April 5, 2007
Worked late last night. Got out of the office at about 7:15. Meghan and Abby were still here, trying to wrap up the June issue.

Got in this morning and tweaked errors on the Ed Short vs. Black-faced Charley Bryant Classic Gunfight. I'm concerned about The Mapinator's railroad route from Hennessey to Wichita. Gus is in Alabama and doesn't have access to our map collection and we don't know how to find stuff the way he could when he was here. He ended up wing-dinging the railroad route from Hennessey, Oklahoma to Wichita. This makes me nervous because it would be like someone wing-dinging a railroad from Kingman to Vegas, which would be wrong for the simple reason that there isn't one. You had to go to Needles, California on the Santa Fe and up through California to make that route. I may call Ed LeRoy at Old Cowtown Museum in Wichita. I'll bet he knows.

Billy The Kid's Death Suit
To all of the Fort Sumner residents who are questioning Buckeye Blake's sculpture of Billy's funeral clothes, and why the ensemble wouldn't have included cowboy boots and a gunbelt, here's Paco Anaya's account in his book, "I Buried Billy":

"'OK,' my brother answered, and with out swearing in or anything else, my brother started to name from those that were there; and he named Antonio Saverda, Jose Silva, Sabal Gutierrez, Lorenzo Jaramillo, but he (Negro) did not want to serve. He said he did not know anything about that. Then Don Alejandro said to my brother, 'You, too, can serve.' And so it was done.

"Then Pat [Garrett] gave Don Alejandro a paper. This paper had the verdict already written by Pat Gartett, which we all signed. My brother signed as president, and then the rest. I took the paper, it was a paper of five inches wide, and about 10 inches long.

"When we were through, Pat said to Don Pedro Maxwell, 'Pete, take this $25 so you can put good clothes on Billy.'

"Don Pedro took the $25 and he and Don Manuel Abreu went to the latter's store and bought a beige suit, a shirt, and undershirt, shorts, and a pair of stockings. I, the writer, and my brother, Higinio Garcia, and several others of those that were there, dressed Billy with those clothes than we laid him on a high bed, one of those narrow ones, and we took him to the saloon where they held dances. There we watched, and on the next day we buried him."

Onion Headline de Jour
Office Manager Forced To Resort To Unfriendly Reminders

"Dilligence is the mother of opportunity."
—Old Vaquero Saying