October 11, 2026
Just got this from Australia:
"Hi Bob, this is what AI did with The Real Old Sadie picture. I asked it to reimagine the image at age 20. I believe she was 18 or 19 when she met Wyatt."
—Bradley Ireland
Sadie De-Aged via AI
Impressive, and frightening. Will we ever be able to trust photographs ever again?
It is raining right now (6:14 a.m.) to beat the band. That was a favorite saying of my grandmother Minnie: "They were going to beat the band." She meant that they were driving really fast, but where in the hell did that weird saying come from and what does it really mean?
To Beat The Band!
"It's from the late 1890s, to do something with maximum enthusiasm, great force, high speed, or to the greatest possible degree."
—Mad Coyote Joe
Minnie Hauan Bell on her wedding day
Well, naysayers and the nitpickers will undoubtably claim that saying would only be in usage to a narrow Norsky immigrant clan from northern Iowa. Most certainly the saying was not in use anywhere else.
Detectives Trap Wyatt Earp, 'Gun Man,' In Swindle
Or, so said the headline in the Los Angeles Herald on July 22, 1911. Apparently, the con was aimed at a LA real estate agent, J.Y. Peterson, who claimed he was lured by the three arrested 'sharpies' into a room at the Auditorium Hotel for a rigged faro game. Peterson became suspicious, left, and contacted the police. All three were booked as suspected confidence men and the newspaper claimed Earp was the ringleader.
So When Did the Turn Begin?
Stuart Lake is the one who turned the tide in 1931 with the publication of "Frontier Marshal" (it's a little ironic that Lake wanted "Frontier Gunfighter" as the title, but Sadie would not have it). As you will notice in the headline above, in 1911 Earp was primarily known as a "Gun Man" not as a lawman. And the O.K. Corral incident was more often than not described as the "Earp-Clanton feud" as in the Hatfield & McCoys embroglio.
As author Gary Roberts aptly points out, there were plenty of dissenting voices when it came to debating the newly coined American hero Wyatt Earp. Arizona historian Frank C. Lockwood called Earp a "very crafty and suave dissimulator."
"It does beat the band how the truth will be warped and misstated over the years."
—Wyatt Earp in a letter to William S. Hart
Meanwhile, this just in. . .
Why Cow-Boy And Not Cowboy?
"Bob I just read your The Illustrated Life and Times of Wyatt Earp and thought it was excellent but why did the word cow-boy have a dash between it?
—Kenneth Haines
Before the word "cowboy" became a modern word, journalists across the country used the hyphen to indicate and portray what they saw as miscreants who were somewhere between a biker and a pirate. The term Cow-boy was, at that time, a derogatory term and I used it as a flashback anomaly because I thought it was kind of groovy.
"The shortest distance between a human being and the Truth is a story."
—Old Vaquero Saying
You’ve got to love old sayings like “to beat the band.” When my kids were little, I loved confusing them with phrases I’d stolen from my dad. Some of my favorites were “one-trick pony,” “knee-high to a grasshopper,” “cattywampus,” “willy-nilly,” “half-cocked,” and “a coon’s age.”
ReplyDeleteI remember one time, after my dad and I finished chopping wood for the winter, he said, “I’m about fagged out.”
I let him keep that one.