Roundup: February 12 2020

Roundup Synopsis

The American frontier crawled with gunslingers. Each one picked up the firearm for a different reason, and each one aimed for the same result; gun violence and death was a constant threat in the Wild West, whether the victims were implicated in crime and scandal, or if they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. These circumstances made the firearm the be all and end all to both keeping the peace and disrupting order. The moral code of the time seems blurred to us, making judgment calls on four gunmen difficult—Pink Higgins, Luke Short, Jim Miller, and Bill Fossett. Charles King invited us to set aside our values to marvel at the spectacle that was the ruthlessness, the cunning, and the extraordinary careers of these four men.
Not every gunslinger can be called a ruthless killer, but they were killers nonetheless. Luke Short, a shrewd businessman and gambler, and Bill Fossett, a fearless lawman who climbed the ranks in a long career, both used force to overcome challenges. The American frontier pushed people to vice and violence in a way that left no room for polite diplomacy. Short escaped arrest after selling bootleg whiskey to Native Americans, and his business dealings landed him in one tricky situation after another. He made it big scoring ranch land, owning whiskey stocks, and running saloons, and with the help of his six shooter, he never let racketeers or corrupt capitalists get one over on him in his career.
Fossett’s career involved a more traditionally noble path, killing or capturing outlaws and running with peacekeeping posses. Even his daughter took after him in shooting and maintaining order on the frontier. For every morally dubious or righteous gunman, however, there was also a morally corrupt one— or, at least, one whose career of gunslinging can be harder to swallow.
Some men killed ruthlessly, amassing astounding body counts and defying the law at every turn. Whether their intentions were noble or not, the end results reveal the capacity for death and violence in the Old West. Pink Higgins and Jim Miller had drastically different lives as gunmen, with Higgins leaning toward the far more “righteous” of the two. He took the cowboy profession seriously, and as a range detective for the Spur Ranch in Texas, Higgins lynched many cattle rustlers. Higgins also feuded with the Horrell Brother outlaws, kickstarting his reputation as a gunslinger. While he was ruthless, Higgins directed his brutality toward criminals; Miller’s violence, on the other hand, is harder to reconcile by today’s standards of morality. Miller advertised himself as an assassin, accruing great wealth taking assignments, even during his work with the Texas Rangers. Not only did the Texas Rangers apparently tolerate his lucrative side job, but he had already managed to serve as a lawman in Pecos. A man of no vices save for profitable murder, Miller set a comically conflicting example for men in the Wild West.
Morality changes over the ages, and America being so young makes the jump in standards between eras look steep. King proposed that the concoction of booze, guns, and unsavory personalities lended to the “wildness” of the west, leaving behind a memory of lawlessness in our minds. He saw both marvel and horror in the histories of America’s famed killers. While he entertained the crowd with these stories, King also emphasized the importance in paying mind to the moral gap between the American frontier past and our present—not so far removed from our contemporary lives, and not a history we should honor without judgment. — Arkaz Vardanyan

Photos from the Roundup

Roundup: February 12, 2020

Almansor Court – 700 S. Almansor, Alhambra, CA.
Social Hour: 5:00 PM
Dinner: 6:00 PM

A .pdf of the Roundup Announcement can be downloaded here. 

Our Speaker: Charles King
His Subject: Wild West Gunslingers: Short biographies of various gunmen, lawmen, feuds, and their outcomes.

Charles Randy King will entertain us with stories of “Wild West” gunmen, lawmen, and feuds.   A series of old-time photographs will accompany his talk on notable characters such as gunfighter Pink Higgins; businessman, cowboy and gambler Luke Short; lawman and professional killer Jim “Killin’ Jim” Miller; and fearless frontiersman, detective and Marshal “Wild” Bill Fossett.  After this presentation, the lines may blur between those you consider a lawful man or a gunman.

Charles Randy King is a Corresponding Member of our Corral.  He has worked in the broadcast industry for most of his adult life, while raising a family and actively being involved in community affairs.  Randy has always been an avid student of American History and gravitates to the “Wild West”, which is the genre of several of his published books.  He has also worked and collaborated with the History Academy in Gettysburg, PA, providing crucial research, development, and budgeting for various projects for shows of historical content for presentation to a variety of cable networks.  These include the History Channel, National Geographic, and the Military Channel.  In addition to his published books, Charles Randy King has developed and written two screen plays, of which one screen play and one book have been ‘optioned’ and are currently in development for the movie industry.

