Will the Real Doc Holliday Plot Show Itself?

I had time enough in the afternoon to check out Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It was only twenty miles away from where we were camped. I had read somewhere that Doc Holliday, the famous itinerant, drunken dentist, lies a-molding in the Lynwood Cemetery. I stopped and asked two smiling, jovial, good old boys who were drinking beer on the front steps of a gas station where I might find the cemetery where Doc Holliday was planted. Their directions lead me a couple miles out of town and to the Rosebud Cemetery, definitely the wrong place. On the way back, I stopped and asked a man who was watering in his front yard. He gave me great direction; he knew right where to go. I followed them to the tee and the street I finally turned up was at the very same corner where the two smiling, jovial, good old boys gave me their fine directions. Now, you don't suppose those two guys were having fun with me? Nah.             

    Anyway, I got to the cemetery trailhead and parked the car. This was the right place. A sign pointed the way to the cemetery, up a steep trail. I found out later, no one knows exactly where Doc Holliday is buried. It's an unmarked grave somewhere in the cemetery. A sign explained with words to this effect: John Holliday arrived in Glenwood Springs in last stages of the disease know then as consumption. He worked in the gambling houses. People liked him. When he died, they passed the hat and collected enough money to bury him. A Midwestern gang threatened to steal the body, so Doc's employers hid him away for several years in the basement of a local house. When they felt it was safe, they buried him in an unmarked grave. I guess they wanted to make sure he stayed put. Years later, when he had become bigger than life because of his dealings with the Earps and the OK Corral shootout, a nice monument was carved and placed in the cemetery. It reads, "Doc Holliday, 1852 – 1887. He died in bed." A smaller headstone explains that this is not the actual burial site.

            Wait a minute, I’ve seen the movies. The first one was My Darling Clementine, starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt and Victor Mature as Holliday. In the big shoot out Doc is firing away from behind a rail fence when he gets shot and dies right in the middle of a coughing spell ...The End.  But in Tombstone, Doc dies moments after a poignant, deathbed visit from Wyatt Earp. The camera moves in for a close up. Holliday is weak. His eyes blood shot. There are beads of sweat on his brow and he is unable to feel his toes. He smiles and whispers his last words, “Well, I’ll be damned.” ... The End. 

Of course My Darling Clementine, got it all wrong, what do you expect it’s a movie. At least Tombstone is accurate in one respect, Doc Holliday, as the cemetery epitaph says, died in bed.

Q

George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.

This is the 154^th anniversary of the invention of the Ferris Wheel, which became a major attraction at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893.

    The man who invented it grew up in Carson City. Ferris arrived in Nevada in 1864 at the age of five. His father, George Ferris Sr., was a horticulturalist who was responsible for much of the landscaping in Carson City in the 1870s, including the grounds of the State Capitol.

    The Ferris family lived in the Carson Valley for two years and then moved to a house on the southeast corner of Third and Division streets in Carson City. In 1875, George Ferris Jr. left Nevada to attend the California Military Academy in Oakland. In 1880, he received a degree in civil engineering and was hired by an architectural firm in New York City.

    After a few years, a Pittsburgh firm hired him and it was while working there that he designed the Ferris Wheel. It grew out of the desire to have some kind of structure that would be just as iconic as the Eiffel Tower. Apparently the erecting of the tower was somewhat of a thorn in the side of American engineers. The Americans wanted something grander, something that would say to the world that American engineering prowess was just as good as the French’s, maybe even better.

    The first impression of the fair’s steering committee was not favorable. They initially dismissed the design as being a “crackpot” idea. It was, “modeled on a bicycle wheel: in the pace of spokes to maintain the wheel’s shape and balance, it had heavy steel beams, the ‘forks’ in which the axle was set were two steel girder pyramids. The wheel was 264 feet high, the supporting towers were 140 feet high, and the axle – the largest piece of steel ever forged in the US – weighed 46 ½ tons. The wheel carried 36 elegantly outfitted passenger cars, each of which could fit 40 people sitting or 60 people standing. That's a maximum capacity of 2,160 people! The wheel was spun by either of two 1,000 horsepower steam engines, and stopped by an oversized air brake.”

Much to the committee’s surprise the wheel was proved to be safe.

     It was an immediate hit at the fair and in less than a half year it had carried 1.4 million passengers. In 1904, the wheel was moved to St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Following the show, it was destroyed for scrap. However, the wheel outlived Ferris, who died in Pittsburgh in 1896 at the age of 37.

