H.H.
Lomax’s thoughts
on the
West’s most colorful characters
Over the course of his travels out west, H.H. Lomax
encountered some of the biggest names ever to trod the Old West. These are some of his observations as
recorded in the eight volumes in the Memoirs of H.H. Lomax.
William H. Bonney: Of all the fellows I met during my years
wandering about, not one was more likable than Billy the Kid. Something about the Kid—maybe his
squirrel-toothed grin, his big ears, his infectious laugh—won you over. That’s why I’m glad I didn’t kill him when I
had the chance. Maybe I should have,
because he had threatened me, but it was nothing personal, just that we had
both taken a fancy to the same señorita.
(The Demise of Billy the Kid)
Jesse James: I never much cared for Jesse James. He was about as likable as a rabid mongrel,
but sorry though he may have been, he was downright lovable compared to his
momma. Now there was a cur of a
woman. She was rough as a cob and twice
as ugly, which is a bad thing to say about a man’s momma, even if it’s
true. I never took to her and she never
took to me, though she did take out after me a couple times, once with a
shotgun and once with a frying pan. (The
Redemption of Jesse James)
The Earp Brothers: Running a saloon is as respectable an
occupation as, say, running for political office, and you get to meet a higher
class of people. That’s how I met Doc
Holliday, who threatened to cut out my gizzard, … and the Earp brothers, who
were rightly named because I always felt like throwing up around them. They made me that nervous because I never
knew what side of anything they were on, save their own. I came to believe there were several nooses
hanging in their family tree.” (Mix-Up
at the O.K. Corral)
George Armstrong Custer: I called him “General Bluster” because there
weren’t enough mirrors in the world to adequately reflect his opinion of
himself. And my low opinion of the man
did little to narrow the waistline of his bulging vanity. In fact, he relished telling me how superior
he was to me, him being of Yankee descent and attending West Point, while I was
a poor Southern boy with a narrow education.
I could read, I could write and I could think. Custer could, too, but he liked to read about
himself, write about himself and I imagine, if I could have read his mind, that
he liked to think about himself as well.
Fact was, if you had ordered a thousand sons of bitches from a Chicago
mail-order house and only received him, you’d mark your bill paid in full. (Bluster’s Last Stand)
Calamity Jane: I considered Calamity the homeliest woman I’d
ever laid eyes on. If you could assay
ugly, she’d work out to a hundred dollars per ounce in her early days and five
times that in her later years. On top of
that, her mouth was no prayer book because it was usually filled with whiskey
or profanities so rank she could make Satan blush. (First Herd to Abilene)
Soapy Smith: Known as Jeff when I first met him, but later
as “Soapy,” he was crookeder than a barrel full of rattlesnakes and twice as
mean. What he lacked in integrity, he
more than made up for in cleverness as he could’ve swindled Satan out of his
horns, tail and pitchfork without the devil ever knowing what had
transpired. He possessed enough charm
that shills and hooligans attached to him like metal shavings to a magnet so
you always had to be careful in any town that Soapy worked because his ruffians
were on the lookout for anyone they might defraud or scam. (North to Alaska)
Susan B. Anthony: The more I thought about women’s suffrage
with her as its leader, the more I realized it would be men that would suffer
the most. She marched by with her nose
in the air, her hair pulled tight against her head and tied in a bun in
back. The suffragist wore a black dress
as if she was in mourning, though it was topped with a high, white lace
collar. I wondered if hers was as
prickly as my paper collar and if that was the reason she was brassy as a new
spittoon. If there was any honey in her,
I doubted a thousand swarms of bees could find it. (North to Alaska)
John Wesley Hardin: He stood stationary as a lamppost as I
approached him, drawing near enough to see the evil in his eyes and smell the
whiskey on his breath. Honestly, I was
not surprised because I had met lawyers before, but this was to be the worst of
an inferior breed of humanity. (Outlaw
West of the Pecos)
Oscar Wilde: I met the oddest character I ever encountered
in my travels across the frontier. He
wasn’t American or Indian or Mexican or Chinaman or maybe even human, but an
Irishman named Oscar Wilde, who was traveling the West lecturing folks about
nothing. And people actually paid to
hear him speaking nonsense, though he named it beauty or aesthetics. Beauty was an odd topic for a man as ugly as
Wilde, as he wore long hair like a girl and had a plain, elongated face that
would have looked better on a horse, either end for that matter. (Call of the Wilde)
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5/2/23 |
Review |
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5/2/23 |
BONUS Stop |
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5/3/23 |
Guest Post |
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5/3/23 |
BONUS Stop |
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5/4/23 |
Review |
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5/5/23 |
Review |
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5/6/23 |
Excerpt |
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5/7/23 |
Character Spotlights |
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5/8/23 |
Author Interview |
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5/9/23 |
Review |
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5/10/23 |
Excerpt |
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5/11/23 |
Review |
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5/11/23 |
Review |
These are hilarious! Thanks for sharing!
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