Photographs by Alphonse Mucha

The Killing of the Second Billy the Kid - Nov. 14, 1882

From History.com


Nashville Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie

"On this day, the gunslinger Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie shoots the Billy "The Kid" Claiborne dead in the streets of Tombstone, Arizona.

"The town of Tombstone is best known today as the site of the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral. In the 1880s, however, Tombstone was home to many gunmen who never achieved the enduring fame of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. Franklin "Buckskin" Leslie was one of the most notorious of these largely forgotten outlaws.

"There are few surviving details about Leslie's early life. At different times, he claimed to have been born in both Texas and Kentucky, to have studied medicine in Europe, and to have been an army scout in the war against the Apache Indians. No evidence has ever emerged to support or conclusively deny these claims.

"The first historical evidence of Leslie's life emerges in 1877, when he became a scout in Arizona. A few years later, Leslie was attracted to the moneymaking opportunities of the booming mining town of Tombstone, where he opened the Cosmopolitan Hotel in 1880. That same year he killed a man named Mike Killeen during a quarrel over Killeen's wife, and he married the woman shortly thereafter.

Billy "The Kid" Claiborne

"Leslie's reputation as a cold-blooded killer brought him trouble after his drinking companion and fellow gunman John Ringo was found dead in July 1882. Some Tombstone citizens, including a young friend of Ringo's named Billy "The Kid" Claiborne, were convinced that Leslie had murdered Ringo, though they could not prove it. Probably seeking vengeance and the notoriety that would come from shooting a famous gunslinger, Claiborne unwisely decided to publicly challenge Leslie, who shot him dead.

"The remainder of Leslie's life was equally violent and senseless. After divorcing Killeen in 1887, he took up with a Tombstone prostitute, whom he murdered several years later during a drunken rage. Even by the loose standards of frontier law in Tombstone, the murder of an unarmed woman was unacceptable, and Leslie served nearly 10 years in prison before he was paroled in 1896. After his release, he married again and worked a variety of odd jobs around the West. He reportedly made a small fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike region before he disappeared forever from the historical record."

More about Buckskin Leslie and Billy Claiborne

The marriage of Buckskin Leslie

I Dressed Up for Rock and Roll - Top 30 Things Said by Pre-Schoolers

Amazing statements made by Pre-Schoolers from Twitter's @preschoolgems ...

1. Once upon a time there was a castle with a big beautiful storm inside.

2. This is a sea otter; do what he does and you'll be cool like him.

3. Mother carry me, back to the screaming sea.

4. You live in my brain even when I'm not at school.

5. Somebody hit my feelings.

6. RAWR, I'm fiercing back!

7. I CAN find my angry but I CAN’T find my fun.

8. Where is me?

9. I want to bring a bubble home!

10. I hear something... I think it's the earth.

11. I'm transforming my brain into a different brain.

12. I dressed up for rock and roll.

13. Raisins are psychotic.

14. If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it.

15.  Is it tomorrow today?

16.  I just really need to be Darth Vader right now.

17. He's trying to get at us with madness.

18. Rocks have faces for real.

19. My heart feels like black paint.

20. Watch out, I'm gonna get some dinner from the sky!

21. Is today a long time?

22. There's a stranger in my face.

23. We will become evil and the stars will come alive.

24. The ghost and the werewolf on either side of me are actually really nice!


25. And no one ever stopped screaming
26. My country is right in my pocket.

27. I came here magic.

28. Leprechauns are kind of like scientists.

29. Lots of kids can see invisible stuff.

30. The people on TV are in charge of the snow.

My Favorite by T. S. Elliot - Preludes

I


THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps 5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.

And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Top 20 Grateful Web Blog Entries - Editor's Favorites

1. Creepy Vintage Halloween Photos

2. Film of La Belle Otero

3. Twelve Saints and Sinners by Molly Crabapple

4. Helen Kane, Real Life Betty Boop

5. NYC Photos by Kate Black and Beth Hommel and more including one by Molly Crabapple

6. Art and Love, Goya's Paintings of Maja

7. More Art and Love, the Loves of Lucrezia Borgia

8. Louise Brooks in 'Pandora's Box'

9. Three Poems by Jack Kerouac

10. The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved by Hunter S. Thompson

11. Expressionist Film, Georges Melies

      More Melies and Even More Melies

12. Vanished New Orleans, Bellocq's Storyville

13. Wes Freed: Music and Interview

14. Ramblin' Liz, 'Where I Lead Me' by Townes Van Zandt

15. My Interview with AllPulp.com

16. Lonesome Liz and Kara Clark's Top 10 #1 and Our Top 10 #2

17. Old West Outlaws, Lizzie 'Hoodoo' Brown and Hoodoo Brown

18. 13 Curiosities from Lonesome Liz's Travel Bags and More Things Found in Lonesome Liz's Travel Bags

19. Cowboy Sayings

20. Eric Hahn's Five Things #1, Five Things #2, Five Things #3

What the Witch of Endor Wore - Ancient Jewelry

The Witch of Endor was most likely not a witch at all in the modern sense but a Canaanite priestess. What did she look like? We don't know, of course, but she would have been very educated, cultured and sophisticated, (most Canaanites were!)

More about the Witch of Endor: http://conjurewomanscorner.blogspot.com/

Fabulous jewelry from her time and place:

13 Things I Love Thursday

Inspired by the glorious Gala Darling

1. Haunted Castles! (See my blog entry about them here: http://conjurewomanscorner.blogspot.com/)

2. Halloween! (Check out my creepy & cool vintage image galleries here.)

3. Hot Browns! One of the best sandwich inventions EVER.

4. The cake at Tea Squares!

5. Oolong tea, I like it so much it's officially replaced soda in diet o' Liz.



6. Hunter S. Thompson and even 'The Rum Diary', though it was a tad slow. Oh yea, and Johnny Depp. (Read 'The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved in the blog here!)

