History

Today I was talking to my uncle, who is visiting my mother for a few days. He's 87 and a big Western reader, so not surprisingly he's read quite a few of my books. Like the rest of my mother's family, he grew up in Brown County, Texas. Now, a while back I wrote a book about the Fence-Cutting Wars, a classic clash between big ranchers and the smaller, "greasy sack" outfits in Brown County during the 1880s and 1890s. My uncle read the book and liked it, and today he was talking about how when he was a kid, he knew an old man who had taken part in the Fence-Cutting Wars. He mentioned as well seeing some of the old fences with the barbed wire that had been cut and spliced back together. The conversation came around to an old man who had taken part in the last Indian fight in Brown County, at Salt Mountain, and how my uncle had known that old-timer, too. Of course, sometimes when relatives start to talk, you have to take their stories with a grain of salt. My uncle is still as sharp as can be, though, and has been an amateur historian for many years. I don't doubt the truth of his yarns, and when you do the math on the years involved, it's certainly possible that during the Twenties there were a lot of old men still around who had actually lived through the things that are now staples of Western fiction. In fact, some of the early Western authors, actors, etc., were rumored to have smelled some powdersmoke themselves. It's history and research material to me, but it was real life to them and to the men my uncle knew, and somehow it makes me feel sort of good to have that close a link to it.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm not old, too. Heck, in my time I've bought brand new paperbacks for a quarter.