Sgt. Mom

Air Force veteran, historical novelist, and cat-person

A Touch of Murder in Suburbia

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Our neighborhood the street that we live on is in the news today because of a double murder last night. We didn’t know the victims personally, although we might have seen them now and again. We knew the house, as we walked by it frequently like nearly every day. We definitely had talked casually to some of their close neighbors; this is the kind of neighborhood and street we live on. People know each other and their dogs by sight, wave to each other’s cars, take note of the condition of the yards … that kind of casual suburban thing.

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History Friday – The Legend of Sally Skull

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It was said of Texas that it was a splendid place for men and dogs, but hell for women and horses. Every now and again though, there were women who embraced the adventure with the same verve and energy that their menfolk did; and one of them was a rancher, freight-boss and horse trader in the years before the Civil War. She is still popularly known as Sally Skull to local historians. There were many legends attached to her life, some of them even backed up by public records. Her full given name was actually Sarah Jane Newman Robinson Scull Doyle Wadkins Horsdorff. She married or at least co-habited five times. Apparently, she was more a woman than any one of her husbands could handle for long.

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Julian Fellowes and an American Downton Abbey?

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Seriously, I hope they have better luck than the last time American TV producers tried to riff off the success of the original Upstairs, Downstairs it was called Beacon Hill, as I recall and a routine googlectomy confirms. It started with great fanfare and interest, and promptly fizzled out, probably confirming expectations that American TV just cannot do family saga/period drama in anything other than as a TV miniseries with a limited run. It’s certainly a wise choice to go back to the rip-roaring decades of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. Twain did not mean it as a compliment, though he meant something vulgarly over-ornamented, cheap pot-metal covered with a microscopic layer of gold. All flash and glitter, trashy glamor to fool the tasteless and/or newly-rich, of which there were a lot in post Civil War America, which was going industrial in a way and in a degree that made the genteel old-money established families, with fortunes based on land, trade, banking and the occasional eccentric invention look on in horror.

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History Friday – The Fort at La Ramie

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Once upon a time in the west, there was a pleasant piece of land, of open meadows broken by stands of trees on the headwaters of the North Platte River by the foot of a range of dark hills, in the present state of Wyoming. A creek flowed into the North Platte, just there, where in the very early days of the North American fur trade a French-Canadian trapper named Jaques La Ramee was supposed to have been killed by hostile natives and his body thrown into it. So the little stream and the place where it joined the Platte became known as the Laramie River, and the confluence as the Laramie Fork, or in the alternate spelling of the era “Laremais’ Point.”

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