7. Willie Wonka - new favorite Halloween costume! #7.5 = eating dinner by candlelight as Willie Wonka. (You can download and read it free here!

8. The Victorian Era and the marvelous event/costumes it inspired. (But how did an age with a woman ruling wind up being so restrictive to women? I remain mystified.

9. Speaking of the Vicotirans, Charles Dickens, inspiration for my upcoming Haunted Tea in Dec.!

10. Bowling Green's new Spot Cash Store - mecca of vintage fabulousness.

11. Watching firemen slide down the fire pole. (It's just cool.)

12. Boris Karloff's 'Thriller' series. I think I've watched all that are on Netflix and am now sufferring horribly, I want to see the rest! Best one, 'Papa Benjamin', was about a pianno player who sufferred a Voodoo curse in exchange for a hit tune.

13. Corn Husk Dolls! I've made a beautiful one and think I'll do more!

c. 1895

Things I Love Thursday Archives:

October

June

May

The Emperor of Ice Cream - Wallace Stevens

One more - couldn't leave my favorite out:

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Art by Molly Crabapple

http://www.mollycrabapple.com/

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

More Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens - Sunday Morning

I've been featuring (semi) weekly poems on my Tumblr page (http://lonesomeliz.tumblr.com/) - check them out and check this out too, one of my favorites:

1


Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

3

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
4

She says, 'I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?'
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5

She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

More Wallace Stevens

A Haunted Halloween With the Inmates of Hopkinsville Asylum - A Look at Mental Health Care in the 1800s

Western State Lunatic Hospital

Mental health care in the 1800s wasn’t quite as bad as it was in the preceding centuries or, in fact, in the greater part of the next century, though standards certainly varied from place to place. Following investigations of abuses of patients, who were often kept chained and/or in deplorable conditions reform of places for the mentally ill was undertaken on a widespread basis, (and, again, this unfortunately followed after reforms as well, particularly in the case of conditions for the residents, but the use of restraints was severely curtailed.)

Reforms were part of what was called ‘The Moral Movement’, where patients were, essentially housed and given work to do, along with strict schedules. Outside of sedatives, (including the widespread use of marijuana with reported huge success), drugs were not generally administered and treatments like electro shock and lobotomies, fortunately, did not yet exist. There were, however some cruel and unusual ideas about the treatment of the mentally ill that were unfortunately sometimes practiced; cold baths, for example.

One striking thing about mental institutions in this period is the percentage of people housed there who were not crazy. Asylums generally doubled as a poor house, and the majority of the inmates were often paupers not the mentally ill. Patients appear to have been, with the exception of the extremely and dangerously ill, housed altogether – the poor, the elderly and infirm, those with mental and physical disabilities and, of course, those suffering varying degrees of temporary or permanent insanity. Keep in mind that many diseases of the time, typhoid and syphilis most primarily, also often caused mental illness. So, many people there did not suffer genetic or life-long mental illness.

Women could be institutionalized by their husbands or fathers with no grounds or proof and unfortunately this seems to have happened quite often. Asylums were also home to many unwed mothers and other women committed for ‘immorality’. Also sad to read are the number of women and children there because their husbands and fathers had severe alcohol problems and could not support them. Alcoholism was one of the leading causes for commitment and, combined with the secondary admissions of families of alcoholics, may have even been the primary cause.

The treatment of the poor was almost as gruesome in the preceding century as the treatment of the mentally ill. There were no social welfare programs, not even for the elderly or disabled. There were also, prior to the Moral Movement, not poor-houses or asylums to go to, undesirable as that choice may have been it was, at least, a choice. In the preceding era the impoverished and disabled were auctioned off to the community in a system a little like foster care. Citizens bid on the various people, listing the amount they felt they could take care of them in exchange for and the individuals were then given to the lowest bidder for care.

One can only begin to imagine the abuses that this led to and the system was highly criticized and, of course, ultimately terminated. An Overseer of the Poor was appointed and it was his job to check in routinely on the people placed and to make sure they were properly cared for. Of course, the success of this no doubt depended on the honesty and integrity of the supervisor. The same, of course, applied to the Overseer once the Asylum system was implemented but one imagines that, by removing the number of people involved the room for abuse was at least minimized.

The Asylum in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, inspiration in part for John Carpenter’s famous ‘Halloween’, seems to have been one of the better ones during this time period. Asylums were often training grounds for physicians, (as I said, medication was not generally administered for the patients mental illness, at least not with much variation, however, the large number of people housed there needed a wide variety of medical care, thereby providing good and broad experience.) I was particularly surprised by the number of female doctors listed on staff, a far greater percentage than one generally imagines working in the era.

Reports of conditions in Asylums of the time vary from the horrifying to relatively happy farm life, again, depending on the place’s administrators. Inmates who had money or who’s families did remanded it to the Asylum and inheritances for inmates were often donated, again, creating opportunity for abuse. The greater majority of people housed there, however, appear to have been poor, as pointed out earlier this was, in fact, often the reason they were there. Charlie Chaplin spent part of his childhood in one and left some tragic writings about it behind. Another notable figure of the time was Elizabeth Packard, a woman wrongfully committed who not only fought back but fought upon release to change laws for the mentally ill across the country.

Mental Health trends shifted back to community integration over the next century, with increased use of medication playing a large part in facilitating this. Fortunately, social service programs prevented a return to the auctioning off of the poor for community sponsorship.