Brand Book 23 Release and Book Signing

It’s time to celebrate Westerner style.  Come be a part of our celebration this evening with Editor Joe Cavallo for the release of the new, highly anticipated, beautiful, high-quality, limited edition Brand Book 23!  A special author and contributor signing event will take place during our social hour, so plan on arriving early to attend this grand event which has been sixteen years in the making. Copies will be available for those who previously preordered.   For those who have not yet submitted their book order, copies of Brand Book 23 may be purchased at this event.  This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Register for the February Roundup before the Thursday deadline to reserve your place at this historic event!    The deadline to register is February 6th, for our February 12th Roundup!

Future Los Angeles Corral Events

March 11, 2020
Bruce Merritt
The Founding of the Society of Colonial Wars in Los Angeles in 1895.

April 8, 2020
Mike Post
The Chimineas Ranch of the Carrizo Plain National Monument

May 13, 2020
Steve Baker
Notable Women of Monrovia and their Enduring Impact on Society

Dinner Fees, Reservation Deadline & Meal Choices

Please make your reservations by Thursday, February 6^th, so that we can include your meal preference when placing the food order for our event.   This month, your meal selection is beef, chicken and vegetarian.  The beef meal will be Top Sirloin grilled and slow roasted.  The chicken option is Baked Garlic Chicken, lightly breaded, topped with garlic and parmesan cheese.  The Vegetarian entrée is Vegan Tartare, an artfully displayed seared seasonal fruit or vegetable diced & atop a bed of avocados & topped with a balsamic vinaigrette and a homemade crostini.  Our dessert will be Haagen Daz vanilla ice cream! 

Please observe the registration deadline for this special event and place your order no later than Thursday, February 6^th

The Roundup Dinner Fee is $40 for those who register before the deadline.  Those who register late or walk-in will be charged $45, and may be limited to their choice of meal.  The Roundup Store can be reached through the Members Only tab.   Be sure to select your meal option, then pay using a PayPal account or by credit card.

New Mailing Address for Roundup Reservations & Dues

Our Registrar of Marks and Brands position is currently vacant.    Until this position is filled, the Trail Bosses kindly request that all Roundup reservations and membership dues be sent to our Keeper of the Chips, Mr. John Shea, at 13613 Barlin Avenue, Downey, CA 90242-5107.  Questions or late reservations?   Please direct all reservation or membership dues questions to John Shea by phone at (562) 408-6959.

Dues Renewal Reminder

As a reminder to all members, if you have not already renewed your 2020 dues, please send in your payment of $50.00 or renew online as soon as possible.   Members who have not already renewed will receive a reminder from a Trail Boss until we have a new Registrar.  Your dues help support our Fellowship program and pay for the Branding Iron, Special Keepsakes and Westerners International dues.

The Dues Store is located under the Members Only tab. Pay using a PayPal account or credit or debit card (through PayPal).   If paying by check, please forward your payment to: Mr. John Shea, at 13613 Barlin Avenue, Downey, CA 90242-5107.  Thank you.

Los Angeles Corral Ongoing Book Auction

Many books have been donated since our last public auction at the October 2019 Rendezvous!  Request a copy of the new, 2020 book list with an Email to:  briandervindillon@gmail.com.  If you place your order via Email, books can be delivered to you at the monthly Roundups!  You can find the updated list of auction items here.

Roundup: January 8 2020, ECV Night

Roundup Synopsis

On E Clampus Vitus Night, fraternity members dressed in red to usher in the New Year at the first roundup of 2020. Clamper Mark Mutz took the floor to discuss the ins and outs of storytelling. Mutz uncovered the truth behind various legends about American history. He connected historical monuments of death and destruction with his experience as a curious young man in New England, an infantry sergeant from the Pacific Northwest to Kentucky, and as a resident in his current home in California. The tombstones he found throughout his life served as reminders of grim moments in the past often forgotten by the average American today—“A Soldier of the Revolution,” the Russian orthodox cemetery near Fort Richardson, Alaska, and the Civil War graveyards near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Each marker told a story, and those stories contributed to Mutz’s endeavor to report on those stories in his newspaper, The Fence Post.
America was built on legends and continues to be spoken of in the language of these legends. The mythos surrounding the origin of Thanksgiving cracked under the pressure of Mutz’s corrections, and that same pressure challenged other popular misconceptions; the conquered Californios who fought back against American conquest with skill and bravery, as opposed to letting our country have an easy victory. Most fallacious of all, in Mutz’s eyes, would be the various paradoxes that make up America’s historic foundation. The fight for U.S. independence missed a true sense of universal patriotism as a mess of loyalism, fence-sitting, and opportunism stood in the way of unified dissent against the British. “Liberty and justice for all” applied only to a select portion of the American population for many generations. The existence of slavery and the disenfranchisement of women are two of the clearest examples of how America’s promise did not match up to reality.
How can a nation stand on so many contradictions? Mutz strives to take such contradictions apart. Their existence begs asking— does America stand because of a collective willingness to overlook errors in nationalist nostalgia? Many more factors put America in a good position to avoid discussing its checkered past, but a critical look at the historical record is necessary to stop the cycle of perpetuating a lack of awareness of our country.
— Arkaz Vardanyan

