Sometimes We Don't Know Jack

 October 29, 2023

   Sometimes riding herd on a history magazine is a bit like a nighttime cattle stampede. It's hard to see where you're going at such a high rate of speed, and you hope all the other hands are doing their part to keep the herd together. All you can do is hang on for dear life and turn the herd slowly until the rampaging nitpickers—I mean cows!—slow into a trot then stop to chow.

   Or, something like that.

   Here's the deal. We often repost old articles out of the magazine and sometimes, a caption, will produce a Gotcha!

   We backtracked and found out this was a caption on a photo in 2017 and the person who wrote this erroneous tidbit is an editor who is no longer with the magazine. Still, it was an honest mistake. The editor in question probably Googled the photograph and got a bogus ID. Happens every day. Of course, we pride ourselves in being above all that and most of the time we have historians, editors and proofers who know better and should have caught it to get it right. And, of course, it hurts our street cred and we are working to make sure this doesn't happen again. Or, I should say, honestly, that it happens as little as is humanly possible.

   But, of course, this "Gotcha!" game has been going on for a very long time.

Daily Whip Out:

"Horseback Vaqueros Laughing at Gringo"

"Hey, Gringo, you don't know Jack!"

—Old Vaquero Saying