Bookshelf

I was going through my bookshelf yesterday after chowing down on the turkey with all the trimmings and reviewing some of the books I have on hand. In one bookcase I came across the following:

l. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, a great western by a prolific and great author
2. Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle by Katie Lee
3. Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill by Colonel Wm F. Cody
4. Flaming Gorge Country by Dick and Vivian Dunham
5. Dictionary of the American Indian by John Stoutenburgh, Jr.
6. Gun Notches by Thomas H. Rynning
7. The Outfit by J. P. S. Brown
8. Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard by Joe DeBarthe
9. I, Tom Horn by Will Henry
10. Memoirs of a Lawman edited by Wilson Rockwell
11. Rocky Mountain Warden by Frank Caulkins
12. Indians and Outlaws by Albert A. Lyman
13. Ferron Creek by Wanda Snow Peterson

Except for the first in the list, everything else is non-fiction, some of which bring back memories of my first ten years growing up in a place that is no longer in existence as a town. I think I've read and passed on more books like this than I can show in a listing, some of which I'm sorry I didn't keep, but space limits, and my beautiful better half tells me I have to get rid of all that stuff in the garage, it's too hot out there to keep paper things. But I still have two or three big boxes of baseball cards, etc., which will be passed on to descendants some time or other. There for awhile I was attending card shows and getting autographs on occasion at the urging of a friend who kept telling me it was good deal. Hah! Maybe in a hundred years one or two of them will amount to something.

I had an aunt who lived in Ferron we visited with off and on a few times when we could catch a ride there and back, so when I spotted number 13 above in a used book store somewhere, I had to buy it and read it to see if my relatives were mentioned. They weren't, but I certainly enjoyed reading about the area and the creek that caused so much trouble. My cousin, same age, and I had great entertainment running around the hills looking at things near his house. One time there was an incident with a calf in the barn that was hilarious, but my cousin's life was cut short one day at work later on in his 20's or maybe 30's by an accident. He hadn't been home long from the Korean War zone, and phfffft! it was all over. And the same think happened to another cousin a few years' later. Hell, they went through the battles in Korea and come home only to get blown away in industrial accidents. Life isn't pretty for some people.

But there I go again, wandering on about everything in the world except Westerns, and I've used up about all the time I have to spend on this this morning. I made a little progress on my book yesterday before we went to dinner. The whole thing is down on paper, not a very long one, and I'm rewriting some parts as I read it again for the umpteenth time hoping the great ideas, or near great ones, at least good enough ones, come to me from out of nowhere. That's happened once or twice or I wouldn't have written all the things already that's waiting to be put in commercial book form. Another day, another thousand words, is what I say!