April 2, 2004
Rained all night last night. Went for a soggy walk this morning with Kathy and the dogs. I had on a big cowboy hat and Kath had an umbrella. The dogs got soaked but were still prancing and dancing like it was their birthday (Oh, to have the outlook of a dog).

Kathy and I watched the third installment of Deadwood last night (it will run this coming Sunday). Big poker scene with Jack McCall (he still isn’t I.D.d, although I think someone called him “Jack” last episode). Check it out and see if you agree if yesterday’s claim is on the money. Also, the description of the real McCall was that he was “cross-eyed” but the producers evidently decided to give him a sleepy eye, which makes sense. A cross-eyed character would be a tad hard to portray, and an actor would be hard pressed to cross his eyes take after take and even if he could it probably would be way too distracting for the viewers.

Powers Booth (Curly Bill in Tombstone) is a guest star and his character is starting a rival saloon across the street from the villain’s crib. Unfortunately, Booth doesn’t get much to do. Hopefully we’ll see him get his evil mojo going in the fourth episode.

The Neilsen numbers for Deadwood are quite convincing. With the Sopranos lead-in on Sunday night, Deadwood pulled in 5.3 mil the first week and 4.9 the second. That was evidently enough for HBO to greenlight 12 more shows. By the way, the Sopranos pulled in 9.4 mil.

The roaring success of Deadwood caused us to take a look at our Classic Gunfights calendar for this year and we seriously considered whether to put my Wild Bill Hickok book (which is about three-quarters done) in place of the top secret extension of Classic Gunfights, Volume II. We finally decided that if Deadwood is on next year we will still be in good shape, so we are staying on our original schedule.

On the Custer front, I’ve been getting almost hourly updates on questions and info from Michael Donahue and Jim Hatzell. Excellent stuff. In addition to the well-placed arrow (which by the way was stuck up the end. Ouch!) and a six-inch-gash in his left thigh (the Sioux believed if they slashed your thigh in death, you’d have trouble mounting a horse in heaven), and here’s the kicker, Custer was totally naked, except he still had on his socks. Argyles, perhaps?

This morning, Gus, Meghan and I are going to go over all the new information and get it shoe horned into the seven pages allotted for it (we added a page yesterday because of the stunning new material). Finally, we will see an accurate narrative of what Custer did in the last 45 minutes of his life.

“If only accuracy was art .”
—Bart Bull