On January 28, 1886, a bright and brisk Sunday morning in Susanville, California, the bodies of Holden Dick, a Pit River Indian, and Vicente Olivas–known as Mexican Ben–were found hanging from a crossbeam in the woodshed outside of the Lassen County courthouse.  Both men were convicted murderers.  Dick had been sentenced to death by Judge ...

  I have a confession to make:  I can’t dance.  In fact, my aversion to this activity is so severe that it makes watching other people dance an uncomfortable experience.  I love music, but dancing?  Not so much.  At a concert, say a Lyle Lovett gig at the Les Schwab amphitheater down in Bend, I ...

I keep waking up to bad news. This morning it was a double-whammy, the market down another 400 points and worse, word that Grizzly Adams has died. His real name was Dan Haggerty, of course, but I didn’t know Dan Haggerty. I knew Grizzly Adams.  The show had a short run, only two seasons, but ...

I was inspired last night by the President’s annual address (yawn) to bring all of you, my fellow Americans, up to speed on the condition of our rancho in the pines.  I am happy to report that State of the Figure 8 is healthy, happy, and good, and I am delivering this address with an ...

  It’s 2016, folks, and we are staring down the barrel of an election year, though for some reason I am having a difficult time mustering up any vigor for that slog–in fact, I’m already quite exhausted by it–given the abysmal slate of candidates on either side, and my growing disdain for the election method ...

To be good at something, and I mean really good at it, requires feel.  There are people with tremendous amounts of talent who lack feel, which has something to do with understanding subtlety, and the power of subtlety, to inform a work.  It’s more than that, of course.  It might even be magic, who can ...

You may have noticed, dear readers, that I have been away for a while.  I can explain.  Spring and summer came over the Figure 8 Ranch with an endless list of work to accomplish:  barn building, garden planting, shop-cleaning, mowing, more planting, tree falling, wood splitting, cocktail mixing, raids into northern California, horse buying, and ...

  Recently, I was contacted by Dietrich Waller, a blog reporter from the German fanzine Der Luftballooner with a request for an interview.  Though this blog has a low readership in Germany, I was surprised and consented to spend a few minutes with Dietrich.  It was an enjoyable conversation.  Here is a segmented transcript of ...

The French, much in the news lately, and for all of the wrong reasons–and as luck would have it, just as I was finishing a terrific biography of Marie Antoinette–have an elegant phrase:  L‘esprit de l’escalier, which might be rendered literally as “staircase wit,” either in the pejorative, or merely as an observation of fact, ...

Our final push into Austin was a dash through the heart of Comanche Country, a trip that only a few sleeps ago would have invited certain death.  The Comanche, “Lords of the Southern Plains”, were not an outfit to be trifled with, given that they ran the Apaches–no slouches–out of what became Texas, turned the ...