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Thursday, August 24, 2006
Annals of the Former World
I saw this mentioned in Wikipedia, so I checked out a copy from the library - Annals of the Former World by John McPhee.
"Through the eighteen-nineties, there are various hiatuses in the resume of John Love, but as a cowboy and homesteader he very evidently prospered, and he also formed durable friendships--with Chief Washakie, for example, and with the stagecoach driver Peggy Dougherty, and with Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). There came a day when Love could not contain his developed curiosity in the precesence of the aging chief. He asked him what truth there was in the story of Crowheart Butte. Had Washaki really eaten his enemy's heart? The chief said, "Well, Johnny, when you're young and full of life you do strange things."
Robert LeRoy Parker was an occasional visitor at Love's homestead on Muskrat Creek, which was halfway between Hole-in-the-Wall and the Sweetwater River--that is, between Parker's hideout and his woman. Love's descendants sometimes stare bemusedly at a photograph discovered a few years ago in a cabin in Jackson Hole that had belonged to a member of the Wild Bunch. The photograph, made in the middle eighteen-nineties, shows eighteen men with Parker, who is wearing a dark business suit, a tie and a starchy white collar, a bowler hat. Two of the bunch are identified only by question marks. One of these is a jaunty man of middle height and strong frame, his hat at a rakish angle--a man with a kindly face, twinkling shrewd eyes, and a mustache growing over his mouth like willows bending over a brook. It may be doubtful whether John Love would have joined such a group, but when you are young and full of life you do strange things." (P.304-305)
"In one of those Yale summers, while taking some time away from the rock, he badly cut his foot in a lake near Lander. He made a tourniquet with his bandanna, and limped down to see Doc Smith. This was Francis Smith, M.D., who had coaxed David's father past the tick fever, had seen David's mother though a strep infection that nearly killed her, and, over the years, had put enough stitches in David to complete a baseball. Now, as he worked on the foot, he told David that one of his recent office visitors had been Robert LeRoy Parker himself (Butch Cassidy),
David said politely that Cassidy was dead in Bolivia, and everybody knew that.
Smith said everybody was wrong. The patient had appeared in the doorway, and had stood there long and thoughtfully, searching the face of the doctor. Pleased by what he did not find, he said. "You don't know who I am, do you?"
The doctor said, "You look familiar, but I can't quite say."
The patient remarked that his face had been altered by a surgeon in Paris. Then he lifted his shirt, exposing the deep crease of a repaired bullet would--craftmanship that Doc Smith recognized precisely as his own." (P.358)
Take it for what you will.
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