Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West, 1830-1890

(NYTBR) It is in names like Victoria, Rugby and Runnymede (a dinky little community long since buried beneath a sea of Kansas wheat) that modern travelers across the great plains of the Midwest can still catch a glimpse of the lost — and deeply weird — world that has been lovingly excavated and brought back to life in “Prairie Fever,” by Peter Pagnamenta, a writer and documentary producer for the BBC. Back in the late 1880s, Runnymede was the spot where a group of English colonists decided to live out the fantasies they had read about in the exotic cowboy tales of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Known derisively as “remittance men” because of the comfortable allowances they regularly received from their daddies back home, these young toffs had been lured to Kansas by Francis Turnley, a wealthy Irish landowner’s son from County Antrim who had gambled his future on the chance that a new railway line would lay its tracks straight through his personal fief: Runnymede. Continued

2012: Trains collide on Union Pacific's Tucumcari Line in Oklahoma

(msnbc.com) Two trains collided Sunday near the Oklahoma Panhandle town of Goodwell, sparking a diesel fire and forcing the closure of a stretch of highway. Three people were missing. The accident happened shortly after 10 a.m. on tracks about two miles east of Goodwell. A westbound train consisting of three locomotives and 80 rail cars collided with an eastbound intermodal train consisting of four locomotives and 108 rail cars, Union Pacific Railroad spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza told msnbc.com. Continued

Buffalo, the Pawnee and an Old Story on a Trip Across the Plains

(NYTimes) One of the most adrenaline-fueled vacations in American history took place in August 1872, when a young New Yorker named George Bird Grinnell boarded a train at Grand Central Depot for the era’s hot new travel destination — Nebraska. While most Gilded Age travelers preferred to immerse themselves in the Old World pleasures of Paris and Venice, the 22-year-old Grinnell was one of a new breed of nature-lovers who chose to take rugged, and often dangerous, excursions into the Western wilderness, usually for the purpose of hunting and fishing. Now Grinnell was taking America’s first “adventure travel” trend to a new cultural level: In order to experience firsthand the most romantic image of the Western frontier, he intended to join the Pawnee Nation of Plains Indians on their summer buffalo hunt through the prairies. Continued

Prairie, Poetry and Loss

(NYTimes) Rebecca Norris Webb’s book “My Dakota” is a personal meditation on the land where she came of age and an elegy for her brother who died in the middle of her project. James Estrin interviewed Ms. Norris Webb via e-mail. Continued

Route 66 still holds allure for travelers, industry

(Reuters) ... The last section of the fabled U.S. route from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif., was dropped as a federal highway in 1984. But its hold on travelers' imaginations has revived motels, diners, souvenir shops, gas stations and other buildings along the old route.
The enduring fascination, along with some federal grants, has helped Route 66 thrive, even as people old enough to remember its heyday die off.
"People are looking to see the real America, not Walt Disney's version," said Ron Hart, director and founder of the Route 66 Chamber of Commerce in Carthage, Mo.
A Rutgers University study released in March estimated that people spend $132 million annually along old Route 66, which crosses eight states and is marked in some places by ceremonial signs. Continued

City Divides and Unites for a Dog Called Blue

ELEPHANT BUTTE, N.M. (NYTimes) This is the story of a leash, a law and a city’s dueling definitions of compassion. It is a story of limits tested and stretched; of strife, threats and, possibly, compromise. Mostly, though, it is a story about a dog named Blue who, this week, brought this small desert city together after nearly tearing it apart.

The City Council held a meeting on Wednesday to decide Blue’s fate. Continued

Billionaire pledges 90,000 acres for conservation area in Colorado

(MSNBC) ... The proposed conservation area -- which would be much larger than Bacon's ranch -- "remains largely unchanged and is a place where wildlife can migrate between the high prairies of eastern New Mexico and the high mountain valleys of central Colorado," an Interior team that scouted the area last year reported.

"Maintaining such an open corridor is important for species survival and overall ecosystem health," the team added. "There are few other places in the southwestern United States where such an open and unchanged landscape exists." Continued

The Jews Who Tamed The Wild West

(Jewish Week) ... Schweizer, on the other hand, was like a bold character out of “Blazing Saddles” — a short, stocky, prematurely balding, cigar-chomping German immigrant who rose from selling oranges on Santa Fe trains in California to managing the Harvey eating house in Gallup, N.M., (a job he got after winning a fight with a tough freight train crew that refused to pay — crowning one with a Fred Harvey signature sugar bowl and pulling an unloaded antique gun on the other). Continued

Photo: Harvey House, Belen, New Mexico (Kim Choate/MDRails)

Attebury

Annie Oakley's gun fetches $143,400 at auction

McALLEN, Texas (AP) A shotgun that once belonged to Western sharpshooter and entertainer Annie Oakley sold for more than $143,000 at an auction in Dallas on Sunday.
The trove of about 100 of the icon's items headlining Heritage Auctions' "Legends of the Wild West" event brought in nearly $520,000, according to the auction house.
The items included several guns, her Stetson hat, photographs and letters. Oakley's great-grandnieces put up the items and had inherited them from their mother, who died in 2009. Continued

Mesa Redonda

Just a few miles south of Tucumcari, Mesa Redonda reigns over the southern Mesalands in stoic splendor. I think I could spend the rest of my life photographing this mesa and never do it justice, but it's worth a try. Below is a hundred year old postcard of the mesa, courtesy of my grandmother. 

Old House 7

We were having some color problems, mostly from the laptop (too blue), and just couldn't get the color right in our pictures. It finally occurred to me to patch it into the LCD TV and things are looking better, I think.

Once Upon a Time in Italy: A Spaghetti Western Roundup

(NYTimes) WHEN film critics and historians refer to the spaghetti western, they tend to mean four films directed by Sergio Leone: his “Dollars” trilogy with Clint Eastwood, and his epic, “Once Upon a Time in the West.” This focus on Leone’s work is understandable: he was a great filmmaker who made Mr. Eastwood a star. And it also acknowledges Akira Kurosawa, the form’s spiritual godfather, whose film “Yojimbo” inspired Leone and his colleagues to see westerns as cynical samurai films. But the spotlight on one director has tended to obscure the rest of the Italian western subgenre, which may include as many as 500 films. Continued