Q

Westward Ho!

It was bound to happen...In the late 18^th century, this young nation wasn’t content to be confined to the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies, so some eighty years after the Pilgrims landed, exploration shifted into high gear and thus began what was termed “manifest destiny,” the expansion across the continent. Several trails were blazed. People packed up their belongings and headed west. The historic trails reached their peak between 1830 and 1870. During that time period upwards of two-thirds of a million pioneers and traders used them. It took the pioneers six months to do what we can do in a few days. And we do it free of all the hardships and in relative comfort. We have no rivers to ford, no Indians to fight, no disease to contend with, and no shortage of food and water to suffer through. Best of all, we don't have to walk most of the way.

   In addition to the pioneer trails, I’ve added four other trails: the two that were developed so that goods could be brought for trade to new settlements in the southwest, the route used by the Pony Express and finally the all important first transcontinental railroad route.

Lewis and Clark Trail 
”The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803-1806 was perhaps the most important in the history of American exploration. It opened up vast new territories to American knowledge. After the Louisiana Purchase, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were sent to explore the new American territory. They sought a land route to the Pacific, and along the way they made many scientific observations, collected many specimens of flora, and studied the Indians.” 




The Oregon Trail  The first serious attempt by a group to emigrate west along the Oregon Trail took place in 1841. The trail ran from the Missouri River in Kansas City, across Nebraska and Wyoming, on to southern Idaho, and finally into Oregon. Here we have a bit of a puzzle. The map I looked at had it ending in Vancouver, but I have seen a sign in Seaside, OR on the coast west of Portland, which says that that was the end of the trail.  Finally according to Wikipedia the terminus is Oregon City. When asked the question, Where does the Oregon Trail begin and end? WikiAnswers had this to say:

    Well, that depends on how you look at it. Officially, according to an act of Congress, it begins in Independence, Missouri, and ends in Oregon City, Oregon. To the settlers, though, the trail to the Oregon Country was a five-month trip from their old home in the East to their new home in the West. It was different for every family. Some people got ready to leave the East, or "jump off" as they called it, in towns like St. Joseph or Council Bluffs, and others jumped off from their old homes in Illinois or Missouri and picked up the Oregon Trail in the countryside. Along the way, they could choose to take shortcuts or stick to the main trunk of the Trail, and the end of their journey didn't really come until they settled a claim somewhere in the vast Oregon Country.

The Mormon Trail  The trail began in Nauvoo, IL, the year was 1846. Harassment, antagonism, and persecution forced the Mormons out of Nauvoo. The trail’s route ran 256 miles across Iowa to the Missouri River and then 1032 miles across the Great Plains following pretty much the same path as the Oregon Trail until eastern Wyoming where the trail headed southwest to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Over a twenty year period, 70,000 Mormons traveled by wagons and handcarts along this route. 

The California Trail  The trail followed, generally speaking, the same course as the Oregon and Mormon Trails. Near American Falls, Idaho, it headed south across Nevada, over the Sierras and into the golden state.

The Santa Fe Trail   William Becknell was a trader who wanted to take his goods to Santa Fe to sell. He felt the new settlers in New Mexico, who were lacking essentials, would welcome his business, which turned out to be true.

The Old Spanish Trail  The trail was used as a trade route linking Santa Fe, New Mexico and Los Angeles. It had a brief, but active heyday between 1830 and 1848. Traders took goods west and returned with mules and horses.

The Pony Express  The Pony Express was a brave enterprise. It took a lot of guts for the young riders to brave the environment, the Indians, and the weather. It was a job filled with danger. An advertisement recruiting riders asked that recruits be expert riders, willing to risk their lives. "Salary, $25 a month and Orphans Preferred," read the handbills. From St. Joe to Sacramento in ten days was the promise, and they did it. Remarkable! It only lasted 18 months (April 1860 to October 1861) because by that time transcontinental telegraph lines stretched across the continent, and as a result the Pony Express was forced out of business.

Transcontinental Railroad  By 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed, Leland Stanford pounded in the golden spike (supposedly) and travel over the various pioneer trails declined. I’ve read that old man Stanford tried three times to hit the spike and missed all three times. Finally a railroad employee did the deed and history was made at Promintory Point, north of Salt Lake City.