Photos from the Roundup

Roundup: January 8, 2020

Sheriff Ann Shea declares the January Roundup as E Clampus Vitus Night!   Clampers are encouraged to wear ECV regalia.

Almansor Court – 700 S. Almansor, Alhambra, CA.
Social Hour: 5:00 PM
Dinner: 6:00 PM

A .pdf of the Roundup Announcement can be downloaded here. 

Our Speaker: Mark Mutz, Corral Member, Newspaper Publisher and member of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus (Peter Lebec Chapter)
His Subject: Stories: The Myths, the Facts, and the Realities

Mark Mutz has always had an interest in history and events.  As we go through life, we can begin to realize that the descriptions of many events in history are tainted in such a fashion as to make the subject of the events appear quite different than the actual circumstances.   

Mark’s love of history and events started at an early age.  He was born and raised in New England, where history was all around him.  There were stories of Indian Wars, some of which occurred 140 years before the United States declared independence.  One battle lead to a day of Thanksgiving being declared in 1637, following the Mystic Massacre during the Pequot War. 

When walking through the woods, he occasionally came across stone walls in the middle of stands of Oak trees that were third or fourth growth.  Other times, he found lone Chestnut trees and later realized that the oaks had replaced these mighty trees.  He also remembers walking through a graveyard and finding a headstone marked for “A Soldier of the Revolution”.   

Stories are all around us and the retelling can share the facts, portray the reality, or turn them into myths.  While stationed in Fort Richardson, Alaska as an Infantryman, Mark also found an old cemetery for Russians, complete with little houses on each grave.  When he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, there were more graves, but this time for Veterans of the Civil War. 

One of the biggest problems in telling an accurate story is getting accurate information to base it on.  For Mark, the art of storytelling involves presenting a topic in a space ranging from ¼ to two pages long that allows the reader to develop a complete picture in their mind when reading the Fence Post, a newspaper that Mark and spouse Dorothy own and publish monthly.   

Come spend an evening with the Westerners, as we listen to storytelling presented by our newest Corresponding Member, Mark Mutz!

Future Los Angeles Corral Events

February 12, 2020     
Randy King        
Wild West Gunslingers: Short biographies of various gunmen, lawmen, feuds, and their outcomes.

March 11, 2020      
Bruce Merritt
The Founding of the Society of Colonial Wars in Los Angeles in 1895.    

Dinner Fees, Reservation Deadline & Meal Choices

Please make your reservations by Thursday, January 2nd, so that we can include your meal preferences when placing the food order for our event.   This month, your meal selection is beef, chicken and vegetarian.  The beef meal will be Top Sirloin grilled and slow roasted.  The chicken option is Baked Garlic Chicken, lightly breaded, topped with garlic and parmesan cheese.  The Vegetarian entrée is Vegetable Pad Thai, made from classic Pad Thai noodles with stir fry fresh vegetables and topped with scallions and peanuts.    The dessert for January is Panna Cotta.

The Roundup Dinner Fee is unchanged for 2020 at $40 for those who register before the deadline.  If registering online at www.lawesterners.org, the Roundup Store can be reached through the Members Only tab, and entering the password. Be sure to select your meal option, then pay using a PayPal account or by credit card.

If paying by check, please mail your meal selection and payment to: Mr. Aaron Tate, Registrar of Marks and Brands, 9768 via Roma, Burbank, CA 91504. 

Questions or late reservations can be directed to Aaron Tate by calling or texting to (818) 804-9926, or email at airnbobo@gmail.com. 

Early reservations are strongly recommended and preferred, as there will be only limited, or potentially no meals available for walk-ins.  The cost for late registrations and walk-ins is $45.

Dues Renewal Reminder

As a reminder to all members, it’s time to renew your dues!  If you have not already renewed your 2020 dues, please send in your payment or renew online as soon as possible.   As per our Range Rules, Article VI, dues shall be paid yearly by February 15th.  Members who have not renewed by this date will receive a notice from our Registrar of Marks and Brands.    

