WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE
Little Josephine Cole, not yet three years old, trying to catch an evasive cat in our home, shocked her Aunt Myrtle by saying, “Damn that cat.” My wife was telling Mrs. Morrison, our neighbor, about it, When Dick Morrison, the husband, spoke up saying, “I said those very Words about our damned old cat while the child was over here yesterday.” It has wisely been said: “Out of the mouths of babies come Words we shouldn’t have said in the first place.”
DONE IN CALIFORNIA
Not Hitherto Published—1948.
By John T. Bristow
As sequel to the foregoing old-time cattle riding story-experienced in my younger days on the gently undulating plains of Northeast Kansas, I here record a contrasting up-to-date cattle riding experience I recently had on a far away mountain range. But in this last ride I did not race my horse and crack my whip for the sheer fun of it—as of yore.
Until Sunday, April 18, 1948, I had not been on a horse for fifty-five years—not since the opening of the Cherokee Strip, September 16, 1893, at noon, when, with my brother Dave, and Dr. David H. Fitzgerald, and Charley Rice, I rode sixteen miles in fifty-six minutes to locate a claim on Turkey creek, seven miles southwest of the present city of Enid, Oklahoma. In that race we were led—for a price — by “Ranaky Bill,” an Oklahoma outlaw.
While going up the mountain, the name of other notorious outlaws—the Daltons—was mentioned by my nephew, Sam Bristow, with whom I was riding. Sam owns “Dalton Mountain,” some sixty miles east of Fresno, California, where it is said those desperadoes were in hiding a long time ago.
The Dalton gang of bank robbers—following in the wake of the Jesse James gang whose hideout was in Missouri — operated mainly, I believe, in Kansas and the Indian Territory, in the late ‘80’s. At any rate, the Dalton bank robbers came to grief at Coffeyville in southern Kansas, with three of the gang killed by a sharp-shooting local hardware merchant, and law enforcement officers. Grat and Bob Dalton were killed. Emmett Dalton was badly shot up — was captured, convicted, and given a life sentence. President Theodore Roosevelt pardoned him. I have a faint recollection that sometime prior to the Coffeyville raid, the news dispatches stated that the Daltons—under assumed names—had shipped their horses to the Far west. And it is not at all improbable that our old-time Kansas and Indian Territory band of desperadoes rode their horses to the saddle-back near the top of my nephew’s 3500 foot mountain, from which eminence they could have guarded the approach in all directions.
Dalton Mountain is an attraction for patrons of a large Dude Ranch close by, in the Kings river area—something to talk about only. No dude could ride a horse up that mountain—particularly none of the thirty New York “dude” girls who rode the canyon trails thereabout for several weeks, recently.