly put a hold on nearly four hundred million dollars.”
- David Enrich begins his book with a suicide in “Deutsche Bank Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction” and then meticulously details the bank’s Russian money laundering operations. Deutsche’s Russian business surged after revenues had fallen 50% due to the 2008 financial crisis. Putin’s Russia, poured in to Deutsche from deals it did with VTB Bank, linked to the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus. Deutsche positioned itself as a crucial cog in “The Laundromat” by doing what couldn’t be done — processing cross-border transactions for banks that were too small and didn’t have offices outside their home countries.
- “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy” by Jamie Raskin recalls one tragedy no parent should endure — the suicide of his son — and then a second tragedy at almost the same time — the insurrection on January 6th 2021, that terrified he and his congressional peers who were tasked by the Constitution to routinely oversee the orderly transfer of power from one former president to the duly elected new President.
- “A Warning” by Anonymous (Miles Taylor) written prior to the January 6th Insurrection as an insider’s account documenting how frequently the former President’s behavior and rage without any “guard rails” showed just how far he would go to win the next election at any cost while spinning lies and misinformation on top of each other.
- “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides anecdotes, stories and inside reporting documenting the controversial last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as the presidential transition and early presidency of Joe Biden.
- “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising,” by Joshua Green tracks the money behind the scenes leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the growing influence of Steve Bannon’s network of extreme nationalists.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Inspired by Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate
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