The Dues Store is located under the Members Only tab at www.lawesterners.org.   Use the same password to enter this members only section of our website and pay using a PayPal account or credit or debit card (through PayPal).   If paying by check, please forward your payment to:   Mr. Aaron Tate, 9768 via Roma, Burbank, CA 91504.  With Brand Book 23 due out in February, and Brand Book 24 already in process, this is a wonderful time to be a Westerner!   Your dues also help support our Fellowship program and pay for the Branding Iron, Special Keepsakes and Westerners International dues.

Visit our Corral at Live on the Green! 

We will be tabling at the Live on Green! Festival at the Pasadena Convention Center on December 29-31.   Volunteer to help us promote membership in the LA Corral or, at least, when you visit this outstanding free festival, stop by the Eubanks Equestrian Pavilion and visit our booth!  Contact Jim Macklin to volunteer at (626) 305-2391 jhmacklincpa@gmail.com.

Roundup: December 11, 2019

Our Speaker: Brian Dervin Dillon, Ph.D.
His Subject: Wyatt and Josie Earp: Fact, Fiction, and Myth

Brian Dervin Dillon, Ph.D., Past Sheriff of our Los Angeles Corral, just received his 8th consecutive Coke Wood Award from Westerners International for his historical publications, one of which (2015) was on Wyatt and his wife Josie Earp. Brian’s family has a distant connection with that of the famous lawman, and Brian’s younger brother and co-author has worked for 30 years in the cemetery in Colma, California, where Wyatt and Josie are buried.

Dozens of Hollywood movies and hundreds of hours of T.V. programs have been devoted to Wyatt Earp. Almost every Tinseltown leading man, over the past 70+ years, has portrayed the hero of the O.K. Corral shootout. Earp himself was an advisor to early Hollywood “horse operas,” and both William S. Hart and Tom Mix were pallbearers at his 1929 funeral. But what just about every last big or small screen portrayal of Wyatt Earp has in common is an almost complete absence of facts. With the recent revelation that the supposedly definitive biography of Josie is fraudulent, it seems that no aspect of the lawman’s life was left untouched by fictionalizers and mythologizers. This promises to be a fascinating program to end our year.

Roundup Synopsis

Taken From Branding Iron 297 Winter 2020. 
The Los Angeles Corral’s very own Brian Dillon was the speaker for the December roundup. Brian regaled us with the truth, lies, and legends about Wyatt and Josie Earp. Wyatt Earp has been portrayed as a hero in various forms of media for many years. He is represented as a lawman who seeks justice first and foremost. This is mostly fiction though. Earp was a deputy sheriff and deputy marshal, but he was also a pimp, a gambler, and, when he was young, a horse thief. So how did Earp get his good reputation while hiding his negative side? Enter Ned Buntline, the pseudonym for a hack fiction writer named Edward Zane Carroll Judson.
Buntline never wrote about Wyatt Earp, but he did start the American obsession with the Wild West that inexorably led to Earp’s stardom. His first creation was Buffalo Bill. The famous Wild West Show started on a stage in New York and expanded to the giant spectacle with which we are all familiar. From there the mythologizing moved onto the big and small screens. Earp worked as a consultant on some of these movies adding an air of legitimacy to the lies being fed to the public.
With all of the twin six shooter twirling cowboys running around on screen and in books, people started to actually believe what was being sold to them—even those feats that violated common sense or the laws of physics. Reenactments and theme parks perpetuate the fictitious version of the Old West. Ever present among the movies, books, and especially TV shows was Wyatt Earp, the steadfast lawman, keeping the west safe for women and children everywhere in nightly reruns of his shootout at the O.K. Corral.
Josie Earp was not immune to telling lies about her husband and his exploits. After Wyatt’s death in 1929, she sold off various guns that she claimed belonged to him. She was also not safe from lies being spread about her. A photograph of a woman in a very sheer dress was said to be a photo of Josie taken in the 1880s. But the photo was originally taken in 1914 in New York when she was 53 years old and 2000 miles away. That didn’t stop it from being used on the cover of an entirely fake biography of Josie.
Legends can be good as entertainment but that good goes away when they are presented as fact. A man who did a lot of bad things in his life portraying himself as an upstanding lawman isn’t good. When it leads to various authors and filmmakers embellishing, not just that man’s life, but also the world he lived in, that can be dangerous. A case in point being the downright stupid way most movie and television cowboys handle their guns, which they treat like stage props rather than deadly weapons. It can lead to unsafe behavior at the best and death at the worst. Pistol twirling cowboys are fun to watch but they aren’t real. They should remain in the land of make believe and stay out of history books.
— Aaron Tate

Photos from the Roundup