May 31, 2012
Going to be a scorcher today (109). Got up at 4:30 and did my walk in the cool.
On the home stretch for a big James-Younger Gang painting "They Took The Whole Road." Here's the painting as it looked this morning before yoga class:
That's Charlie Pitts in the back, behind Jesse. Had good photo reference of Minnesota farm fields in mid-September (the corn fields start to turn brown, in rows, not all of them). Wanted to get that right. Of course, after the gang botched the Northfield robbery, they encountered two storms on the way out: a storm of posses (over 1,000 residents of the state turned out to guard every road and bridge and two, they encountered a huge storm of rain that lasted for almost two weeks). Incredibly, it was the heavy rains which actually aided them in their escape (at least as far as they made it) wiping out their tracks, etc.
Chip DeMann, of Northfield fame, is writing a piece on all the new information that has surfaced about the raid. For example, where they got their horses. For the longest time the conventional wisdom was they rode to Minnesota from Missouri, but we now know they came on the train (ironic, eh?) and purchased horses in the Land of 10,000 lakes. Now we know differently, and soon you will also.
"The future is no more uncertain than the present."
—Walt Whitman
