May 9, 2025
My son, T. Charles, sent me a Storyteller Tactics deck of cards with helpful hints on how to create better stories. So, this morning I read this one card with interest: combine disparate photos and images and give them demented back stories.
A madame at Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1876, she operated a disorderly house for a time but got tired of the grind and became best known as an adept gambler, once fleecing a young Bat Masterson of his entire bankroll and his pants. She allegedly made him mount up without them. She was attractive but stern and described by oldtimers who "knew her" in the biblical sense as having "sparkling black eyes and always comporting herself in a genteel manner." Tiring of men in general and cowboys in particular, she retired in 1897 and joined the Episcopal Church and became known for her social welfare work. She died at Deming, New Mexico in 1934.
Free-ways Named In His Honor
On the San Carlos Apache Reservation in the 1870s the U.S. Army was charged with writing down the names of each tribal member who was eligible to receive rations. The problem the soldiers had was in the Apache culture, it’s rude to ask an Apache his name. Plus, their names are often hard to pronounce, much less spell. This led to the soldiers giving the Apaches creative monikers such as Mickey Free (a popular, fictional, Irish character in a book one of the soldiers was reading) and Curly, who was probably anything but. Some were descriptive—Cut Mouth—and some names were not creative at all, like A-1. But one of the most enigmatic names given was Fun. Was he? One can only hope.
Daily Whip Out: "Fun"One Can Only Imagine
Fun was arrested in the aftermath of the Cibecue affair of August 30, 1881, but he was freed when Al Sieber came to his defense. Three other mutinous scouts were executed. He was always very popular at the dances and fathered numerous children. Fun retired from active service in 1925 and received an "Indian War" pension and lived out his life in Apache high style with his extended family on his ranch near McNary in the White Mountains. The Southern California rock band The Beach Boys immortalized him in their hit song, "Fun, Fun, Fun."
—Poached and bastardized from Dan L. Thrapp's Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography
"The problem with most history is that so much of it is simply not true."
—Old Grizzled Historian who absolutely hates my flights of fancy
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