El Malpais Dust Riders & A Fitting Epilogue to Finding The Truth

 November 9, 2025

   Okay, here's a couple opening scenes I'd like to see: They rode out of a dust storm on El Malpais, eager for the hunt, daggers sharp, alert to the danger.

Daily Whip Out: "Malpais Dust Riders"

Scratchboards Collage:

"Real Women of The Wild West

He walked with a swagger, he whispered sweet nothings at the drop of a hat but he never said anything was as easy as all that.

"The Mexicali Stud"

This boy gave back as good as he got.

"Jesse In Hell"

A Fitting Epilogue to Finding The Truth

    It appears from where I sit that the frontier era I loved growing up is fading from the stage. New eras, closer to our current time, have emerged in recent books and TV series as more popular history. Yellowstone and Landman being good examples. 

   When I started chasing the dream of finding out the truth about the Old West characters I loved to read about as a kid, little did I realize that the odds of finding out any solid truth would be so low. In my naive way, I thought, with some effort that we might be able to get close to 100% of the truth. I now realize the realistic chances of finding out rock hard truth is very, very iffy. Just for an example, I read a statistic that of all human history we only know, perhaps 1.6% of it. The world we live in has been designed to be forgotten. And, to make matters worse, written diaries, verbal testimony, is only as good as the human condition is geared to know, which is to say, it's all very sketchy.

   I still love it as much as I did as a wide-eyed kid, perhaps even more, because now I realize how elusive it is to understand anything in this world.

"You often hear, 'History will be my judge.' But history will have its own obsessions, prejudices and amnesia. We don't get to climb some sort of mountain of truth and stand on the top and know everything."

—Ian McEwan, author of "What We Can Know"