June 21, 2007
I almost missed a day on my sketches. I was visiting Lew Jones on Tuesday afternoon and catching up on all the news and about five, we had a couple beers, and then some wine with dinner. Lew cooked homemade bar-b-que and pintos and cold slaw and we sat out on his deck and relished the cool, mountain breeze. I had a long day driving and shooting Apaches, so I went to sleep at about ten, a tired boy. Woke up at three in the morning and realized I only had three sketches in my sketchbook for the day. Got up, stumbled out to the car in the dark and got the sketchbook, and whipped out four more, just to be safe. Whew! That was close. I realize that someday I'm going to miss because of circumstances beyond my control, but in the meantime I'm pretty proud of my run (4,007 and counting). And I hope the discipline will pay off in skill and quality.

Speaking of which, I sold a Billy painting to a railroad guy who goes through Kingman quite a bit and calls it "Kingmanistan." I loved that. He is at End of Trail and I saw him last night and he told another story about a young girl with her family on the train, who came up to him and the little girl asked if this train was "The Polar Express," and he told her it was, but then confided to the mother, "It's actually more like the Bi-Polar Express." Rich.

"He stumbled into the Wild West, learned the codes, battled its perils, and documented its ruthless reality."
—Perriton Maxwell, 1907, describing Frederick Remington